The Fortunes of War author had a grudge against the world, writes Artemis Cooper
The Balkan and Levant triologies, written between 1960 and 1980, were Olivia Manning's most important achievement. Collectively known as Fortunes of War, the novels were adapted for television seven years after the author's death. The series starred Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime lives mirror those of Manning and her husband, RD "Reggie" Smith.
Born in 1908, the daughter of a naval officer whom she adored, Manning grew up in a penny-pinched household in Portsmouth, in an atmosphere poisoned by her mother's bitterness and rancour. She was five when her brother Oliver was born and, as her mother poured all her love into her son, Olivia felt bereft. She began earning her living as soon as she left school, and took evening classes at the Portsmouth School of Art. But when she began writing serials for the local papers, she realised that it was writing, not painting, that would help her save money and get away from home.
She moved to London in 1934, in the depths of the Depression when work was very scarce. A series of badly paid jobs left her half-starved in chilly bedsits, but she used every spare moment to write. Her first novel, The Wind Changes, appeared in 1937. Set during the Irish rebellion of 1916, one of its themes is the heroine's exasperation at the way she is excluded from the political discussions and concerns of the two men in her life – and her frustration is manifested in an angry sexuality.
Manning met Reggie Smith in the summer of 1938. He was a generous, cheerful man, with friends in every pub and books in every pocket. He had enjoyed her first novel, and liked the contrast between Olivia's strong intelligence and the slim fragility of her body. Three weeks later they were married. Five days after that they were on a train to Bucharest, where Smith was teaching for the British Council. He was greeted with delight by all his old friends in Romania, but few warmed to the reserved woman he had brought with him. Manning was annoyed by the fact that Smith seemed to dissipate all his energies in drinking and talking – a fate she was determined to avoid.
Unlike her fictional alter-ego, the unemployed Harriet Pringle, she doggedly carried on writing short stories, articles and reviews throughout the war years. The married couple escaped Romania just ahead of the advancing Germans, and found themselves jobless and penniless in Athens. When the Germans took Greece, Olivia and Reggie were among the flood of refugees who ended up in the hot, fly-blown, indifferent cacophony of Cairo.
The experience of exile scarred Olivia profoundly. In her trilogies it appears as a restless unease that is never far below the surface; as Deidre David observes in her book, this reflects the anxieties that preyed on her as she wrote the books during the cold war. Even more searing, though buried deeper, was the loss of her only child. In 1944, she and Reggie were delighted to find that she was pregnant. But the foetus died inside her, and she had to carry her dead baby to term.
David is a generous and sympathetic biographer, even if she underlines some points too heavily. At every opportunity we are reminded of Manning's skill in fusing history and personal experience into fiction, or how brilliantly she wrote from the male perspective. At the same time, she is good at putting Manning into context – particularly in the postwar British literary scene. While Reggie was making his name as a producer in the BBC, Olivia grumbled about how critical admiration for "The Booksey Boys"– writers such as John Wain, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne – left women writers out in the cold. But when Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Edna O'Brien rose to fame, Manning's resentment shifted as she brooded over their celebrity and press coverage. Why were they getting so much attention? Her books – she hadpublished six between the end of the war and 1960 – were just as good as theirs, she felt, but hers were consistently ignored.
I don't agree with David's claim that "the sense of injury for which she was criticised after the war" grew out of the privations she had endured during her wartime exile. I think it was born when her mother's love found a new focus in her son – though this did not stop Manning from loving her brother, who like her had to endure the weight of their parents' miserable marriage. He joined the RAF and was killed in action in 1941. But although she disliked her mother, Manning seemed doomed to inherit that uncontainable grudge against the world. She was tightfisted with tradesmen, and fears that England was being overrun by foreigners provoked a small-minded racism that was particularly unattractive.
David never hides these flaws, and does her best to persuade us that Manning was a great novelist. She deconstructs the novels to their author's skills and preoccupations, and shows how her fiction is put together. This is a worthwhile exercise, although it has the built-in danger of diminishing the books it seeks to celebrate. I was not seized by an urgent desire to read The Doves of Venus, The Play Room or The Rainforest. Despite the research and sensitivity that David brings to the study of such novels, I cannot help thinking that their plots sound thin and watery compared to the trilogies.
It is Olivia's relationship with Reggie that remains at the core of this story, and given the tensions between them, there is something moving about their mutual devotion. Manning was, undoubtedly, a pill. But the shambolic and philandering Smith – who sometimes had both the radio and the TV tuned to the sports channels, while she was trying to write – must have been equally hard to live with. He was her primary editor, her rock of support, and he inspired the most vital character in her work. I wish there were more about him in this book, and that the reader could have heard something of his voice, either from letters or his lectures. Considering how much Manning wrote about him and what a compulsive talker he was, he remains elusive and silent.
Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor is published by John Murray. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.
The Balkan and Levant triologies, written between 1960 and 1980, were Olivia Manning's most important achievement. Collectively known as Fortunes of War, the novels were adapted for television seven years after the author's death. The series starred Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime lives mirror those of Manning and her husband, RD "Reggie" Smith.
Born in 1908, the daughter of a naval officer whom she adored, Manning grew up in a penny-pinched household in Portsmouth, in an atmosphere poisoned by her mother's bitterness and rancour. She was five when her brother Oliver was born and, as her mother poured all her love into her son, Olivia felt bereft. She began earning her living as soon as she left school, and took evening classes at the Portsmouth School of Art. But when she began writing serials for the local papers, she realised that it was writing, not painting, that would help her save money and get away from home.
She moved to London in 1934, in the depths of the Depression when work was very scarce. A series of badly paid jobs left her half-starved in chilly bedsits, but she used every spare moment to write. Her first novel, The Wind Changes, appeared in 1937. Set during the Irish rebellion of 1916, one of its themes is the heroine's exasperation at the way she is excluded from the political discussions and concerns of the two men in her life – and her frustration is manifested in an angry sexuality.
Manning met Reggie Smith in the summer of 1938. He was a generous, cheerful man, with friends in every pub and books in every pocket. He had enjoyed her first novel, and liked the contrast between Olivia's strong intelligence and the slim fragility of her body. Three weeks later they were married. Five days after that they were on a train to Bucharest, where Smith was teaching for the British Council. He was greeted with delight by all his old friends in Romania, but few warmed to the reserved woman he had brought with him. Manning was annoyed by the fact that Smith seemed to dissipate all his energies in drinking and talking – a fate she was determined to avoid.
Unlike her fictional alter-ego, the unemployed Harriet Pringle, she doggedly carried on writing short stories, articles and reviews throughout the war years. The married couple escaped Romania just ahead of the advancing Germans, and found themselves jobless and penniless in Athens. When the Germans took Greece, Olivia and Reggie were among the flood of refugees who ended up in the hot, fly-blown, indifferent cacophony of Cairo.
The experience of exile scarred Olivia profoundly. In her trilogies it appears as a restless unease that is never far below the surface; as Deidre David observes in her book, this reflects the anxieties that preyed on her as she wrote the books during the cold war. Even more searing, though buried deeper, was the loss of her only child. In 1944, she and Reggie were delighted to find that she was pregnant. But the foetus died inside her, and she had to carry her dead baby to term.
David is a generous and sympathetic biographer, even if she underlines some points too heavily. At every opportunity we are reminded of Manning's skill in fusing history and personal experience into fiction, or how brilliantly she wrote from the male perspective. At the same time, she is good at putting Manning into context – particularly in the postwar British literary scene. While Reggie was making his name as a producer in the BBC, Olivia grumbled about how critical admiration for "The Booksey Boys"– writers such as John Wain, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne – left women writers out in the cold. But when Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Edna O'Brien rose to fame, Manning's resentment shifted as she brooded over their celebrity and press coverage. Why were they getting so much attention? Her books – she hadpublished six between the end of the war and 1960 – were just as good as theirs, she felt, but hers were consistently ignored.
I don't agree with David's claim that "the sense of injury for which she was criticised after the war" grew out of the privations she had endured during her wartime exile. I think it was born when her mother's love found a new focus in her son – though this did not stop Manning from loving her brother, who like her had to endure the weight of their parents' miserable marriage. He joined the RAF and was killed in action in 1941. But although she disliked her mother, Manning seemed doomed to inherit that uncontainable grudge against the world. She was tightfisted with tradesmen, and fears that England was being overrun by foreigners provoked a small-minded racism that was particularly unattractive.
David never hides these flaws, and does her best to persuade us that Manning was a great novelist. She deconstructs the novels to their author's skills and preoccupations, and shows how her fiction is put together. This is a worthwhile exercise, although it has the built-in danger of diminishing the books it seeks to celebrate. I was not seized by an urgent desire to read The Doves of Venus, The Play Room or The Rainforest. Despite the research and sensitivity that David brings to the study of such novels, I cannot help thinking that their plots sound thin and watery compared to the trilogies.
It is Olivia's relationship with Reggie that remains at the core of this story, and given the tensions between them, there is something moving about their mutual devotion. Manning was, undoubtedly, a pill. But the shambolic and philandering Smith – who sometimes had both the radio and the TV tuned to the sports channels, while she was trying to write – must have been equally hard to live with. He was her primary editor, her rock of support, and he inspired the most vital character in her work. I wish there were more about him in this book, and that the reader could have heard something of his voice, either from letters or his lectures. Considering how much Manning wrote about him and what a compulsive talker he was, he remains elusive and silent.
Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor is published by John Murray. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.