by Rachel Cusk
Olivia Manning
The Balkan Trilogy
‘I haven’t any parents,’ says Harriet Pringle, heroine and presiding spirit of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy. ‘At least, none to speak of. They divorced when I was very small. They both remarried and neither found it convenient to have me. My aunt Penny brought me up. I was a nuisance to her, too, and when I was naughty she used to say: “No wonder your mummy and daddy don’t love you.”’
If a project as lengthy and diverse as The Balkan Trilogy can be represented by a few lines, these words of Harriet’s are those lines. Indeed, to be able to discover in a small fragment the structure of the whole is one of the hallmarks of a work of art, and in this sense the compendiousness of The Balkan Trilogy is somewhat deceiving. Harriet’s impoverished heart is the unvarying leitmotif of its thousand-odd densely filled pages; a nondescript twenty-one-year-old English girl’s lack of parental love the central metaphor for war, displacement, cataclysm and the death of the old world in 1940s Europe.
Nevertheless, it is by virtue of this strange and striking parallel that The Balkan Trilogy preserves its freshness and makes its claim to greatness. In these novels we are shown wartime Europe as a world of emotionally stunted men and women, of people starved by the reticence and coldness of their upbringing, of people who have lacked attention and acceptance and love, who have lacked it generationally; a lack so deep in the grain of (English) social institutions and attitudes that only total destruction could erase it. Indifference, injustice, cruelty, hatred, neglect: in The Balkan Trilogy these are the constituents both of personal memory and of social reality, of private unhappiness and of public violence. In Olivia Manning’s analogy, war is the work of unhappy children; but while Harriet embodies the darkness of this perception, she represents too the individual struggle to refute it. Harriet’s determination – against every provocation – to preserve her marriage, to stay rather than to abandon, to keep instead of smashing, is the novel’s other, private war. Manning claimed to be at her happiest when writing of her own life, and the events of the Balkan and Levant trilogies correspond closely to those of the years (1938–46) she spent in Romania, Greece, Egypt and later Palestine with her husband, the socialist R. D. ‘Reggie’ Smith, who, barred by poor eyesight from military service, worked as a lecturer for the British Council. Guy and Harriet, newlyweds arriving in Romania on the eve of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, are Olivia and Reggie’s undisguised alter egos; and the narrative, so naturalistic, so full of incident and coincidence, so detailed, so densely populated with minor characters, confirms that Manning did indeed have a genius for writing at first hand. But her autobiographical presence in these novels is strikingly magnetised by the world: she is here not to describe herself but to witness. Her eye and ear are a match for the large canvas of war; her Bucharest of 1939–40 is riven with unease and changing political values, filled with sundry foreigners – hacks, hangers-on, diplomats, wanderers, profiteers – uncomfortably exposed by the flash of conflict, and it is brought so brilliantly and meticulously to life that by the end the reader feels she could easily find her own way around its chaotic streets and would recognise half the clientele in the English Bar.
Manning’s ‘people’ are more than literary characters: they have the feeling of real beings who happen to find themselves in the narrative frame, like passers-by caught on camera. Indeed, The Balkan Trilogy is frequently so faithful to the sense of lived life that it is often difficult to discern the hand that is shaping it. The prolix conversations of men and the pointed conversations of women, the hours Guy likes to spend discussing politics with his British legation cronies, evenings at restaurants that are sometimes interminably boring and sometimes fun, the configuration of a room, a street, a shopfront, the slow passage of time and season, most of all the way other people come and go, becoming known or half-known, by a process that seems utterly random and yet on which life is dependent at the deepest level for its structure and form: this river of narrative is both the chief beauty and the central mystery of The Balkan Trilogy.
The ‘truth’ of a writer’s experiences is difficult to unravel, but in these novels the striking impassivity of the point of view is the place to look for it. The shaping hand, we realise, is Harriet’s; Harriet’s is the recondite soul we are occupying; Harriet who watches, who pays attention, yet so rarely draws the drama to herself. When, as readers, we crave some evidence of sensibility from this fictional world, some attention, some disinterested gift of love, it is Harriet’s craving we are experiencing. And as we pass from admiration of Guy, lecturer in English literature and incurably sociable socialist, to a profoundly critical disillusion that nonetheless recognises the impossibility of ever rejecting or abandoning him, we are reliving every twist and turn of Harriet’s lonely journey of marriage.
What Guy represents in The Balkan Trilogy is the concept of society as the only possible force for good, and as such he is pitted against the emotional individualism represented by Harriet. Guy would give his last penny to a beggar, his last ounce of strength to a stranger in the street; Harriet, on the other hand, wants exclusivity, attention, possession. ‘He gave her an illusion of security – for it was, she was coming to believe, an illusion. He was one of those harbours that prove to be too shallow: there was no getting into it. For him, personal relationships were incidental. His fulfilment came from the outside world.’ This conflict, of course, is not just Guy and Harriet’s: it is the dialectic of the twentieth century, the essence of the struggle to create a new social order. What is interesting is that Guy’s dedication to ‘the world’, and his concomitant refusal to give Harriet the attention she craves, makes her feel ‘safe’, for it returns her to the original sensation of being unloved. She is constantly being told that Guy is a ‘great man’, a ‘saint’, and in this way we come to understand that it is not only Harriet who feels safe with Guy, who experiences emotional need as a form of shame. Other people – a great number of them – feel it too. What Guy (Guy as socialism) represents for them is a kind of extruded subjectivity, whereby ‘need’ is separated from ‘self’, and Manning cleverly gives us the reason why such a representation appears virtuous. For Harriet, and those like her, it entails a new discipline of self-renunciation that eerily re-echoes the old; it offers security, or perhaps ‘an illusion of security’.
It is in Harriet’s relationship with Clarence, a British legation officer in Bucharest and fellow lost soul, that these ideas are explored. When Clarence tries to tell her about his unhappy childhood, Harriet experiences violent feelings of resistance. ‘Don’t think about it: don’t talk about it,’ she silently abjures him. ‘She knew [Clarence] was one who, given a chance, would shut her off into a private world.’ And she has sufficient self-knowledge to understand that in this way he is exactly like her. ‘What was it they both wanted? Exclusive attention, no doubt: the attention each had missed in childhood. Perversely, she did not want it now it was offered. She was drawn to Guy … and the open world about him.’ Later, in an extraordinary scene, Harriet participates in the ‘de-bagging’ (a public-school prank whereby a person’s trousers are forcibly removed) of Clarence at the Pringles’ flat, with Guy and Guy’s boorish friend David. David, a bully, identifies Clarence as a victim and Harriet finds herself ‘caught into the same impulse to ill-treat Clarence in some way’. After Clarence has left, Harriet wonders:
‘What is the matter with us? Why did we do that?’
‘It was a joke,’ said Guy, though he did not sound sure of what he said.
‘Really, we behaved like children,’ Harriet said and it occurred to her that they were not, in fact, grown-up enough for the life they were living.
As this vast narrative progresses it becomes clear that what these people lack, what stunts them and renders them no more than oversized children, is the transformative experience of love. It is here that Manning’s subtle control of her characters is most skilfully demonstrated, for this lack can be detecte
d everywhere in these densely peopled novels. The disloyalty of Guy’s colleagues Lush and Dubedat, the moral cowardice of petty officials like Dobson, Sophie Oresanu’s attention-seeking, the emotionally stilted kindness of Inchcape or Alan Frewen, most of all the hermetic childlike selfishness of Harriet’s bête noire (and Manning’s masterpiece) Yakimov: again and again Manning elicits from her reader not scorn but pity for this handicapped race, encourages us to see them as more damaged than monstrous. Manning was a talented painter who once thought she would pursue a career as an artist, and it is often her physical portraits of her characters that convey most powerfully their loneliness. In this world of repressed emotion it is the body that speaks, that sculpts itself into pitiful and sometimes grotesque forms.
Professor Pinkrose was a rounded man, narrowshouldered and broad-hipped, thickening down from the crown of his hat to the edge of his greatcoat. His nose, blunt and greyish, poked out between collar and hatbrim. His eyes, grey as rain-water, moved about, alert and suspicious, like the eyes of a chameleon.
Late in the narrative, when Harriet’s experience of transformative love finally and briefly comes, she feels it as a demolishing of that formal loneliness, of bodily isolation.
Their [Harriet’s and Charles Warden’s] sense of likeness astonished them. It resembled magic. They felt themselves held in a spellbound condition which they feared to injure. Although she could not pin down any overt point of resemblance, Harriet at times imagined he was the person most like her in the world, her mirror image.
Modern readers of The Balkan Trilogy will certainly marvel at it as a technical accomplishment, as a good read, and perhaps even as a meticulous historical document; but its value as a complete chronicle of an important period in the emotional evolution of Western society is likely to strike today’s audience most of all. The relationship between institutional representation and personal experience has been reconfigured in our era; the self is ascendant, the concept of duty remote. But we, too, are part of the eternal flux. The personal and the political, peace and war, the individual and the communal, the need and the obligation, the self and its society: all are in motion, just as they always have been. And if readers conclude that ours at least is a more liberated world than Guy and Harriet’s, a more expressive and tolerant world, perhaps even a more loving world, they will also have gained a greater sense of how it came to be so, and of the value of that love, so desperately sought, so bitterly fought for.
Eat, Pray, Love
There’s a running gag in Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir of breakdown and recovery, concerning alternative titles she claims to have considered for her book. ‘A few times a week,’ runs one example, ‘Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thums Up – a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian ashram food – always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard’s rule about travelling in India is a sound one: “Don’t touch anything but yourself.” (And yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)’
The book’s actual title, Eat, Pray, Love, is sincere, almost reverential: the function of the joke is to fumigate that sincerity regularly to allay any suspicion that the author is taking herself too seriously in her use of it. Not to mention the reader – for the words eat, pray and love might in themselves be an invocation of the lost or prohibited pleasures of femininity: hedonism, devotion, sensuality. Without quite knowing why, twenty-first-century woman finds this a powerful trinity to behold on the cover of a book. These monosyllables govern one another by means of an order both consolatory and somewhat foreign to modern female experience: eating first, loving last, and praying – an activity unpoliticised by the female psyche and one she might vaguely associate with being cared for – separating the two like a referee a pair of boxers in the ring.
The three words correspond to the book’s three sections. These in turn refer to a highly schematised year of Gilbert’s life, in which she lived consecutively in three different countries – Italy, India and Indonesia – to fulfil that title more or less on demand. In Italy she eats, in India she lives in an ashram, in Indonesia she finds physical passion, and nowhere is it suggested that fate was anything other than malleable to this plan, that Eat, Pray, Love might for instance have turned out to be a book about Catholicism, the Kama Sutra and Balinese cookery.
‘It wasn’t so much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves,’ she writes. ‘This has been done. It was more that I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later … that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery.’
This is the voice of twenty-first-century self-identity: subjective, autocratic, superstitious, knowing what it wants before it gets it, specifying even the unknown to which it purports to be abandoning itself. It is the voice moreover of the consumer, turning other realities into static and purchasable concepts (‘tradition’, ‘the art of pleasure’) that can be incorporated into the sense of self. As though by a further extension of the author’s all-powerful will, the book has been three different kinds of success: a critical success, a word-of-mouth bestseller, and the holy of holies, the basis of a film starring Julia Roberts. The new edition has a picture of Roberts on the front cover, a little plastic gelato spoon clamped between her lips. Whatever frisson remains, the sight of a ‘perfect’ woman publicly displaying her greed was evidently judged sufficient at least to shift a few more copies.
The author’s claim that she considered other titles is just one example of her expert use of the camouflage of humour. Gilbert’s writing propounds a comic cult of female personality, a kind of literary incarnation of the ‘best friend’. From the mouth of this witty warrior-woman the female reader is prepared to hear nearly anything, to have her gender secrets, her most private embarrassments, her deepest dissatisfactions disclosed. In ‘best friend’ language, humour is a culturally approved manifestation of ambivalence, in which the love of life asserts itself over the admission of destructive desires.
Of course, this is a well-worn mode of female literary expression – Bridget Jones’s Diary is a good example. The writer elects herself a girlish giant-slayer and strides forth into inadmissible regions of feminine experience: armed only with her personal charisma, her wit and her wisecracks, she sets about its taboos and its secret shames. Violent gender-specific emotions – hatred of one’s own body, for instance – are recognised in the same moment as being neutralised by humour. Helen Fielding saw the link between herself and Jane Austen, who invented this genre in which the darkest aspects of female passivity and interiority give rise to an elaborated surface of verbal skirmishing. And at the end of it all the author curtsies – she was only joking, after all. It’s a pretty performance, in whose echo chambers some readers are wont to discern the reverberation of emotional depths.
Eat, Pray, Love can be placed unequivocally in this tradition. Women like this literature because it alleviates feelings of pressure without the attendant risks of rebellion or change. Nothing is lost or destroyed or interrogated by comedy, or at least not literally. Yet a book is a placement of internal material in public space. The more representative it is of what people personally feel, the more satisfying and necessary its publication.
The difference here is that the feeling and the representation are not quite the same. The suspicion arises that the female reader is being bled of her private tensions, of her rage, of her politics, in order to give the writer the attention she craves. The reader herself becomes the echo chamber; she may return to these tensions depleted by laughing at them, for if she privately experiences repugnance at her own body – for example – as unacceptable, as a form of failure, she will in so
me sense have betrayed herself by experiencing it publicly as success.
But Eat, Pray, Love is more of a conundrum than it seems from this description, and to begin to understand it one has to examine what Gilbert would call the ‘backdrop’. The book opens with her as a high-achieving, wealthy ‘career girl’ in her early thirties, living au grand luxe with her husband in the suburbs of New York. ‘Wasn’t I proud of all we’d accumulated – the prestigious home in the Hudson Valley, the apartment in Manhattan, the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our choice, buying ever more appliances on credit? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life – so why did I feel like none of it resembled me?’ At night she often finds herself in the bathroom crying her eyes out. Why is she so unhappy? She is not sure she loves her husband; she feels obliged to have a baby but doesn’t really want one. Her sister, a mother, has said to her (in a textbook example of the comic-ambivalent mode): ‘Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.’
Crying in the bathroom one night she finds herself praying. She has never been a religious person, she tells us, but her despair is such that she reaches out to this vaguely benign entity – God – and is surprised to discover she feels better. She unearths her own capacity for devotion, or at least finds in ‘God’ an object that – unlike any of the real or possible objects in her actual life – will satisfy it. Over the next few months she goes about extricating herself from what she doesn’t ‘want’ – at enormous financial and emotional cost – and formulates her elaborate international pan-cultural plan for self-discovery.