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Chapter Five - 'John Bull’s Other Ireland’: Manning’s Palestine fiction
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Chapter Five ‘John Bull’s Other Ireland’: Manning’s Palestine fiction Olivia sits on Arthur Koestler’s lap as he and Reggie play chess, in the otherwise deserted lounge. O rather ostentatiously strokes Koestler’s hair. He appears a bit contemptuous about R’s chess and to take little notice of O – rather as if her attentions are merely his due; he was given at that time to seeing himself as God’s gift to women . . . I thought – still think for that matter – that I would not have put up with O’s behaviour if she had been mine. Louis Lawler1 T his recollection of Olivia Manning from one of her contemporaries in wartime Palestine provides a telling example of how the intrigues of her marital situation so often distract attention from her political context as a writer. Her flirtation with journalist and writer Arthur Koestler is in fact of significantly less interest than the spatial and chronological circumstances of Lawler’s rather censorious tableau: the chess game was being played in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem – serving in the 1940s as headquarters of the British administration in Mandate Palestine – as the war in its later stages exposed and exacerbated the fragility of a governing British authority in the Middle East. In this most volatile of landscapes, the relationship between two anomalous and very different writers, one the granddaughter of a County Down freemason, the other an exiled Hungarian and (at this stage) Zionist revolutionary, might be better read as a reminder of the curious personal dislocations and sudden proximities which marked the physical experiences of wartime and which helped shape in its aftermath a literature of deep political insecurity. Arthur Koestler had left London for Jerusalem in December 1944 and, at the time of his meeting with the Smiths, was spending six months in Palestine in order to research material for his next book. Published in 1946, Thieves in the Night was his semi-fictional portrait of a group of 1930s European intellectuals and idealists attempting to establish an exclusivist Jewish community by the Sea of Galilee, against a swelling tide of Arab resentment and British indifference. Part historical saga, part Zionist tract, the novel (based largely on Koestler’s own experience in a Zionist settlement in Haifa in 1926) consolidated the author’s thematic pursuit of revolutionaries frustrated in their aims by the clash between the purity of principle and the necessary ugliness of practice. On this, his third visit to Palestine, Koestler was also gathering information for a more direct attack on Britain’s faltering administration of the troubled territory. Three years later Promise and Fulfilment, his account of the history of Palestine from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to British withdrawal and the end of the League of Nations Mandate in 1948, would deal systematically and savagely with what he viewed as a series of short-sighted, repressive and ultimately brutal policy decisions surrounding Jewish immigration and settlement in the region he pointedly labelled ‘John Bull’s Other Ireland’.2 Such sentiments were a natural extension of the ideas expressed in Koestler’s previous works on the plight of European Jewish refugees: Scum of the Earth (1941) and Arrival and Departure (1944). In addition, his campaigning on behalf of Jewish exiles in London and his close involvement with the World Zionist Organisation had established him in the period as a leading advocate for the Jewish national cause. At the time of their meeting in Jerusalem, his particular brand of intellectual Zionism would certainly have appealed to Reggie Smith, who, despite challenging Koestler’s celebrity status in a 1945 issue of the journal Orion, was generally an admirer of the writer and a fellow sympathiser with the cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a position vociferously endorsed by his fictional alter ego Guy Pringle (in the Levant Trilogy, Guy is ‘particularly impressed by the idea of kibbutzim, based he believed on the Russian imperial refugee [44.211.228.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:29 GMT) soviets, and the possibility of turning the Negev into arable land’ (LT, p. 304)).3 But to what extent did Reggie’s perspective align with his wife’s views on the same subject? If Manning was persuaded by Koestler’s Zionist ideals, then how did she reconcile them with the growing contradictions of the refugee question in Palestine during the war years, and with British sensitivities to the Arab presence in the country? Manning’s tangential engagement with...