Olivia Manning
Olivia Mary Manning was a British novelist, poet, writer, and reviewer. Her fiction and non-fiction, frequently detailing journeys and personal odysseys, were principally set in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East. She often wrote from her personal experience, though her books also demonstrate strengths in imaginative writing. Her books are widely admired for her artistic eye and vivid descriptions of place.
Manning's youth was divided between Portsmouth and Ireland, giving her what she described as "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". She attended art school and moved to London, where her first serious novel, The Wind Changes, was published in 1937. In August 1939 she married R. D. Smith, a British Council lecturer posted in Bucharest, Romania, and subsequently lived in Greece, Egypt, and British Mandatory Palestine as the Nazis overran Eastern Europe. Her experiences formed the basis for her best-known work, the six novels making up The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. Critics judged her overall output to be of uneven quality, but this series, published between 1960 and 1980, was described by Anthony Burgess as "the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer".
Manning returned to London after the war and lived there until her death in 1980; she wrote poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, reviews, and drama for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Both Manning and her husband had affairs, but they never contemplated divorce. Her relationships with writers such as Stevie Smith and Iris Murdoch were difficult, as an insecure Manning was envious of their greater success. Her constant grumbling about all manner of subjects is reflected in her nickname, "Olivia Moaning", but her husband R. D. Smith never wavered in his role as his wife's principal supporter and encourager, confident that her talent would ultimately be recognised. As she had feared, real fame only came after her death in 1980, when an adaptation of Fortunes of War was televised in 1987.
Manning's books have received limited critical attention; as during her life, opinions are divided, particularly about her characterisation and portrayal of other cultures. Her works tend to minimise issues of gender and are not easily classified as feminist literature. Nevertheless, recent scholarship has highlighted Manning's importance as a woman writer of war fiction and of the British Empire in decline. Her works are critical of war and racism, and colonialism and imperialism; they examine themes of displacement and physical and emotional alienation.
Early years
Olivia Manning was born in North End, Portsmouth on 2 March 1908. Her father, Oliver Manning, was a naval officer who rose from naval trainee to lieutenant commander despite a lack of formal schooling. At the age of 45, while visiting the port of Belfast, he met Olivia Morrow, a publican's daughter fourteen years his junior; they married less than a month later in December 1904, in the Presbyterian church in her home town of Bangor, County Down.Manning adored her womanising father, who entertained others by singing Gilbert and Sullivan and reciting poetry he had memorised during long sea voyages. In contrast, her mother was bossy and domineering, with a "mind as rigid as cast-iron", and there were constant marital disputes. The initially warm relationship between mother and daughter became strained after the birth of Manning's brother Oliver in 1913; delicate and frequently ill, he was the centre of his mother's attention, much to the displeasure of Manning, who made several childish attempts to harm him. This unhappy, insecure childhood left a lasting mark on her work and personality.
Manning was educated privately at a small dame school before moving to the north of Ireland in 1916, the first of several extended periods spent there while her father was at sea. In Bangor she attended Bangor Presbyterian School, and in Portsmouth Lyndon House School developing, as she recalled, "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". Schoolmates described her as shy and prone to tantrums; her tendency to tell boastful tall-tales about her family led to ostracism by her peers. Supported by her father, Manning read and wrote extensively, preferring novels, especially those by H. Rider Haggard. Her mother discouraged such pursuits, and confiscated material she thought unsuitable; when she found her daughter reading the Times Literary Supplement she scolded that "young men do not like women who read papers like that", and that Manning should focus on marketable job skills, such as typing.
Indeed, when financial circumstances forced Manning to leave school at sixteen, she worked as a typist and spent some time as a junior in a beauty salon. A talented artist, she took evening classes at the Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, where a fellow student described her as intellectual and aloof. In May 1928, she had a painting selected for an exhibition at Southsea, and was subsequently offered a one-woman show of her works. Manning seemed to be poised for a career as an artist, but she had meanwhile continued her interest in literature, and at the age of twenty determined instead to be a writer. Her artist's eye is apparent in her later intense descriptions of landscapes.
Early career
Manning's first published works were three serialised detective novels, Rose of Rubies, Here is Murder and The Black Scarab which appeared in the Portsmouth News beginning in 1929 under the pseudonym Jacob Morrow. Manning did not acknowledge these books until the 1960s; their publication dates might have given away her age, a secret she kept even from her husband. Between 1929 and 1935 she wrote about 20 short stories, including a ghost story that was the first work to be published under her own name, though using initials to obscure her gender. Manning also wrote two literary novels, neither of which was accepted for publication. Her second manuscript sufficiently impressed Edward Garnett, a literary editor at Jonathan Cape, that he asked his assistant Hamish Miles to write her a note of encouragement. Miles, a well-connected literary adviser and translator in his late thirties, invited Manning to visit if she were ever in London. Manning, feeling stifled in Portsmouth, had already made efforts to move to the capital, but her meeting with Miles made her more determined. She succeeded in obtaining a typing job at the department store Peter Jones, and, despite opposition from her mother, moved into a run-down bed-sit in Chelsea.Short of food and money, Manning spent long hours writing after work. Miles took Manning under his wing, dazzling her with dinners, literary conversation, and gossip, and providing unaccustomed support. A married man with two children, he told Manning that his wife was an invalid and no longer able to tolerate sex; they soon became lovers. Manning later recalled that "sex for both of them was the motivating charm of life".
A case of mistaken identity involving an artist with a similar name led Manning to a better-paid job antiquing furniture, at which she worked for more than two years, still writing in her spare time. She recalled this as "one of the happiest seasons" of her life. With Miles' encouragement she completed a novel, The Wind Changes, and saw it published by Jonathan Cape in April 1937. The novel, set in Dublin in June 1921 during the Irish War of Independence, revolved around a woman torn between an Irish patriot and an English writer with pro-Republican sympathies. It was well received, with one reviewer commenting that "the novel shows unusual promise". Soon after, Miles learnt that he had an inoperable brain tumour, and disappeared from Manning's life. Since the affair had been kept secret she had difficulty obtaining information about him, and could not afford to visit him in the Edinburgh hospital where he lay dying. She lost her job at Peter Jones, moved to a well-paid job at the Medici Society, but was sacked when she refused her boss's order to give up novel-writing in the evening so as to conserve her energy for the day job. Manning obtained other work assessing new novels for their potential as films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but by the time she had saved sufficient money for a trip to Edinburgh, Miles was too ill to see her. He died in December 1937.
Miles did not normally introduce his literary friends to each other, but before his death, he had been forced by circumstance to introduce Manning to the poet Stevie Smith. The two developed an immediate rapport and enjoyed exploring London's backstreets, with regular outings to museums, cinema, and visits to the Palmers Green home that Smith shared with an eccentric aunt. According to a mutual friend, Manning found in Smith's home "an atmosphere of security and comfort which must have made her room in Oakley Street seem even chillier and more threadbare". The novelist and critic Walter Allen met Manning in 1937 and observed that she had a "devastating" wit "and was as formidable a young woman as any in London". Manning and Smith, he added, were a malicious pair of snobs.
Marriage and Romania
In July 1939, Walter Allen introduced Manning to the charming Marxist R. D. "Reggie" Smith. Smith was a large, energetic man, possessed of a constant desire for the company of others. The son of a Manchester toolmaker, he had studied at Birmingham University, where he had been coached by the left-wing poet Louis MacNeice and founded the Birmingham Socialist Society. According to the British intelligence organisation MI5, Smith had been recruited as a communist spy by Anthony Blunt on a visit to Cambridge University in 1938.When he met Manning, Smith was on leave from his British Council position as a lecturer in Romania. He had diligently prepared himself for the introduction to Manning by reading her works, and felt that her book The Wind Changes showed "signs of genius". He described Manning as a jolie laide, possessing lovely hair, hands, eyes, and skin though an overlong nose, and fell in love at first sight. When he borrowed a half-crown from her on their first meeting and repaid it the next day, he knew they would marry. Manning was less certain of the relationship, but Smith quickly moved into her flat, proposing in bed a few weeks later. They were married at Marylebone Registry Office on 18 August 1939, with Stevie Smith and Louis MacNeice as witnesses. The bridegroom, unconventionally yet true to form, did not produce a ring for the ceremony. A few days after the wedding, the couple received word that Smith had been recalled to Bucharest. They left within a matter of hours; Manning later wrote to Stevie Smith from Romania asking her to find out what had happened to their flat and to take care of her books while she was away.
The couple travelled by train to Bucharest, arriving on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. Between the two world wars, Romania had looked to France to guarantee its security against German territorial aspirations. The impact of the Munich Agreement, the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and the Fall of France increased German influence and control over the country, and included demands that Romania cede territory and resources. The couple's time in Bucharest coincided with the rise of fascist and totalitarian power within ostensibly neutral Romania, while war threatened from without, driving thousands of refugees within its borders.
The Smiths initially rented a flat, but later moved in with the diplomat Adam Watson, who was working with the British Legation. Those who knew Manning at the time described her as a shy, provincial girl who had little experience with other cultures. She was both dazzled and appalled by Romania. The café society, with its wit and gossip, appealed to her, but she was repelled by the peasantry and the aggressive, often mutilated, beggars. Her Romanian experiences were captured in the first two volumes of The Balkan Trilogy, considered one of the most important literary treatments of Romania during the war. In her novels, Manning described Bucharest as being on the margins of European civilisation, "a strange, half-Oriental capital" that was "primitive, bug-ridden and brutal", whose citizens were peasants, whatever their wealth or status.
Manning spent her days writing; her main project was a book about Henry Morton Stanley and his search for Emin Pasha, but she also maintained an intimate correspondence with Stevie Smith, which was full of Bloomsbury gossip and intrigue. She undertook a dangerous journalistic assignment to interview the former Romanian Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu in Cluj, Transylvania, at the time full of German troops, and soon to be transferred by Romania to Hungary as part of the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, imposed by the Germans and Italians. Like many of her experiences, the interview was to be incorporated into a future work; others included her impromptu baptism of Smith with cold tea because she feared being separated from him after death, and Smith's production of a Shakespeare play, in which she was promised a prime role that was given to another.
Smith was relentlessly gregarious, and throughout his life, his warmth, wit, and friendliness earned him many friends and drinking companions. In contrast, Manning was reticent and uncomfortable in social settings and remained in the background. She acted, in her own words, as a "camp-follower", trailing after Smith as he went from bar to bar, often choosing to go home early and alone. While Manning remained faithful to Smith during the war, their friend Ivor Porter was to report that Smith had numerous affairs.
The approaching war and rise of fascism and the Iron Guard in Romania disconcerted and frightened Manning. The abdication of King Carol and the advance of the Germans in September 1940 increased her fears, and she repeatedly asked Smith "But where will the Jews go?" Just before German troops entered Romania on 7 October at the invitation of the new dictator Ion Antonescu, Manning flew to Greece, followed a week later by Smith.