Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War

Chapter Two - The Balkan Trilogy: Romania and the far end of Europe

Chapter Two The Balkan Trilogy: Romania and the far end of Europe In the summer of 1940 the Athene Palace was the last cosmopolitan stage on which post-world-war Europe and the new-order Europe made a joint appearance. There was, of course, the Hotel Aviso in Lisbon, Portugal, but there the old society, harried and terrified, just waited around for the boats to America. There still was the Serbsky Kral in Belgrade, Jugoslavia, where the two orders mingled, but here the setting as well as the cast lacked glamour. In the Bregues in Geneva or the Dunapalato in Budapest, there was no play on at all. Only in the Athene Palace, a glamorous setting in the traditional style of European Grand Hotels, the cast of post-world-war Europe and the cast of the new order, all-star casts both, still had equal billing and the play itself was full of suspense. R.G. Waldeck1 ‘ A t the first mention of going to Roumania, a great many persons, as did myself, would take down their atlas and open the map’, wrote Sacheverell Sitwell at the beginning of his account of a fourweek visit to the country in 1937. The efforts of locating this exotic destination ‘at the far end of Europe’ were more than worthwhile, he continued, delighting over a land rich in agriculture and food stocks, picturesque – if one overlooked a few seemingly inappropriate twentiethcentury innovations – in its ancient landscapes and peasantry, and well ruled since his return to the throne some seven years earlier by a solid and amiable King Carol II. The travel writer’s confidence in this obscure and romantic territory was ill-founded, however, and indeed in many respects already obsolete. The Romanian monarchy would shortly be revealed as one of the most corrupt in Europe, Romanian peasantry the most disaffected and oppressed. Sitwell’s visit took place at a time of tense political transition in a country already fractured by ethnic and economic discrepancies and now threatened too by European conflict on its many vulnerable borders. In his introduction to Sitwell’s account, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor was obliged to adjust his predecessor’s portrait considerably, pointing out its grievous misrecognition of reality. ‘By 1938’, he wrote, ‘Romania was already clouding over with the threat of a war that nobody had their heart in; when it burst, the country was dragged into a chain of events that ended in half a century of tyranny from which it has only recently half emerged’.2 Olivia Manning arrived in Bucharest with Reggie Smith two weeks after her marriage, on 3 September 1939. The couple would leave again just over a year later in October 1940, as German troops and the Gestapo were bedding down in the city. Given this timeframe, the country to which she came as a new bride was far from stable. Historically bound up with the ‘Balkan problem’ (despite the persistent efforts of Romanians to detach themselves from the Slavic identity this connoted), Romania shared much of the insecurity of her neighbouring states and regions, a victim, like them, of the tendency of great powers to use this fraught post-Habsburg landscape as a political playground.3 The country’s modern difficulties lay deep in a convoluted European past. Romanian insecurity was not simply a product of wartime (when the country was officially designated as neutral) but of diverse social, political and ethnic neuroses accumulated over a long history of invasion, counter-invasion, geographical reconstitution and border realignment, all hampering its struggle to emerge from feudalism into a modern independent nation. Manning’s sensitivity to this volatile and evolutionary social landscape is evident throughout the first volume of her Balkan Trilogy and particularly in her portraits of the capital city, its centre swarming with ‘minor government officials and poor clerks, a generation struggling out of the peasantry’, its merchant laneways peopled by ‘ringletted Orthodox Jews’ and its outskirts teeming with ‘peasants in their astrakhan caps’ (BT, p. 17). Her descriptions also detail, famously, the bourgeois repositories  imperial refugee of the city: the Athénée Palace hotel; the central boulevard Calea Victoriei with its elegant shops and cafés; the restaurants like Capşa’s and luxury grocers like Dragomirs; even the fading elegance of the Cişmigiu gardens, where the Pringles stroll through the changing seasons. These represent the ‘lux nebun’ – the insane luxury – of the...