Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War

Introduction

Introduction O livia Manning’s reputation as a difficult personality often threatens to obscure her reputation as a writer. Few twentiethcentury novelists can have inspired such consistent dislike. The publisher Dan Davin, for example, who was devoted to Manning’s gregarious husband Reggie Smith, complained of her as a shrewish woman whose aim was ‘to be as unpleasant to as many people as possible’, while the legendary denizen of Fitzrovia, Julian Maclaren-Ross, recalled among his Stag’s Head drinking circle ‘the taciturn, undemonstrative and physically unattractive Olivia Manning who, from the vantage point of her bar-stool regarded the others with an expression of amusement, mingled with contempt’. Fellow writer Inez Holden christened her ‘whiney’ Manning; Anthony Powell, her otherwise generous editor at Punch, admitted her to be ‘the world’s worst grumbler’, and her publishers at Heinemann were forced to conclude that she was ‘never an easy artist to handle’. Even Kay Dick, her lifelong friend and correspondent, depicted Manning in her 1984 novel The Shelf as the spiteful gossip Sophie, who, with her ‘wry fragility, delicate hands and penetrating voice . . . often reminded me of a goshawk about to bite’.1 Can this reputation be challenged? Manning herself readily acknowledged her tendency towards maliciousness ‘at least in the past’, as she put it when interviewed by Dick in the early 1970s.2 Olivia Manning: A Life, the biography assembled over several years by her friends Neville and June Braybrooke and completed after their deaths by the novelist Francis King, makes a valiant attempt at her rehabilitation, but from it nevertheless emerges a woman with a seemingly natural bent towards animosity, a peevishness exacerbated by what she took to be critical and public neglect of her writing. Undoubtedly this was a major source of her discontent, and letters to friends during her life constantly register her grievances against the numerous rivals, editors and reviewers seemingly determined, as she saw it, to keep her from the upper reaches of a literary hierarchy.3 This was not simply vanity: her bitterness stemmed from a genuine sense of distress at how her work repeatedly failed to make its mark. ‘I feel I have been a disappointment’, she wrote to her publishers at Heinemann after poor sales threatened their investment in a novelist they had initially regarded as a major talent.4 The recognition she did achieve, meanwhile, often tended towards the kind of damnation with faint praise suggested by Pamela Hansford Johnson’s response to Manning’s 1951 novel School for Love: ‘among the best ten novels written by women in the past twenty-five years’.5 Disconsolate, Manning seemed at one stage to hope for little more than the qualified glory hinted at in her introduction to a 1968 edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: ‘Not all writers of genius take the public by storm. Dickens wanted, indeed, needed, immediate and unlimited fame; Stendhal wanted and correctly anticipated recognition only after his death. Jane Austen in her lifetime was successful without being a sensation.’6 The reputation is not to be challenged then. Rather Manning’s bitterness needs, like the author, careful handling as a starting-point to recover her place as a pre-eminent novelist of British wartime experience. It was, after all, her embittered personality that sustained her scepticism towards what she regarded as the cultural bombast and vacuous political idealism carried by an inter-war generation of ideologues into the theatre of the Second World War. Manning’s natural spite gives much of her writing its defining character as an aggressive riposte to the society and events around her, enhancing her fiction dealing with the wartime era and boosting, too, her literary criticism deriving from the same period. Significantly, the tenor of her critical voice was developed not in the London book pages of the 1960s but in the maelstrom of the war in the Middle East, when her shrewishness – looking in her younger years more like bravado – gave a sharp but welcome edge to the prolific review work she undertook during the 1940s for the Palestine Post. Here, for example, her private campaign against Penguin’s New Writing shows her spirited contempt for what she regarded as the incestuous dross emanating from  imperial refugee a navel-gazing literary London. ‘It is depressingly certain that practically every number of this periodical’, she wrote of a 1945 issue, ‘will contain one of Mr Lehmann’s inconsiderable...