Olivia Manning's Balkan and Levant Trilogies
It’s odd how Portsmouth seems to produce or stimulate writers and stories. Conan Doyle was a penniless doctor in Southsea (grubby, tarry Pompey’s green seaside twin sister). Charles Dickens was born there. H.G. Wells toiled in a draper’s shop in Southsea and hated it. The city features often, with its grotesque, ferocious prostitutes known as ‘Portsmouth Brutes’ in Patrick O’Brian’s matchless series of novels about the Navy in Napoleonic Times, and of course in C.S.Forester’s currently under-rated ‘Hornblower’ stories. The murder victim (as he turns out to be) in Josephine Tey’s extremely ingenious ‘The Singing Sands’ is a young man from Portsmouth who used to love crossing Portsmouth harbour on the Gosport ferry, one of the great unsung delights of England. Knowing it as I do, I’m not surprised. If I had time I’d slip down to the Hard now, and take the ferry again.
Portsmouth is a curious mixture of the ugly and the lovely, best seen on a clear late winter’s afternoon from the top of Portsdown Hill, where several of my forebears are buried in the unyielding chalk. Amid harsh, practical and warlike buildings, and high walls to keep out saboteurs and spies, monstrous Victorian forts to keep out the scheming Frenchies, you find the occasional flash of unintended beauty, especially relics of the 18th century, when it seems even government builders were not immune from grace and proportion. And then there’s the pure scoured air, never free from salty wind, and the constant glitter from the unresting sea, and the impossible rural prettiness of the Isle of Wight, its miniature Downs like Bunyan’s Celestial City, clear enough to make out individual buildings, but out of reach beyond deep water.
Find yourself in Pompey on New Year’s Eve, and you’ll hear the mournful, heartless howl of the ships’ whistles and hooters at midnight, all sounding to mark the turn of the calendar. I happen to associate this dismal racket with sad moments, but I defy even a cheerful, optimistic person to hear it without being moved and a bit disturbed. It also reminds me of how, as a child living near the sea, I would listen safe in bed to the giant sirens of transatlantic liners on their way into Southampton, and huge warships inbound for Pompey, feeling their way through the Spithead fogs as the enormous tides tried to tug them away from their courses.
Perhaps it’s that mixture of tarry smells and slimy seashore stinks, the faint thumping of distant brass bands behind barrack walls, rackety brown pubs exhaling gusts of stale beer smells, big guns, sea-glitter, glum, momentous memorials (imagine the day the news came that several Pompey-based ships had been lost with all hands in the Battle of Jutland. I mean, imagine it, in the days when we still took death seriously and suddenly there were hundreds of destitute widows and orphans where before there had been contented families. Whole streets must have been overshadowed at once by the Angel of Death).
Such a city might just stimulate the mind, even among those who didn’t especially like the place. Indeed, I have had mixed feelings about Portsmouth all my life. But a year in which I have not visited it is incomplete for me.
In this strange place was born and raised one Olivia Manning, a greatly underestimated author whose two trilogies (the Balkan and the Levant) were dramatised as ‘The Fortunes of War’ in the late 1980s by the BBC, with Emma Thompson playing Harriet Pringle, the main character, based upon Olivia Manning herself.
Olivia Manning was still alive at the time, and objected a bit to Emma Thompson because she thought her feet were too big (thus making it plain that Harriet Pringle and Olivia Manning (proud of her small feet) are more or less interchangeable).
It’s not a bad attempt at screening a large story featuring many characters, though it tails off a but at the end because the books are too big to televise.
They encompass battle, marital misery, the fear of defeat, the despair of a badly-wounded soldier, many personal betrayals and tragedies, and contain extraordinary portrayals of life as it was really lived in Bucharest, Athens, Cairo. Jerusalem and Damascus, in the very last hours of the colonial era.
They run partly in parallel to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ Trilogy (and his ‘Put Out More Flags’, which I tend to see as a separate but linked volume) , and as essential for understanding Britain’s part in the Second World War.
The series begins with the Pringles, Harriet and Guy, making their way to Bucharest by train in the last minutes of peace in 1939. In the warm dark, a man without papers is hustled away to what will probably be his death, while the supposedly safe English passengers look on helplessly. It was more or less insane for anyone to undertake such a journey in September 1939, but before the rapid collapse of Poland and the wholly unexpected fall of France, few if any English people had any idea of this.
Harriet Pringle is a modern woman, a caustically witty, tough and independent young person from 1930s literary London, who would later be pretty much at home in the post-war world. Some of this we know because the books are so obviously autobiographical. An illustration of her toughness is a description, plainly drawn from the life , of a very risky mission, in mid-war, to the disputed city of Cluj. In the book, this crazy journey (at the request of a British reporter anxious to find out what is going on but not prepared to go himself) is made by Prince Yakimov, a White Russian aristocrat, ratfink, sponger, pig and general scapegrace, who is even so loveable, one of the most brilliantly drawn figures in fiction, worthy of Dickens himself.
Harriet’s bizarre marriage to Guy is the constant theme of the book. Guy, based on a Communist called R.J. (‘Reggie’) Smith is the open-handed friend of all, endlessly dispensing his love to the poor and suffering, almost entirely absent from his wife’s life and oblivious to her concerns. He can barely see in front of him through thick glasses, so cannot serve in the Army. His official role in Bucharest is to lecture at the University, part of the ‘soft power’ efforts of the British Council, the official voice of British culture abroad. It is not really a moment for soft power, though it is hugely touching that , as Hitler’s Panzers grind through the Low Countries in a river of grey steel, Guy manages to produce an excellent version of Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (later he reveals a talent for producing smutty revues as well).
This difficult, sometimes utterly infuriating relationship continues in the most extraordinary circumstances. It is the unchanging theme of all six novels in the series. For those nurtured on legends of British victory and finest hours, the events described may be a shock.
Since they are living, without diplomatic protection, in an increasingly dangerous neutral capital liable at any time to he seized by Stalin or Hitler, Harriet and Guy are extremely exposed to the results of British diplomatic incompetence, military weakness and failure.
The menacing growth of Nazi power affects them personally, gradually interfering with their expatriate lives – neutrality means direct encounters with aggressive and deliberately unpleasant Germans, and the symbolic Nazi takeover of the hotel favoured by the British. Restaurants which used to find them tables begin to turn them down and turn them away. Jewish friends face increasingly nasty and ultimately savage treatment.
A poster war is played out between the British and German propaganda bureaux (the British response usually feeble) , and at one stage Harriet sees a Nazi placard gloating over the bombing of what is obviously Portsmouth.
This bohemian and unconventional young woman, who one can imagine refusing to stand for ‘God Save the King’ at home, is wounded to the point of tears by the military collapse of the British Empire. She cannot believe that British troops have fled before the German advance. By mistake, she and her husband and an absurd visiting professor (the appalling Lord Pinkrose, a much more outrageous villain than Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool) find themselves attending a pro-German propaganda concert, and flee the auditorium amid cold contemptuous stares as the Horst Wessel song is bawled from the stage.
Having escaped (after a dreadful shock) the tragedy of Romania, they almost immediately find themselves embroiled in the even worse tragedy which overcomes Greece, the last unconquered corner of mainland Europe.
Again, we see defeat and incompetence, absurd optimism, the bad behaviour of rather too many of the British ‘community’. And there are, alas, the pathetic hopes placed in Britain and its supposed fighting power, by the poor Greeks, who have nowhere to go when the Germans (probably drawn into Greece by British intervention there) arrive. We know, as the Greeks did not, exactly what they brought with them.
Harriet and Guy manage –just- to escape to Egypt, where they find Britain unloved, and its impending defeat at the hands of Rommel happily anticipated by many Egyptians. By the way, this section of the book contains a description of an appalling true incident, whose real-life participants objected strongly to her writing about it. I have read it three times now, and am still unsure whether this very painful event should have been included in the story.
The book is strongly sympathetic to poor Egyptians and observant about them and their lives (in one extraordinary moment, Harriet notes that a man who makes a tiny living as a porter, has feet which have become almost circular from carrying too many heavy loads), and often unenthusiastic about the conduct of their British occupiers.
And it contains scenes from the battle of Alamein which I believe to be highly realistic accounts of real warfare.
It is full of life as it actually feels and must have felt at the time– the reader experiences the Bucharest winters, the grinding hunger of wartime, when there is nothing to eat – even for the fortunate - but the foulest offal, the grey lonely soaking chill of Damascus after the bone-baking, unhealthy blaze of the Cairo heat. For long periods, the immediate possibility of total defeat and utter destitution, lost far from home among strangers, reliant on the pennies of their charity and grateful for it, is a constant danger. The barbarians really could arrive. We have seen them arrive in Bucharest and Athens. Will they come to Alexandria and Cairo too?
For me this setting is especially poignant. Some of the most intense moments of my life were spent in Bucharest around Christmas 1989. I lived as an expatriate in a turbulent foreign capital (Moscow) for two years, never entirely sure of being safe from events. I have been twice to Cairo (and hope never to go again) and find Olivia Manning’s account of the same place in another era enormously evocative. The Mediterranean was where my father spent much of his time in the Navy. He was familiar with the Greek Islands, Alexandria and Suez, as all naval men were then, and he and my mother spent the early years of their marriage in Malta, still a last vestige of the Imperial life, British manners and restraint amid the sun-scorched stone buildings of another civilisation. The war Olivia Manning saw tearing through her life came to dominate my childhood and adolescence, forming as it did our national politics, literature and self-image. How do we think of it? What do we owe to the dead, and those who knowingly and repeatedly risked death? ? What should we think of it? Where does it leave us, morally and culturally, nearly 80 years later, as the last survivors near the end of their days, and the world finally shakes off the treaties and unwritten deals that brought it to an end?
The brief coda to the last book of the six, ‘The Sum of Things’, is so powerful that it made me involuntarily hold my breath. It is a brief flash of the hard, determined and passionate steel beneath the artifice of these books, and may give you a clue as to why they are so very well worth reading. Here it is:
‘Two more years were to pass before the war ended. 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 the noble dead.’
