The man who could not tell the truth

This has to be one of the most courageous books ever written. Literary biography is a foolhardy venture anyway, a writer’s life being usually his own raw material, so he has usually written his own version, or versions, of this, however fragmentary, and, what is much worse, written it well, otherwise there would be no biographer. But what if he hasn’t told the truth, and not just once or twice, but not ever?

In 1985 Norman Lewis published his autobiography Jackdaw’s Cake, which I had looked forward to more than any book published in my lifetime. I would have looked forward to anything he had written, for I had just read John Hatt’s reprint of Naples 44, Lewis’s account of his experiences as a field policeman in occupied Italy, one of the very few books that had prompted something I thought had gone with childhood, the joy each night of looking forward to bed so I could resume my reading.