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Adrift on the Tides of War

It is an irony that the dramatization of a novel may deter not spur. Instead of leading the viewer to the book, it becomes a substitute. Such a fate appears to have befallen Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, which in its Balkan and Levant trilogies traces the wartime travails of young Harriet and Guy Pringle as they flee the advancing Germans, first in Bucharest and Athens, then in Egypt and the Middle East. The six volumes were published to acclaim between 1960 and 1980. Yet Manning’s work is now probably better remembered as the 1987 BBC TV dramatization starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

This is unjust. Fortunes is a triumph, fusing fiction with diligently researched fact to portray a disparate group of expatriates surviving under threat of invasion: their stoicism, heroism and cowardice; their fleeting romances and petty intrigues. The prose is economical and the gaze sceptical and unsentimental. Added to this tapestry is a rich evocation of contemporary society, place and manners. Anthony Burgess called the sequence the ‘finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer’.

Fortunes is unashamedly autobiographical, a creative reconstruction of actual people and events, with the fictionalized emotional battleground of Manning’s marriage to the ebullient Reggie Smith mirroring the wider conflict.

I was drawn to the series because my father served in wartime Greece and Egypt, and I thought I might glimpse some part of his experience about which, like so many veterans, he was reticent. I was also intrigued to read, from the perspective of a sharp and critical intelligence, how a generation raised to believe in the certainties of empire reacted to the disillusion occasioned when those certainties were found wanting.

Manning’s literary achievement is the greater for the obstacles she faced. Born in Portsmouth in 1908, she had no educational or social privileges. Her naval officer father was easy-going and warm-hearted. Her mother, the daughter of an Ulster Presbyterian publican, was a rancorous termagant who hen-pecked her husband and turned against her daughter when her son was born. Money was short and rows were frequent. Yet, remarkably, this effectively self-educated woman fought her way into the literary world. In her mid-20s she moved to London, took ill-paid temping jobs and wrote in every spare moment. Her first novel was published in 1937. She remained, however, blighted by a sense of inferiority which literary success could assuage but not dispel. Nicknamed Olivia Moaning, she could be prickly in company and frequently complained that she did not receive due credit.

Manning, then 31, met Reggie, six years younger, in London in 1939. He was everything she was not – open-hearted, charismatic and a committed Communist. Reggie had transcended his workin

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It is an irony that the dramatization of a novel may deter not spur. Instead of leading the viewer to the book, it becomes a substitute. Such a fate appears to have befallen Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, which in its Balkan and Levant trilogies traces the wartime travails of young Harriet and Guy Pringle as they flee the advancing Germans, first in Bucharest and Athens, then in Egypt and the Middle East. The six volumes were published to acclaim between 1960 and 1980. Yet Manning’s work is now probably better remembered as the 1987 BBC TV dramatization starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

This is unjust. Fortunes is a triumph, fusing fiction with diligently researched fact to portray a disparate group of expatriates surviving under threat of invasion: their stoicism, heroism and cowardice; their fleeting romances and petty intrigues. The prose is economical and the gaze sceptical and unsentimental. Added to this tapestry is a rich evocation of contemporary society, place and manners. Anthony Burgess called the sequence the ‘finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer’. Fortunes is unashamedly autobiographical, a creative reconstruction of actual people and events, with the fictionalized emotional battleground of Manning’s marriage to the ebullient Reggie Smith mirroring the wider conflict. I was drawn to the series because my father served in wartime Greece and Egypt, and I thought I might glimpse some part of his experience about which, like so many veterans, he was reticent. I was also intrigued to read, from the perspective of a sharp and critical intelligence, how a generation raised to believe in the certainties of empire reacted to the disillusion occasioned when those certainties were found wanting. Manning’s literary achievement is the greater for the obstacles she faced. Born in Portsmouth in 1908, she had no educational or social privileges. Her naval officer father was easy-going and warm-hearted. Her mother, the daughter of an Ulster Presbyterian publican, was a rancorous termagant who hen-pecked her husband and turned against her daughter when her son was born. Money was short and rows were frequent. Yet, remarkably, this effectively self-educated woman fought her way into the literary world. In her mid-20s she moved to London, took ill-paid temping jobs and wrote in every spare moment. Her first novel was published in 1937. She remained, however, blighted by a sense of inferiority which literary success could assuage but not dispel. Nicknamed Olivia Moaning, she could be prickly in company and frequently complained that she did not receive due credit. Manning, then 31, met Reggie, six years younger, in London in 1939. He was everything she was not – open-hearted, charismatic and a committed Communist. Reggie had transcended his working-class background to graduate with honours in English, which he was then teaching at the British Council in Bucharest. Olivia was socially awkward and haunted by sour provincial memories. Yet only three weeks after being introduced, they married. Five days later Reggie returned to Bucharest with his bride, arriving on the Orient Express on 3 September, the day Britain declared war on Germany. The Balkan trilogy’s first book, The Great Fortune, opens with Harriet and Guy – here, 22 and 23 – making the same journey. The seizure by officials of a German-Jewish refugee who has lost his documents, the ‘dark heart of the forest’ through which they travel and the reflected eyes of beasts flitting through the night-time woods presage the uncertainty and menace to come. Guy, like Reggie, is teaching at the British Council. Harriet, unlike her creator who wrote continuously during her years in wartime exile, has no moorings other than her husband whose love she desires as a bulwark against the world. The alienation and dislocation which result from the discovery that Guy prefers to embrace the society of others reflect Manning’s own emotional and physical experience. In late 1939, neutral Romania is in denial. Germany is poised like a vulture, waiting to feast on a nation corrupted by social inequality and political dissension. Yet in Bucharest the orchestras play on in the packed cafés and garden restaurants, crowds still clog the pavements in the traditional evening parade, shops are stocked with luxury foods and clothes. The mutilated beggars and peasants squatting beside their meagre wares make a disagreeable contrast to this brittle display of complacency. But no one has ever cared about them. Days after the Pringles arrive, the Prime Minister is shot by the fascist Iron Guard on German instructions. Meanwhile, a propaganda war breaks out between the British and German information bureaux on opposite sides of the Calea Victoriei. The English gather in the English Bar of the Athénée Palace Hotel. The German diplomats and staff base themselves in the nearby Minerva Hotel. Under this gathering storm, the embattled English colony of Council staff, diplomats, university teachers and seedy journalists nervously waits upon events. Some, like Guy and his chief, Inchcape, are determined to see matters through to the end, hopelessly waving the flag. Others such as the insufferable lecturer Lord Pinkrose look only to their own safety. The Romanians hold the British in increasing contempt as it becomes clear that Germany is in the ascendant. Rising above them all is one of the great fictional creations of the twentieth century, the splendidly inglorious figure of Prince Yakimov, apparently based on the louche Fitzrovian Julian Maclaren-Ross. Half Anglo-Irish and half White Russian, the former playboy arrives in Bucharest unwashed and starving. Trailing his tatty, sable-lined coat which ‘the Czar gave to m’poor old dad, you know’, this shameless sponger moves through the trilogy, attaching himself to whoever will buy him a drink or a meal while living on memories of his once gilded life and yearning for his abandoned Hispano-Suiza. Through his eyes we witness the rotten heart of the Bucharest bourgeoisie when he is grudgingly admitted to its company, and the poverty of its backstreets where he is forced to find lodgings. His greed and amorality invite our disdain. Yet as he infuriates so he charms, finally achieving a dubious dignity. Harriet, nervous and shy, soon realizes that she cannot rely on her husband to guide her through this unsettling world. Warm-hearted and gregarious, Guy indiscriminately embraces all he meets, inspiring devotion and loyalty. But as he is open to the cares of others so he is blind to Harriet’s needs. ‘She had, in all innocence, been prepared to possess him and be possessed in a relationship that excluded the enemy world . . . Guy was not playing his part. Through him the world was not only admitted, but welcomed.’ As Harriet makes her way in this society, she befriends the lively Bella, an Englishwoman married to a Romanian, and embarks on a chaste affair with the cynical and vapid Clarence Lawson who is working for the Propaganda Bureau. Meanwhile, the mood of imminent disaster deepens. Emmanuel Drucker, a wealthy Jewish banker, is arrested on trumped-up charges and vanishes into the prison system. Menacing Iron Guard youths, their faces scarred like German duellists, appear on the streets. Their day is soon to come. France is invaded and the German residents become increasingly cocky, taking over the English Bar in the Athénée Palace. Paris falls and the map in the German Bureau now shows the French capital ‘hidden by a swastika that squatted like a spider, black on the heart of the country’. Romania itself, with its rich natural resources now so eagerly demanded by Germany, was once itself the ‘Great Fortune’. Now Harriet declares: ‘The great fortune is life. We must preserve it.’ The twin themes of societal and marital disintegration increase in intensity in the second book of the trilogy, The Spoilt City. Bucharest, crowded with refugees, bakes in a dry and dusty heat, its shrivelled parks, closed cafés and weed-strewn lakes mirroring its inner decay. King Carol, aware that England is powerless to help, declares for the Axis. Fears that Britain is now too weak to resist the jackboot are confirmed when the British Bureau is ransacked and Inchcape is brutally beaten by unknown assailants. Horrors lurk beneath the surface of everyday life and rumours abound that thousands have been arrested or executed. The fate of the Jews is captured in a final sighting of the arrested banker Drucker. Harriet last met the elegant patriarch and his family living in a cocoon of false security, believing their wealth would shield them from persecution. Now, ten months after his seizure, she witnesses his departure from court:

What appeared was an elderly, stooping skeleton . . . he paused and one of the warders gave him a kick that sent him sprawling over the pavement. As he picked himself up there came from him a stench like the stench of a carrion bird. The warder kicked at him again and he fell forward clutching at the van steps and murmuring ‘da, da’ in zealous obedience.

It is enough. We know too well what is to come. And what of the egregious Yakimov in these perilous times? Sensing what is in the wind, ‘your poor old Yaki’ tops greed and cowardice with treason by seeking sanctuary in Transylvania where Freddie von Flugel, an old friend from pre-war society days, is the Nazi Gauleiter. Outrageously, he presents him with a British sabotage plan he has stolen and implicates Guy. Throughout the trilogy it is hard to gauge where fact ends and fiction begins, with elements of a roman à clef enfolded in the leisurely embrace of a roman fleuve. Typical is the arrival in Bucharest in September 1940 of the outriders of a German delegation after Romania and Germany have signed a pact. Harriet notes how the appearance of elegant German officers makes an erotic impression on watching women. The acuity of observation could only come from Manning’s own direct experience:

Most gazed spellbound at these desirable young men who were the more piquantly desirable because they had so recently been the enemy. When the Germans passed out of sight the women fell together in ecstatic appreciation, their eyes agleam, their sensuality heightened by the proximity of these conquerors of the world.

It is a moment indicative of the fatal weakness lying at the heart of a country so corrupted from within that it welcomes the predators who will rape it of its resources and drag it into war. Later, the Pringles and the odious Lord Pinkrose find themselves attending by mistake a German propaganda concert where they stand for ‘Deutschland über Alles’ before leaving in humiliation as the ‘Horst Wessel’ song blares out. When Harriet and Guy return from a break to find their flat raided and Drucker’s gentle son Sasha – whom they have been hiding – gone, it is clear time has run out. Harriet grudgingly agrees to catch a flight to Athens, leaving Guy to join her later. Manning, drained by the tensions of Bucharest, made the same fraught journey and her relief at arriving in the ‘longed-for city’ is reflected in the early chapters of the final book in the trilogy, Friends and Heroes. Reunited with Guy, Harriet revels in the contrast between a country that has sold itself in fear and a welcoming people at ease with themselves. Here, the expats are not resident through the necessity of work but because they choose to live in a country they love. And ‘here one had only to be English to be approved’. Greek affection for the English reaches new heights after Greece repels Mussolini’s forces on the Albanian border in a string of successes that have jubilant Athenians surging on to the streets. In response, Britain establishes military bases in the country and its newly arrived young servicemen, ‘pink-faced and sheepish’, are greeted with flowers, hugs and cheers. The Pringles, warmed by the Aegean sun and the kindness of the local populace, are released from the threatening claustrophobia that poisoned Bucharest. Harriet is also released from her emotional dependency on Guy. While her husband is demoralized by his temporary unemployment, Harriet comes to accept the incompatibilities in their marriage and emerges from his shadow. Increasingly independent, she nearly submits to the insistent courtship of a young officer, Charles Warden (based on the Council lecturer Terence Spencer with whom Manning may have had an affair). As in Bucharest, the threat of German invasion is always implicit, and Manning explores the gradual erosion of spirit that overtakes those living in constant tension: the clutch of Englishwomen, personified by the formidable Mrs Brett, who have chosen to stay in Athens, desperately trying to keep up appearances; the gentle Hellenophile Alan Frewen – modelled on the novelist and poet Robert Liddell – determined to remain with the people he loves; the disagreeable intrigues of Council staff ruled by their unpleasant chief, Gracey, a reflection of Manning’s own dislike of the organization for what she considered to be its offhand treatment of Reggie. Familiar faces return. Lord Pinkrose, who fled Budapest in a fit of cowardice, reappears elevated to the post of Director of the English School. Tatty as ever, Yakimov has somehow found his way to Athens where he makes an uncertain living working for the British Information Bureau. This once grand figure of unapologetic self-interest is no longer trying to rise above events, instead submitting to the changing tide of fortune. But as much as Friends is about the fraying of a community and the collapse of a relationship it is also about the collapse of a nation, not from inner corruption and collusion, as in Romania, but from exhaustion and overwhelming odds. As the tide of war turns in the Germans’ favour, wounded Greek troops appear in the streets, their feet wrapped in rags. Food becomes increasingly scarce. Air raids pound the capital. English troops who shortly before had driven out of Athens singing, laughing and catching flowers thrown by well-wishers, now return exhausted, carrying with them the odour of defeat. Manning’s biographer Deidre David has suggested that Olivia lived with the scars of those anxious days for the rest of her life. For the British enclave, escape is imperative. As the Pringles pack for their journey aboard the refugee ship Erebus, Harriet has an emotional epiphany. Looking at Guy, exhausted and for once indecisive, she realizes that for all his welcoming bonhomie he is as scared and confused as she. More importantly, she recognizes that at heart he loves her. His affection may be imperfectly displayed but it is real. ‘They had learnt each other’s faults and weaknesses: they had passed both illusion and disillusion. It was no use asking for more than anyone could give. War had forced their understanding . . . she had chosen to make her life with Guy and would stand by her choice.’ The Erebus enters Egyptian waters and the trilogy closes with a nod to the original motif of the Great Fortune: ‘Still, they had life – a depleted fortune, but a fortune. They were together and would remain together, and that was the only certainty left to them.’ An article on Olivia Manning’s Levant trilogy will follow in Issue 64.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Patrick Welland 2019


About the contributor

Patrick Welland is a freelance writer. He marvels at the stoicism and sense of duty displayed by his parents’ wartime generation and gloomily contemplates how he would have matched up.

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