Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.

This brilliant new anthology, A Quiet Evening, is the latest selection of Lewis’s work edited by John Hatt, who founded Eland Books in 1982. Hatt’s dream was to republish great travel literature in handsome editions. The first classic he reissued was A Dragon Apparent, Lewis’s account of his journeys in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, originally published in 1951, before war devastated Indo-China. (Hatt was surprised to find its author very much alive.) Eland subsequently republished Lewis’s masterpiece Naples ’44 and his study of the Sicilian Mafia, The Honoured Society. 

Almost half the thirty-six pieces gathered here were included in Eland’s 1986 volume of Lewis’s writings, A View of the World. But A Quiet Evening also contains rare material and more contextual information. Lewis’s geographical range is tremendous. Spain and Italy feature strongly, especially Catalonia, Ibiza, Sardinia and Sicily. In West Africa, he visits Liberia and newly independent Ghana; in Asia, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam; in the Americas, California, Belize, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. In his introduction, Hatt wonders why Lewis was not more honoured in his lifetime. Was it his unmemorable name (suggesting a cross between Norman Wisdom and Jerry Lewis)? Was it the author’s own modesty? Did his early publishers fail to champion his work?

I was shuddering with silent laughter on the Tube recently and some other passengers asked what book could possibly be giving me so much enjoyment. ‘Jackdaw Cake,’ I said, ‘The first memoir by Norman Lewis. It’s that bit where his Welsh father goes into a mediumistic trance in the middle of Sunday lunch with the new in-laws.’ The scene is hilarious, but there’s grief behind it. Semi-Invisible Man, Julian Evans’s incomparable life of Lewis, reveals that Lewis’s father became a spiritualist because three of his other sons died young. Lewis became an only child before he was eight. Intensely curious, a linguist interested in birds and plants as well as cameras, cars and guns, he sought to escape the London suburb in which he grew up, where life was ‘an endless, low-quality dream … very close to being nothing’. In his early travels, he found absurdity, adventure and exotica. Then he began writing it all down. 

I think the Second World War, for all its atrociousness, was the making of Norman Lewis. He mocked the Intelligence Corps for its ‘faint aroma of lunacy’ but actually loved being in field security. You could wear civilian clothes or the uniform of a different rank. You were a reporter with a licence to investigate bizarre stories. It was perfect for a writer. Lewis remained a kind of literary intelligence officer for the rest of his life. Away went the prewar Van Dyke beard, leaving him with a nondescript moustache. Lewis looked like a clerk and spoke with a common accent. He could slip in and out of a room without anybody noticing, while he himself noted everybody and everything. This ‘dull old man’ elicited fascinating information from children, fishermen, gangsters and grandmothers. The photographer Don McCullin, who went on assignment with him, was amazed that someone so ordinary-looking was actually so extraordinary. 

A romantic anthropologist, Lewis went ‘looking for the people who had always been there, and belonged to the places where they lived’. He once remarked, ‘primitive people are so much nicer than us’, and recorded in detail our civilisation’s intolerable cruelty towards indigenous tribes. Included in this book is ‘Genocide’, first published in February 1969. At twelve thousand words, it was at the time the longest article the Sunday Times magazine had ever printed. Chronicling the murderous destruction of Brazil’s Amazonian Indians by the people supposed to protect them, this devastating report led Robin Hanbury-Tenison to found the organisation Survival International, which still defends tribal peoples today. 

Good travel writing is a sly art, somewhere between landscape painting and fiction, dealing in vignettes, tones and moods. It requires a good ear, a sharp eye, much concealed scholarship and real literary skill. In trying to enumerate Lewis’s qualities, Hatt stresses his wisdom, passion and wit. He gropes for the Spanish term duende, meaning something like ‘soul’. 

This wonderful book gets its name from the opening piece, the full title of which is ‘A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango’. We are in a remote corner of highland Guatemala, which Lewis has taken four days to reach. The sad Maya town of the title is somnolent: nothing stirs; the vultures wave ‘their scarves of shadow over the flower beds’. Then exploding fireworks rouse Lewis from an early bed. An orchestra and an outdoor shoot-’em-up movie compete in cacophony. In the cantina, three huge bandits with machetes politely ask Lewis to operate the new jukebox for them, requiring him to down their double aguardientes and salt in reciprocity while the marimba song ‘Pecado Mortal’ plays over and over at ear-splitting volume. This ‘quiet’ evening ends only when a small earthquake extinguishes the electricity.