The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic). Enfield is not a likely pocket of the paranormal, but the Enfield Beacon of Light is still going strong. During its table-rapping and other spook-dabbling sessions no one is allowed to make jokes about striking a happy medium. Spiritualism is dead serious.
Lewis’s humdrum upbringing in Edwardian Enfield – aspidistras, astral-planing – was far removed from the social privilege of most literary travellers. Yet his lifelong interest in magico-religious cults and vanishing tribes of one stripe or another had some connection, surely, to the palmistry and crystal-balling of his Enfield years. His 12 magnificent travel books (and as many rather indifferent novels) are distinguished by their rapier-keen observations of supernatural goings-on in far-flung Mexico, Burma, southern Italy and Vietnam. Why the man Graham Greene described as ‘one of the best writers of our century’ is not better known is a mystery. Lewis’s deadpan, occasionally Latinate prose (‘ferruginous’, ‘inflorescence’) was influenced by the waspish New Yorker-ese of S.J. Perelman, and by the classical authors he had devoured as a boy in north London, among them Herodotus. Lewis is one of the great comic writers of our age.
A Quiet Evening gathers half a century’s worth of his finest journalism.
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