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Perilous Times

In the summer of 1974, the author Olivia Manning reread the transcript of a BBC radio talk she had given eleven years earlier about her arrival in Cairo in 1941 with her husband, Reggie Smith. Although she was not well, it inspired her to follow her Balkan trilogy (see SF no. 63), detailing the wartime experiences of Harriet and Guy Pringle in Bucharest and Athens, with a second sequence set in Egypt and the Middle East. The task took five years and by the time it was finished Manning had only months to live. She died in July 1980, aged 72.

She made no secret of the fact that the Balkan trilogy was strongly autobiographical, both in its dissection of an English community living under the threat of German invasion and its depiction of a marriage under strain. Like Manning, Harriet is newly married to a man whose gregarious spirit leads him to embrace others, to her emotional exclusion. By the close of the first sequence, however, she acknowledges that the perils of war have forced them to a mutual understanding and that the only certainty left to them is to stay together.

The Levant trilogy is no less a seamless fusion of historical fact and imaginative fiction. It is June 1942 and the Pringles have fled Romania and Greece one step ahead of the Nazis. Now, settled in Cairo, they are again under threat as Rommel’s Afrika Corps drives remorselessly east following its successes in Libya. These are catastrophic times. Tobruk has fallen, the British are in retreat, abandoning weaponry and tanks, and it is rumoured Cairo is to be evacuated. Determined to evoke not just the fears of civilians on the periphery of fight

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In the summer of 1974, the author Olivia Manning reread the transcript of a BBC radio talk she had given eleven years earlier about her arrival in Cairo in 1941 with her husband, Reggie Smith. Although she was not well, it inspired her to follow her Balkan trilogy (see SF no. 63), detailing the wartime experiences of Harriet and Guy Pringle in Bucharest and Athens, with a second sequence set in Egypt and the Middle East. The task took five years and by the time it was finished Manning had only months to live. She died in July 1980, aged 72.

She made no secret of the fact that the Balkan trilogy was strongly autobiographical, both in its dissection of an English community living under the threat of German invasion and its depiction of a marriage under strain. Like Manning, Harriet is newly married to a man whose gregarious spirit leads him to embrace others, to her emotional exclusion. By the close of the first sequence, however, she acknowledges that the perils of war have forced them to a mutual understanding and that the only certainty left to them is to stay together. The Levant trilogy is no less a seamless fusion of historical fact and imaginative fiction. It is June 1942 and the Pringles have fled Romania and Greece one step ahead of the Nazis. Now, settled in Cairo, they are again under threat as Rommel’s Afrika Corps drives remorselessly east following its successes in Libya. These are catastrophic times. Tobruk has fallen, the British are in retreat, abandoning weaponry and tanks, and it is rumoured Cairo is to be evacuated. Determined to evoke not just the fears of civilians on the periphery of fighting but also the horror of combat itself, Manning introduces in the opening book, The Danger Tree, a gauche young officer, Simon Boulderstone, through whose eyes we witness the ultimately successful El Alamein campaign. Manning could write from experience about the hardships of living in wartime Bucharest and Athens, but she had to rely on outside sources for her description of the frontline desert war. Scrupulous, she consulted military experts and immersed herself in the recollections, published and oral, of participants. The result is an utterly convincing evocation of bloodshed and endurance that we feel could have been written by one who was there. Here is the ‘supreme awfulness’ of an artillery barrage, the intensity of which reduces men to a state of collapse; the ‘stench of death that came on the wind’; sun-bleached skeletons stripped bare by local Arabs; soldiers dying as their blood drains into the sand; burned-out tanks standing like ‘disabled crows’; and, above all, the terrible unforgiving desert, the men ‘breathing sand, eating sand, blinded and deafened by sand’.

Two tanks stood in the middle distance . . . a man was standing in one of the turrets motionless, as though unaware of Simon’s approach. Simon stopped at a few yards’ distance to observe the figure, then saw it was not a man. It was a man-shaped cylinder that faced him with white and perfect teeth set in a charred black skull. He could make out the eye sockets and the triangle that had once supported a nose . . .

Manning rightly resented the description of ‘woman writer’ with its patronizing implication that women cannot write authoritatively about men: ‘There is no inherent reason why men should be mysteries to women and beyond their power to treat convincingly in a novel, or vice versa.’ Even so, her talent for entering the male psyche is exceptional. As the desert claims its dead, so the melting-pot of Cairo disturbs the living. Away from battle, it forms the backdrop to both The Danger Tree and its successor, The Battle Lost and Won. Manning – who recalled Cairo as ‘the final bolthole of Europe’ – disliked the baking city with its flies, beggars and disease. But in her hands it has an almost human presence: its streets are ‘coagulated by heat’ which sticks to the skin like cotton wool; its ‘spicy, flaccid atmosphere’ is pierced by the rancid smell of human waste; its men in white robes flicker through the gloom or hang ‘like a swarm of bees’ from tram doors; a mosque squats like a ‘fat white watchful cat’. Here again war has thrown together a disparate English colony of the privileged, the dutiful and the cowardly, beset by uncertainty and rumour and killing time with heavy drinking and transient affairs. Harriet’s friend Lady Angela Hooper, stricken by grief at her young son’s death from a stick bomb, buries her misery by indulging an infatuation for the boozy poet and journalist Bill Castlebar. The man-eating Edwina Little seeks solace in the untrustworthy arms of a married officer. Both relationships reflect the coarsening amorality engendered by war. It becomes ever clearer that Guy, employed by the British Council, does not want a private life. He cannot understand that ‘his desire to embrace the outside world was an infidelity and an indulgence’. Harriet, given more freedom than she originally wanted, explores increasing independence and her tone becomes more critical and detached. This criticism extends to the British imperial mission with which Manning, resenting the assumption of cultural superiority embedded in the idea of the Council, was disenchanted. Harriet watches disdainfully at the Anglo-Egyptian Union club as English officers deride the ‘gyppos’ in obscene songs, while a group of English abase themselves at a live sex show in Cairo’s seedy Berka district. In contrast, Harriet’s elegant Egyptian doctor Shafik treats her with impeccable old-world courtesy, while saying with gentle irony, ‘Could we let a member of your great empire die here, in this poor country?’ Surely, says Simon, Britain has brought Egypt only ‘justice and prosperity’. Harriet replies: ‘What have we done here, except make money . . . the real people of the country . . . are just as diseased, underfed and wretched as they ever were.’ Familiar figures emerge from the past. Gracey, head of the Council who had been living in decadent splendour as the guest of a wealthy Turk, escapes to Palestine. At the British Embassy the diplomat Dobson joins staff in feeding papers into a bonfire. The odious, and ultimately doomed, Lord Pinkrose reappears. Guy suggests that Harriet, in increasing ill health, join a boat bound for England. She crushes the idea but is left suspecting that he merely wants her out of the way. When Angela leaves for Beirut with Castlebar, Harriet, recovering from amoebic dysentery, grudgingly decides to take up Guy’s suggestion and sets out to board the refugee ship Queen of Sparta. Queuing at the gangway, full of nameless foreboding about the forthcoming voyage, she decides on impulse to join a servicewoman and her lesbian friend on a routine lorry run to Iraq via Syria. We leave her bumping across the Sinai desert, properly independent for the first time since her marriage and carefree at the thought of all the ‘wonders of the Levant’ on the other side of the sands. A coda records that a week after sailing, the Queen of Sparta was torpedoed with the loss of all on board apart from a lifeboat packed with women and children, whose fate is unknown. Manning completed her closing book, The Sum of Things, in 1979 more than thirty years after the end of the war. By this time, she was assured of her place in the literary firmament although she remained typically insecure about her reputation. Since the war, she had been blighted by ill health. In 1944, she had delivered a child two months after the foetus had died in utero – a traumatic experience from which she never fully recovered – and in the following years she had surgery for various conditions, which led to bouts of depression. A lifetime of writing was drawing to its close. The book opens with Simon, injured by a mine which kills his young driver, lying in hospital at Helwan paralysed from the waist down. Meanwhile Harriet, dropped off in wintertime Damascus, finds herself alone. Settling into a pension and thinking that Guy believes her to be at sea for the next two months, she aimlessly walks the rain-sodden streets, missing Cairo’s sumptuous sunsets and moonlight like ‘liquid silver’. She finds temporary employment with the self-centred Italian Egyptologist Dr Beltado and is befriended by a gentle Syrian, Halal. As a solitary woman in a strange land she has survived. But recognizing that her attempt to live an independent life is reducing her to penury, she decides to join Angela and travels by train and taxi to Beirut where she is welcomed by her old friend and Angela’s lover, Castlebar. Together, they move on to Jerusalem, Harriet still blithely unaware that Guy thinks she is dead. Back in Cairo, with the proximity of war receding as the Allies advance, Guy, believing Harriet to have gone down with the Queen of Sparta, is haunted by her loss and the belated knowledge that he both ignored her needs and instigated her departure. Finally admitting the futility of his job in a reserved occupation projecting an idea of empire in which neither he nor his students believe, he recognizes that he has sacrificed the permanence of a marital relationship to needless work and the transient company of friends: ‘this had been as good as any, yet he had not known it at the time’. Harriet’s moment of truth arrives when she runs into an Englishwoman at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and learns that only she and two sailors survived from the torpedoed Queen of Sparta, and that the ship’s loss was covered in the Egyptian press. Realizing that Guy thinks she is dead, she returns to Cairo for an emotional reunion. And so the curtain on the two trilogies is lowered. We leave Harriet and Guy in Alexandria. On their way there, Harriet, once an emotional idealist, is comforted by a realism born of harsh gestation: ‘In an imperfect world marriage was a matter of making do with what one had chosen. As this thought came into her head, she pressed Guy’s knee and he patted her hand again.’ We know Harriet and Guy will never part. As throughout, fiction mirrored life. Despite their differences, Manning and Reggie stayed together to the end, bound by a mutual respect cemented by shared wartime suffering. If Manning was criticized – even mocked – for seeming to hold a grudge against the world, then perhaps she can be excused. Denied her mother’s love, she doggedly transcended her unpromising background, was grievously scarred by the loss of a child and endured years of ill health. Given this, her achievement is all the more remarkable. There can be few works of modern fiction in which such a large cast of characters is handled so deftly and the privations and violence of war are so neatly fused with the uncertainties of private life. Manning’s often austere prose reflects a critical eye in keeping with the author’s spiky personality, but the overwhelming impression is of genuine compassion for ordinary men and women coping with extraordinary and perilous times.

Then at last peace, precarious peace, came down upon the world and the survivors could go home. Like the stray figures left on the stage at the end of a great tragedy, they had now to tidy up the ruins of war and in their hearts bury their noble dead.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64 © Patrick Welland 2019


About the contributor

After 42 years in newspapers, Patrick Welland now hides from social media in Sussex.

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