by Norman Lewis
Loke chased after his wrens endlessly with camera and recording gear, but it was the researches carried out here into the mysteries of birds’ instincts that captured his imagination. This was life as he wished to be allowed to live it, but he was overshadowed by the melancholy knowledge that within days he would return to Singapore and the compulsions of the world of affairs.
‘Surely it’s yours to choose what you prefer to do?’ I suggested.
‘I must admit I would like to spend the rest of my life taking photographs of birds.’
‘And can’t you?’
‘No, but it’s impossible to explain why.’
He was a ruler of an empire it gave him little pleasure to possess: an empire of cinemas, rubber, tin and real estate, and he had become one of the rich men of the world. Yet now he admitted that he would return to Singapore with reluctance. His wealth stalked him like a dragon, for custom committed him to the pursuit of riches for which he had little inclination, for, removed from his background, his tastes proved frugal and austere. In the introduction to his book, A Company of Birds, published when he was accepted as the best bird photographer in Asia, he lays the blame on destiny: ‘I was destined to be a business man,’ he writes. Of his ornithology he adds an explanation. ‘Every man needs some invisible means of support.’ How sad that the empty rituals of a man of affairs should have usurped so much of his life.
Loke went off to Singapore and I back to Tenby in time to assist the Prices in a grand reception of potential converts to Beth Miriam held in the fort’s banqueting hall, from which not only the sinister hook in the roof but the bearskin rug with its unsettling eyes had now been removed. There I stayed for two more months, walking, between visits to my mother in Carmarthen, along the gaunt cliff-tops, and living largely on excellent seaweed bread, cockles which abounded in the Tenby sands, and odds and ends of mutton delivered secretly on alternate days. Towards the end of September autumn made its dramatic appearance with Atlantic gales that drew veils of spray across the sky and filled the rooms with the cannonade of huge Atlantic breakers. At their most violent these batterings spread a vibration through the rock that could be felt in the tips of the fingers pressed against an outer wall. There were days, too, when it was impossible to ‘go ashore’. In compensation fresh food became unexpectedly available, for small fish, killed or only stunned, were sometimes thrown out of the water and landed on lower ledges where they could be reached.
By the time of this passage through the equinoctial frontier, little had been done to expand the framework of the Guatemalan book. Documents galore, some in old Spanish, remained to be read, and I was beginning to doubt whether these conditions—which I was assured by the locals were no more than a sample of what was to come—would be conducive to literary labours. Mrs Price and Rose Sharon left suddenly to open a mission in Cardiff, earlier than had been intended. Taking me into her confidence, Eiluned told me that she had felt it advisable to cut short the mission in Tenby as Rose Sharon had fallen in love with our butcher, who she regarded as unsuitable as a prospective member of her family, although he offered himself for conversion.
To round off perhaps a rather sad occasion, Mrs Price asked me if I would join them in a verse of that cheerful valedictory hymn beginning ‘Now praise we all our Lord’, to be sung, she insisted, in Welsh. A little nervously I agreed and, after a couple of run-throughs to try out the words, I added my soft, baritone croaking to their soaring voices. Routine compliments at the end were shown up for what they were by Mrs Price’s verdict, ‘Well, to be perfectly frank, Mr Lewis, bach, there’s no-one will say that as a singer you’re not better than a fisherman.’
In the spring of 1948 I returned to London where I sounded out the market for a short first novel. I took advice from a mentor in such matters, a member of Routledge who had published my photographs taken in Southern Arabia. ‘It’s publishable,’ he said bleakly, ‘but perhaps not for us.’ ‘Why not start at the top and go for Jonathan Cape, and then work your way down? You’ve nothing to lose.’
This I did, and to my utter surprise received a letter from Cape’s reader Daniel George asking me to call to discuss modifications which might make the book acceptable for publication. But when I phoned to arrange an appointment, George came on the line with the incredible news that Jonathan Cape had now read the book and would take it as it was. This left me with a feeling almost of having offered myself under false pretences. Cape at this time had reached the summit of its prestige as indisputably the leading literary publisher in Britain. Within a decade of its foundation in 1921, the firm had published such stars of the literary firmament as C. M. Doughty, author of the classic Arabia Deserta, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis and T.E. Lawrence—a literary performer who was to make the fortune of the firm. These names were followed by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, and many more of their calibre, so that by the late thirties there were few writers of world-wide prominence who had escaped inclusion in the Cape list.
Summoned to an interview with Daniel George, I was led into his presence at 30 Bedford Square. After glimpses of patrician Georgian interiors, I found him in an oblong cubby-hole, so narrow that it might have been a segment of a corridor. Daniel, hunched at his desk, was hardly visible among a thicket of manuscripts piled to a considerable height on the floor, the window ledges and his desk. In some cases these looked no more promising than the dog-eared, red-taped documentation shoved into odd corners of an old-fashioned lawyer’s office. Others had been expensively bound for presentation and I was to learn that both extremes were disapproved of, and lessened the author’s chances of success.
Daniel was extremely affable, with a pleasantly sardonic sense of humour that he allowed to come frequently into play. When I commented on the accumulation of hopeful effort over which he presided, he said that he had his method of dealing with it. It was probably at our next meeting that he mentioned this method as being an adaptation of the one invented by his predecessor, the celebrated Edward Garnett. According to an account in the book published by Michael Howard, the firm’s junior director, Garnett ‘would turn over a few pages and quickly make up his mind whether to read [the book] carefully, and if so put it on one side to be sent down to his flat’.
Garnett had read about ten manuscripts a week. Whether reading them or not, Daniel George had to deal with an immensely larger number. His system was to read the first page, then perhaps two or three pages from the middle of the book, before turning to the end, the whole process occupying perhaps a quarter of an hour. He told me that he was easily put off, as by a single sentence in bad English, pretentious imagery, or ridiculous subject matter. A famous author of that day, venturing upon autobiography, had fatally embarked on page one on an affectionate account of his earliest memory of himself seated on a chamber-pot. Daniel was merciless with literary affectation, and with the repetitive pet phrases with which some authors studded their work. Double negatives were hunted down with ferocity, a special bête noire being a sentence that begun with ‘It was as if—’. Sometimes persons in high places wishing to try their hand at writing books responded vigorously and with effect to Daniel’s criticisms. It was just before our first meeting that he had caused an uproar by attempting to turn down a book of favourite poems by Lord Wavell, then Viceroy of India. Although Daniel George protested that many of the poems had been sketchily remembered and incorrectly quoted, he was officially silenced and the book became a bestseller under the title Other Men’s Flowers.
Daniel and I went on to see a good deal of each other, and when I felt that it would not be inappropriate to do so, I asked him if the beginning, middle and ending method had been applied in my case, and he confirmed that it had. What had probably saved the day for me was that he had opened the manuscript at a page describing the destruction by artillery fire of an Arab village in Algeria. The gunner in search of some clearly defined object in a background of heat-haze and shapeless mud huts had chosen with huge reluctance to range on a tethered
horse. He read on, and I was saved. I asked Daniel what Jonathan Cape liked about the book and he said, ‘It’s about abroad. He never goes anywhere except New York on business. The only books he really enjoys reading are about travel, and he said yours could have been one. He’d have probably liked it better if you’d have left out the plot.’
Samara was within a few months of publication when I made a second visit to Bedford Square, in early 1949, having been invited to lunch with Jonathan Cape himself. It had been mentioned by Daniel that Irish stew inevitably featured on these occasions, and this was frequently burnt. Such authors as were favoured with an invitation to lunch, knew the place as ‘Heartburn House’. Daniel George and the poet William Plomer, who helped out with the reading of manuscripts, were also to be there, and in a brief aside Daniel warned me that Jonathan had just returned from an Easter holiday at Eastbourne with his wife, of which we must expect to be treated to a lengthy description. Both these men stood in awe of their employer who, having started work as an errand boy at Hatchard’s bookshop, Piccadilly, had read as many as he could of the books he delivered and through them prepared himself for admission to the world of the famous and the great.
He proved to be tall, imposing and stately, like the most eminent of Strache’s eminent Victorians, cultivating intentionally, it might have been, a slightly outdated appearance. By reputation he was autocratic and blunt, but no-one could have been more courteous on this occasion. He made a brief but kindly reference to my book, after which the conversation moved on as foreseen to the Eastbourne holiday.
‘Normally I am an early riser,’ Jonathan began, ‘never later than seven. On holiday my wife and I set out to spoil ourselves. A real English breakfast in bed. Eight o’clock to the minute. By nine we’re out on the front.’
I took a cautious mouthful of the Irish stew. I had been hoping in a diplomatic and round-about fashion to bring the conversation to the subject of Cape’s most successful and famous author, Lawrence of Arabia. For years in my youth, long after Lawrence had broken his neck on a Brough Superior motorbike, I constantly ran into people who believed he was still alive. Some even believed that his reported death was no more than a trick by which this huge, if preposterous figure, had been spirited away to re-appear under a different name as a semi-divine defender of the Empire. Nevertheless, as Daniel had assured me, the Eastbourne holiday monopolised the agenda.
‘Routine can be enjoyable,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the morning two brisk lengths of the Marine Parade, and in the afternoon one. Beneficial both to health and appetite. We’re both believers in a square meal at midday, and something light before turning in. Did you say you knew Eastbourne?’
‘Vaguely,’ I said.
‘We stay at Queen’s,’ Jonathan said. ‘The only place to have been awarded an H for merit. Most afternoons we settle to an hour or so of Strauss in the Garden Court, and at five we often pop in at the Southview Café for one of their excellent Welsh rarebits. Something they do very well.’
With that Eastbourne was dismissed. ‘And what are your plans for the future?’ he asked me.
‘I’m hoping to do something about Guatemala,’ I told him.
He pretended not to have heard, and I repeated what I’d said.
Jonathan smiled austerely, and shook his head. ‘Always write a book about Nelson,’ he said. ‘Never write a book about South America.’
Back in the office I tackled Daniel George.
‘Do what he says,’ Daniel said. ‘Write a book about Nelson. He’ll probably publish it. Jonathan has the market at his finger tips. If he says South America won’t sell, it won’t.’
‘What about Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure?’
‘The adventure sold, not Brazil. It could have happened anywhere. Most of the people who bought the book didn’t know where Brazil was. In any case, from what you say your Guatemalan book is going to keep you busy for five or six years. What are you going to live on?’
I packed the Guatemalan material away for another time, and made a start on another novel, Within the Labyrinth, describing the Machiavellian Italian scene at the end of the war.
A year later, having submitted the typescript of this book, another lunch at Heartburn House took place, incredibly enough just after Jonathan Cape had returned from holiday. Since my first lunch at Bedford Square I had made a quick excursion to Eastbourne to study its topography and could now speak of the place in a more intelligent fashion. Together in spirit we walked the Marine Promenade twice in the morning and once in the afternoon, listened briefly to Strauss in the Garden Court and were self-indulgent with the Welsh rarebit in the Southview Café. Jonathan responded to my encouragement.
‘So what’s to come next?’ he asked. ‘Not Guatemala, I hope.’
‘Not if you’re against it.’
‘How much work have you put into it so far?’
‘I’ve travelled round the country and talked to a lot of people. The Indians go in for the most amazing ceremonies. Few people have seen them. There’s a village where a man volunteers to be crucified at Easter. In another place they’re supposed to sacrifice a child to the god Mundo every ten years by throwing it down a volcano. I should also add I’ve read a good deal, my hope being rather to put the thing on a scientific basis. I should have to go back again, of course.’
Jonathan raised his hand to his mouth, then yawned enormously. ‘Put it on ice,’ he said.
William Plomer said something about there being a market for a child’s book on Indians, and Jonathan turned hastily to the subject of travel. ‘We’ve done well with it in the past. But why not go somewhere people will want to read about? Say Indo-China, for example. Nothing’s been written about the place for years. There’s certainly a book in that.’
The outcome was an offer by Jonathan to back a book on Indo-China and finance travel in the country for a journey taking up to three months. A logistics problem now arose. In the matter of travel, tickets could be bought to any place in the world, but since the war the amount of cash that a traveller could take out of the country was limited to £100. Using his influence, Jonathan was able to increase the sum for this particular journey to £200, but it was difficult to see how this could cover the cost of internal travel and subsistence in a country so vast. In hope of helping the situation I bought a gold watch with the intention of selling this if funds ran out. Jonathan also gave me an introduction to Peter Fleming at The Times, who provided a commissioning letter without which travel would have been impossible in a country ravaged by war.
Oliver Myers was back in the Middle East, although archaeological digs were now a thing of the past. In the four years since our last meeting, at Stonehenge, he had entered the Diplomatic Service, but we continued to keep in contact by letter. Having discovered that the Air France plane from Paris to Saigon stopped at Beirut, it was my hope to be able to break my journey there and see something of him again.
When in London I liked to stay, as before, with the Corvajas, with whom I remained on affectionate terms, although there was something unreal in the tacit and never-questioned assumption that Ernestine would eventually reappear. It was to this address that I arranged for the proofs of Within the Labyrinth to be sent so that I could correct them before leaving.
The proofs, however failed to arrive, so I rang up the publisher and was told that by mistake they had been sent to 4 Gordon Square. This was about a hundred yards away so I walked across to collect them, only to discover that a second Norman Lewis lived at this address, and that he, too, was a Cape author who had recently completed a hugely successful updated version of Roger’s Thesaurus. Unfortunately, I was told, the second N.L. had left the country only two days before, and was presumed to have taken my proofs with him. Three days later I stepped down from the Air France plane at Beirut, where Oliver awaited me. ‘We’re having a little party for you at the embassy,’ he said, and minutes later I suffered a surprise from which I have never wholly recovered, for the first introduction was to
the man with whom I shared names, who had also stopped off at Beirut on his way to some Eastern destination. It was a circumstance that further encouraged Oliver’s fascination with the paranormal, and inspired him to begin a work to be entitled The Mechanisms of Coincidence, although the book was never finished.
Chapter Four
THE INDO-CHINESE JOURNEY—or rather journeys—had been planned with some misgivings, because in 1950 this vast country remained terra incognita. In London there was no-one to whom I could go for information on what I was to expect, and all the French Embassy could do was to send me to Paris. Here the information service provided a guide who took me to the splendid Musée de L’Homme, which dealt in great depth with the culture and history of the many subject races in the process at that time of extricating themselves from the embrace of the French colonial empire. Whatever knowledge there was to be uncovered in this field, it was here. There was one drawback: it was a decade out of date. A curtain had fallen with the Japanese conquest of 1940, and when they pulled out another historical pause was to follow before the French were once more in the saddle of power. With that the nationalist rebellion began, and with it the start of a fresh colonial war.