“I don’t want fame when I am dead,” Olivia Manning once complained. “I want it now.” Manning, the British novelist who died in 1980, held onto grudges: she never made the Booker shortlist, never received a standalone review in the Sunday papers, and was forever eclipsed by Iris Murdoch. Manning’s most celebrated work, the so‑called Balkan trilogy drawn from her experiences in Romania and Greece during World War II, was republished by NYRB in 2010 with a glowing introduction by Rachel Cusk, and Manning would likely have wondered why it took so long for such attention to arrive.
“Manning’s ‘people’ are more than mere literary figures: they carry the sense of living individuals who happen to occupy the narrative space, like passersby captured on film,” wrote Cusk. “In truth, The Balkan Trilogy often adheres so closely to the feel of lived life that it’s hard to tell where the author’s craft begins.” This affinity explains why Cusk, in particular, found the work so appealing. Around the same period she wrote that preface, she herself faced a lawsuit from some of her own “people,” who recognized themselves in her memoir The Last Supper.
What Cusk’s preface does not mention is that Manning also faced libel trouble connected to those very novels. One of the grim complications of such cases is how they can distort a book’s reception. “The American edition was litigated to death,” Cusk recalled of The Last Supper. “It’s a somewhat butchered corpse, that one.”
What may be more ruinous than a legal vat of censorship is when the censorship is mishandled, which is what happened to Manning. The Balkan trilogy’s inconsistent censorship introduced an error into one of the volumes that has lingered, largely unnoticed, for six decades. If anyone had spotted it at the time, Manning would likely have complained.
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Manning’s three Balkan novels are widely acclaimed, though one contemporary reader warned that in a semi‑autobiographical work it can be “too easy to put down what happened.”
Yet Manning drew heavily from real life. A prim, petty matron in her 1951 novel School for Love was inspired by Robert Graves’s sister Clarissa, though Manning’s Clarissa was written as shorter than the real Clarissa. Clarissa herself noticed and contemplated a lawsuit. Manning’s friend, the poet Steve Smith, penned a caustic review of The Doves of Venus after discovering a character closely resembling himself—neurotic, even fearfully sensitive about the dentist—despite Manning’s altering Smith’s height.
Manning’s husband, Reggie Smith (unrelated to Steve), warned: “You may be able to mislead the Sunday Times readers, but there will always be some who know the truth.”
In 1967 Manning finally faced legal pressure from someone’s lawyers. “Something dreadful has happened to me,” she wrote to a friend. In the first two Balkan books, The Great Fortune (1960) and The Spoilt City (1962), Manning had alluded to the 1939 assassination of Armand Cǎlinescu, Romania’s prime minister, carried out by the Iron Guard, a fascist faction. Manning and her husband were in Romania when the event occurred. Drawing on real life as she often did, Manning depicted Cǎlinescu’s death and the subsequent fate of his surviving family, who, the narrative claimed, were “taken to the nearest large town and shot in the marketplace.” The original version suggested that King Carol aided the act: “You never heard that the King said… ‘I’ll get that bastard Cǎlinescu if it’s the last thing I ever do’?”
In truth, Cǎlinescu’s family had not been executed in the streets, and his son, Barbu Cǎlinecsu, lived and worked in Cambridge as an architect. The younger Cǎlinecsu was “libelled and deeply damaged by things said about his family and father” in Manning’s novel. For one thing, the claim that King Carol supported the assassination had no basis in fact. But the publishers, Heinemann and Panther, conveyed to Manning’s editors that if readers accepted the events as factual, they could conclude that Barbu Cǎlinescu was murdered in Romania, and that the Cambridge architect with the same name was “a liar and impostor.” Barbu Cǎlinescu sought damages, and demanded that the two novels be withdrawn and that Manning and her publishers issue a public apology.
“It made me feel quite sick when I thought about it,” Manning confided to a friend.
The mistake was a genuine mistake, not a deliberate fabrication. Yet the threat unsettled both Manning and her publishers. “The libel law is so perplexing that everyone offers different interpretations,” she wrote. “Even the solicitors seem vague about it. That’s the worst part—British juries can be unpredictable.”
“What a good thing you have insurance against libel,” Manning told the Heinemann managing director.
“Yes,” he replied, “but you are not.”
The type of claim brought by Barbu Cǎlinescu was not unusual in itself, but it occurred long after the early, more informal days of the novel genre when it was still evolving as a literary form. A critic might have mounted a sophisticated defense against Cǎlinescu’s argument. Why should readers assume that what they encountered in a novel—distinct from a memoir or historical work—was true, or accept the novelist’s word over their own senses? Yes, Manning’s fiction was semi‑autobiographical, but it used fictional names for real people who appeared in her life, which might tempt readers to treat the entire work as untrue in some sense. Catherine Gallagher, in her 2006 essay “The Rise of Fictionality,” argued that readers’ ability to accept a plausible, lifelike story—such as Manning’s—as fiction demonstrates a form of literary sophistication within a culture.
If she ever paid attention to how her books had been censored she never said much about it. The real effect of the episode was to put her on high alert of being sued again.
But few novelists have had a work identify them personally as having “died” twenty years earlier, and so perhaps we cannot fully grasp the impact. Even Manning, in private letters, referred to Barbu Cǎlinescu as the man “claiming to be the son of the assassinated prime minister.” Her instinct was to trust her own fiction.
The publishers settled the matter. Cǎlinescu accepted an apology, amendments to the volumes, and reimbursement for his costs. Manning, however, argued with Heinemann that the firm had not committed libel. “The publisher is not the one who libeled anyone,” Heinemann replied. Manning contended that if a writer bases material on life, such episodes are bound to occur. She even threatened to leave the imprint if they forced her to bear the costs, and the dispute eventually faded into quietness.
The Spoilt City was recalled and amended, with all references to an execution of Armand Cǎlinescu’s family removed. Panther, Manning’s paperback publisher, initially bungled the amendments, leaving the plural “slaughtered Cǎlinescus” intact; a later edition corrected it.
Also removed were assertions that King Carol had wanted his prime minister dead, a sentiment once embedded in a line of dialogue in The Great Fortune. The line is the exchange where Galpin tells Yakimov, “You never heard that the King said… ‘I’ll get that bastard Cǎlinescu if it’s the last thing I ever do’?” This was eliminated.
Yet a later reference to that line remained. In a subsequent exchange between Galpin and Yakimov about King Carol, Yakimov asks, “You said he said he’d get Cǎlinescu.” But Galpin hadn’t spoken that line in any edition published since 1967. A reader might assume the line referred to a conversation beyond the page; instead, it’s a subtle clue that the text has not remained exactly as originally printed.
The retention of that line is odd, since it implies Carol’s involvement in the assassination just as the expurgated dialogue did. It has persisted in the book to this day, untouched and—at least in the eyes of the Cǎlinescu family—undetected.
Manning described the affair as “a sorrowful episode.” If she considered how her novels had undergone censorship, she seldom spoke about it. The true consequence was to make her vigilant about the possibility of further lawsuits.
The character Yakimov, a wry, amoral scrounger whom Rachel Cusk called Manning’s “masterpiece,” drew heavily on a real person. The depiction was so unflattering that Manning went to great lengths to conceal her inspiration. After the Cǎlinescu case, a woman approached Manning at a party and confessed she found Manning’s work entertaining because she knew the source material for Yakimov. Manning insisted she was mistaken, but the woman named the individual: the British writer Derek Patmore.
“I begged her not to mention the books to him and she promised to keep the matter quiet, but the moment made me feel ill and I had to leave the party,” Manning recalled.
Patmore, like everyone else in this tale, is long dead. If he were alive, he would face more trouble than Manning: one line in Patmore’s Wikipedia biography is a dubious, third‑hand rumor asserting that he was a pederast.
From the Cǎlinescu affair, Manning learned to ensure that the people she wrote about were really dead. In wartime Cairo, she had witnessed an eight‑year‑old killed by a mortar shell and, in a later scene, the child’s parents, in disbelief, attempted to revive him with porridge poured through a wound in his cheek. Decades later she included this scene in a novel. Penelope Lively called it “one of the most insensitive translations of experience into fiction.”
When the book appeared, both of the child’s parents were deceased, yet their lawyers demanded the passage’s removal and the alteration of the surrounding text. Manning stood firm, insisting that Angela Hooper, the fictional character, bore no resemblance to Amy Smart, the real mother. She explained the differences: nationality, color, temperament. The most obvious difference—omitted by her implication—was that Angela Hooper would later become close friends with the Manning analogue in the book. In real life, Amy Smart had invited Olivia Manning to a dinner party but then barred her from the house for what a biographer has described as a “carping and vindictive” temperament.
One mutual acquaintance told Manning, “You must be among the happiest of women.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you carry out, as well as anyone, what you set out to do.”
“And what is that?”
“To be as disagreeable as possible to as many people as you can.”
That, Manning seemed to accept, was part of being a novelist. It’s not hard to see why she might relate. “Now I feel it’s a form of social embarrassment that everything I do winds up in my next book,” observed Rachel Cusk in 2010. “I used to fret about it constantly, and now I’m completely shameless.”
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This article draws on Olivia Manning biographies, including Olivia Manning: A Life by Neville Braybrooke and June Braybrooke (Chatto & Windus, 2004), and Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as unpublished materials from Manning’s papers housed at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
