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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘The World’ A Glance At Writer’s Personality

Robert Taylor The Boston Globe

“The World, the World: Memoirs of a Legendary Traveler” by Norman Lewis (Holt/John Macrae, 293 pp., $27.50)

Norman Lewis, now closing in on his 10th decade, may well be the best travel writer of our time. He is something of an unknown in America; none of his 23 books displays a jacket picture, and when he is not journeying to remote and hazardous places, he lives with his family in the pastoral calm of the English village of Finchingfield.

“The World, the World” provides more of a glimpse of Lewis’s personality than its predecessors. Though he enjoys solitude, he is by no means a recluse. Travel for him is not merely a celebration of the exotic; he was the first to expose the genocidal killing of the Amazonian Indians; his six-part series on the Mafia, which ran in William Shawn’s New Yorker, later appeared as a bestseller, “The Honored Society”; and his lament over the ruin of the English countryside, where no cuckoo sings and the chimney swifts virtually queue up to nest, expresses the indignation of a man who values the sight of a grasshopper warbler more than the asphalt jungle of a parking lot.

The pattern of the book, roughly chronological, starts with a sentence that might have been written by John Buchan or Eric Ambler: “Although it was years before I realized this had happened, the direction of my life changed in 1937 with the sudden appearance of a breathless young Englishman who dropped into the dining-car seat facing me on an Italian train.” The young man is an archaeologist named Oliver Myers, a scientist with an interest in the paranormal, who becomes a devoted friend. That they hit it off illustrates Lewis’ approach to travel writing, in which place is inseparable from human behavior.

Another aspect of that approach resides in his sense of the absurd. He has seen Ernest Hemingway waffle out of a duel over Ava Gardner and read the letters of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) pleading for book-reviewing assignments to supplement his army income of 3 shillings a day. Covering the marathon speeches of Fidel Castro, Lewis is amused by Castro’s fondness for displaying lethal objects said to have been used in attempts on his life - a rare seashell stuffed with explosives and then thrown on the seabed where Castro went snorkeling, a hollowed-out pack of cards firing a poisoned dart with a range of only a foot, a dog that blows up when patted. If all this sounds like the comic strip adventures of James Bond or the slapstick of a TV sitcom, alas, the world as sitcom may be our present reality.

Toward the end of the memoir, however, a faint melancholy arises. Change has been a persistent theme. Archaic cultures have disappeared. Even the jungles of Vietnam - where hawks formerly perched on bamboo groves and “once in a while a boar came trotting down the track, kicking up deep purple butterflies as it went” - are no longer arboreal. For a birder and ardent environmentalist like Norman Lewis the loss is great; but there are survivals - such as the enduring pleasure of his prose.