Olivia mannig a woman at war

free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com OLIVIA MANNING free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Deirdre David 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2012 Impression: All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–960918–5 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com For John Richetti free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Preface In 1969, a journalist from the Guardian, preparing to interview Olivia Manning, did some asking around among friends and colleagues Most knew Manning was a writer, but few could come up with titles of her novels Wasn’t she rather ‘difficult’, someone ventured; others recalled she’d had a rough time during the war; and almost everyone seemed to know she was married to the BBC producer, Reggie Smith.1 Beginning this book, close to forty years after the Guardian interview, I also quizzed friends and colleagues: had they heard of Olivia Manning? Read any of her novels? Discovered anything about her life? Almost everyone knew the name, some had read the Balkan and Levant trilogies (transparently autobiographical novels about Olivia’s wartime adventures), and no one had heard of Reggie Smith All remembered Fortunes of War, the 1987 BBC adaptation of the wartime books and recalled that Emma Thompson was terrific as Harriet Pringle, Olivia’s barely disguised fictional surrogate The biographical challenge became clear: while remaining attentive to the wartime experience, I needed to show that Olivia Manning had been a woman at war on a number of fronts From the time of growing up in Portsmouth, a seaside city she forever despised, to living in London in the 1930s as a young woman with little money but plenty of wit and sexy good looks, through her traverse one step ahead of the Germans across the Balkans and the Middle East, to her immediate post-war years back in Britain where she confronted an indifferent literary culture, she had battled her way through adversity At one time or another, all biographers are queried about their subject, asked to explain why they are traveling to libraries, tracking down documents, reading primary texts, manuscripts, letters, diaries, medical reports, and wills, and, whenever possible, interviewing Ruth Inglis, ‘Who is Olivia Manning?,’ Observer Colour Supplement, April 1969 free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com viii PREFACE people who knew the person they are writing about In the case of Olivia Manning, my answer has been simple Knowing the trilogies were heavily autobiographical, I became curious about the rich and risky life of the writer, and also to wonder what else she had written in addition to these six novels But as I began my education in her life, I realized I was being drawn to writing her biography because of certain similarities between that life and my own, improbable as this may seem Like Olivia, I left school at sixteen and went to work, reluctantly, as a typist Like Olivia, I survived World War II, far less dramatically, to be sure, since rather than being a woman in her early thirties dodging the Germans in the Balkans and the Middle East, I was a child dodging V1 and V2 rockets sent over London at the close of the war And like Olivia, I had lived in post-war Austerity Britain, less troubled than she by poor food, bombed-out streets, and washed-out faces, since I was used to ration books and doing without And when I read Olivia’s descriptions of the stress of wartime conditions in Bucharest bringing about dirty fingernails, sour breath, nicotine-stained fingers, I recalled my own memories of sleeping in the Clapham South tube station: it reeked of too-long brewed tea, soured milk, sweaty bodies wrapped in multiple jumpers to stave off the icy drafts that came hurtling through the tunnels Even though I was disinclined to make a fictional appearance in the biographical narrative (could I have become Olivia’s wartime friend?) or to weave my own memories with her autobiographical recollections, I readily recognized much of her experience and I shared her ambition to move to a world elsewhere (in her case away from the provincial swamp of Portsmouth and in mine far from the dismal seediness of South London) I’d like to think that this sort of empathetic affiliation makes for good biography At a cultural moment of nostalgic reconstruction of World War II, with the Imperial War Museum offering the Blitz Experience, Jamie Oliver urging Britain to adopt a healthy wartime diet featuring many root vegetables and not much meat, and a global recession turning people’s thoughts to allotments and make-do-and-mend, a reconsideration of Olivia Manning’s wartime fiction would seem to be in order But she did not just write about World War II She published novels about the struggle for survival by young women in 1950s still-diminished London, about desecration of the environment through uncontrolled commercial development, and about the painful www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com PREFACE ix adjustment to post-war English life for young men (her work is especially notable for its subtle portrayal of male, sometimes homosexual, characters) And in her short stories, relying upon memories of her Portsmouth childhood, she writes brilliantly about unhappy children trapped in an adult world of quarrels about money and disappointed expectations For thirty-five years after the end of World War II, she was a visible, hard-working presence in the British literary marketplace: as the author of thirteen published novels, two volumes of short stories, and four works of non-fiction, and as a regular writer on contemporary fiction for The Spectator, The Observer, and the Sunday Times Over her long career, she reviewed some four hundred novels and many collections of short stories But despite becoming a polished woman of letters with a wide circle of intelligent friends culled from Reggie Smith’s world of BBC colleagues and actor pals, and from her own group of fellow-writers such as Francis King, Margaret Drabble, and Beryl Bainbridge, she felt herself exiled as much from the London literary establishment as she had from the provincial world of Portsmouth Claire Tomalin remembers her in the 1970s as ‘slim and chic, hair well done, lively face, the very embodiment of a successful and worldly literary woman,’2 yet despite her smart appearance and confident manner, Manning bitterly resented many of her female contemporaries—figures such as Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Edna O’Brien—who, she believed, received an unwarranted amount of critical attention and were paid more money than she ever commanded for her novels and reviewing But even though she never made the short list for the Booker prize and never got that solo Sunday Times review for which she lobbied vigorously, she remained a dedicated, ambitious writer until the end of her life As a young woman, writing sustained her as she witnessed the dispiriting battles between her adored father and her nagging mother; it kept her going throughout dislocation from Romania to Greece and from Greece to the Middle East; and from 1945 until her death in 1980, writing was her daily work, despite periods of dark depression and ill health that were a legacy of the war Correspondence between the author and Claire Tomalin, 26 November 2011 free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Lieutenant-Commander Oliver Manning With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Olivia Manning, with doll, aged five years With permission of Diana Hogarth Olivia Manning (seated) at Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, c.1934 With permission of Diana Hogarth www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Olivia Manning, studio portrait, just before leaving Portsmouth for London in 1936 With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Hamish Miles, editor at Jonathan Cape, and Olivia’s lover until his death in December 1937 With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing Stevie Smith, c.1950 Mary Evans Picture Library/Robin Adler www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Reggie Smith, in Bucharest, 1939, shortly after his marriage to Olivia Manning With permission of Diana Hogarth Louis MacNeice, 1946, Reggie Smith’s mentor at the University of Birmingham in the mid-1930s Getty Images free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 10 Athe´ne´e Palace Hotel, Bucharest, February 1940 Getty Images/Margaret Bourke-White 11 Calea Victoriei, Bucharest, February 1940 Getty Images/Margaret Bourke-White www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 12 Romanian Iron Guard, December 1940 Getty Images/Hulton Archive 13 Reggie Smith, broadcasting from Jerusalem, 1942 With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 14 Olivia Manning’s brother, Oliver, 1941, who died in an airplane accident in the same year With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 15 Olivia Manning, studio portrait, Cairo, c.1942 With permission of Diana Hogarth free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 16 Olivia Manning, studio portrait, on her return to England in 1946 With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing 17 Olivia Manning and Kay Dick at a William Heinemann garden party, c.1947 Olivia Manning Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 18 Reggie Smith in his office at the BBC, after his return to England in 1946 With permission of Diana Hogarth 19 PEN Party, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Olivia Manning, December 1948 Getty Images free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 20 Olivia Manning at ‘her beautiful home in St John’s Wood’ photographed for The Tatler, October 1955 Mary Evans Picture Library www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 21 Olivia Manning in her study, 1960, by Ida Kar National Portrait Gallery, London 22 Christmas 1968 in St John’s Wood From left to right, June Braybrooke, Olivia Manning, Jerry Slattery, and Neville Braybrooke With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 23 Olivia Manning, 1969, by Mark Gerson National Portrait Gallery, London 24 ‘Bookish Line-Up’—Olivia Manning with Margaret Drabble (right) and others, July 1972 Hulton Archive/Getty Images www.ebook777.com free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 25 Olivia Manning and Reggie Smith at home in St John’s Wood, late 1970s With permission of Victoria Orr-Ewing ... 32 OLIVIA MANNING: A WOMAN AT WAR male fear of female sexual contagion testifies to Olivia? ??s extensive reading and bold imagination After ? ?A Scantling of Foxes’ was accepted by New Stories, Olivia. .. Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available... tracking down illustrations and obtaining permissions: Mark Paul at Getty Images, Mark Vivian at the Mary Evans Picture Library, and Bernard Horrocks at the National Portrait Gallery were most helpful