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American army trucks parked next to the St Lucia fountain, with Vesuvius in the background
American army trucks parked next to the St Lucia fountain, with Vesuvius in the background. Photograph: George Rodger/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
American army trucks parked next to the St Lucia fountain, with Vesuvius in the background. Photograph: George Rodger/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Rereading: Naples '44 by Norman Lewis

This article is more than 12 years old
Norman Lewis's travel book, justly celebrated for its portrait of a war-torn city, also contains the best account of the eruption of Vesuvius

When Norman Lewis disembarked from the Duchess of Bedford at Paestum in early September 1943 he found the beach littered with pile upon pile of office equipment. It had been decided to land the raw material of US military bureaucracy on the sand, rather than any tanks, armoured cars or cases of munitions. That scene set the tone for the rest of Lewis's year in southern Italy and for his dancing masterpiece, written 30 years later, Naples '44.

The American Fifth Army had opted to borrow a section of the Field Security Service (FSS) from the British Intelligence Corps, first for their operations in Algeria and Tunisia, where Lewis employed his own "Adenese bazaar Arabic", and then for the invasion of southern Italy – for which Lewis was better prepared linguistically since his then wife was Sicilian. Once Lewis had landed, he and 11 companions were isolated from their American colleagues, many of whom were equally bemused trigger-happy country boys. Lewis's section went ashore to play their part in the Allied effort with little more than a motorbike, a Webley pistol and five rounds of ammunition each. They had received no briefing or guidance.

They made for a wood, where dead German soldiers, victims of the battle earlier that day, were neatly laid out. Pressing on they were met, on the far side, by an astonishing vision of "unearthly enchantment". Washed by the glow of a late sunset, the three great Greek temples of Paestum stood in clear view. In the immediate foreground lay a pair of dead cows, their feet in the air. Cattle with rigor mortis framing classical columns – in his characteristic, elegant shorthand Lewis calibrated the extremes between the absurd and the sublime.

In the pacing and narrative of Naples '44 Lewis established a subtle and continuous hum of dissonance, his terse language, his mordant wit occasionally fired up by blistering fury. After the initial débâcle of the landings, Lewis felt that history must be left to "dress up this part of the action of Salerno with what dignity it can". His own enduring impression was of "ineptitude and cowardice", a contagion from the top. He considered that the responses of Lieutenant General Mark Clark, the allied commander, veered between blind panic and violent revenge.

But the complete lack of forward planning also allowed Sergeant Lewis and his section to spend much of these early weeks on Italian soil "lotus-eating" at Paestum. Their only serious mission was to identify the mysterious lights seen every night, flickering in the fields near the nearest village. That they turned out to be torches, illuminating the path as the locals stumbled out to their communal latrine, was no great surprise.

In early October the section moved up to Naples, driving past local people whose drawn faces were the colour of pumice and who waved at them in a desultory fashion, "the apathetic fascist salute of last week" having become "the apathetic V-sign of today". Air raids, one in August, one in September, had left the already semi-destitute city without water and in ruins, "literally tumbling about our ears". The FSS was, however, in luck and was housed in the piano nobile of a palace on the once elegant Riviera di Chiaia. Lewis was given the task of dealing with suspected collaborators, and he and three colleagues began sifting through vast sacks of written denunciation, "mountains of vilification and calumny" – the result of resentment, boredom or vendetta. Before long individuals began to appear in the office in person, eager to turn informer.

Meanwhile General Clark, apparently oblivious to every nuance of his situation and having expressed a preference for fish, dined on a baby manatee, the most prized specimen in the rapidly depleting Naples aquarium. He had, perhaps, failed to notice that no boats were permitted to leave harbour and the only fishing took place off improvised rafts, usually made of doors lashed together. Otherwise Neapolitans were eating chicken heads, the windpipes of calves and even, it was rumoured, cats. Lewis might be guilty of occasional exaggeration in the interests of a good story but his description of the butchers' elegant display of gruesome offal needed no extra effects.

On one occasion Lewis was eating out with his lawyer friend Lattarullo, "most faithful of my Neapolitan allies". The fish brought to them, resplendent on a large platter, had a body that bore no relationship to the fine head, while the veal escalope was revealed, beneath the breadcrumbs, to be a thin slice of horsemeat. Suddenly a group of little girls in black, institutional uniforms appeared, stumbling towards the tables, tears pouring down their cheeks. He realised they were all blind. The diners had taken no notice whatsoever and the crestfallen, weeping children were removed from their presence. In prose Lewis was the master of the telling small incident that defined the larger picture but that moment cut deeper. It marked his conversion to pessimism. "I would never recover from the memory of it."

Outdoors, ingenuity was at a premium. The manhole covers had gone, leaving the streets pockmarked with gaping mantraps, while one abandoned tank was vanishing day by day, melting away "as if its armour-plating had been made of ice". Entire ships had been spirited out of the water and broken up, while gangs were busy stripping apart any intact military vehicle they could find, like hordes of busy leaf-cutter ants.

Lewis played the Neapolitans as if they were chess pieces, he the quizzical master of the game, fascinated and full of admiration for their resilience and resourcefulness – prostitutes and black marketeers would come in many shapes and at every degree in those desperate months. But rising above his cast of villains and eccentrics, including a countess who had earthed over her ballroom and grew vegetables there, was a tender portrait of the old lawyer, Lattarullo. His (largely illusory) professional status, maintained in the interest of bella figura, masked the reality of his desperate circumstances, just as his own worldly views were at variance with those of his unseen aunt, through whom he voiced visceral prejudices and beliefs.

And soon those beliefs were to be tested. On 19 March 1944 Vesuvius erupted, "the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see", Lewis wrote. Overhead rose a cloud in the form of Pliny's famous pine-tree, apparently quite solid. While steadily growing larger, it remained entirely immobile. That still shape, hanging above the city, was full of menace. Recently, when I was writing my book Vesuvius: The Most Famous Volcano in the World (Profile, £15.99), I reread Naples '44. Of perhaps a dozen resounding accounts of the volcano as it erupted down the centuries, no one has bettered Lewis's description. Only George Rodger's photographs run it close.

In his official capacity, Lewis had been sent to check on military installations in those coastal areas most at risk from the lava flow, south of Naples at Portici and Torre Annunciata. He drove there through a "slow, grey, snowfall" and, the following day, headed inland to San Sebastiano, the village most at risk of destruction. His tyres skidded on sticky ash and the vehicle was bombarded by a hailstorm of volcanic debris. On arrival Lewis found the lava pushing with slow resolve down the main street, having ingested buildings large and small. The entire cupola of the church rode the wave. Nowadays it's possible to read his words while watching the event live, for several newsreels made by Allied cinematographers are on YouTube.

As the lava marched on, the full cast of local saints was dragooned into action. Although San Gennaro (Saint Januarius) was the patron saint of Naples, he was also on standby in the back streets of San Sebastiano. The hoped-for liquefaction of his blood three times a year offered protection to the city against misfortune, especially that posed by the looming volcano at its back.

Once the volcano had settled down, the saint's mood during the ceremonials in early May became a matter of pressing concern – particularly given the numbers of non-believing servicemen in town. In the end it was judged a "poorish liquefaction", Lewis noted, but at least the transformation had eventually taken place. All would be well until September. Lattarrulo, who had for once forgotten to introduce his aunt into the conversation, was concerned that the miracle should occur, confessing that even he was "not immune to mass suggestion".

Lewis's Naples teemed with a population that challenged medieval levels of density, and health hazards to match. Palaces with 10 or 20 great (unfurnished) rooms above provided accommodation for dozens, even hundreds, below. The destitution was not solely the result of war – the bombardment had exacerbated an existing level of crisis. Like Victorian London the city was a network of "human rookeries" and the people had become equally estranged and dislocated from the countryside from which they had come.

In August, with great misgivings, Lewis's section was transferred to Benevento, ironically to the Hotel Vesuvio in the town of which San Gennaro had been the bishop. The ancient centre had been "purposelessly destroyed" by Flying Fortresses 18 months earlier.

The political situation there, just as closer to Naples, was chaotic. Organised crime in the region had been greatly facilitated by the rise of leading figures in the Camorra. The brief but meteoric rise of Vito Genovese as a trusted intelligence source within the American army, despite his criminal past and close links to Mussolini, fouled the transition between fascist placemen and any hope of an improved new order. The keystone of Mussolini's dictatorship had been removed and into the void tumbled a host of splintering political parties. The FSS reckoned they had identified 65. One neo-fascist group was Forza Italia.

By the time Genovese was rumbled, in August 1944, it was too late. Early-21st-century leaders are frequently seduced by credible tribal warlords; their mid-20th-century counterparts seemed unable (or unwilling) to tell a gangster king from a social democrat. For all that, Lewis wrote about the values, ingenuity and extraordinary spirit in many of the individuals he encountered. Tragically, behind them the stage for modern Italy was being set on shifting moral sands guided by little more than ignorance, naivety and astonishing misjudgement. Lewis, a figure in the shadows, was the most profound witness to that process.

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