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

[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)