by Susan Hill
This year there are a few surprises. Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy is here. So are books by Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Elizabeth Bowen, Patricia Highsmith, Jeanette Winterson – and Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Hemingway and Raymond Carver. An upmarket bookcase, then.
Serendipitously, I have brought both Olivia Manning trilogies, and it is those I have started reading – or rather, re-reading – with a break in the middle for two novels by Edith Wharton.
In between those, because this is how I always read, I am catching up, decades late, on Jay McInerney and Brightness Falls, one of the American ‘Brat Pack’ novels, about the young turks of New York finance and publishing, who rose to dizzy heights before coming a cropper a few years ago. It is very sharp, very witty and it includes a comment about holiday reading, when the Bright Young Couple go to a paradise island.
‘This is vacation,’ she said. ‘You should read something really trashy.’ They combed through the musty-smelling swollen paperbacks and Reader’s Digest condensed novels on the living-room shelves.
In other words, beach reads. I was slightly mortified when a friend on holiday in Turkey reported seeing three people reading one of my crime novels on a beach – I have never taken them too seriously, but for a split second I thought, ‘I didn’t realise they were as bad as that.’
The Olivia Manning trilogies have grown in stature since they were first published – as some books do. They have already stood the test of time and I am sure they will go on doing so, while novels by many of her female contemporaries have all sunk without trace. Ivy Compton-Burnett anyone? Kay Dick?
There are plenty of Second World War novels, and more pour off the presses with every year that takes us away from 1939, but Manning does not touch the Battle of Britain or the Blitz. In fact, she barely mentions England at all. The six novels are set in Romania – The Balkan Trilogy – and Egypt –The Levant Trilogy, because this is where Olivia Manning and her husband Reggie Smith spent their own war. They are the models for Guy and Harriet Pringle, who, like them, met and married in haste at the beginning of the war and spent much of it in the Balkans and the Levant. Reggie Smith, like Guy Pringle in the novels, works for the British Council and his wife, although getting occasional jobs in foreign legations, spends much of her time exploring the cities in which she finds herself, and travelling occasionally out of them, to villages, seaside resorts and the pyramids, and socialising, perforce, in cafés and bars while waiting for her husband to come home to the various rented flats and rooms, which are variously uncomfortable and sometimes squalid. Harriet never complains about the war or the conditions in which she finds herself, but she half-complains about the way her husband has time and attention for anyone and everyone before he can spare any for her.
This summer’s re-reading must be my fourth, and each time the books yield something new, perhaps because as I grow older I understand more. They give the sense of countries and cities at war more vividly than any other English literature I know – the smells, the noises, the deprivations, the sudden panics, the ominous lulls, the atmospheres of cafés and hotels, the temporary nature of every relationship – which makes them all the more vivid and fervid – all of these things fill the novels with detail. I have never visited Romania or Egypt, and have certainly never been near a desert, yet I feel, via Manning’s books, that I know them and in a strange way have always known them. Manning said often that she could not invent anything, that her novels were descriptions of her own experience, but that cannot be altogether true.
In The Levant Trilogy two brothers in their early twenties are serving with the British army in the desert. One is killed. The other serves and fights on, is later wounded and hospitalised, apparently paraplegic. Their relationship is briefly described, and we never encounter them together, yet we understand the depth of their brotherly feeling and the agony of the one left behind. We are there, we know intimately what this sort of war was like in physical detail. We feel the extreme heat, the sandstorms blowing up in front of us, so that we taste the stuff, it gets into our eyes and lungs, we smell death and blood, we see the enemy ahead – or is that the enemy, through the heat shimmer, and not another brigade of our own force? How can we tell? The chaos and muddle of this war, the commands and counter-commands, the guesswork, the attempts to find out what the hell is going on a mile ahead, let alone in the rest of the battlefield, or the entire theatre of war – these are wonderfully conveyed. Manning was a more imaginative and creative a novelist than she knew, for all that so much of her own experience and so many of the people taken from life are part of the weft and warp of the books.
I sat for a long time at the end of the day’s reading, as the sun set and the air cooled and the night scents and smells rose from the garden, thinking and thinking about these novels. I had probably done this thinking, or a version of it, several times before but the books had given me more to brood about. It is seventy plus years since those days through which we live in the two war trilogies. Olivia Manning died in 1980. I wonder if it matters how much she wrote out of her own direct experience and how much she created from her imagination – ‘made up’.
Does it ever matter? Only at the time, perhaps. A decade, or half a century later, it is all one. The books stand or fall by themselves. That is what time does to literature. And these novels stand. They come up fresh at every re-reading. I laid down the last as I finished it and sat in the soft dusk, with moths batting against the lamp and owls hooting somewhere deep in the French woods, and felt moved all over again, and made to think what it had been like for my parents’ generation, and the one before, and for those so-young soldiers in the desert – the Boulderstone brothers are twenty and twenty-two, the age at which young men now are still boys to us. In the war they had to grow up fast. You were an officer, men called you ‘Sir’ and looked to you for orders and leadership and you were still celebrating your twenty-first birthday.
Olivia Manning was an unusual-looking young woman, with a pointed face and a large nose, but as she grew older her face became softer and less strange. She was a difficult person, hardworking, knowing her own worth as a writer but always feeling that she did not get her just deserts, in the form of praise and prizes, but was constantly overlooked in favour either of the new posse of ‘Angry Young Men’ or of the other women novelists she saw as rivals. She was dismissive about most of them, not because she really believed their books were poor so much as because she was jealous of them. She need not have been.
A chip on the shoulder is always unattractive and, in her day, I sometimes heard Olivia being mocked by her contemporaries. My friend Pamela Hansford Johnson admired her work and spoke up for it, and the admiration was mutual. Mention Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark, though, and Olivia became enraged that they both received such adulatory attention from the literary editors – who were in those days always men. (Come to think of it, most of them still are.) She was furious that every time one of Murdoch’s long novels appeared it was what she called ‘Iris Benefit Week’, and she loathed Spark as being too smart, too fashionable, too laden with jewellery. Too rich. She was wrong about her fiction, though. Novels like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Comforters, The Girls of Slender Means are very different from anything Olivia wrote, but they still yield a great deal today. Her style is very – well, stylish. Perhaps an acquired taste. Her wit is straight-faced and very Morningside. Her characters are almost but not quite caricatures. She was not trying, as Olivia was, to write realistic novels, she was doing something quite different. And doing it brilliantly. And her short stories are impeccable – perfect examples of what the short story does and the novel does not.
Iris Murdoch is another matter. I have tried to re-read her books but only one, to my mind, has lasted – The Bell, a masterpiece of irony and extremely funny. I have re-read it often and recommended it, successfully, to people who say they cannot take Murdoch. Otherwise, her odd fantasy-cum-philosophical castles-in-the-air are hard to take now. T
hey have dated, though they are set in some out-of-time period which is supposedly England after the war but never seems to be quite anytime or anywhere. I doubt if she will ever have her day again. She was too donnish, too clever, took herself too seriously as a writer. But I knew and liked her. And something else about Iris has just struck me. Perhaps it was just chance, but I never ever heard her speak a bad word about any of her contemporaries. Maybe she just hadn’t read their novels, but that doesn’t stop some people.
Olivia Manning’s books stand tall alongside any one by those who, like her, were writing in the second half of the twentieth century, and above quite a few. She was a great writer. Her books were given a shot in the arm when The Balkan Trilogy was televised as The Fortunes of War, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, at the end of the 1980s. But the boost of a TV adaptation to book sales is short-lived and a new appreciation of Olivia Manning’s work is long overdue. Her other novels deserve attention but the war trilogies are the very best of her, and just as it does not matter that they were in part autobiographical, so her own prickly persona is of no interest to the newcomer to her work in the twenty-first century.
I cannot think that even now I have now done with the Balkan and Levant trilogies. In ten years’ time, I am sure I will pick them up again and find more meaning in them. Most great books yield their full meaning slowly
It is getting late. The moths are pattering against the lamps. This French garden smells of night and autumn. I blow out the citronella candle, and go indoors.
AT THE FAR END OF THE GARDEN is an old stone animal shelter, and behind it has been put a wicker chair which is probably almost as old. It has deep cushions that have been well bedded-in and after about three o’clock the shade slips over and covers it and I sit reading there. When I look up, there is a sloping meadow where the stubble is waiting to be ploughed, next to a field full of sunflowers – an important crop down here. They stay, heads hung, until they dry out and blacken, before being harvested. On the skyline, a row of oak trees. This area is rich in trees, and dense woods where wild boar hang out, and from which I can hear the sounds of hounds baying and yelping and guns during afternoons of la chasse. The French are great hunters, but not, like us, on horseback. I am not unhappy about the hunting of wild boar. Their numbers have to be kept down, they are predators, and they are dangerous. There are no boar in this garden, I hope. They will be hiding in the dark and cool of the woods.
My book bag contains a strange selection of books I have been waiting to read or re-read or am halfway through, but the heat has increased, it is humid and sultry – and that makes me irritable. No book will quite do. I wander into the house to go through the shelves there again. When I am in France I try to keep up my grasp of the language – such as it is – by reading Le Figaro and the local newspaper of the Lot every day, and sometimes a book in French. I bought a Simenon in the local librairie. But in this oppressive weather the words will not filter through into my brain.
I have brought all three of Edith Wharton’s wonderful Old New York novels, which I turn to every five years or so. But until the inevitable thunderstorm breaks the weather, I will resort to what is called ‘light reading’. That novel by Jay McInerney is on the table beside me. I had never previously read anything by him but my elder daughter raves and I love novels about New York, set at any time. I don’t suppose the author would be pleased to have his book called ‘light’, but I can’t quite think of another term – it is certainly not ‘heavy’.
It is also the sort of novel one plunges into, as into the deep end of the pool, and swims off straight away. The prose is cool and observant, in that crisp American way, and I know what is going to happen, so there is the delightful build-up to the crisis. These young people, married, wife in finance, the husband in publishing, are going to experience life in New York as it crashes and burns. They are going to lose their jobs, fail to hang on to their apartment, suffer with their friends in the same worlds, the same boat … I love books where pride cometh before a fall. Schadenfreude rules. Is that bad? Yes, but not as bad as gleefully wishing the crash and decline on real people.
Nothing happens fast in this novel. I read fifty pages, before the sun moves round, and I am not much further forward, but McInerney’s depiction of a self-regarding novelist who has been writing his ‘great novel’ for twenty years and endlessly getting his publisher to take him out to lunch in expensive and fashionable restaurants, to talk about the publicity for his non-novel, is spot on. I have met plenty of what Franz Kafka called non-writing writers. Have you ever heard of a non-painting painter or a non-composing composer? But those writers who never quite get on with their book are around – using ‘block’, the ‘pram in the hall’, the day job, anything – as a reason for never producing. Meanwhile, if they have done their self-publicity well, they are always referred to as ‘X, the novelist’ (note, ‘the’ not ‘a’) in interviews. ‘… as someone once said of E. M. Forster, his reputation grew with each book he failed to publish’. I have seen that happen, and not in New York.
McInerney knows them all. He also knows that a publishing house is only as good as its last bestseller, and how two or three books which do less than brilliantly can make all the difference between success and going under. The head of the firm for which our hero works has a habit of sending back curt notes about the manuscripts sent along by his editors. ‘I can see these poems probably ought to be published, but why by us?’
This is the perfect holiday book, but it does not slip down like a bland drink. It is not a time-waster. It is not the kind of book you can’t put down. I put it down quite often, in order to think about what I have just read. It is meaty and it creates a whole, real but fictional world. It has sharp observations, rapier-sharp dialogue. It is emphatically not a beach read, but reading it does not make my brain melt in the ambient temperature of 34 degrees.
THE WEATHER BREAKS. It has been unbearably humid as well as hot, and I am no good with it. Though it has been fine to sit in the shade, or outside on the terrace in the evenings, behind a wall of anti-mosquito coils and with pyrethrum-scented flesh, reading by a pleasantly wavering light. But there is still no breeze. Even the very tops of the elms do not stir.
Thunder is near. Sheet lightning flares. Something out there makes a strange cry.
When the storm comes, it is short and very sharp, but the rain will please the farmers, who have had none since late June. It rains all night, steadily, soothingly, and much of the next day, and the following night. Everything suddenly smells wonderful.
When it stops, the yellow-brown grass is greening already, and the heaviness has dissolved away, yielding to miraculously cool air – so cool it has dropped from 34 to 18 degrees in twenty-four hours. We look out jumpers and I read inside, sprawled on the comfortable sofa indoors until it warms gradually again, reaching the mid-20s but no longer oppressive.
Autumn is hovering close by. The trees are beginning to turn. The nights draw in. But still, I can be outside on this or that garden chair or wicker chaise longue, reading.
A CLATTERING LATE LAST NIGHT just outside the back door. We used to get badgers in the Cotswolds and Jeanette Winterson, who lived not far away, always swore they ate her crockery. But there are relatively few in Norfolk, so it wasn’t that. The clattering continued. I went outside and found a hedgehog knocking the tin dog-food dish about. They are so rare now, though if ever a garden, and its environs, were attractive to them, this is it. We have wild areas and long grass and weedy areas, and heaps which were meant to be compost but never quite made it. All of these are supposedly attractive to hedgehogs. Once, coming back late, I had to slam on the brakes to spare a family of them marching down the lane ahead of me. So they are about.
I put out some meaty chunks from the cat food, refilled the water bowl and left it to itself. Everything went very quiet but the meat had gone in the morning. It might not, of course, have been taken by the hedgehog.
Children’s books sometime
s feature hedgehogs, though I daresay they are as weird and wonderful as dinosaurs to young readers. Mrs Tiggywinkle is the archetype. There is no hedgehog in The Wind in the Willows, though there ought to be. Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog is a friend of Little Grey Rabbit in the stories by Alison Uttley. And of course there is Sonic the Hedgehog, though he inhabits a game world not a book one.
OCTOBER
THE NEW ACADEMIC YEAR. When we lived in Oxford, schools had been back three weeks or so before the university term began and the city filled up with bicycles. It made a difference, mainly in the square mile where the principal colleges are. It used to make an even greater one when undergraduates wore gowns in town. It is a pity they wear them no longer, but Oxbridge got rid of them decades ago. When I was in London, at King’s, only theologians and lawyers wore gowns. I longed for one but I have never worn an academic gown and, as I refuse all offers of honorary degrees, I am sure I never will.
IN SUMMER THE VILLAGE smells of barbecues. Now it smells of bonfires and the first wood smoke curls up, drifting into my nostrils from a dozen chimneys. The wood man has been round several times, tipping trailer-loads of logs. Now, of course, we are told we should not be burning them. We gave up coal years ago. Oil became a dirty word. Environmentally friendly folk converted to biomass, at great expense, but apparently research has shown that this is just as bad as everything else. We are meant to put on more jumpers, I expect. Wrens just dive deep into thick bushes and cling together for warmth. There were at least three nests of them on the south side of the house this year and yesterday I saw one dive into the hawthorn, which is well sheltered by two old walls adjacent to it. And so, barring a bitter winter and many nights of sub-zero temperatures, Troglodytes troglodytes should be fine. I hope so. Such tiny, vulnerable birds. I picked up a dead one and there was nothing in my hand at all. Weightless as air.