Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis By Julian Evans Jonathan Cape, 792pp. £25A DISILLUSIONING MEETING with Ernest Hemingway in Cuba was a turning point in the life of Norman Lewis.
Seeing the famous author-adventurer in a state of drunken apathy a year before his suicide in 1961 confirmed Lewis's instinctive suspicion of celebrity and his determination to pursue his literary ambitions in his own way. Which he did, prolifically, right up to his death in 2003 aged 95, producing 12 novels as well as his non-fiction: the peerless essays, travel books and memoirs that made his name. And, if he was human enough occasionally to regret his lack of fame in his early career, he valued his independence more.
His self-reliance had been learned early. As a boy, in the London suburb of Enfield, in the 1920s, he endured severe physical bullying from the local children, who sensed he was different. Left an only child after the early deaths of two siblings, his childhood was marked by violence interspersed with boredom, while his parents took refuge in alcohol (his father) and spiritualism (his mother, who built a spiritualist church in their back garden). His own escape would take longer to achieve, but in tandem with his intellectual curiosity he developed an entrepreneurial drive early on that would eventually give him the freedom he craved. From a sense of emotional displacement and insecurity, he re-invented himself as a restless business opportunist; from the modest photographic processing service he ran from his father's pharmacy in Enfield he went on to import and supply the latest Leica cameras, then to establish a highly successful chain of specialist camera shops in London.
Motorbikes and rare, fast cars came next: in his impeccable suits he drove a Bugatti and raced cars competitively through the depressed 1930s, managing sufficiently to impress the daughter of a Sicilian diamond dealer that she married him, securing considerable financial backing for his business from her father and a welcoming new home with her extended family in Bloomsbury. Although the marriage to Ernestina didn't last, his sense of connection to Sicily did, eventually flowering in his fascinating study of the mafia, The Honoured Society, and his novel, The Sicilian Specialist.
In this meticulously researched biography, his friend and former editor, Julian Evans, vividly recreates these pre-war years, when a combination of high energy, acumen and luck allowed Lewis to pursue his love of speed, risk-taking and the latest technology. Underlying it all were the deeper, intertwined desires: to escape and to write.
As Evans suggests, Lewis's sense of displacement, of not belonging, was the key to his great gifts as a writer, which he first tested on a journey he made with his brother-in-law to Spain on the eve of Civil War, and published in 1935 with his own accompanying photographs.
Spain made a profound impression: he revisited it over many decades, writing Voices of the Old Sea, celebrating the Mediterranean before mass tourism, and was still captivated by its landscape, people and culture in his final book, The Tomb in Seville.
He later regarded his first book, Spanish Adventure, as an apprentice piece, as it was the second World War that really shaped him as an acute observer and stylist of "spartan clarity". As Evans puts it, "the war allowed him to render tragedy and absurdity simultaneously". In personal terms it legitimised the separation from Ernestina, who had moved to Guatemala with their son, and allowed Lewis to set off, unencumbered, on his first great adventure.
A TALENTED LINGUIST, he was enrolled with the British Intelligence Service and posted first to North Africa and then, in 1943, to Italy. Naples '44, the distilled account of the Allied liberation of the south of Italy that Lewis wrote in the 1970s, is, as Martha Gellhorn observed, "pure gold". With its precise observation and detached, deadpan wit, it is full of the absurdities and iniquities of war, sympathy for the extreme suffering of the Neapolitans in their devastated city, and admiration for their spirit, battered but not broken. Lewis based it on the sketchy notes that he took at the time, and Evans takes pains to compare the sources with the finished work, pointing out where the two diverge. In fact, the discrepancies are surprisingly minor, considering the decades that had elapsed, but what's more important, in any case, is the act of creative recollection.
Teasing out the question of truth and invention, Evans concludes that "the only truth that matters is an aesthetic one", one that supplies meaning, and that "the invented episodes are indispensable to its truthfulness". Occasionally observations such as these become laboured and bog down the narrative, and the "Prelude" in which Evans makes some throat-clearing comments on the nature of biography could certainly have been dispensed with. Yet he is a very astute and sensitive critic, especially in his comments on Lewis's failings as a novelist, and overall, he has produced an impressive, illuminating book, notably free of point-scoring or a desire to posthumously undermine his subject's achievement. He handles Lewis's shortcomings - as an unconventional father, and as absent partner to Hester, the mother of two of his children - with a combination of clear-sightedness and delicacy. He draws attention to the prescience of Lewis's work: on the imminent disaster of Vietnam in his book about Indo-China, A Dragon Apparent; on the genocide of the Brazilian Indians, which he wrote about during his period as a contributor to the Sunday Times and Observer magazines in the late 1970s; on the impact of the destruction of the Amazonian rain forests; on the centrality of oil to the relations between the West and Islam, in Darkness Visible. Always, Lewis was alert to the threat posed to rich, ancient cultures by the forces of what we would now call globalisation.
Romantic in tendency but never sentimental, his work is characterised by self-effacement. Although full of his first-hand observation, Lewis manages to keep himself out of the frame. It is not the author who is the subject, but the places he observes, and it was of supreme importance to him that they were subjects rather than objects to be exploited. Evans's aim in writing this biography is to send the reader back to Lewis's books. Picking them up again, in their Eland Books editions from the 1980s, we can still admire their sense of elegant perfection, but with vastly more appreciation of their "semi-invisible", utterly singular creator.
• Helen Meany is a journalist and editor of Irish Theatre Magazine