Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War

Chapter One - A life in writing

chapter one A life in writing O livia Manning belonged to a British literary generation which held tenaciously to its diverse Irish connections in the wartime years, but, as with Cyril Connolly or Lawrence Durrell, her claims on Irishness were intermittent and often distinctly pragmatic. In her youth she was given to periodic outbursts of romantic nationalism: manuscripts of poems written while still at school and shown in later life to the poet George Fraser were awash, he noted, with Irish revolutionary pieces, while in her Irish travelogue, The Dreaming Shore, she quotes at length Irish patriot Roger Casement’s speech on the ‘indomitable persistency’ of the Irish nation (though partly, one suspects, in an effort to animate the book’s rather dull sequence of history, legend and landscape).1 With similar headiness she applauded, in an early review of Mary Lavin’s short stories, the Irish writer’s departure from Celtic whimsy as ‘an indication that the Irish are losing the self-consciousness of a subject people and are getting on their feet as a nation’. Such gestures may appear heartfelt enough but disguise a more conflicted view of Ireland’s political evolution. More to the point, perhaps, Manning was alert to the idea that ‘Irishness’, by the mid-century, had become something of a literary liability, an outmoded cultural name-tag: ‘[I]t is now believed that owing to the Irish Revival which took place some years ago’, she observed wryly, in 1945, ‘everyone got so bored with the Irish that no one will read an Irish novel or short story.’2 Manning’s Irish background was solid enough, nevertheless, to influence her personality and political outlook and therefore it offers a suitable starting-point for tracking her emergence as a writer. Born on the southern English coast, in Portsmouth in 1908, she spent three years in Ireland during the First World War while her father – then an officer in the British Royal Navy – served on a patrol vessel in the English Channel. Sojourns with her mother’s cousins in Galway and Clare in the west of Ireland would later provide incidental material for the wild mountainous Irish landscape depicted in her curious 1934 tale of a dysfunctional Irish convent, ‘A Scantling of Foxes’, and for her portraits of a fading Irish Protestant small gentry class in several stories from her 1948 collection, Growing Up.3 Her mother was from Ulster, from the town of Bangor, County Down, where Manning’s maternal grandfather had settled on his return from America to become the proprietor of a well-known local public house, the Old Inn at Home. It was with Bangor that Manning kept her strongest ties, and in future years this reserved seaside town, with its peculiar and heady cultural mix of Presbyterianism, freemasonry, loyalism and political alienation, would become the shadowy elsewhere to her sense of Englishness.4 Though she frequently acknowledged her Ulster links, Manning affected to be disenchanted with the place in later life. Her grim visits to her mother’s wealthy relations in Bangor were described to Kay Dick in 1954 (‘It is simply golf, sport and canasta all day’), and when her husband Reggie Smith was appointed to a post at the University of Ulster in 1972, she wrote without enthusiasm of having to go and find him somewhere to live in ‘the ghastly north’.5 In some of her earliest writing, however, Manning makes use of Bangor – and Ulster in general – for key thematic purposes, drawing on her childhood memories of place to undermine both securities of belonging and, at the same time, any romantic instincts towards Irish nationalism. Her representation of a fractured Northern Irish experience, depicted in several of her early fictions, gestures towards the national disenchantments of later work. In her rather remarkable short story ‘A Visit’, for example, the setting of the Belfast linen factories grounds the misery of an emotionally strained, petty bourgeois family in the dourness and constriction of the northern city’s industrial landscape, as a kind of Irish anti-romance: ‘the black river crawling under the drizzle of rain; the wet cobbles; the dirty pavements; the stale fishy smell from the  imperial refugee docks; the women with their hating, starved faces beneath their shawls; the cold. . .’6 More expansively, in her 1937 historical novel of Irish independence, The Wind Changes, a sequence in which the protagonist Elizabeth Dearborn recalls her childhood in...