This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
It’s 1957 and Ian Fleming, foreign editor of the Sunday Times, is moonlighting for MI6. He sends Norman Lewis to Cuba to sniff about and see whether Fidel Castro’s revolt has any chance of succeeding. In particular, he must sound out Ernest Hemingway. Lewis eventually tracks down the American, then 60 and at the peak of his fame. He is in shockingly poor physical condition, shuffling about like a man well into his seventies, overweight and on the bottle.
“This was an encounter that might have been dangerous and undermining to any young man in the full enjoyment of ambition and hope, because it presented a parable on the subject of futility.”
Lewis recalled that Hemingway was irascible, impatient, suspicious and unhelpful. As he later told Fleming, “He told me nothing but taught me a lot.” It is an uncompromising piece: vintage Lewis with his trademark powers of observation, lambent prose and laconic humour.
A Quiet Evening gathers 36 articles from around the world, from an interview with Castro’s self-styled “artist” executioner in Cuba and Nazi-hunting in Austria to encounters with West Papuan cannibals and marked men fighting the Sicilian mafia. What will strike readers is the sheer continental range of his writing here. We are in extremely good hands with John Hatt, founder of the peerless travel publisher Eland, who knew Lewis well and published him for decades.
Lewis is incapable of writing a dull sentence. In Ghana, the roadside anthills are “pinnacled like Rhine castles painted in the background of German Old Master”’. Accompanying 3,000 Soviet prisoners of war back to the Soviet Union as a British Intelligence Officer in 1944, he describes Red Army officers inspecting the doomed Central Asians “like looking over cattle that would soon go to the slaughterhouse”.
In the Guatemalan mountain village of Huehuetenango, Lewis and his taxi driver Calmo enjoy the “quiet evening” from which this anthology takes its name. They descend on a tavern for a few glasses of aguardiente to find it populated by drunks and desperadoes.
“‘In my opinion it is better to go,’ Calmo advises the Englishman. ‘These people are very peace-loving, but when they become drunk they sometimes assassinate each other in places like this.’”
Behind one of the bandits, “a lieutenant loomed, swaying slightly, eyes narrowed like a Mongolian sage peering into the depths of a crystal, mouth tightened by the way life had gone”.
The 1960 interview with two elderly Cuban generals, heroes of the 1895-1898 Cuban War of Independence, gives Hatt the opportunity to include an anecdote from Lewis’ autobiography The World, The World. There he recalled General García Vélez showing him an album which had once belonged to the Venezuelan revolutionary and womaniser Francisco de Miranda. It contained snippets of pubic hair from 51 of his conquests, including one marked K, supposedly Catherine the Great.
Fascinated by cannibalism, Lewis once flew to a remote village in Indonesia, where he struck up a conversation with a naked tribesman. “He was studying me speculatively and with what might have been modest approval. “If you had come here ten years ago,” he said, “we would have eaten you.” I suspected that this was to be taken as a compliment.”
If that was all there was to Lewis — transcendent prose, forensic powers of observation and memory, moments of unexpected hilarity and an addiction to high jinks and the whiff of danger — it would be enough to make him a very good writer. Yet there was a greater seriousness at work here, far beneath the surface level of travel writing and journalism.
Nowhere is that better evidenced than in the 1969 article which Lewis considered his finest. Headlined “GENOCIDE”, at 12,000 words it was the longest ever to be published by the Sunday Times and stunned the world, chronicling Brazil’s systematic destruction — by the government’s Indian Protection Service, loggers, landowners, rubber tappers, diamond prospectors and missionaries — of its indigenous tribes.
Here Lewis exalted the responsibility of bearing witness to the height of becoming witness for the prosecution. Decades later, the accumulated detail of officially-backed ethnocide — “bacteriological warfare had been employed, by issuing clothing impregnated with the virus of smallpox”, the gift of sugar laced with arsenic had eliminated the Tapayuna, to cite two examples — still makes astonishing reading.
In Sicily, he roamed from Palermo to the mafia HQ of Corleone with his friend and photographer Don McCullin. He was no dewy-eyed romantic when it came to organised crime, but still understood the Sicilian’s “inextinguishable respect for the comfortable values of the past”. It was “a last-ditch defence … against the encroaching banalities of our age”. His fans would say the same of reading the ageless Lewis prose in this gem of a book.
