Fortunes of War

[liadnan]

Started re-reading Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War sequence and struck once more by how appallingly ghastly Guy Pringle is. You have to wonder how your marriage - vaguely open though it was - would prosper once you'd turned your real-life husband into a character like that. (Her friendship with Stevie Smith apparently did not survive Manning putting her into a different novel, followed by Stevie Smith reviewing said novel in venomous terms)

Difficult to see Pringle as the Soviet spy the real-life Reggie Smith allegedly was though. (supposedly recruited by Blunt).

Comments

[oursin]

Apparently Reggie was a useful literary spouse, according to bio of Manning I read - unlike the total waste of space and oxygen that Guy comes across as - even if he had major downsides.

[liadnan]

I may have a look at a biography at some point. I was inspired to read it because I just finished Hermione Countess Ranfurly's To War With Whittaker (Slightly Foxed ftw) and wondered if they had run into one another in Cairo or Jerusalem (the internet does not reveal and I'm nowhere near the Cairo Trilogy yet)

I guess it's always dangerous, when one knows a character is partly inspired by someone real (see also Powell, Raven, Waugh, etc) to make too strong a connection. But I was amused on looking things up to discover that Professor Pinkrose 'is' Lord Dunsany.

[perennialanna]

I'm fairly sure they don't, though it's a while since since I've read the Cairo Trilogy. PLF and Joan Monsell definitely ought to crop up in either or both, I feel, though given the over-crowdedness of Cairo it would be quite possible to never actually meet one's contemporaries. Just like I never met the only famous person my school has ever produced, even though we overlapped considerably and I knew his older sister reasonably well.

Does the Slightly Foxed have the pictures? Her childhood memoirs (The Ugly One) were published in a pretty little hardback which would go very well with a Slightly Foxed, but I wouldn't want to lose the pictures from my ancient paperback of To War With Whittaker*.

*This is why I have had two copies of Blue Remembered Hills for a decade.

[liadnan]

Manning and Smith certainly aren't in To War With Whittaker and I'm not sure Ranfurly would have had much patience with Manning, or any tolerance for Smith, on the other hand she seems to have known everyone in North Africa and the middle east.

No pictures in the Slightly Foxed edn. (But I took out a subscription because of the Sutcliff reprints they are doing, which *do* have original illos)

PLF ought to crop up in the Greek bit I agree. I rather expected him in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour as well. (Perhaps too close to the bone, Sword of Honour has that whole theme of not quite making it to the war, which Waugh seems to have rather felt, and they must have been aware of one another. The Mitford sisters, sadly, do not tell us what PLF and Waugh thought of one another).

[perennialanna]

An unwritten Never Invite Together, I suspect. Being a Mitford must have meant having a vast mental database of who could or couldn't be invited at the same time.

[liadnan]

Yes, I think it could have been a difficult dinner.

[liadnan]

(Nb re the Sutcliffs, I now possess *three* copies of Eagle of the Ninth and will not be giving up any of them)

[perennialanna]

Also three. A Slightly Foxed, a Folio (gift from my mother), and the 1970s Puffin I actually read as a child, which is currently shedding pages alarmingly.

[liadnan]

Ooh, I haven't got the folio... I have a battered original (ish) hardback, a modern penguin (they did the first three rather nicely a few years back and at the time 'my' original hardback was retained by my mother), and the SF

[perennialanna]

My mother gives me Folios for Christmas and birthdays unless I specify something else. She is also responsible for the Alexander Trilogy and a complete set of the Dark is Rising sequence.

[liadnan]

Jealous. My classic puffin of the Dark is Rising, still more my Gill illustrated, 1st Puffin imprint of Over Sea Under Stone*, will go with me to my grave, but I could do with reading copies.

[caulkhead]

I have two copies of The Lantern Bearers - my original 80s one which has long since lost the cover, an ex-library first, and I may well buy the Slightly Foxed one just because.

[sartorias]

What was PLF's birth? Waugh was obsessed with getting himself numbered among the "right set."

[liadnan]

Waugh possibly a bit posher (descended from Admiral Cockburn, I wonder what relation that makes him to Sarah Caudwell) but not much. PLFs father was a knighted scientist-academic and his grandfather worked in a bank, but there were Navy officers on his mother's side.

[sartorias]

No wonder he wasn't on Waugh's horizon. (I just checked the letters and diaries.)

[perennialanna]

PLF got by on charm and competence and the kind of good looks that as someone said, made him one of the few men in Europe entitled to complain about being undersold when Dirk Bogarde was cast to play him. He managed to get across most of Central Europe on a chain of letters of introduction to the next schloss-owner along. Probably along the lines of "This is a charming chap who knows his cutlery and his Latin poets. You can trust with your horse but possibly not your daughter. Lock him in your library if necessary, he will enjoy it almost as much."

[sartorias]

I know. Time of Gifts is one of my favorite books of all time.

[liadnan]

My school recently folded (which has prompted facebookery) I was reminded we have two famous alumni, the current Chief Economist to the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (who as a 6th former played the Lord High Executioner, I think, while I was a 1st yr member of the chorus of maids from school) and a chap who successfully mounted a coup in the Seychelles and ruled as dictator for some time (but he was gone before my time)

[legionseagle]

Things change once they get to Egypt. Again, in the show that was edge of the seat stuff (I think of it as Alexandria, but then I always think of Egypt as Alexandria.)

[liadnan]

I read the Cairo ones years ago (first, oddly) but I have forgotten much. I do remember having the Alexandria Quartet in the back of my mind throughout

[legionseagle]

I've recently been reading stuff about Lawrence Durrell and boy does he sound to have been a shit, which may affect how/if I re-read the Alexandria Quartet.

[liadnan]

All the Durrells were shits and the mother was monstrous (probably not at all well mentally, in her partial defence). My Family & Other Animals is *very* airbrushed.

I adore the Alexandria Quartet but have struggled with other stuff of his (and he does keep coming back to the same idea, which can get a bit wearisome)

[legionseagle]

A very slight college acquaintance of mine got dragged into Gerald Durrell's ambiance and while I held no brief for the acquaintance initially, I did get a fleeting sense of "Poor bugger" from his account (very late period Gerry, dramatic drunken rages.)

ETA also, Gerry's ire was all about "How dare those fucking Philistine oafs destroy Corfu?" and my acquaintance, as the heir of a substantial Northern beer and spirit fortune, was not unacquainted with privilege, but did try to draw the line at arrant hypocrisy.

[liadnan]

My interest in him was revived because I got to be a fan of the Zoo & Foundation and met people there when I was in Jersey for a while.You hear stories from that end too, also obviously lawyers, particularly offshore lawyers, never gossip but..

(I like it when clients want me to go out to Jersey in person because it means I can fit in going to talk to the gorillas and the orangutans, and am concerned the zoom era may put the kybosh on that).

[legionseagle]

I hadn't realised she'd put Stevie Smith in a novel --- which one?

[liadnan]

Doves of Venus. The friendship at the heart of the novel supposedly is inspired by Manning and Stevie Smith's own friendship.

Wiki - "Eventually, Manning grudgingly forgave [Stevie Smith for the review]: learning of Smith's final illness, she remarked, "Well, if she's really ill, we'll have to let bygones be bygones"

But it seems from wiki that Stevie was jealous and unfond of Reggie in any event.

[legionseagle]

I loved the series, with Branagh and Thompson clearly hoping it would be another Brideshead or Jewel in the Crown, and there was no reason why it shouldn't, except, I think, it's almost impossible to put up with ghastly Guy Pringle, even if Branagh's using every last ounce of his considerable charm to show why any sane woman might marry him in the first place.

[liadnan]

I've yet to watch it. But I can imagine Charming Branagh as Pringle very easily

[legionseagle]

He's brilliant in the role. Mind you, Thompson outacts him, nonetheless.

[liadnan]

It's only now I am really coming to see how good an actress she is, I confess.

[legionseagle]

She had a solo comedy sketch show that fell as flat as a pancake in the (very) early nineties and yet was genius in its own way, and would have been given more rope had she been a bloke.

[coughingbear]

I adored that show, and was sad it didn't continue.

WRT Manning/Smith in real life, an aspect that does come through very strongly in the Deirdre David biography as oursin mentions, is both that Smith supported and believed in her writing, and of course that her writing significantly absorbed Manning, where Harriet doesn't have that kind of outlet.