The travelogues of Norman Lewis, which are much admired for the extraordinary burnish they attain, were written by him in a spidery longhand. The author of acclaimed accounts of the Sicilian mafia and the exploitation of Indigenous tribes in South America, he scribbled his rewrites on fresh scraps of paper and, with the help of his wife Lesley, pasted them over earlier drafts until his manuscript crackled like parchment. I observed this process for myself when I interviewed the writer, by then in his 90s. We were at his home, an old rectory in deepest Essex enclosed by a wild garden which grew as high as an elephant’s eye. Here he recuperated between adventures in an “introspective, almost monastic calm”, or so the blurb on his book jackets improbably claimed. Rangy and moustachioed, he had been an early adopter of zoot suits, a crack shot, and a zealous if foolhardy racer of Bugattis. His life had included strenuous ardours and undercover work in Cuba for MI6 and the CIA. Lewis died in 2003. Now many of his best articles are being published between hard covers for the first time in this collection, its title as uncharacteristic of its author as his claims of monk-like meditation.
