I don’t often read a book twice, but I have just finished
reading for the third time one of the most vivid, amusing and touching books to
emerge from the Second World War --- Norman Lewis’s diary of his year spent in
Naples as a British Intelligence Officer, attached to the Allied Military
Government, with the assignment to look out
for the interest of the British
troops. The book is called Naples ’44,
and is widely considered to be his masterpiece from among the 35 books he wrote
between 1935 and the year of his death at the age of 95 in 2003 (with yet
another book, his last, ready for
publication).
His book on his Naples experience
was not published until 1978, 34 years after the events, and his last book is
about a journey he made through Spain and Portugal 69 years before.
What a remarkable career for a
writer whose books had in common that they were an expression of his delight in
the human condition, expressed with a modesty so entrenched that he once wrote
that he could walk into a room full of people, stay there for some time, and
leave before anybody had noticed his presence. In other words, a born observer.
It is remarkable how his prose,
while maybe dealing with the events of seven decades before, can still portend
to our present times. As a Guardian obituary published right after his death,
said, he had been among the first “to witness the idiocy of American policy as
it drove countries to embrace communism”, he had foreseen by 15 years the
superb efficiency of the aeroplane for bombing communities into oblivion, and
he had in another book predicted the brutal dictatorship that was already
shaping up in Burma. All of this
foresight had not been thrust upon the reader, but had sort of made itself
apparent in the detailed descriptions in which he delighted to reveal the basic
characteristics of the countries he was visiting, and the peoples he had rubbed
up against. Yet for all the acclaim with which his books were greeted, he
himself considered that the most important thing he ever wrote was an article
in The Sunday Times of London in 1968
about genocide being carried out against Amazonian tribes by the Brazilian
government, an article that had resulted in formation of the influential NGO Survival International, which is still
working away on the same issues 47 years later.
I found the same revelation, reading
again his description of the landing of the American forces at Salerno a day
after the signing of an armistice with Italy. The behaviour he describes of
American soldiers, falling out of their tanks after retreating from a German
counter-offensive, terrified at the possibility that a Panzer division might
strike down to cut the landing force in half, their panic leading to them to
shoot down three Spitfires and shoot wildly around them at friend and foe
alike, with accompanying rumours that the American General Mark Clark was
“proposing to abandon the beachhead and had asked the Navy for the Fifth Army to be re-embarked”, made
one realize how years later it came about that the Americans, for all the might
of their armies, have failed in Vietnam, and have managed to ruin Iraq and
Afghanistan years after declaring that their mission was “accomplished.” They
are trigger-happy.
What Lewis found when he did
reach Naples, and was assigned to look after a ring of small nearby towns, was
that the Allied Military Government was being run, in effect, by Vito Genovese, The
head man in the American mafia, who had been deported back to his home village
somewhere around Naples, and had been eagerly grabbed by the invading army for
his knowledge of the language and the local culture. He had used this authority
to impose on the whole city and on all surrounding towns, members of the
so-called Camorra, a local rival to the more famous Sicilian underworld
criminal organization the Mafia. This was all done with the support of the AMG,
who turned a blind eye to the criminal behaviour of the Mayors appointed by the
underworld in all the small towns where Lewis was active. He describes this behaviour as that of
communities whose people were starving, with unemployment of 100 per cent, and in which
even the best-paid functionaries were paid a fraction of what an ordinary
private in the American Army was paid.
He described many examples of well-dressed, respectable-seeming women
who would arrive with their teenage (and even younger) daughters, offering them
to the responsible soldiery for mere trifles, a can of meat, as bottle of wine,
a jacket or blanket. Most of these women
would rather have had paying jobs, Lewis observes, and he could not find it in
his heart to condemn them, even when they were quite clearly engaged in
criminal activities. He describes how
the markets were full of goods that had been quite clearly stolen from the
Americans, but says that these thefts were on such a scale --- one ship I every
four that docked at Naples was skinned clean, he says --- as to be unmanageable
by the authorities. Time after time, he describes meetings which, as a law-abiding
citizen of a stable industrial country, he would deplore, but he realizes how
counter-productive would have been anything he tried to do about it. One of his
major jobs was to carry out the vetting of Italian women whom some soldier was
hoping to marry. In most cases their determination to marry was caused by their
burning desire to escape the poverty in which they were irrevocably trapped.
At the end of his time in Naples,
he had this to say: “A year among the Italians had converted me to such an
admiration for their humanity and culture that I realize that were I given the
chance to be born again and to choose
the place of my birth, Italy would be the country of my choice.”
When, just over a year after
arriving there, he learned that he was being transferred out, he descibes it
thus: “The thunderbolt has fallen. Today I was ordered to prepare to leave
immediately for Taranto, to embark on the Reina
del Pacifica for Port Said….So I am left with only hours to spare and no
time to say goodbye to any of the friends scattered through so many towns. There
will be no time for a last glass of marsala with any of the scheming sindacos
or the Machiavellian chiefs of police, who have always, for all their
innumerable shortcomings, shown hospitality to me as a stranger. There will be
no time for a last coffee substitute in the Gran Caffe in the Galleria to say
goodbye and good luck to several girls who are virtually fixtures of the place,
and bear me no ill-will because I was unable to help them to marry Allied
personnel. I realize I have had my last meal at Zi’Teresa’s and will never
again shake the gnarled paw of the old aunt herself…”
Such an elegiac farewell, after a
year mixing with prostitutes and their pimps, criminals and their underlings,
crooked black-marketeers, and the AMG which he had finally to describe as
“completely corrupt.”
Wise enough to know he could do
nothing to change things, Lewis settled for describing it all in a way that few
people engaged in the business of war have ever done. A book that instructs us, without ever
seeming to, about the meaning of humanity.
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