by William Boyd
When Her Privates We was published in 1930 it became an almost immediate success, some 15,000 copies selling in the first three months as newspaper columnists vied with each other trying to guess the identity of “Private 19022.” Manning’s cover was blown relatively quickly. One of the first to guess the true identity of the author was T. E. Lawrence who claimed that within six weeks of the book’s publication he had read it three times.
Lawrence recognized Manning as the author because he was a great admirer of Manning’s book Scenes and Portraits (published in 1909). When Manning’s identity was revealed to the world at large it came as something of a shock. Frederic Manning was a minor figure in Edwardian literary circles, a Greek scholar, a poet, a belle-lettrist, friend of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot—he seemed a million miles away from the foul-mouthed soldiers in his novel, scrounging for booze and bitching about the war.
Manning was in fact an Australian, born in 1882 to a prosperous family in Sydney. His father was mayor of Sydney, later knighted, and his brother became Attorney General. Manning, a neurasthenic young man of perpetually failing health, came to England in 1903 determined to make a career in literature. And his efforts followed the predictable path of those blessed with a modest talent, a private income and low ambition: reviews and poems printed in periodicals, a turgid epic poem called The Vigil of Brunhilde, and then finally the critical success of Scenes and Portraits, a series of imaginative dialogues between historical figures which display a refined and ironic intellectual preciosity but which now read as hopelessly dated. However, in 1909, the réclame of the book finally permitted Manning full access into Edwardian literary circles and it was at this time that he and Ezra Pound became friends.
What little information there is on the early life of Frederic Manning makes it hard to believe that one day he would write Her Privates We. Before the war Manning published regular reviews for the Spectator and other periodicals, and the occasional poem appeared in little magazines. He lived in a vicarage in the countryside and, when he could afford it, travelled in Europe. Nothing about his life distinguishes him from many other somewhat effete and vaguely talented littérateurs that then abounded. There seems also to have been no grand romantic passion in his life—with either sex—and even his friendships, with the painter William Rothen-stein, with Pound, appear oddly formal and distanced.
When war broke out in 1914 Manning did not volunteer immediately because he thought he would fail the army medical. He continued to scratch a living from his pen but eventually in October 1915 he enlisted in the Shropshire Light Infantry and reported for training at Pembroke Dock in South Wales.
Manning was now “Private 19022.” Quite why he had not attempted to apply for a commission is not clear—it is possible he had, but had been rejected (I am indebted for much of this information to Jonathan Marwil’s Frederic Manning: An Unfinished Life). However after some weeks of basic training he was selected and sent to Oxford to train as an Officer Cadet. Manning’s role as a tyro officer did not last long—he was returned to his unit in June 1916 for drunkenness.
So Manning went to France in August 1916 as a private, an elderly private too, at the age of thirty-four—there were boys of sixteen at the Battle of the Somme. He was joining the secondary stages of the Somme battle that had begun with the catastrophic slaughter of 60,000 killed and wounded on the first day—1 July—and that would fizzle out in the freezing mud and snow as winter closed in at the year’s end. In August the Shropshires soon saw heavy fighting around Guillemont, in the southern section of the Somme battle front, and later, towards the end of the year, on the Ancre front at Serre. Manning’s war as a private soldier lasted just over four months. He returned to London at Christmas 1916, again to attempt officer training.
Those four months on the Somme front provide the background for Her Privates We. Bourne’s war, in the novel, is very close to Manning’s both geographically and in terms of the experience undergone. Just as Bourne was transferred to signals, and thus to comparative safety, so too was Manning. And just as Bourne was constantly urged to apply for a commission so too, one must suppose, was Manning. In any event, when complied with, the new experience was not a happy one. Manning duly became a lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment but his drinking problems became more serious (in the novel, Bourne is an intermittent but redoubtably heavy drinker). In August 1917, in Dublin, Manning was summoned before a court martial and severely reprimanded. In October 1917 he was in hospital, suffering from delirium tremens. Shortly after, he offered to resign his commission and was accepted. But Manning carried on drinking and was described by his battalion medical officer after one binge as being in “a stupor, quite unfit for any duty, evidently the result of a drinking bout.” Manning’s own account was blunt and factual: “From some time… I had been suffering from continual insomnia and nervous exhaustion. I was in an extremely weak condition of health generally, and in those circumstances had recourse to stimulants.” Manning’s self-diagnosis is more easy to understand in this the day and age of post-traumatic stress disorder but in 1918 he met with little sympathy: his military career was over.
After the war Manning took up his old life as a jobbing man-of-letters again—literary journalism and hack work in the shape of a biography of a famous naval architect. He moved in the same obscure literary and intellectual circles as before, returning to Australia in 1925 for a visit. But there is a sense of the decade of the 1920s being one long slow slide of apathy and disillusion. He published a small book on Epicurus and wrote reviews for T. S. Eliot at the Criterion. Manning, a lifelong chain-smoker, was still drinking heavily and, inevitably, health problems returned. He had thirteen teeth extracted. Photographs at the time show a gaunt, seamed face, prematurely aged. It was only when the publisher Peter Davies urged him to write his war memoirs that some form of energy returned and Her Privates We was composed in a few galvanized weeks. Manning had never written so easily, before or since.
But the success and fame of the novel, as well as temporary prosperity, brought little contentment. Manning’s health was failing and it seems he was by now suffering from emphysema. He travelled to Australia again in 1932 and passed sixteen isolated months there. Manning returned to England but spent most of his time in and out of rest homes and hospitals. He now needed oxygen to help him breathe. Any cold or attack of flu brought with it deadly risks. Early in 1935 Manning contracted pneumonia which, coupled with his chronic emphysema, proved swiftly fatal: he died on 22 February. He was fifty-two years old.
At the centre of Frederic Manning’s short and disappointed life stands the monument of Her Privates We. It was a book that Ernest Hemingway read each year, “to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them.” Hemingway has got to the heart of the book’s dogged and lasting appeal. There are many superb memoirs and testimonials about the First World War that have stood the test of time and become classics. Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Graves are permanent members of the poetry canon. It is perhaps somewhat strange that, apart from Her Privates We, there are no English novels that came out of the Great War with a similar status. Yet it is precisely because Her Privates We is a novel that its reputation and its import are so remarkable and so affecting. Fiction adds a different dimension that the purely documentary and historical cannot aspire to. As Hemingway said on another occasion: “I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be.” This is what the novel does and this explains the enduring power behind Her Privates We. Something in Manning’s persona made him wish to write a novel rather than a memoir. Perhaps fiction gave him that freedom to reinvent himself as Bourne, made him truer than he would be, and perhaps fiction gave him that freedom to be honest in a way that more decorous autobiography would not permit. For, finally, it is the unremitting honesty of Her Privates We that stays in the mind; its refusal to idealize the serving soldier and military life; the absolute determination to present the war in all its boredom, misery and uncerta
inty; its refusal to glorify or romanticize; the candour that makes a soldier say about the civilians back home, “They don’t give a fuck what ’appens to us ’ns.” We know now that all this was true—but we needed Frederic Manning to bear fictional witness for us, to make it truer.
If we only had the expurgated edition of Her Privates We it would still remain a great and original novel. It may seem a somewhat large claim to make but the restoration of these stark curses, oaths and swear words in the unexpurgated version has the curious effect of making the First World War seem somehow modern and more contemporary—of making it closer to us, removing the decades that lie between our time and the summer of 1916. After all, it was not that long ago. My grandfather and my great-uncle both survived the First World War: one was wounded at Passchendaele, the other at the Somme, in August, at about the time Manning arrived there. These famous names still resound awfully, even now—Passchendaele, the Somme—names with their great freight of history and of potent abstract nouns—courage, duty, sacrifice, heroism. But, funnily enough, it is the thought of my grandfather and my great-uncle swearing—“fucking” and “cunting” with the rest of the poor benighted infantry—that makes them real to me. I understand their ordinariness and humanity. Therefore I understand all the better what they endured.
1999
Charles Dickens
(Introduction to Martin Chuzzlewit)
The first problem about Martin Chuzzlewit is its title. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet,” opines Juliet, and normally I would agree, but I feel that in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit the axiom does not neatly apply. Martin Chuzzlewit is one of those novels that would benefit from a title change. It is a problem that emerges only once the book has been well begun, as a vague niggle at first, then a growing worry, and then, by the time one has reached the end, it is a full-blown puzzler. Why on earth is the book called Martin Chuzzlewit? More precisely: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit? Who, in all honesty, gives a fig about young Martin—whose story, I roughly calculate, probably occupies barely a fifth of the text—so why should the book be named after him? When one thinks of the great eponymous Dickens novels—Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby — it is apparent that Martin Chuzzlewit, though it would seem to be in the same family, is manifestly not. And this misnomer goes some way to account, I think, for the novel’s surprising though significant neglect. For one of Dickens’s greatest novels it is, without doubt, under-read and undervalued. It is as if it has been placed, as it were, in the wrong pigeon-hole: it shouldn’t be with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield but with, say, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend. Readers are expecting Dickens to offer them something they are familiar with, and something that he does unsurpassably well, and in the event the central character is almost insignificant, and was there ever such a bland pair of lovers as young Martin and Mary? It is not conclusive evidence, though telling enough all the same, but in a recent biography of Dickens the index cites only nine fleeting references to the novel, the longest being a couple of paragraphs dealing with the American episodes and their sources. Clearly, Martin Chuzzlewit is something of a square peg in a round hole; Martin Chuzzlewit is an odd fish.
And yet at the same time Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, the most sheerly funny of all Dickens’s novels, with a teeming energetic humour that continues to delight some hundred and fifty years after its first publication. It contains enduringly celebrated Dickens creations, notably Seth Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, a whole gallery of brilliantly rendered minor characters and writing of a verve and vigour, and imaginative audacity, that is the equal of anything else in the oeuvre. Dickens himself was highly pleased with the book as he was writing it. “You know, as well as I,” he confided to his friend and future biographer John Forster, “that I think Chuzzlewit in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I know, if I had health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men, though fifty writers started up tomorrow. But how many readers do not think!” The somewhat plaintive self-justification is highly revealing, as is his evident ambition and confidence. It was prompted by the comparative failure of the novel, which was appearing in monthly parts throughout 1843 and the first half of 1844. By Dickens’s standards it was not doing well. Pickwick and Nickleby sold 40-50,000 copies a month: Chuzzlewit never rose much over 20,000.
It must have been hard for Dickens to comprehend this baffling shortfall. He was thirty-two years old and at the very apex of his fame. Chuzzlewit was his sixth novel, destined to follow the unequivocal triumphs of Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. He was in a real sense a mature novelist with a massive readership and in full and confident apprehension of his particular genius. He had special hopes for Chuzzlewit also: it was to be more deliberately structured than the picaresque form of its predecessors; moreover it was to have a clear moral agenda—it was designed to illustrate, according to Forster, “more or less by every person introduced, the number and variety of humours and vices that have their root in selfishness.” And throughout the novel Dickens dutifully reminds us of this great theme of “Self,” addressing little homilies to the reader, explaining motives and consequences, just in case the outlines of the grand plan are becoming a little blurred. But it does not work, or rather it works, but only in the most general sense. Yes, one can see what he is driving at, but this sententious overview is an afterthought; it has nothing to do with the success, nor of the greatness, of the novel.
And here we enter the realm of speculation, somewhat. Chuzzlewit is a huge novel, more than half a million words I calculate, which was written more or less continually over a period of eighteen months. Your average late twentieth-century novelist, producing a lean, well-tooled 200 pager every three or four years, must stand in shamefaced awe at this superabundant energy. Dickens’s letters are full of it—“writing like a Dragon,” “powdering away at Chuzzlewit,” “writing merrily.” Again he declares to Forster: “I have been all day in Chuzzlewit agonies — conceiving only. I hope to bring forth tomorrow” (my italics). The demands of monthly serial publication must have made this form of writing rhythm inevitable. A day of feverish thought and plotting followed by days of feverish writing. Even if we did not have Dickens’s own words for it the internal evidence of the text would suffice to establish that the novel was composed in this manner. You can chart the rise and fall of his energies and enthusiasms, easily spot the longueurs and the padding. That the novel is generally so unflaggingly zestful is what is astonishing: the fact that it is not wholly sustained, that it occasionally goes off the boil, meanders and loses its way, is not only inevitable, it is also—thank God—only human.
In every artist’s head, certainly in every novelist’s, there is an urversion—a perfect Platonic vision—of the art form he or she intends to produce. For various reasons—usually a blend of impossible ambition and pragmatic constraints—something different, and, rarely, something better, emerges. And this, I think, is what occurred with Martin Chuzzlewit. We know in fair detail what Dickens hoped the Chuzzlewit he was writing would be: we can only be grateful that it didn’t come off.
Because it has to be said that, for all his hopes about producing a more sophisticated and better-structured novel than its predecessors, Chuzzlewit — judged by Dickens’s criteria—fails. It is uneven, it is ungainly, it sags and from time to time bores and baffles. The most signal example of this, as I have already suggested, is the superficiality of the eponymous hero. But the American episodes are another instance of bad planning (apparently an attempt, in response to the disappointing sales, to win new readers). When Martin and Mark Tapley go to seek their fortune in the New World the whole tone of the novel changes. It reads today as laboriously heavy-handed satire, but I suspect that, even in 1843, when the narrative switched back to England and the Pe
cksniffs, a sense of relief would be inevitable. This is not to say that the novel is badly plotted: on the contrary, Dickens keeps the strands of various storylines taut and neatly interconnected. As the novel progresses, the geographical displacements of minor characters—Mark Tapley, Bailey, Mrs Gamp—function very effectively as points de repère for the multilevelled plot. Young Bailey, for example, neatly takes us from Mrs Todgers’s boarding house, to the Anglo-Bengalee Assurance Company, which links us again with Jonas Chuzzlewit and the unfortunate Merry Pecksniff. Another device Dickens employs is deliberately to withhold information from us, while at the same time letting us know that the information is highly significant. This is a form of teasing on the part of the omniscient novelist that can occasionally verge on the arch. An obvious instance is the “dirt” that Nadgett digs up on Jonas Chuzzlewit. He hands the details to Tigg Montague who reads them with mounting glee. Dickens knows, Nadgett knows and Montague knows… but we don’t. The reader’s curiosity is distinctly piqued. Also the invalid Lewsome confides to John Westlock that he has a dread and vital secret to impart and will do so as soon as he recovers his health. This knowledge ticks away like a buried time bomb as the story continues elsewhere. Another tribute to Dickens’s skill in the mechanics of novel writing is that nothing is wasted. I am sure every reader would have forgotten that young Martin designed a grammar school while he was briefly Pecksniff’s pupil. But it delivers a pleasant frisson of surprised recognition when, hundreds of pages later, Martin and Mark return to England and discover Pecksniff humbly receiving the plaudits of an admiring crowd as the foundation stone of Martin’s grammar school is laid.
All these techniques are narrative skills that Dickens possesses in abundance, that contrive to keep the story moving, that deliver a sense of something shapely and well constructed (though he doesn’t hesitate to resort to absurd coincidence when he is in a tight spot). But they are the sort of manipulations that, I would suggest, manifest themselves in the day to day business of writing and plotting the monthly numbers. The component parts—the whirring cogs, the levers and the pulleys—are all functioning well: it is only the grand design of the machine that is flawed.