A book that could be divided into two parts, although it contains five part headings, I Came, I Saw describes Norman Lewis's life in a manner that is funny, witty, demoralizing, and at times somewhat terrible. Lewis's autobiography fills its pages with craziness: insane families, lunatic army officers, drug crazed teenagers, corrupt officials, and military indifference to slaughter and murder.
The parts that consist of Lewis's childhood on through his time as an intelligence NCO in North Africa during World War II are the best. The pages read like a novel most of the time, or, when describing North Africa, Sicily, and Naples during the war, like a travel book. All of the first quality.
Lewis's parents were spiritualists, his father a medium and his mother a healer. They were at odds with the established religions and madly sincere in their beliefs. Perhaps this is why Lewis would later insist he had no beliefs; indeed, he didn't even believe in belief. Meanwhile, three crazy aunts living with their father, Lewis's grandfather, in Wales make for an equally eccentric household. And when Lewis meets an upper class Sicilian family of Spanish descent, he falls for their daughter, Ernestina, and marries her. The encounter between the two families at the Lewis home north of London is, frankly, as funny as anything I've read. Culture clash, intellectual train wreck.
When Lewis goes off to war, he becomes estranged from Ernestina, although he remains close to her parents. He describes a commanding officer in Tunisia who orders his men to appear before him, while he wears only a shiny belt, boots, and a holster for a gun which he threatens to use against one of his soldiers before turning on himself. In Algeria, Lewis details French maltreatment and outright murder of Arabs--predicting accurately enough that the war between French colons and Algerian Arabs will not turn out well for the French.
Alas, following the war, when Lewis is pushing out one book after another, the author decides to skip over things until moving his family (he never even mentions his second or third wives names) to a village near Rome. Lewis doesn't even bother with dates. The only way I knew when these events took place was because Lewis mentioned the kidnapping and mutilation of Paul Getty, which occurred in 1973. This last section is a good one, however, again filled with wit, sly observances, and a wistfulness for decaying cultures. It's just that Lewis zips from 1945 to 1973 without describing much in between that makes it disorienting. I like reading Norman Lewis, his novels and his travel writing. And this autobiography, I can tell, will remain memorable. The uniqueness of the man and the places through which he traveled come across every page.