The lady’s not for exhuming

It’s curious to reflect that in reviewing Olivia Manning’s biography alone and prominently one is paying her more attention than any of her novels had in her lifetime. They were invariably reviewed as one of a group, rather than stand-alone, and for the general reader she fell into the category of novelists whose name is somehow familiar but whose novels are not familiar at all. After her death, an excellent television adaptation of her Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson at the height of their vogue did turn her into a famous name; but during her lifetime she never attained the celebrity which she felt was her due.

It must be said that her lack of success was partly her own fault. She was one of those writers — and it is easy to think of living people who have fallen into the same trap — who by ceaseless complaint, denigration of successful contemporaries and moaning about their own lack of success very quickly impress their listeners with the fact of their failure. Manning’s acquaintances had so often listened to her going on about how unsuccessful she was that, in the end, they believed it, and she never was successful in her own or anyone else’s eyes.

This biography is full of instances of her incredible paranoia and refusal to accept any kind of compliment. ‘The trouble with you, Olivia,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett used to remark, ‘is that you deserve too much.’ When Antonia Fraser recommended one of her novels, in completely unequivocal terms, her only response was to complain about a small verbal slip her reviewer had made. Reviewers who praised, say, The Rain Forest were hauled over the coals for not mentioning all her other novels, too. If John Gielgud knelt at her feet at a party, telling her that he wanted to pay homage to her genius, she subsequently moaned that it had been too noisy to hear anything he said.