William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

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 uncertainty; 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.