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 fataclass="underline" 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.
1999
Charles Dickens (Introduction to Martin Chuzzlewit)
The first problem about Martin Chuzzlewit is its title. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet,” opines Juliet, and normally I would agree, but I feel that in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit the axiom does not neatly apply. Martin Chuzzlewit is one of those novels that would benefit from a title change. It is a problem that emerges only once the book has been well begun, as a vague niggle at first, then a growing worry, and then, by the time one has reached the end, it is a full-blown puzzler. Why on earth is the book called Martin Chuzzlewit? More precisely: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit? Who, in all honesty, gives a fig about young Martin — whose story, I roughly calculate, probably occupies barely a fifth of the text — so why should the book be named after him? When one thinks of the great eponymous Dickens novels—Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby — it is apparent that Martin Chuzzlewit, though it would seem to be in the same family, is manifestly not. And this misnomer goes some way to account, I think, for the novel’s surprising though significant neglect. For one of Dickens’s greatest novels it is, without doubt, under-read and undervalued. It is as if it has been placed, as it were, in the wrong pigeon-hole: it shouldn’t be with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield but with, say, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend. Readers are expecting Dickens to offer them something they are familiar with, and something that he does unsurpassably well, and in the event the central character is almost insignificant, and was there ever such a bland pair of lovers as young Martin and Mary? It is not conclusive evidence, though telling enough all the same, but in a recent biography of Dickens the index cites only nine fleeting references to the novel, the longest being a couple of paragraphs dealing with the American episodes and their sources. Clearly, Martin Chuzzlewit is something of a square peg in a round hole; Martin Chuzzlewit is an odd fish.
And yet at the same time Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, the most sheerly funny of all Dickens’s novels, with a teeming energetic humour that continues to delight some hundred and fifty years after its first publication. It contains enduringly celebrated Dickens creations, notably Seth Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, a whole gallery of brilliantly rendered minor characters and writing of a verve and vigour, and imaginative audacity, that is the equal of anything else in the oeuvre. Dickens himself was highly pleased with the book as he was writing it. “You know, as well as I,” he confided to his friend and future biographer John Forster, “that I think Chuzzlewit in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I know, if I had health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men, though fifty writers started up tomorrow. But how many readers do not think!” The somewhat plaintive self-justification is highly revealing, as is his evident ambition and confidence. It was prompted by the comparative failure of the novel, which was appearing in monthly parts throughout 1843 and the first half of 1844. By Dickens’s standards it was not doing well. Pickwick and Nickleby sold 40–50,000 copies a month: Chuzzlewit never rose much over 20,000.