I Came, I Saw: An Autobiography by Norman Lewis

I Came, I Saw: An Autobiography Reviews

• 
  John

  I had read Lewis' travel narrative books a while back, so decided to try this memoir.
  
  Title refers to being sent to live with his aunts in Wales as a young child for several months, where a cake was prepared for local jackdaws each Saturday by them, a rather unusual group to begin with. Next section has to do with his life in a London suburb with his Spiritualist parents, his father a (rather erratic) medium, and his mother a healer. Thirdly, we get his married life at the home of his his Sicilian in-laws, which often earned "you can't make this stuff up" status. The last section, on his time in the Army in North Africa during WW II interested me less, though his humor was there.
  
  Recommended for folks interested in inter-war Britain especially, though general interest enough for most memoir aficionados.
• 
  ^

  “What thou seekest is here, it is in Ulubrae, unless equanimity is lacking"— Horace.
  
  At the time the autobiography in my hand was revised and published, Norman Lewis was the author of thirteen novels and ten works of non-fiction. I felt surprised that I had not heard of him before. So I began, as I so often do, by looking for obituaries on the man.
  
  Starting with
  http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/... I particularly liked Julian Evans’ observation that, “it says far more about his modesty that failing to attract attention was the only claim he pretended to.” In conjunction with
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu... I divined a very restless and perhaps easily bored Lewis, a compulsive traveller.
  
  Lewis conjectures whether the English county of Essex (north-east of London) might be his Ulubrae; “an ancient village about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Rome, past the Three Taverns on the Appian Way, and at the start of the Pontine Marshes. It is known primarily for its use as a byword for a remote and empty location by Latin authors such as Cicero, Juvenal, and Horace.” [Wikipedia].
  
  In his book, “The Appian Way”:
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... , the American Professor Robert Kaster positively revels with excited delight in discovering the past in the present; a startling complexity of ‘ghosts’ who are very much ‘alive’.
  
  Yet there is a dissatisfaction of spirit that seems to inhabit Lewis; as marked, perhaps, through and by a living experience of total War? I was guessing, and choosing to look for the obvious. To live in ‘interesting’ times may realistically be considered a curse; yet one ameliorated to an extent by rational questioning and reflection on Life as expressed. A different time, a different way of living: a different generation now lost to us. Without the living eye-witness, sight inevitably becomes distorted, whilst fascination breeds.
  
  Memorable examples stand out to me, including the period that Lewis spends with three, somewhat dotty, aunts in in South Wales circa. 1918; and much later, after re-marriage (we are not told whether to the same lady, or merely to the institution) and upping sticks to Isola Farnese, in Italy. A small-arms hunting party interrupts the dawning of the day; to blast at small songbirds migrating from Africa. This unregulated hunt pops away all day; the feathered bag increasing alarmingly. Annunziata, the maid hates the hunters:
  
  NL: “Don’t you like them?”
  
  A: “Well who would? Did you hear them down by the river? They ran out of birds, so they shot all the frogs. Can you wonder we vote Communist?”
  
  Norman Lewis writes with a remarkable equanimity of mind. There he has indeed found his Ulubrae.
  
  
• 
  Danielle McClellan

  I picked this up because I love Norman Lewis, and then I realized quickly that this is the same book that I read under another title five years ago. But no matter, it is a real gem and I am getting so much out of my second reading. Lewis is a remarkable writer whose family is like no other that I have ever read about or met. From his deeply eccentric Welsh grandfather, a tea salesman who kept fighting cocks and a French mistress, to his strange, traumatized aunts to his pharmacist-turned-spiritualist father there are so many indelible scenes that will stay with me always. In fact, I was glad to identify the source of a clear image that has been in my mind for years of birds flying into a kitchen window to eat cake. It is hard to imagine that all of these memories are literal, but the mix of childhood interpretation and adult imagination makes for lush and luscious reading. I love this book.
• 
  Colin Freebury

  Norman Lewis was a born writer: brilliant, free-flowing prose; wonderful power of observation; acute insights into the human condition. This book deals with four parts of Lewis's life: boyhood with an eccentric (even for England) family; marriage to the daughter of an eccentric (even for Sicily) family; life as an WW II intelligence officer with the British Army in North Africa and Southern Italy; and life as an expatriate family living in rural Italy in the early fifties. I re-read this book every few years to enjoy the clarity of his writing and the wealth of his life experience.
• 
  Roger Norman

  A friend once gave me Voices of the Old Sea by this writer, a wonderful account of a now-vanished existence in a coastal village in north-eastern Spain. Lewis is the perfect observer of places and people – alert, detached, non-judgemental and imaginative. The best chapters of I Came, I Saw describe his upbringing in England in the 1920s, with parents who earnestly believed in spiritualism. They wrote books on the subject, conducted seances and invited famous diviners and soothsayers to the home where the young Lewis grew up. Almost as good are the chapters on army service in the Second World War during which he worked for British Intelligence in Algeria and Tunisia. He was not directly involved in combat but scenes of a battleground when the fighting was done, and of Tunis the morning after, as the victorious British troops recover from huge hangovers, strewn around the streets, may be unique. What is most attractive to me in this book is the way the author, present in every scene, central to every episode, says almost nothing about himself (character, opinions, dispositions, preferences) not because of a tremendous diffidence but because (despite the grandiose title) this is not his concern.
• 
  Judy

  I downloaded this because it described him as a travel writer, and told of all the places he had lived in and written about. This one is (as the subtitle says) an autobiography and covers quite a lot of territory, from his very odd childhood in Wales and England, to his equally odd marriage to the daughter of a Sicilian couple living in London, to his time in the Intelligence Corps during WWII, to a short period living in Italy with his second wife and children. Together it made a rather odd compilation, but each portion was fascinating.
• 
  Malcolm Watson

  An enjoyable read!
  Norman Lewis had a not very enjoyable upbringing in Wales but went on to become a celebrated novelist & Travel writer.
  This is the first part of his autobiographies taking him from childhood to the end of the second world war and writing "Naples'44".
  He led and unusual life meeting many colourful individuals and he writs his adventures with flair and humour.
• 
  David

  Memoir of the author's life through about 1965. Not as detailed about some periods, as he covered those in-depth in other books, e.g., "Naples '44.". Very interesting about North Africa in 1942, Italy in the 1960s. Overall, quite good.
• 
  Geoff

  An intriguing book with such flowing descriptive language. What a life he had, and he only opened up a few areas. His childhood with his crazy aunts in Wales, then years back with his Spiritualist family in Enfield, the early years of his marriage and tumultuous time with his Sicilian wife Ernestina, war years in Nth Africa in the Intelligence Corps, and finally a period with his family in Italy.
  Graham Greene had "no hesitation in calling him one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century".
  When I started reading my next book club assignment, it seemed so flat, no life in the prose ...
  This was a gem of a book to pick up in an op shop.
• 
  Katie Nelson

  some parts were so fascinating I couldn't put it down, especially the beginning about his childhood in Wales. But the whole book suffered from an emotional vacancy -- I never felt like he was being honest about his thoughts and emotions.
• 
  Veronica

  Having bought this online thinking it was a book I hadn't read, I was quite annoyed to discover that it is in fact the excellent Jackdaw Cake, which I already own, with a new title. Big black mark to Picador.
• 
  Jason Goodwin

  Lewis is always dry, unobrtusive and deceptively clever. This autobiography is typical.