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| Soldiers climbing over their trench on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July, 1916. |
Why hasn’t Anzackery’s ever-rising tide washed Frederic Manning and The Middle Parts of Fortune further up the Australian literary shore?
Every Father’s Day and every Christmas publishers search, with increasing desperation, for fresh presentations of the Australian Great War experience. On that basis, one might have expected a combat novel lauded by Ernest Hemingway, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, TE Lawrence and other immortals to exert more of a cultural presence.
But while Frederic Manning “revivals” have been announced ever since the 1960s, the canon invoked during Anzac season still somehow begins and ends with Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and, perhaps, Charles Bean.
The problem might be traced to Manning’s marked divergence from the rugged Digger archetype celebrated by Bean and his acolytes.
The son of a wealthy Sydney financier, Frederic was always delicate and bookish. At the age of just 15, his parents allowed him to depart for England with his much-older tutor, the Reverend Arthur Galton – a man who’d once moved in the same Oxford circles as Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Together, they moved into the tiny village of Lincolnshire, where they maintained an intense (but perhaps non-sexual) relationship that shaped the boy into a scholar-aesthete like his mentor.
Biographer Verna Coleman describes Manning as “the Last Exquisite”, both because of the delicacy of his prose and because of a brittleness that prevented him from capitalising on his early literary success. By 1928, his peers regarded Manning as talented but strangely old-fashioned: a chain-smoking, semi-alcoholic asthmatic with a bad back and poor digestion, more attuned to the aestheticism of the 1890s than contemporary modernism, and congenitally incapable of completing a major work.
But that year the publisher (and fellow veteran) Peter Davies urged Manning to write about his experiences on the Somme – and locked him in his apartment until he did so. Supposedly, Manning wrote his loosely-fictionalised account entirely without revision, with Davies forestalling procrastination by rushing each chapter from the typewriter straight to print.
The Middle Parts of Fortune appeared anonymously in a volume only available to subscribers, with a bowdlerised edition subsequently released to the public under the title Her Privates We (another reference to the bawdy passage in which Hamlet declares fortune “a strumpet”).
The problem was language: rather unexpectedly Manning, the fastidious aesthete, had reproduced the genuine wartime vocabulary instead of the euphemisms to which other (more obviously transgressive) novelists resorted.
Yet in other ways The Middle Parts of Fortune also conveys the deep gulf between now and then.
It follows the experiences of a private called Bourne – an obvious surrogate for Manning – for a few months on the Somme and Ancre fronts.
Critics have praised the book for celebrating the ordinary soldier, largely because its protagonist stays in the ranks rather than accepting the commission to which his education suits him. Yet Manning portrays Bourne as more misfit than egalitarian, alienated from the English officers as an Australian who didn’t attend a public school, and separated from the other men by his erudition.
Indeed, isolation defines the war, an experience that, despite moments of camaraderie, every man endures in solitude.
“One by one,” Manning writes, “they realised that each must go alone, and that each of them already was alone with himself, helping the others perhaps, but looking at them with strange eyes, while the world became unreal and empty, and they moved in a mystery, where no help was.”
The highly strung, deeply repressed man [was] always slightly out of kilter with his era
It’s that profound atomisation, conveyed in Manning’s finely wrought prose, that makes the book’s brief and hallucinatory battle scenes so terrifying, with modern combat a sensory overload inflicted on the individual psyche.
Famously, Wilfred Owen describes his subject as “the pity of war”. Manning takes a very different approach.
“To call [war] a crime against mankind,” he says in his introduction, “is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.”
Where militarists like Ernst Jünger show the conflict redeeming men through violence, Manning sees wartime suffering as facilitating a peculiar authenticity, as his characters “turn […] from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts”.
We might go so far as to say that Manning’s war reflected Manning’s peace. The highly strung, deeply repressed man always slightly out of kilter with his era seems to have experienced the Battle of the Somme as an intensification, almost to the point of liberation, of the isolation he already felt.
The final words of The Middle Parts of Fortune encapsulate the theme of one of the strangest, most compelling books from the Great War.
“They sat there silently,” the novel ends, “each man keeping his own secret.”
