Backlisted - Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

We are joined by the poet Katrina Porteous and the writer and editor Patrick Galbraith to discuss Norman Lewis’s account of the of the three summers he spent working in Farol, a remote fishing village on the Costa Brava in the late 1940s. His book records the intricacies of life in a small community whose rhythms are based on the shoals of sardines and tuna, and whose beliefs and rituals have remained unchanged for a thousand years. But change does arrive in the shape of a black marketeer who buys up two-thirds of the village and opens a garish tourist hotel. Within a year, the ancient Spain that Lewis loves begins to sink beneath the tidal wave of greed, commercialism and liberal attitudes that package holidays and unfettered tourism unleash. Lewis wrote his book thirty-five years after he’d lived in Farol. We are now 40 years on from its publication in 1984. Do his stories still resonate? We discuss why his sharply observed and artfully written books aren’t better known today, and put his writing in the context of the travel writing boom of the 1980s. Katrina also brings a fresh perspective to Lewis’ experience– she has lived in the fishing village of Beadnell on the Northumbrian cost for the past thirty years, where similar erosion of culture., language and tradition has taken place. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in a remote fishing village on the northeast coast of Spain in the late 1940s. A straggle of brilliant white houses stand in stark relief against the semicircle of jagged rocks. Cats of all shapes and sizes slink and sleep in the sunshine. We step into a dark bar sparsely furnished except for the mummified corpse of a large sea creature which hangs above the counter, its mournful glass eyes staring out to the beach and the sea beyond.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people pledge to support the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by two guests making their debut on Backlisted, the poet Katrina Porteous and the writer and editor Patrick Galbraith. Welcome Katrina and Patrick. Hello. Hi.

Katrina was born in Aberdeen, grew up in North East England and has lived on the Northumberland coast for 37 years. She writes from a deep commitment to place and community and is president on the Northumberland coast for 37 years. She writes from a deep commitment to place and community and is president of the Northumbrian Language Society. Her poetry collections from Bloodaxe include The Lost Music, Two Countries, Edge, poems written for a planetarium, and Risedont. Have I got that right, Katrina, you have, yes. Few riser daunt, which is shortlisted for this year's T S Elliot prize. Congratulations.

Thank you very much. It's astonishing. Isn't it? I couldn't believe it. It's not for me to say. A wonderful, wonderful collection. Katrina, you've lived on the Northumberland coast for 37 years. Can you currently see the Northumberland coast?

I can't, Andy, because just at this moment, I'm in my late parents' house, which is the house where I grew up, which is just outside of Concert in County Durham. It's an old steelworking town, it was, when I was growing up here. But normally, I would be speaking to you from the Northumberland coast, where my house overlooks the rocky seashore. And I look out when I get up in the morning,

I look out at rocks that are about 350 million years old. Wow. Concert was famously a steel town and it closed down. And then it became famous in the 1980s because of, I think they're called Finneas Fog, the Snacks, Madam's Lee Road concert. There was a famously award-winning adverts that put concert, literally put concert on the map for people. And the other place I used to go and stay and still love to go is Crasta, which has

got a little harbour where you get the best kippers in the world. It knocks, they knock the Robsons, I think, the kipper makers, knocks all your wippy kippers and your kind of lower stuffed kippers into a cocked boat, I would say. And you used to be able to get them, I don't know if you still can, you used to be able to get them packed in a wooden box and they'd post them to your house. Yeah, they definitely still do that, but they do that from seahouses as well. So swallow fish in seahouses do kippers, very, very good kippers as well.

It's kipper heaven up there, let's be honest. It is. We're also delighted to welcome today, Patrick Galbraith. Hello, Patrick. Hi. Patrick Galbraith is a writer and editor. His first book, In Search of One Last Song, was published by William Collins in 2022. And his second book, Uncommon Ground, Rethinking Our Relationship with the

Countryside, will be published by William Collins in the spring. He is currently setting up Boundless, a digital magazine for people who love great writing and are fascinated by the world's wonders and strangenesses, such as the history of Chinese food in England. And I have to say, I did take the hand of the hedge lord himself here. It says here that hedges will be the subject of a piece in Boundless. So Patrick, how do you know hedges are the thing that readers are keen to hear more about? I think not just one piece is going to be a big focus.

We're going to do a whole series on hedges until people can't take any more. No, I mean, I think we're suddenly discovering what hedges really mean and how important they are in the countryside. I don't want to go into that in massive detail, but obviously we've lost so much habitat in the countryside. We've lost so much scrub land. So we have commissioned a piece on hedges and the importance of hedges by a hedge layer. So hedge layers have long been present in the English countryside, maintaining hedges

and keeping them bushy and thorny and full of all the sorts of things that we want to be there like nightingales and turtledoves and so on. But really it's about English culture and it's about what hedges mean. Well, I was going to suggest what's an irony that a magazine called Boundless should tackle the subject of enclosure. That seems remarkable. Well, that sounds fascinating. John, over to you. The book we're here to discuss is Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis, an account of his three years spent working in Farrell, a remote fishing village on the Costa Brava in the late 1940s.

It records the intricacies of life in a small community whose rhythms are based on the shoals of sardines and tuna, and whose beliefs and rituals have remained unchanged for a thousand years. As he is gradually accepted into the community, he is able to observe the complicated love lives, the petty squabbles and ancient feuds, and the often surprisingly unsentimental attitudes

of the people he lives amongst. But Chains arrives in the corpulent, voracious shape of Jaime Muga, a black marketeer who buys up two-thirds of the village and opens a garish tourist hotel. Within a year, the Spain that Louis loves, the land of Lorca, Albania, and Defaya, begins to sink beneath the tidal wave of grief, commercialism, and liberal attitudes that package holidays and unfettered tourism had unleashed. The book was first published in 1984 by Hamish Hamilton. So it came in the middle of what we might now regard as the high watermark of the travel literature boom as represented by writers such as Colin Thubron, Jonathan Rendell, who else

might we say? Paul Theroux, who's in the book, The Kingdom by the Sea, Eric Newby, and so on and so forth. The book was reviewed enthusiastically, although the Times Literary Supplement turned down an extract saying, quote, it read like chapters of a novel. And indeed we will return to the TLS later in this podcast because I have the review that they ran of the book after they had turned it down for serialization, which is in itself hilarious now John has shared this small fact with me. Given that Lewis wrote as much fiction as he did nonfiction, this seems like a very niche reason for rejection one will discuss in the main body of the show.

Nicholas Walliston and The Observer captured Lewis's achievement perfectly. His book should be under every tourist's pillow in Spain, to show what went on before corruption and monotony set in, and hot dogs drove out the cats. And the book's editor, Julian Evans, adds, Norman prefers eccentrics and makes the reader prefer them too. adds, Norman prefers eccentrics and makes the reader prefer them too. Norman Lewis wrote this book 35 years after he lived in Faro and we are now 40 years on from its publication. So, do the stories still charm and intrigue us? Is there anything left of the Spanish culture he writes about? Are there parallels to be found in our own culture? We'll be talking about this and much else besides after this message from Athponthath. The Paramount Plus exclusive series The Agency. The CIA sends us out to behave in a dangerous way. Starring Michael Fassbender and Richard

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The E-Land one, yeah. Do you want to just give us a blast of the blurb on the back cover and then we'll see how that compares with the original. Here the original. In the late 1940s, Norman Lewis settled in a remote fishing village on what is now the Costa Brava, relishing a society where men regulated their lives by the sardine shoals of spring and autumn and the tuna fishing of summer, and where women kept goats and gardens, arranged marriages and made frugal ends meet. Over the course of three years he watches with sorrow and affection as the villagers struggle to hang on to a way of life unchanged for centuries. How long can their precarious economy, their ancient feuds and traditions, not least the

evenings of impromptu blank verse in the bar, hold out against the encroaching tide of packaged tourism which sidles insidiously into the village with the arrival of black marketeer Muga." Well now, I think that Eland blur Patrick, oh that's quite a good blur. Do you think that's a decent blur? Yeah, really well written. And the thing that really stands out to me is three years he spent there. And you know, you now read books where someone goes for a month or whatever, so the idea

that he really went and got under the skin for three years, I think that's possibly a reflection on the advances that people got paid there so you can actually, you know, you could go and do it properly. All right, listeners, I'm not going to read the whole of the jacket flap on the first edition that predates the Elandish by some 40 years, but I'm going to suggest you might find this very familiar from what you've just heard. The Spain to which Norman Lewis returned after the war was much as he remembered it, much indeed,

as it had been since the time of Lorca. In the remote fishing village of Farol in Catalonia where he came to live, the men still live their hound-to-mouth existence, their lives regulated by the sardine shoals of spring and autumn, and the tunny fishing in the summer, while the women kept goats, arranged marriages and maidens meet. Deeply suspicious of all forestieros or interlopers, it took much energy and care on Lewis's part

to find himself accepted. What helped most of all was his talent for mental arithmetic, most unique in the village, which worked out the value of the fisherman's catches. I mean, basically what the person from Eland has done is rewritten the original blurb. It's a time-honored publishing tradition. It's written in an era when people think they won't get caught. Okay, Katrina, where were you, who were you, what were you doing when you first read Norman Lewis's, Voices of the Old Sea? Well, I first read it in 1996 and I was in Beednall.

I'd been living there for nearly 10 years by that time. And much of that time I'd spent living alongside the fishing community there, which at that time largely consisted of older people who were in their seventies and eighties. And I'd been writing about them. I'd been writing poems mostly, and also taking very careful notes of all their way of life. So I was about to publish some of those poems in my first collection from Blood Axe called The Lost Music that came out at the end of 1996. So I read Voices of the Old Sea really just before that came out. And it was a bit of a turning point for me in my life because the year before

I'd lost one of my closest connections to the fishing community, an old man called Charlie Douglas who was a really, really good friend to me and in a way the sort of head man of the village in many ways. He was the person everybody came to for a bit of fishing equipment or to find something out for a memory or he kept the community together in a practical sense and in a storytelling sense as well. And he died the previous year. So I just become a little bit less attached to Beadnell. And I was about to take up a post in the Shetland Islands for several months over the winter as writer in residence there. So it was quite a fluid moment in my life when I read the

book. And did you find, God kill me now John, did you find therefore the book to be relatable? I never thought I'd see the day. This is the last episode of Batlist everybody, that's it. We're done now. What a word. What a word. I love the book because I felt so many parallels to my own experiences in Beednall. Beednall was changing very rapidly at the time when I read it. And as I say, much of the community, which was very small by that time, the kind of indigenous people who were born in Beednall and had been there all their lives, and the men who were fishing and their families, they were kind of coming to an end. And it was clear to me that it wasn't going to last in its present form for much longer, that kind of fishing.

So that was really why I'd been writing about it for so long. So yes, Norman Lewis's experiences in Spain were relatable, as you put it, on so many different levels. There were parallels just in very, very tiny things like the way that Norman Lewis had become very gradually kind of involved in the community and accepted by the community and the signs that they gave him that he'd been accepted. Like they gave him a chair, a horrible broken down old chair outside the bar. And that was the kind of symbol that he belonged.

And that was exactly what Charlie Douglas had done for me in his fishing hut. The first year I started writing about them, when I got a seat in the hut and it was, he called me diner, that was my name. It was diner seat in the hut. Then I really knew that I belonged. So there were these tiny things. And then there was the much bigger picture of the way that the place was changing and the way money was changing the place and the way that it insidiously at first and then on a grand scale changed the culture through money and through the women of the community and that it was the women of the community who kind of made it impossible for the men to hold out in a romantic fashion.

And the same sorts of things I had noticed happening in Beedinor. I don't know if that answers your question, Andy. It answers it superbly. And it leads me on to ask my colleague and sometime friend, John Mitchinson, who himself lives in a village. John, did this ring true for you as someone who perhaps feels a sense of guilt for driving out the indigenous inhabitants of your village? Yeah, yes. I think there is a, what's really, I think, remarkable about this book is how people have a kind of an idea of a

sort of idyllic existence of the sort of a golden age where everybody was kind of happy and the sea was full of fish. But of course, the reality is much more complicated than that. So the things that really chimed with me was that Norman arriving, as he says, he's been in the army. He wanted to reconnect with the old Spain that he visited when he was much younger. His first book he'd published in 1935, Spanish Adventure. And so this was, and this book was written

many, many years after he'd actually spent the time in Spain. So what he encounters is a very strange culture. The unfamiliarity of it, I think, is which he captures, I think, brilliantly. Lewis is a bit like a camera. He doesn't interject a lot of opinion into the narrative. He just records this remarkable kind of sequence of attitudes and of strange foods and strange rituals that nobody can remember why they're what the rituals actually represent anymore, but they just do them anyway and there's this there's also the thing that I Absolutely struck struck me reminded me of coming to Chu 30 years ago. He says, for the fishermen of Farol, the peasants of Sort, which is the next

village, but inland, might have been the inhabitants of a distant planet rather than a village five kilometers away. They found it difficult to interest themselves in their fate, whatever misfortune might have befallen them. And that reminds me of my friend, Brough, who's in the village. He said, for the first seven years, nobody would talk to me. He arrived in the village in the early 60s.

And I said, why? And he said, well, because I was an outsider. And I said, where did you come from, Brough? He said, Middle Barton. I said, but that's only three miles away. He said, yeah, but it may as well. He said, it may as well have been on a different continent. Right.

Okay. The pace of change, I think is what Lewis is in a way is lamenting in this book. That so much happened so quickly. I would like to alert listeners to the fact that what you heard there was a real bit of backlisted magic, which is that John answered completely straight and sincerely an entirely facetious question for me. So that's where we are. Thanks.

That's where we are. That's why it works. Relatable. Not so much. I, of course, have, I've written at some length about the Kinks and their LP, the Village Green Preservation Society, but I myself have never lived in a village. And indeed, like the country singer Hoyt Axton, I have never been to Spain.

I don't know if any of you know the song, Never Been to Spain, but the first verse goes like this. Well, I never been to Spain, but I kind of like the music. Say the ladies are insane there, but they sure know how to use it. They don't abuse it. Never going to lose it. They don't abuse it, never gonna lose it, and I can't refuse it. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.

So I am the tourist of the sort that Norman Lewis and Hoyt Axton, Norman Lewis would mistrust, right? And so I'd never, I hadn't read this book before, Katrina. And the two things that struck me about it were one, the prose is exceptional, exceptional. The sort of what I would call literary non-fiction book, I hesitate to say travel writing because I think as soon as you say travel writing, you shut down all sorts of potential interpretations. The prose is really remarkably good and consistent and worked over and refined in every sense one might say. The second thing that struck me is in a sense, this kind of book has become the Spain that Lewis writes about.

It's vanished and been overrun by more populist styles of writing. And I wonder whether we could talk a little bit about, and I'd like to ask Katrina this first, what do you think it was about quote unquote travel writing that so appealed to people in the 1970s and 80s? Why did that genre catch people's imaginations and flare up and then die down again. I think that for many of us, the early 1970s were a time when the world was really opening up. You know, my parents were relatively comfortably off, but they didn't go on foreign holidays until 1973. That was the first time they went anywhere abroad, abroad as it was called. Yes. You know, I've never been to Spain myself, so you and me alike, Andy.

You, me and Hoyt. Yes, that's right. But I think the world really did open up in the 70s. Air travel became much cheaper, much more accessible to people. And I think it may be that the interest in travel writing went along with that, with a sense of the world becoming a much smaller place. And the other thing that kind of occurs to me at the same time was, you know, the first moon landing right at the end of the 1960s and that sense of the earth, the planet as being this small thing.

That's interesting. That occurred around about the same time. And I think that intellectually people were trying to get to grips with this idea of elsewhere. You know, we've been talking about elsewhere. John talks about elsewhere as being a village three or four miles away. And that's exactly the same as my experience in my village. I knew a fisherman who was married to someone from the village of Bambera, which is five miles up the road. And she died in her 80s, but she always, the fisherman always said, oh, she's Bambera, she's no beadland, she's Bambera. Because she always belonged elsewhere. and that was five miles.

And yet at the same time, this was a time of the world opening up so that elsewhere overseas, going abroad, we were opening up to that. So you've got this sort of clash of an old world where elsewhere could be somewhere very close and also a much newer world. And I think travel writing belongs to that time when that opening up is happening. I think that's very interesting. I wonder whether when we look back on this period now

from the vantage point of a quarter of a way through the 21st century, you know, we said in the introduction that we're talking about this book as many years on from when Lewis had originally wrote his book. Yeah, I mean, as far after as it was, he was the stuff he was recollecting. Yeah. And I wonder whether with the overview of the century that we now have, you know, when we were growing up in the seventies, John, I didn't have the perspective

that I now have, which is that fundamentally we were growing up in a post-war country, a post-Second World War country, that the debts accrued, financial debts that had built up in that period was still not paid off, neither was there money to deal with them. And that's why everything was brown and gray because we were in a post-war environment. And I wonder whether travel writing represents both a kind of a reaction to a sustained period of peace, relative peace, a sustained period of, as Katrina suggests, travel, where people could begin to take travel for granted in such a way that freed them up to write about things. And also perhaps in a post-empire sense, a lot of these books are about British or American writers going to look at communities that are changing and arguably declining because

change and decline is what was happening to certainly Britain in that era. Indeed, Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux that we did on this show, that's a book that applies that theory to Britain itself. And so in a sense in microcosm, voices of the old C is a, is an exploration of that very topic. What are the forces of globalization that encroach on and destroy communities that have lasted for hundreds of years? That seems to me one of the repeat themes of travel writing. It is definitely a generational thing, right?

If you, let's take Norman Lewis, because he is clearly, and we'll maybe talk about why he isn't perhaps as well known as the Theroux and some of the bigger names in travel writing, despite I think being clearly, as you've said Andy, an astonishing writer. For know, for him, the big, he grew up in the suburbs, in Enfield, it's kind of very, very dull, in his own words, oppressive kind of environment. He kind of deals with that in one way, becoming a bit of a dandy and racing, you know,

Bugattis and driving motorcycles and becoming a bit of, you know, a kind of man about town. But the war changes everything. The war is when he really encounters, you know, particularly, you know, his experiences in Naples and his most famous book, Naples 44, is an astonishing account of being a young man and both the excitement of war and the horror and the genuinely the exoticism of other cultures, of people that didn't behave like his slightly mad but very dull suburban family back in Enfield. And he then gets

the travel bug and he wants to travel and write about his travels. I'm probably one of the few people, certainly that I know, that can actually enter a room and leave it without, and nobody will know that I've been there. I can just come in completely silently, I can turn the handle of the door, I can let myself in, I can sum up the situation and retreat, and nobody will know that I've been there. This is a quiet nap which I've never lost. I just kept out of the way, behaved myself, kept quiet. In that way, deflected wrath as much as I possibly could. I've probably gone through life to some extent, expecting to be sort of hit over the head all the time. It's never happened, but I'm worried about it as a possibility.

I love that that's from a documentary, isn't it? That's from an arena documentary from 1986 about Norman Lewis. One of the things I loved about watching that program is that his voice proves that a man can travel the world and soak up experience. You can take the man out of Essex, but you cannot take Essex out of the man. He's got a way of speaking like that. It's very much so. Tremendously. Hello, Norman Lewis here. But Patrick, that's not the written voice. That's not the written voice. The written voice of Norman Lewis is, as I said earlier, exceptionally refined.

What are the attributes, would you say, of Lewis's prose? Certainly in this book, Voice of the Old Sea. I think there's something very spare about his tone and the way that he writes. So it's interesting that you say that that isn't his voice. I think that there is still a sense of sort of humbleness about his writing. So he's not trying to bring himself into it. He's a witness, just seeing things which makes him very interesting and I think makes him different to other travel writers. So a lot of the power I think comes from the sparness of it and

this sense of him being the witness who's just there and sometimes tremendously moving scenes and tremendously sad scenes and the power of them only hits you sort of after you've finished with it because it's not kind of, you know, full tilt in the style of, I don't know, somebody like Chatwin, for example. Yeah, yes. Chatwin is a very interesting comparison because Chatwin, as we know, has a similar, I don't want to say disregard for the truth, let's say regard for the good story. So I don't want to make a negative attribute. But I wonder as well if there's a little more, Katrina, we could say about the prose. Is there a section

you could read us that you feel is particularly redolent of what Lewis is good at? Let me read a bit from about the middle of the book, which describes underwater fishing and an encounter with a big fish. I was beginning at last to appreciate the fact underlying all the fisherman's law, that there are seas of many kinds, all of them having their special problems, and offering their different rewards. There were old seas, rising and filling seas, full seas and swells, and there were hybrid oceanic states in which two or more of these factors could be involved. There were also variables, like currents, water temperatures, and above all, the time of day that governed the presence or the absence of fish.

One thing I could be certain about was whatever awaited me as I swam out over the shelving seabed into deep water, it would be quite different from what I had seen in my first visit to this place. To be a competent undersea fisherman, the indispensable qualities are those of any other hunter. Patience, powers of observation, and the ability to keep still, to merge into the background on the alert for the small irregularity of shape, color, or movement that betrays the presence of the quarry. By chance it was this that I was suddenly aware of in the moment of giving up and turning

back to make for the boat. There was something in the mouth of a cave in perhaps ten feet of water that was, in some way, not as it should have been. The sun slanted, a solid, moat-filled shaft across the opening, and behind it I could make out a misted profile that was too regular, too boldly curved for the haphazard patterns of the sea, a veiled shape, half imagined, half seen. I dived and found myself within a few feet of the largest escorvia I had so far seen.

It had placed itself almost as though on guard across the entrance, and perhaps a foot inside the cave, and behind it, against the dim architecture of the cave's interior, up to a dozen slightly smaller but still large fish were arranged like so many overlapping metal plates. The big escorvier spread a dorsal fin like a junk sail, edged forward with a flexing of the body that released soft reflections of copper, pewter, and pinchbeck. And the iridescent patch over the neck deepened from purple to violet, then faded again. I levelled the gun and pressed the trigger, and with the harpoon's impact, the fish seemed to emit sparks of green and yellow

light. It carried the harpoon with it in a series of flashing parabolas into the depths of the cave, and the metallic wall of fish that had backed it shattered itself, hurling its shining parts into dim recesses, out of view. It's amazing, isn't it? It's interesting though, isn't it, that he says to be a competent undersea fisherman, you need patience, powers of observation, and the ability to keep still, to merge into the background, which are the qualities that you need to be a good writer as well. Also, but certainly the qualities which he, as we heard in that clip, he was very keen to adopt and claim as his own, as a silent witness, at least while he was taking his notes.

Katrina, I'd like to ask you about the prose as well. So that section you read seems to me to combine both a poetic understanding of the weight of every word and the rhythm of every phrase with an almost Orwell-like, windowpane-like clarity of vision. And that's extremely unusual and hard to pull off to make it sound as natural as he does in the part that you just read. When you read, Lewis, do you shade towards the poetic side or the journalistic side? LL I think for me, it's absolutely the tension between the two things. I think if he was one or the other, I would like him less. But I love the way that the clarity, as you say, Orwellian is a good description. It is very like Orwell, that very spare description of what the fisherman had to know and that intellectual knowledge

balanced against that description, a marvelous description of the fish and the different colors of the fish and the textures and the flashing light and if he was one or the other he would still be a great writer but the tension between the two I think is extraordinary. I like Lewis as a journalist and I sort of find some of his writing about fishermen perhaps leans towards the romantic in a way I find slightly difficult. I think the extent to which we romanticize these figures, I mean having spent time with fishermen very recently catching sea trout not far from where I am at the moment in Beadle Bay,

which is right on Katrina's doorstep. I think it was a really interesting thing to do with writing about shooting creatures and harvesting animals, which I've done quite a lot of, to do with how you romanticize it or otherwise. And I think it's a really interesting thing when you talk to these people who do these things. And they have to have so much knowledge and they have to have so much understanding.

But I don't always know how easy it is to write about it as it really is. I don't know, Katrina, what do you think about that, about being a writer looking at fishermen and how we romanticize these pursuits or otherwise and how you get to the truth. The truth. I think. Stop. The episode is over. I think we've established the theme.

The truth. Yeah. Let me try and answer that question though as best I can. I think I have several things to say about that. I think Norman Lewis is interesting because he does, as you say, let the romantic side, he expands on the romantic side. So let's just leave that there for a moment. But at the same time, he balances that against a very large amount of very austere presentation of cruelty in this book. There's a lot of cruelty.

There's a lot of animal cruelty and human cruelty. And it's, we're just presented with those things and left to make up our own minds. So the, the, the, the, the, the barbarity of, of, of, of some of the description like the, the, the bear dancing on the red hot coals. And there, there, there, there are many examples, you know, when, when the dogs from the neighborhood village are, are let loose and come into Farol, which is the cat village and the dogs are poisoned with dried up sponges, which then expand in their stomachs and the dogs all die. And this is just, we're just presented with these facts.

So there's no romanticism in that. So we've got this layering and again, tension, these opposites in the writing. And I think it's the interplay of those opposites. It's very, very interesting. But to go back to the question of romanticism that you began with, yes, I mean, there's quite a lot to say about that, but I think you've also got to ask yourselves what Norman Lewis thought the people themselves thought. Because my experience of fishing communities is very often that they have a sort of sense

of their own identity, which is in fact very romantic. They pride themselves in being incredibly independent. Norman Lewis talks about them talking about their fishing experiences in the bar in blank verse in a kind of high Castilian. I mean, they are romanticizing themselves. And I found this again and again and again, similar things in the storytelling that fishermen do about their lives. There's always exaggeration, there's always mythologizing. And there's a huge sense of beauty and the appreciation of the beauty of what they do that kind of sort of runs counter to and is in tension with the barbarity, the cruelty.

And I think Norman Lewis gets that really well. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Katrina. We're going to take a little break now when we come back. A stunning expose that was published in the TLS again in 1984. So stay around for that. See you in a moment. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them.

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Conditions apply. And we're back. We're talking about Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis. And before the break, we were talking about the romanticization of community in Lewis's work, but also in a sense, he's reporting what he finds. Katrina, I think I'm right in what you were saying there. He's saying, well, I'm writing about these fishermen, but I'm just telling you how they romanticize their own lives. I would like to read, we said in the introduction that this book was turned down for serialization in the TLS because it was too much like a novel. Well, here is a small excerpt from the review that the TLS subsequently ran in late 1984. And I'll ask people to comment on it when we when we reach the end.

Here we go. Tony Lambert wrote this. Voices of the old sea testifies to Lewis's continuing concern with cultures under threat of extinction, which has contributed most notably to worldwide awareness of the plight of the Amazonian Indians. The tone is not merely elegiac. With a novelist's eye for a rounded story as well as an anthropologist's nosiness, Lewis disinter's memorable lives and presents a rich array of brave, comic, idiosyncratic, and above all dignified characters. Particularly endearing is the

Quixotic Village priest who accepts with good-natured resignation his ambiguous role in a community where fishermen touch their testicles and spit into the wind to avert bad luck at the sight of him. His consolation is to sneak off whenever possible to forage among the Roman remains of Ampudan. Another character who ends by commanding respect as well as affection is the impoverished landowner Don Alberto, whose impotent feudalism and vain efforts to revive half-spurious folklore are born of a real respect for the village people which contrasts with the demotic vandalism of the black market king. The only mystery to remain unresolved is that of Louis himself. Why was he so anxious to

be accepted in this noble but alien and prickly community? How fully accepted was he? How did he learn to communicate with such apparent ease and speed in what must have been a very local form of Catalan? How can he recall incidents and conversations of nearly 40 years ago in such a wealth of detail? Did he spend his whole time writing in a notebook. In short, how much imaginative license is there in this poetic book? It is perfectly credible that fishermen should have recounted the happenings of their days at sea in improvised verse, but the examples given here are very beautiful. But why in Castilian? people. But why in Castilian? There you go. That's the slightly come off it Norman tone of that review. Now, I just want to say one more thing on this topic. I wasn't expecting this when we started, when we, I knew we were going to record an episode about Norman Lewis,

but the book that this reminded me of and the tone that it reminded me of for anyone who listened to our last episode was unexpectedly The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven. There's a kind of performative charm in the prose, which Niven would totally understand. Also a relationship to the truth. There's a wonderful quote from Lewis's second wife who said, Norman was useless on family holidays because after a while he will get bored because he couldn't make anything up. His Spanish publisher, his Catalan publisher said, when I read Voices of the Old Sea, I'm not sure it's my country. I find things which are certainly Mediterranean but not Catalan. And then I wonder if Norman did not include things from Sicily that he knew so well.

I told him once, politely, nobody quite knows what the response was. But anyway, Norman goes back. There's a piece in the Sunday Times in 1984. He goes back to Farrell and he finds his old fishing companion, his comrade Sebastian, now 60 and rich. This is from the brilliant, I think, biography of Norman Lewis. Really one of the best biographies I've read in a long, long time by Julian Evans, who was his editor, the editor of this book at Hamish Hamilton. So Sebastian's now 60, rich and apparently happy after building himself a hotel on a once valueless chicken run he had owned in the village. But admitting, as Norman had it, that something in this place used to have his gone.

What was missing? Norman asked him. Among all these bright lights, this music, this laughter, the seemingly successful search for instant joy, what was it that had turned its face away, withdrawn its magic, that had died? Sebastian was ready with the answer. Poetry, he said, it's abandoned us. Poetry is abandoned. That's very interesting. Okay. So, so I know Katrina will be bristling at the idea of poetry in this discussion as a euphemism for untruth, because of course, poetry is the opposite, right? But I would like to ask Patrick, Patrick, okay. So you've said that you appreciate the journalistic elements of Lewis's writing. Where do you stand on the idea of

telling an untruth in pursuit of a greater truth? I think when I said that I appreciate the journalism, I like the detail. I like how he goes rich on detail, and if the detail is made up, I don't really care. I think to a degree, Lewis is creating a community that he would like to be part of. I think that's a big thing for him. And I think there's an interesting, we touched on him coming from Enfield and being at one point a very successful camera salesman. I think he sold more Leica cameras than anybody else and never liked to talk about it, which is a really interesting thing. That's what funded, he had a chain of shops. R.G. Lewis after his

dad and that's what funded all his travels. But there's a fascinating thing there because it's like, but to be a proper writer you can't also be a successful camera salesman or whatever else it happens to be. But the point is, I think, is that the whole notion of it being the truth and him having to paint it exactly, I think we get very hung up on that. And I think the idea of going back and trying to establish exactly what was, that's never been kind of a possible thing to do. And as the fishermen, I mean, I've listened to wonderful, wonderful recordings that Katrina

has taken of fishermen who live near her, talking about huge fish. And I'm so enchanted by the story. And listen, I don't know if the fish were quite as big as they said they were, but it's kind of not really the point. It's how big they wanted them to be. And like in these stories, there is a, there is a truth and, you know, there is something more real and more important in what people want things to be sometimes

than what it exactly was. What's astonishing, I think in the, in the life that he writes about, it's not dull. What you get a real sense of is what happens afterwards, is they get bored taking tourists out on boats, whether that's the poetry in their lives or whatever it is, but you do get that sort of sense that some kind of vital energy is kind of drained away by the money that changes all their lives. Doesn't he say something like, I couldn't stay for one night? He stops off and has to go somewhere else completely.

Patrick, have you got a section you'd like to read us that appeals to you particularly? Yeah, I'd love to read this little bit that he just writes about the trees, which is a kind of theme throughout. And then I'd like to think a little bit about how that works and how powerful that is as a simple device but a powerful one as I say. In the year before my arrival in 1948 people in sort began to notice that something was happening to the trees but the early spring foliage had changed color and was withering. Word of their neighbour's alarm reached Farrell, but the fishermen shrugged their shoulders and went on preparing their

lines or mending their nets. It was impossible for them to understand that their destiny could be in any way linked with that of the peasants with whom they had little contact and from whom they were separated by huge differences of temperament and tradition. For the fishermen of Farrell, the peasants of Saut might have been the inhabitants of a distant planet rather than of a village five kilometres away, and they found it difficult to interest themselves in their fate whatever misfortune might have befallen them." And I just think that's a really interesting thing because we were talking about how journalistic he can be and how spare his writing can be, but right from the start he creates this sense

of foreboding that keeps you going in a way that journalism often doesn't do. And I think one of the failings of narrative non-fiction now is often that people don't do that. They don't try and do that throughout the whole book and they don't try and do that on a chapter level. But Norman Lewis has a very clear idea. I think they always said that he loved entertaining people. He loved the idea that he was entertaining people with his stories. And for all that this is journalistic, it's also a very, in a sense, not very, but it's quite a tightly plotted story. And it kind of takes us back to truth

I would rather have a tightly plotted story With a great sense of foreboding that keeps you going to find out, you know What what is gonna happen and why should these people care? Expensive perhaps exactly what happened. I Think it's very interesting that the the section you just read is the same one referred to by John at the beginning of the show, but John, you brought it in to demonstrate a kind of the sense of the alien that can exist five miles away, but you Patrick bring the same thing in and say, well, there's foreboding there. And of course it's both things at the same time. But also I would say Katrina underpinning that, I returned

to the pros, the pros, the pros, the pros, right right Cyril Connolly said of Norman Lewis he could make a lorry fascinating that's great it's so true he could make a lorry fascinating and I often see a kind of again this is a slightly odd comparison but that if you read any of AA Milne's nonfiction that he would file for punch on a weekly basis, a lot of the time he would he would look around the room and go, I've got nothing to say. There's a fish tank over there. I'm going to write 800 words about that fish tank and I'm going to make it play. And he does make it play. play. You know, there's a similar kind of fascination with how the object or scenario can be transmuted into the good yarn or the poetic picture. And that I think is really

extraordinary in this book. That was the thing that really hit me more than anything else. Does it matter, Katrina, that this might not be true? It doesn't matter to me that it might not be true because I'm not even really sure what true is. Anybody's description of this place would have been different from anybody else's. This was Norman Lewis's truth of this place. And he allowed himself to be so permeated, I feel, by the spirit of the people that he was among, that it rings true. It's not a forensically true account, but it is full of truth. Yes, yes. Well, what we recognise, Patrick, do we recognise truth about things other than a particular

Spanish village in a particular three-year period? Yes, yes. I was just thinking something that came to mind on what Katrina was saying and talking about fishing is that not so long ago, I edited a hunting and fishing magazine and we had a complaint raised about the truth of an article in this. So we got a call from the press standards guys saying,

was this true? And they came into our office and I laid all of these magazines out before them. And I told them from the 30 pound salmon caught here to the 20 geese shot there, to this story that reoccurs every five years about a goose flying across the sky with a scarf trailing from its neck,

which is just this crazy thing. Somebody shoots this beautiful goose and then they try and tie it up because they want to take it home. And it's only just injured a little bit. They're going to take it home and put it with that other geese. And they call their friend from along the marsh

and they say, look how beautiful this goose is, and they say, what goose? And they look up and it's flying across the sky with the scarf trading. And I said to them, none of it is true. That's the wonderful thing about fishing and hunting and so on. And they said, thank you very much, we'll consider this. And they sent an email a couple of weeks later,

and they said, that's really fascinating, thanks for that. Case dismissed. So I think for all that that's ridiculous, there is something in that. Fishing, writing, you're always chasing beautiful things and sometimes the objective truth gets lost in that. And the truth to this community in Faro, you know, many of these things that ostensibly appear to us to be completely ridiculous things like all the superstitions and the customs like the one that you referred to earlier about having to touch your testicles

if you see the priest or to touch iron. Those things were true to those people. They believed in them. That was their truth. So truth is a very, very slippery term, I think. Yeah, you have to do the testicle thing in Liverpool, I can reveal. They take against you if you don't. I've got a little bit I would like to read now and I would ask listeners, in fact, well, let's play a little game with this. I'm going to read you a very good story from this book. And at the end, I'm going to say, you have to tell me if this happened or didn't happen. As somebody would on the disgraced social media platform X, formerly Twitter, would you reply to this saying, oh, didn't happen?

Right. Or is or is there more to say? OK, very good. So here we go. Right. I'll ask each of you. You tell me if you think this happened or not. With only three days to go to the fiesta, the strangers invited by Don Alberto appeared in the cat village and began to put up a large tent on the beach. This was his circus, but which turned out to be no more than a traveling theater of the kind which still survived where there were no

cinemas within reach. A sad and seedy affair providing the barest of subsistence for aging and talentless players who had come to the end of the road. A garish poster covered the front of monsters and devils, a man eating tigers and a man in a balloon and under it a notice read, the palace of illusions, a spectacular parade of great luxury. The sweet, sad, shallow music of the far south came through the tent's opening all the long late summer's afternoon and aged actresses ravaged by the years and exposure to the sun hung about despondently in carpet slippers, kimonos and beach suits in appalling taste. A blood-red ticket box plastered all over with handbills of performances that had taken place

many years before in important towns for a placard that urged, hurry, don't delay a moment, the spectacle is about to start and few places remain. But nobody went to the theatre because nobody in Farol felt they could afford to throw four passators away in entertainments of this kind. They had also realised that these people were gypsies and they disliked and mistrusted gypsies and everything to do with them. This antipathy was irrational and reflected no more than a national prejudice, for it was unlikely that any member of the community had ever spoken to a gypsy, but for all that it was deep-seated.

When Carmela seized a cat up by the tail, swung it round her head and hurled it through the window, or dropped a mouse sizzling into the nearest fire, it was always with a cry of hatred. JETANO! I asked her and the grandmother to list their objections, and they were these. One, they were treacherous and unpredictable. Two, they dressed flashily and were given to boasting. Three, they preferred to live in caves, which to be fair was true. And four, no male gypsy ever worked if he could find a girl

to pimp on. Having found a girl to keep him, he spent his life sleeping or playing the guitar. In the course of this inquiry, it came out that many things regarded by foreigners as typical of Spain, such as flamenco dancing, were held in contempt by the cat people because of their gypsy origins. I was in the bar with Juan and Sebastian when a young man from the beach theatre came in with a guitar and began to sing cante flamenco. This annoyed my friends and after a moment or two Juan said almost in an undertone, may the devil shit out your soul. The gypsy heard him and immediately got up to go. Juan was conscience stricken at having given offense. So he went after the man and stopped him at the door.

He said later that he felt terribly embarrassed because although he was ashamed, he couldn't bring himself to apologize. In the end, he asked the man, why do you sing like that? To frighten fear, the gypsy told him. This was the kind of way any Spaniard liked to hear a man talk. And Juan began to take a liking to him. Who was the kind of way any Spaniard liked to hear a man talk. And Juan began to take a liking to him. Who wrote the words of that coplayu? No, a man called Lorca, the gypsy said. Well, I like it anyway. From your part of the world is he? Nearby, he died. I'm sorry to hear that, Juan, because he was a man I would have liked to meet. Anyway, come with me my friends and have a drink.

There it is. Now that is a good yawn. David Niven would be proud of that. Patrick, truth or lie? True. Totally true. Yeah. Totally true.

I would say 10% true. 10% true. Yeah. Totally true. No, I would say 10% true. 10% true. Absolutely. I wonder whether then people felt much more confident in going off to far-flung places such as Spain and sort of just spinning yarns because they didn't think anybody was ever really going to be able to check. Whereas like now you'd worry a little bit because, you know, somebody was probably on Instagram.

I was there and that's not what he said. And that gypsy never said that. You know, John, let me ask you truth or lie. Well, I think I plead, you know, the, what I'm now going to call the porches defense and say, it doesn't really matter. But there are, I tell you what, there are two absolute cast iron, provable truths within that story. One is the deep hatred of gypsies, which I can tell you that that list.

You could get, I could get people to recite that list in my pub, in my village. That's still absolutely a true thing. And the second thing is that a lot of the things that we think of as Spanish are not really claimed by most of Spain. So flamenco music, cantejondo, a lot of the Moorish kind of tradition. So tapas. Kind of Basque. Tapas or Basque. Yeah. Tapas. Tapas Abbas, yeah. Okay, we should also note before we leave that Norman Lewis, who is best known as a travel writer and journalist, did not want to be remembered for being a travel writer and journalist. He also wrote 12 novels, which he was much keener that people

see as his literary legacy, while simultaneously being aware that that was never going to happen. And indeed, those novels were very well reviewed in their time, perhaps better than some of his other writing was, but that's not why, if he's remembered, we remember him. Was it his biographer who said that he struggled with fiction because he couldn't do emotion in the way that other people could, which I thought was a really interesting thing. And is that in some ways why he was so good as a journalist, as a travel writer, you know, which we were talking about, because he has that sense of being a witness, you know, as opposed to someone like Graham Greene. He needed to build on a factual base, didn't he? And even if what he built was fanciful, he still needed that as the

underpinning of the thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fascinating. I'm afraid the inexorable tide of time has rolled in. We must haul our boats up the beach and stow them for the winter. So huge thanks to Katrina and to Patrick for reminding us of the semi-invisible genius of Norman Lewis and to Nikki Birch for reminding us that not all modern technology is cheap and tawdry. Long pause.

If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 226 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you would like to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're still keen to hear from you on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky and wherever else you feel compelled to write from.

If you want to hear about Backlisted early and add free, subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. you feel compelled to write from. and recommending the books, films and musics we've enjoyed in the period of Fortnite. For those of you who enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Plus, lot listeners get their names read out, accompanied by praise like this. Barbara Kangason, thank you. Jay McCarthy Flynn, thank you. Joy Stanley, thank you. Sam Tozer, thank you. Christine Taylor, thank you. Thank you. Joanne Rutter, thank you. Helen Heaney, thank you. Anne Lennon, thank you very much. Steve Hodgkins, thank you very much. Thomas Carton de Viart, thank you. Before we go, I'll start with you, Patrick. Is there anything else you would like to say about Voices of the Old Sea or Norman Lewis or the concept of truth itself that we didn't manage to cover in the main show?

I was very sad that we didn't get to talk more about Norman Lewis and the suburbs because I know that's something obviously that you've written about quite a lot. I think did Norman Lewis say that the suburbs was like nothing with chips? Yes. He said Saturday night in Enfield was like nothing with chips. Yes. He said Saturday night in Enfield was like nothing with chips. Just Saturday night in Enfield. But I think that's a really interesting thing. So, you know, the idea that Enfield was one thing, then the places that he goes and discovers are something else. And that's, you know, there's a really interesting thing there. I think his relationship was... Yeah. So he goes to Spain and goes, oh, this is something with chips.

Well, exactly. Nothing with chips. Exactly that. Okay. Yeah. Katrina, is there anything you would like to add before we finish? There is one thing. Lewis talks in this book, largely through the other characters, I think. He talks about the death of the cork trees in the adjoining village to the fishing village and how that is bringing that way of life to an end. So there's a sense in which the human, the cultural disintegration or being overlaid

by something else or being dismantled by capitalism is also accompanied by an environmental catastrophe. And I feel that if he saw that that was the right moment to be a traveler and that in the future, you weren't going to be able to travel in the same way, perhaps he was also presaging something which is connected to that, which is our current environmental catastrophe. Yes, I strongly agree with that actually.

John, is there anything you want to add before we go? Yeah, I would just to say, I had once had a marvelous lunch, Rachel and I. Rachel used to do his publicity and she loved, she absolutely loved and continues to love Norman's memories. She just said he was one of the most, just nicest, kindest, most generous, most interesting lunch companions that she'd ever had. And we went and had lunch with him and his wife Leslie in Finchingfield. And he showed me his extraordinary collection of orchids. He was obsessed with, you know, it was a very unlikely thing to find in an Essex village, but there it was, this marvellous sort of hot house full of orchards. And it just reminded

me of something that Oberam Waugh said when saying that why did Norman Lewis, because it's still amazing to me that a lot of people don't know about Norman Lewis, he never wanted the limelight, you know. And Oberyn Waugh said that he shunned the company of the London Literati, seeing himself as the exact opposite of writers like C.P. Snow and Paul Theroux. Theroux, this is what Oberyn Waugh says, writes with well-bred scorn. Lewis is always consumed with ill-bred enthusiasm. And I love that. I think ill-bred enthusiasm is perfect. My last word I'm giving to Hoyt Axton with his song Never Been to Spain.

You'll recall earlier, everybody, Never Been to Spain. Here's the beginning of the second verse of Never Been to Spain. Well, I never been to England, but I kind of like the Beatles. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening everybody. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much. Thank you Katrina and Patrick. Thank you. See you, everyone. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Thank you. The End