Fortunes of War Read online

  OLIVIA MANNING (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R. D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. During World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece, then to Egypt, and finally to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later.

  ANTHONY SATTIN is a journalist, broadcaster, and former resident of Cairo. Among his published works of nonfiction are The Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile. His latest book, Young Lawrence, about the five years T. E. Lawrence spent in the Middle East before World War I, will be published in the United States in 2015.

  Fortunes of War

  THE LEVANT TRILOGY

  OLIVIA MANNING

  Introduction by

  ANTHONY SATTIN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

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  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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  www.nyrb.com

  This collection copyright © 1982 by the Estate of Olivia Manning

  First published in Great Britain as The Levant Trilogy in 1982 by Penguin Books, Ltd; published in Great Britain in paperback in 2003 by Phoenix

  “The Danger Tree” copyright © 1977 by the Estate of Olivia Manning First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson; first published in the United States in 1977 by Atheneum Publishers

  “The Battle Lost and Won” copyright © 1978 by the Estate of Olivia Manning First published in Great Britain in 1978 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson; first published in the United States in 1979 by Atheneum Publishers

  “The Sum of Things” copyright © 1980 by the Estate of Olivia Manning First published in Great Britain in 1980 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson; first published in the United States in 1981 by Atheneum Publishers

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Anthony Sattin

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph: George Rodger, Graves of the crew of a British bomber shot down in June 1941; © George Rodger/Magnum Photospaper.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Manning, Olivia.

  [Levant trilogy]

  Fortunes of war : the Levant trilogy / by Olivia Manning ; introduction by Anthony Sattin.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-721-1 (pbk.)

  I. World War, 1939–1945—Egypt—Fiction. I. Manning, Olivia. Danger tree. II. Manning, Olivia. Battle lost and won. III. Manning, Olivia. Sum of things. IV. Title. V. Title: Levant trilogy.

  PR6063.A384L48 2014

  823'.914—dc23

  2013048995

  ISBN 978-1-59017-736-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  VOLUME ONE: THE DANGER TREE

  VOLUME TWO: THE BATTLE LOST AND WON

  VOLUME THREE: THE SUM OF THINGS

  Introduction

  When Olivia Manning completed work on The Sum of Things, the last volume of The Levant Trilogy, she and her husband, the retired academic and BBC radio producer Reggie Smith, took a holiday in Spain and France. She was seventy-two years of age. She had suffered greatly during the Second World War, and had been chased out of Romania and Greece by German advances. When she and Smith reached Egypt, she then suffered the uncertainties of whether the Allies would hold out against the German assault on El Alamein. In 1944, when they were living in Jerusalem, she became pregnant, but the child was stillborn. It was her only attempt at conceiving. In an uncertain time, writing had become her refuge and she had managed to write most days of her adult life. As a result, her output was impressive, both in extent and in quality. So as she reached old age, with the pain of a collapsing hip and a sense that she was not as appreciated a writer as she thought she ought to be, she did at least have the certainty that her place in the literary establishment was assured: she had been lauded at the Authors of the Year party in March that year and the paperback of The Balkan Trilogy was prominent in London bookshops.

  Publication for The Sum of Things was set for autumn 1980. The title was particularly apt for it completed The Levant Trilogy and that, in turn, brought to an end a cycle of six novels begun with The Balkan Trilogy (composed between 1956 and 1964), and called Fortunes of War. The Sum of Things concluded the work that most closely reflected the events and concerns of her life. It also turned out to be the last thing she wrote because in early July that year, after a tiring day in their London home cleaning out Reggie’s bedroom, she had a stroke and was dead within the month.

  The Levant Trilogy continues the stories and develops the themes Manning introduced in her three Balkan novels. Its central characters, Guy and Harriet Pringle, in places a thinly disguised representation of the author and her husband, are refugees, chased across the Mediterranean to Egypt by the Nazi advance. In North Africa they discover that nowhere is safe. In 1942, Rommel and the Afrika Corps capture Tobruk and push the British east through Libya into Egypt. There is panic in Alexandria, which is exposed and regularly bombed, and then in Cairo, from where the British had ruled Egypt in an unofficial way for the previous sixty years: there was a mass burning of official documents. This background of threat, displacement, and ultimately loss seeps into each action and colors every relationship in the trilogy.

  The Pringles, who belong to no military or social elite, are an odd mix. Guy is a gregarious intellectual, out of work at the beginning of the trilogy, eventually running the British Council, and nowhere more at home than drinking beer in the garden of the Anglo-Egyptian Union. Harriet, first introduced as a skinny, pale girl with a “glowing darkness” in her eyes, is a more reserved, more dependable character, suffering the long absences of a husband who is always available to students and friends, always late for meetings, and seemingly determined to please everyone but his wife. Perhaps, she thinks, she expects too much from her marriage, “but were her expectations unreasonable?” Another major narrative thread follows Simon Boulderstone, a young, innocent and slightly hapless officer eager to get to the Western Desert to see action and to find his brother. Among the more notable supporting characters are Edwina, a beautiful young woman in search of a husband, preferably with a fortune and title, and Angela, a woman who has jettisoned her husband, kept her title, but whose only child is blown up by a land mine. Even the lucky are losers here.

  Man
ning’s reputation has fluctuated since her death, and her account of colonial Egypt in particular has been somewhat overshadowed by Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Like Manning, Durrell was a refugee from the other side of the Mediterranean, who arrived in Egypt looking for safety and stability but found inspiration for his writing. Manning (like her character Harriet) worked as a press attaché at the American embassy in Cairo; Durrell occupied the same position for the British. But they were very different people and very different writers, and while Durrell sought to dazzle with his prose and to play with the possibilities of structure to reveal his characters, Manning wrote with pared-down precision. She was not alone in finding his writing, like his character, pretentious and misogynistic: As the writer Jan Morris, one of Durrell’s admirers, accepts, “the [Alexandria] Quartet is not without pretension, in concept as in performance.”* Durrell was equally unflattering about Manning, calling her “the hook-nosed condor of the Middle East” and accusing her of being determined to be “dans le movement,”† implying that she was not. While Durrell was intent on exposing and celebrating modern love, Manning wished to reveal the many facets of horror in war. Two things they had in common were a talent to turn firsthand experiences into compelling prose and a consummate ability to conjure the spirit of a place.

  Manning’s relative obscurity may in part be explained by her work’s indifference to the trends and topics of the 1960s and ’70s. She did not play with novelistic form, nor did she examine the political or sexual revolution like her more celebrated contemporaries Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch. Though a very vocal supporter of women’s rights, she was not perceived as a feminist writer. Moreover, and perhaps more important, she wrote her best work late in a life that had seen a steady stream of work, her first novel appearing in print fifty-one years before the last. Although it was widely praised, there was no surprise about The Levant Trilogy.

  Manning made no attempt to conceal the fact that much of her inspiration and many of her characters were drawn from life. She made the most of the interesting times in which she had lived. She probed at the things that had excited her and, even more, at those that had made her unhappy. She exposed the flaws of her wartime marriage, which she recognized had been decided on too quickly, but which had proved surprisingly enduring in spite of its obvious shortcomings. She pinned down the smallness of many of the characters met on her travels and in London. But most remarkable of all was the way she wrote about something of which she had no direct experience, the brutality of fighting. The scenes of death in battle, of a man’s life seeping into the hot sand, and those in which a wounded solider struggles to overcome his disabilities show what Manning could achieve when she reached beyond her own experiences. These are some of the most memorable scenes in the books.

  Manning’s style of storytelling is a quiet one—some readers may find the going slow, the narrative voice too quiet, the whole thing just too genteel. But this ability to tell a story and hold one’s attention without shouting is one of her many gifts as a writer. The first novel opens by introducing twenty-year-old Simon Boulderstone, who “came to Egypt with the draft. For nearly two months, as the convoy slid down one side of Africa and up the other, he had been crowded about by other men. When he reached Cairo, he was alone.” The third novel ends with Boulderstone back on a troop ship, his youth and memory fading “like a face disappearing under water.” The precision of Manning’s observation, the economy of her characterization, the lack of sentimentality where privately she was awash with emotion, all help to shape and fix the sense of loss that her characters feel—loss of life, of innocence, of fun and possibilities, of a world consumed in the flames of buzz bombs and of men shattered by shells. Equally vividly drawn on her pages is a Cairo of the 1940s illuminated by soft evening light, a small pension aired in Tiberias, smoky bars in Alexandria, a Middle East transformed by conflict.

  There is serious purpose beyond the nostalgia and the personal vivisection, for Manning turns out to be a vocal critic of colonialism. “What have we done for them?” Harriet asks her friends, a dozen pages into the first novel, to which the answer comes, “We’ve shown them how people ought to live.” By the end of the last novel, the conviction that the way “we” live is in any way better than “them” has been shattered. The cultural and racial superiority of foreigners, particularly the British, is taken apart on several occasions in the trilogy, perhaps nowhere more brutally than in a scene in Cairo’s Birka (now known as Ezbekiya), the seedy red light district, where some of the main characters, including an English professor, pay a young Egyptian to have sex in a brothel so they can watch. After the brief union, the onlookers discover that the young man was one of the professor’s students. “We Egyptians are not like you Europeans,” the student concludes. “We are liking to do such things in private.”

  The three novels are not overly long—571 pages in all—and together they create more of a saga than an epic. This is fitting given Manning’s essentially unglamorous view of the world as a place where we are driven as much by our pettiness and perfidies as by our nobility and grandeur. The dead, we know by the end, are ennobled, but the rest of us live with our foibles and weaknesses. This, in essence, is the sum of things to which the trilogy leads and which Manning understood: that life, rarely easy and often compromised, can be rich and rewarding. It is the promise of such rewards, as well as insight into the motives that drive the characters, a view of the Middle East in the 1940s, and the evocation of the sight and smell of desert warfare, that continue to make these novels such compelling reading.

  —ANTHONY SATTIN

  *“Rereading: The Alexandria Quartet,” The Guardian, February 24, 2012.

  †Quoted in Neville Braybrooke, Olivia Manning: A Life (London: Random House, 2004), 113.

  Volume One

  THE DANGER TREE

  To Reggie, with love

  One

  Simon Boulderstone, aged twenty, came to Egypt with the draft. For nearly two months, as the convoy slid down one side of Africa and up the other, he had been crowded about by other men. When he reached Cairo, he was alone.

  He had two friends on board, Trench and Codley, who had been his family, his intimates, the people nearest to him in the world. The sense of belonging together had been deeper than love — then, at Suez, a terrible thing happened. He lost them.

  As the three were disembarking, Simon had been ordered out of the lighter and put in charge of a detachment of men whose officer had gone down with jaundice. He shouted to Trench and Codley ‘See you on shore’ before joining the men who had been holed up in the corridor all morning. They were weary of waiting, and they had to wait longer. It was mid-afternoon before Simon reached the quay and discovered that his friends had gone. No one could tell him where. There was an emergency on and each truck, as it arrived, filled up with waiting men and went. Simon was not only alone, he had missed his transport. It seemed, too, that he had reached the most desolate and arid place on earth.

  The sergeant to whom he spoke said Trench and Codley might have gone to Infantry Base Depot, or they might have gone to one of several transit camps that were in and around Cairo.

  ‘Wherever they are,’ said the sergeant, ‘they won’t be there long. Things are in a bloody mess. Just heard Tobruk’s fallen. What bloody next, I’d like to know?’ He gave Simon a travel warrant and directed him to take the afternoon train to Cairo and report to Abbasia barracks.

  ‘Anyone in particular?’: Simon hoped for the reassurance of a name.

  ‘See Major Perry in Movement Control. I’ll phone through to him. Good bloke, he’ll fit you up.’

  Simon, waiting at the station, was numb with solitude. Everything about him — the small houses packed between dry, enclosing hills, the sparking glare of the oil tanks, the white dockside buildings that reflected the sky’s heat, the dusty earth on which he stood — increased his anguish of loss. He had never before seen such a wilderness or known such loneliness.

  The
train came in, a string of old carriages foetid with heat and human smells, and set out slowly through the Suez slums and came into desert. Simon saw a lake, astonishingly blue, with sand all around it, then there was only sand. The sand glowed when the sun set. The glow died, the darkness came down — not that it mattered for there was nothing to see. Simon tried to open the window but the two Egyptians in the carriage said ‘No.’ One, holding up his finger in an admonitory way, explained that sand would be blown into the carriage. As the journey dragged on, the heat grew and Simon felt that he was melting inside his clothes. He longed to leave the train, imagining the night air would be cool but when he reached Cairo, the outer air was as hot and heavy as the air of the carriage.

  Waiting for a taxi, he breathed in the spicy, flaccid atmosphere of the city and felt the strangeness of things about him. The street lamps were painted blue. Figures in white robes, like night-shirts, flickered through the blue gloom, slippers flapping from heels. The women, bundled in black, were scarcely visible. The district looked seedy and was probably dirty but the barracks, he thought, would be familiar territory. He hoped Major Perry would be there to welcome him. When he was dropped at the main gate, he found he was just another young officer, another problem, adding to the overcrowded confusion of the place. He pronounced the name of Perry, to which he had clung as to a lifeline, and found there was no magic in it. He was told by the clerk in the Transit Office that the reporting point for his unit was Helwan. The barracks had been turned into a transit camp. And where was Major Perry? The clerk did not know. The major could be at Helwan or he could be at Heliopolis.

  ‘All sixes and sevens these days,’ the clerk pushed his handkerchief impatiently across his sweaty brow and Simon appealed to him: