Lewis / Hatt A Quiet Evening

The Travels of Norman Lewis
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78060-241-7
Verlag: Eland Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 504 Seiten

Collected here, from a period of nearly five decades, are thirty-six of Norman Lewis's best articles. In each, his writing crackles with poker-faced wit and stylistic brilliance. As a witness to his times - the good, the bad and the absurd - he was unmatched, and his instinct for important events, and moments, was infallible. His range here includes Ibizan fishermen, an interview with Castro's executioner, the genocide of the South American indigenous tribes, a paean to Seville and his meeting with a tragic Ernest Hemingway. Lewis told Ian Fleming, who had commissioned him, that the meeting was 'a shattering experience of the kind likely to sabotage ambition'. Fortunately it didn't, and the articles assembled between these covers are compulsive, hilarious, tender and beautifully written, at times deeply upsetting and always unforgettable.

Norman Lewis was born in 1908. His early childhood was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in suburbs on the edge of north London, and partly with half-mad aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and petty trading - including selling lost umbrellas and cameras - to finance travels in Spain, Italy, Morocco and the Balkans, as well as racing Bugattis. A visit to southern Arabia and the Yemen on behalf of the intelligence services, including a long voyage by dhow, greatly bolstered his passion for the exotic. During the Second World War he spent three years in the Intelligence Corps in North Africa and Southern Italy. His diaries from that time later became his masterpiece, Naples '44, written only in 1977. Before the war, he had published two books, but his literary career only took off with the publication of A Dragon Apparent in 1951. Over the following decades he wrote thirty books, half of them novels. In the year of its publication, an omnibus translation of his novels into Russian outsold Tolstoy. After travelling to Brazil in 1968 to research the ethnocide of the indigenous tribes, his later writing also included passionate campaigning on their behalf. Even into his nineties Lewis was enthusiastically travelling to off-beat parts of the world. He died in 2003.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lewis, Norman

Hatt, John

Leseproben

A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango

Norman Lewis first visited Guatemala in 1946. In this article, written nine years later, he arrived soon after a CIA-backed coup overthrew the elected government.

He mentions that his reason for the visit was to gather background material for a novel. Indeed soon afterwards he wrote The Volcanoes Above Us, published in 1957. It was enthusiastically reviewed, in several cases by famous writers such as V. S. Pritchett and Cyril Connolly. It may have been Lewis’s most successful novel, and Russian readers especially took it to heart, buying more than two million copies.

Guatemala consistently inspired Lewis. The hero of The Volcanoes Above Us contends that ‘For anyone who has lived in Guatemala, other countries, by contrast, are lacking in savour’.

First published in the New Yorker, July 13, 1956

In the bleak depths of an interminable English winter, I was suddenly seized with an almost physical craving to write a novel having as its background the tropical jungles and volcanoes of Central America. Having succeeded in persuading my publishers that this would be a good thing from both our points of view, I boarded a plane at London Airport one morose evening in January, and two days later I was in Guatemala City. I chose Guatemala because I had been there before and knew something about it, but also because all that one thinks of as typical of the Central-American scene – primitive Indians, Mayan ruins, the wrecks of grandiose Spanish colonial cities – is found there in the purest concentration.

For three weeks I did my best to absorb some of the atmosphere of life in seedy banana ports of the Caribbean and the Pacific, where bored men in big hats still occasionally pull guns on each other. I went hunting in jungles said to abound with jaguars and tapir without shooting anything more impressive than a species of giant rat. I talked with wily politicians of the country, survivors of half-a-dozen revolutions, and took tea with exiled fellow-countrymen on isolated coffee plantations, who had lived so long among the Indians that they sometimes stopped in mid-sentence to translate their very proper English sentiments from the Spanish in which they now thought.

My final trip was to the far north of the country, the remote and mountainous area beyond Huehuetenango, which lies just south of the Mexican state of Chiapas and is reached after three hundred miles of infamous roads and stupendous scenery. Here under the Cuchumatanes, the ultimate peaks of Guatemala, even the onslaught of the Spanish conquistadors faltered and collapsed. And here the mountain tribes were finally left in peace, to live on in the harsh but free existence of the Stone Age, touched only by the outward forms of Christianity, consoled in secret by the ancient gods, and rejecting with all their might the overtures of Western civilisation.

In the early afternoon of the fourth day, my taxi, driven by a town Indian from Guatemala City called Calmo, reached the top of the 12,000-foot pass overlooking the valley of Huehuetenango. We stopped here to let the engine cool and noticing that the trees in this windswept place were covered with orchids, I astounded Calmo by suggesting we should pick some. ‘Flowers?’ he said. ‘Where? They don’t grow at this height!’ I stumbled, weak and breathless from the altitude, up the hillside towards an oak, loaded with vermilion-flowered bromeliads. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you mean the parasitos. Well, certainly, if you like, sir. When you said flowers, I didn’t realise... We call these weeds – tree-killers.’ Calmo was not only an intrepid driver, but a qualified guide supplied by the State Tourist Office. He spoke a version of English which so effectively stripped the meaning from his remarks that I steered him back to Spanish whenever I could. For the rest, he was gentle, sad-looking and pious, dividing his free time between visits to churches and – although well into middle age – running after women.

We got into Huehuetenango at four in the afternoon, and it turned out to be an earthquake town, with corrugated-iron roofs on fine churches, squat houses iced over with multicoloured stuccoes, and a great number of pubs having such names as ‘I Await Thee on Thy Return’. We went into one of these, each of us carrying an armful of orchids, Calmo probably hoping that no one he knew would see him bothering himself with such contemptible weeds. The woman who brought the beer had a Mayan face, flat-featured but handsome, and full of inherited tragedy. Calmo told her in his most dignified way, ‘This I say with all sincerity. I want to come back to this place and marry you.’ The woman said, ‘Ah bueno,’ shaking off the compliment as if an invisible fly had settled on her cheek. She wore a massive wedding ring, and there were several children about the floor.

After that, Calmo wanted to go into the cathedral to pray for success in that week’s lottery. The cathedral had just been freshly decorated for the pre-Lenten festival with huge bouquets of imitation flowers, their stiff petals varnished, and dusted over with powdered glass. Indians were lighting candles among the little separate patches of red and white blossoms that they had spread out on the flags to symbolise the living and the dead. Hundreds of candles glimmered in the obscurity of the cleared space where the Indians worship in their own way in the Christian churches, grouped in whispering semicircles round the candles, while their shamans passed from group to group, swinging incense-burners and muttering magical formulas. The Indians were dressed in the frozen fashions of the early sixteenth century: the striped breeches of Castilian peasants, the habits of the first few Franciscans who had scaled the heights to reach their villages, the cod-pieces of Alvarado’s ferocious soldiery. They had left their babies hidden in the old people’s care in the mountain caves, still remembering the days before the conquest, when at this season the rain god had taken the children for his annual sacrifice. These Indians were still surrounded by a world of magic and illusion, living characters in a Grimm’s fairytale of our day in which the whites they see when they come down to the towns are enchanters and werewolves, who can kill with a glance, but are themselves immortal.

We went out into the sunshine again. A meteorite shower of parakeets fell screeching across the patch of sky stretched over the plaza. Soldiers, shrunken away in their American uniforms, were fishing in space with their rifles over the blood-red balustrade of the town hall, which was also their barracks. The green bell in the cathedral tower clanked five times, and the sleepers on the stone benches stirred a little in the vast shade of their sombreros. Calmo woke up an ice-cream vendor, bought a cornet, then said, ‘I cannot eat it. The hot for my teeth is too great.’ When speaking English he found special difficulty in distinguishing between opposites such as heat and cold.

We sat down in the car to decide what to do with the evening. The sleepiness of the place was beginning to paralyse us. Nothing stirred, but the vultures were waving their scarves of shadow over the flower beds. Calmo said, ‘Yesterday a market-day, tomorrow a procession; so that today we have no prospect but an early night. There is really nothing to do.’ As he spoke, a man came riding into the plaza on a tall, bony horse. The man looked like an Englishman on his way to a fancy-dress ball: he was lean, pink-cheeked, mildly aloof of expression, and his improbable costume of black leather with silver facings had clearly been hired out too often and was on the loose side for its present wearer. He was carrying a bundle of what looked like yard-brooms wrapped up in coloured paper. Calmo explained that these would be rockets for use in the next day’s celebrations. The clip-clop of the hooves died away, and the silence came down like a drop-curtain. Huehuetenango was a place of apathetic beauty, built out of the ruin of a devastated Indian city. There was a sadness, a sense of forgotten tragedy in the air; and here it seemed that silence was a part of the natural condition. As Calmo had so often said, ‘We Indians are a reserved people. Even in our fiestas. Our joys and our weepings are hidden away inside: for us only, you understand – not for the world.’

There was a notice over the hotel door that said, ‘Distinction, Atmosphere and Sympathy’. The atmosphere was all-pervasive. The garden had been turned into a floral jungle encircled by borders of Pepsi-Cola bottles stuck neck-down in the earth. Quite ordinary flowers like stocks and hollyhocks were throttling each other in a savage struggle for living space, and hummingbirds like monstrous bees zoomed about the agonised sea of blossom. Goldfish bowls containing roses hideously pickled in preserving fluid, stood on every table-top. The bedroom towels were embroidered with the words, ‘Sleep My Beloved’.

Food in this hotel was American Plan – words which have now been accepted into the Spanish vocabulary of Central America. They no longer refer to the system of charging for accommodation...