The Greatest of All War Novels

To American writer Daniel Boorstin, a “celebrity” was a person “well-known for being well-known”. By reverse reasoning we could describe Australian expatriate author Frederic Manning (1882–1935) as “famous for being forgotten”. A fresh example of his curious status has just arisen.

In the London Spectator of December 13 last year, Hugh Cecil reviews what appears to be an excellent study of the many memoirs left by the soldier-participants of the First World War. The author is the distinguished modern military historian Brian Bond, and Cecil calls his work “absorbing and affectionate”, and written by one who has laboured for a lifetime in this field. The book is called Survivors of a Kind—doubtless a polite bow to Guy Chapman’s splendid A Kind of Survivor.

I have not read Bond’s new book (published by Continuum) but Cecil tells us we will find many of the famous names—Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves; but my particular interest was in Frederic Manning, whose fictionalised account of his own war service, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) “is among the most moving books to emerge from the conflict”.

I agree with Hugh Cecil, and would indeed go further. For me, Manning’s book stands at the pinnacle of all fictional representations of the solitary tragedy and the inward meaning of war. Just for examples, Ernest Hemingway, Lawrence of Arabia and Ezra Pound all thought much the same. How is it possible, asks Cecil, that Manning’s Middle Parts, “in and out of print since 1929 and always praised … remains inexplicably neglected?”

There was little about Manning’s life that followed ordinary rules. Son of Sir William Manning, one of Sydney’s leading wealthy citizens, Fred was delicate—almost an invalid—and most of his education was private. At fifteen he left Sydney for England, in the guardianship of a querulous but learned Anglican clergyman, Arthur Galton. During his Australian sojourn Galton had been the not-wholly-successful private secretary to the governor of New South Wales. Young Fred was to live with Galton in his English country vicarage. He was to be formed (almost like plasticine) into a scholar (especially in the Greek and Roman classics), a writer, an aesthete and a young Victorian gentleman.

It all sounded a bit creepy to me, but it seemed to work for Frederic Manning. He was by nature a scholar-writer, and content with his quiet country life. He wrote some rather studied poetry and a couple of books on classical themes, contributed articles to journals, travelled a little, and appeared occasionally among London’s clubs and polite society. He became a leading book reviewer for the Spectator, but we cannot now be sure which “crits” are his: more modest than today’s journalists, reviewers then did not sign their articles.

His Australian identity remained stronger than one might expect; English people meeting him would rarely have mistaken him for one of themselves. He revisited Sydney, and family stays in England by his mother and siblings were not infrequent. Lady Manning extended a visit so she could nurse him through an illness.

When Europe’s belle époque exploded in the fury of the Great War, it astounded Fred’s circle that this physically frail, fastidious exquisite enlisted, joining the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry Regiment. I have often wondered whether Manning’s admiration of A.E. Housman may have influenced his choice of unit. His friends’ astonishment doubled when he sought no commission, but entered the ranks as Private 19022. (Remember that number.)

In the latter half of 1916 the Shropshires served on the Western Front in France, suffering greatly in the battles of the Somme and Ancre. With its sodden, muddy misery, terrifying pressures of concentrated high explosive, the constant threat of death from bullet or shrapnel, the front displayed in full measure every horror of early twentieth-century trench warfare. At first, Manning’s frail body was spared none of it—the exhausting marches, the crushing loads of pack and equipment, the loss of sleep, the irregular meals. Fred served with the best of them and underwent the lot. Later he was given some relief with lighter duties, but he remained with the Shropshires in the line. Then he was transferred to the Brigade Observers, supposedly to make life a little easier. (From what I have read about the Observers, it seemed that their duties were highly stressful and dangerous.) Later again he was hospitalised, and was eventually discharged from the army in 1917. He went back to his quiet country life of study and writing, but seems not to have resumed his regular book reviewing for the Spectator.

Then, in 1929, ten years after the war, the lively young publishing newcomer Peter Davies issued out of the blue a war novel of extraordinary depth and power, received with great critical and general-reader acclaim. It was called The Middle Parts of Fortune; despite its success there were objections to its profuse reproduction of the crudest soldier language. In 1930 a version expurgated of its profanities was published, re-titled Her Privates We. It too was immensely well received by both critics and the public. (Both books’ titles were sly allusions to a bawdy passage in Shakespeare. For minds of the kind likely to be interested in such trifles: Hamlet: act 2, scene ii.)

The author, in both cases, was identified only as “Private 19022”, though it cannot have been long before Fred was “outed”. The book’s protagonist was Private Bourne, the name of the town nearest to Fred’s home; he was cast as an Australian, fully accepted by his Shropshire mates, but still just a little “different”. In the novel, Bourne dies in action.

Manning did not long enjoy his fresh fame and wider public, but died of pneumonia in 1935. And thereupon he swiftly sank from sight, both in England and Australia.

I was fortunate in being introduced to Frederic Manning’s works by Leonard Mann, that quietly perceptive Australian writer who had himself written a fine novel, Flesh in Armour, drawn from his own service in France with the First AIF.

I was even luckier that, over the twenty-five years I was his publisher, I could discuss Manning with that vastly knowledgeable historian and sterling servant of scholarship, Geoffrey Serle. He and I had both served (separately) in the Pacific campaigns of the Second World War, in which he had been severely wounded. Serle and I concluded that, despite all the differences there might be in the circumstances of their campaigning—from the drowned, shell-ravaged fields of France to the silent jungles of New Guinea—the deepest instincts and feelings of all soldiers are the same when the pressure is on.

We also decided (how I wished that Len Mann could have been with us!) that neither of us could recall ever having read a truly convincing piece of war fiction which did not stem from the author’s own experience. Here was a branch of literature which could be written only from the inside. We recalled the words of the great English war writer Richard Aldington: “As well ask a frigid person to understand passion.”

It remains curious that Manning’s great book is so little read. We know a good deal about the man and his life. The researches of Laurie Hergenhan have been thorough. We are fortunate indeed in having a splendid biography by Verna Coleman. Called The Last Exquisite, it has all the merits of being scholarly, short and—above all—readable.

The critic’s critic himself, T.S. Eliot, called Manning “one of the very best prose writers we have”. As Hugh Cecil reminds us, the several later reprints of The Middle Parts of Fortune have all roused fresh enthusiasm, but briefly: it resurfaces, only to sink again.

Part of the reason may be that Manning’s total output was so small and, of that, much was rather recondite. No one, for example, could forget the names of Evelyn Waugh or Ernest Hemingway: their next book was almost in the bookshops before you had finished reading the previous one. Perhaps Fred’s reclusive ghost still hovers over his book, sheltering it from the pushiness of a vulgar world? Perhaps Fred was simply too modest. Wrote Lawrence of Arabia: “How like him to slip away … He was too shy to let anyone tell him how good he was.”

A great body of sensitive opinion has long saluted this book as the best war novel ever written. Read it for yourself—if you can find a copy.

The Deputy Editor notes: The Middle Parts of Fortune is currently available in several paperback editions (one of which uses the title Her Privates We). In Australia it is published by Text, with an introduction by Simon Caterson.