by
Laurie Hergenhan
Frederic
Manning (1882-1935), novelist and poet, was born on 22 July 1882 in Sydney,
fourth son of native-born parents (Sir) William Patrick Manning, financier and
politician, and his wife Honora, née Torpy, both of Irish descent; his elder
brother was (Sir) Henry. A lifelong asthmatic, Frederic was educated privately
except for six months at Sydney Grammar School. Aged 15 he went to England with
his tutor Rev. Arthur Galton, a friend of Matthew Arnold and Lionel Johnson,
who had come to Australia as private secretary to Governor Sir Robert Duff.
Some two years later Manning returned to Sydney, but, uninterested in business
or the professions, pursued a literary career in England from 1903. He lived
with Galton, from 1904 at the vicarage at Edenham, near Bourne, Lincolnshire.
With
occasional visits to London (where all his works were published), Manning lived
a retiring, leisured and scholarly life, steeping himself in the classics and
assisted by a small allowance from home and later an interest in a Queensland
sheep station run by a brother. Through Galton he had the entrée to select
literary circles, including that of Olivia Shakespeare, friend of W. B. Yeats
and mother of Ezra Pound's wife Dorothy. He published a narrative poem, The
Vigil of Brunhild, in 1907 and Poems in 1910, and was principal reviewer for
the Spectator in 1909-14.
Manning's
first prose work, Scenes and Portraits (1909), a collection of short historical
fictions in dialogue or monologue form, explored the idea that there are 'only
two religions … [that] of the humble folk, whose life is a daily communion with
the natural forces and a bending to them; and the religion of men like
Protagoras, Lucretius and Montaigne, a religion of doubt, of tolerance and
agnosticism'. Manning's theme sprang from a deep sense of isolation, suffering
and transience of human lives. The book won him considerable attention from
such writers as Max Beerbohm, E. M. Forster, T. E. Lawrence and Pound.
After
failing an officers' course, Manning enlisted as a private in the King's
Shropshire Light Infantry in 1915 and served in France on the Somme. On 30 May
1917 he was commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment of Foot,
but ill health prevented further active service. That year he published a third
volume of poetry, Eidola, which included some war poems. After Galton's death
in 1921 he lived much in Italy. He published a commissioned biography of Sir
William White, designer of the first dreadnought, in 1923, and an edition of
Walter Charleton's Epicurus's Morals in 1926. His friend (Sir) William
Rothenstein described him as having 'the worn look, as of carved ivory, due to
constant ill-health … and the sensitive intelligence one finds in men of
fastidious habits'. His only hobbies were horse-racing and book-collecting.
Friends, including Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, found his conversation
'extraordinary for its learning and charm'.
His
sensitively speculative cast of mind underlies Manning's most enduring work,
the war novel published anonymously under the pseudonym, 'Private 19022', in
1929 as The Middle Parts of Fortune and the abridged version next year as Her
Privates We. It was regarded as one of the outstanding English war novels by
Forster, Lawrence (who discerned Manning's authorship), Arnold Bennett, Ernest
Hemingway, Peter Davies (his friend and publisher) and Eric Partridge. The
novel concerns the life of men in the ranks of an English battalion in France,
both in and out of action, and is based largely on Manning's own experiences as
a 'ranker'. It depicts a temporary release from isolation through a heightened
form of comradeship and is a kind of acceptance of war, despite its suffering
and horrors, as a heightened form of the reality of all human lives.
Soon
after returning from an eighteen months visit to his siblings in Australia,
Manning died on 22 February 1935 at Hampstead, London, and was buried in Kensal
Green cemetery beside his lifelong friend and literary hostess, Mrs Alfred
Fowler. He died a Catholic, albeit an unorthodox one. Eliot wrote that Manning
lacked the prerequisites for a reputation in his own time, 'a considerable body
of writing and a range of acquaintance', not only because of his ill health and
lack of ambition, but because his passion for perfection could be
self-destructive. Nevertheless his aesthetic perfectionism, combined with his
humanism, earned him posthumously a distinguished place in English and
Australian literature, for he can be seen as belonging to both.
Select
Bibliography
W. Rothenstein, Men and Memories (Lond, 1932)
W. Rothenstein, Since Fifty (Lond, 1939)
H. Klein (ed), The First World War in Fiction (Lond, 1976)
London Gazette, 29 June 1917, p 6495
Australian Quarterly, June 1935, p 47
Criterion, Apr 1935
Reveille (Sydney), 1 Apr 1935
L. T. Hergenhan, ‘Frederic Manning: a neglected Australian
writer’, Quadrant, Spring 1962
L. T. Hergenhan, ‘Novelist at war: Frederic Manning's Her
Privates We’, Quadrant, July-Aug 1970
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 12, no 2, 1977
L. T. Hergenhan, ‘Two expatriates: Frederic Manning and
James Griffyth Fairfax’, Southerly, 29, no 1, 1979
London Magazine, Dec 1983–Jan 1984, p 54
L. T. Hergenhan, ‘Ezra Pound, Frederic Manning and James
Griffyth Fairfax’, Australian Literary Studies, with checklist, May 1984
Sydney Morning Herald, 8, 12 Jan 1938, 25 Oct 1978
Manning papers (State Library of New South Wales).
Sources:
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