Frederic Manning

Frederic Manning (22 July 1882 – 22 February 1935) was an Australian poet and novelist.

Born in Sydney, Manning was one of eight children of local politician Sir William Patrick Manning. His family were Roman Catholics of Irish origin. A sickly child who suffered from asthma, Manning was educated exclusively at home. As a teenager he formed a close friendship with the Reverend Arthur Galton, a scholarly man who was secretary to the Governor of New South Wales. Galton went home to England in 1898, taking Manning with him. Manning returned to Australia in 1900 but finally settled in the United Kingdom in 1903.

Manning moved in with Galton, who had become vicar of Edenham, a village about three miles north-west of Bourne in south Lincolnshire. He devoted his time to study, reading voraciously, particularly the classics and philosophy, under the domineering influence of Galton. Although he seemingly shared Galton's contempt for Catholicism, Manning never renounced it entirely. He made several unsuccessful attempts to write a historical novel, and in 1907 published his first book, The Vigil of Brunhild, which was a monologue written in verse. Scenes and Portraits followed in 1909, which was a discussion of religious topics written in the form of a series of debates in which those taking part are leading lights from the past, such as Socrates, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Cromwell. These books went down well in literary circles, but did not enjoy a particularly wide circulation. Manning was recognised as an up-and-coming writer, a reputation that the indifferent collection Poems (1910) did not dissipate.

Manning was never very robust, neither was his lifestyle particularly healthy. In the years immediately before World War I, he started to move in London artistic circles, becoming friends with Max Beerbohm and William Rothenstein (there is a collection of letters from Manning to Rothenstein), as well as the influential young poets Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington.

When war broke out, Manning was keen to enlist, possibly to escape from a stifling environment and to widen his horizons. A man with his fragile constitution and unhealthy lifestyle was not going to be an attractive proposition for the military authorities, but in October 1915 after several attempts, his persistence paid off and he enlisted in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry. He was a private with the service number 19022. He was selected for officer training, but failed the course. Sent to France in 1916, Manning experienced action with the 7th Battalion at the Battle of the Somme, was promoted to lance-corporal and experienced life in the trenches. He was recalled for further training and posted to Ireland in May 1917 with a commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment. The life of an officer did not agree with him; he seems not to have integrated particularly well and he drank excessively, getting into trouble with his superiors. His inebriation was put down to neurasthenia, but Manning resigned his commission on 28 February 1918.

Manning continued to write. In 1917 he published a collection of poems under the title Ediola. This was a mixture of verse predominantly in his former style alongside war poems heavily influenced by the imagism of Pound, which deal introspectively with personal aims and ideals tempered in the crucible of battle. He contributed to anthologies, for example, The Monthly Chapbook which appeared in July 1919 edited by Harold Monro, containing twenty-three poems by writers including John Alford, Herbert Read, Walter De La Mare, Osbert Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Robert Nichols, Rose Macaulay and W. H. Davies alongside Manning and Aldington. He wrote for periodicals, including The Criterion, which was produced by T. S. Eliot.

Poetry did not pay, and so in 1923 Manning took a commission from his publisher John Murray to write The Life of Sir William White, a biography of the man who, as Director of Naval Construction, led the build-up of the Royal Navy in the last years of the nineteenth century. Galton had died in 1921, which not only left Manning effectively homeless, but also lacking a forceful directing influence in his life. He lived for much of the time at the Bull Hotel in Bourne, apart from a short spell when he owned a farmhouse in Surrey. At this time he was friendly with T. E. Lawrence, then serving in the Royal Air Force at RAF Cranwell, some twenty miles (a motorcycle ride) from where Manning was living. In 1926 he contributed the introduction to an edition of Epicurus's Morals: Collected and faithfully Englished by Walter Charleton, originally published in 1656, published in a limited edition by Peter Davies.

In the 1920s the demand for writing on the war started to grow, the catalyst being the play Journey's End written by R. C. Sherriff which first appeared in 1928. Davies urged Manning to use his undoubted talent to write a novel about his intense wartime experiences. To capture the moment, Manning worked rapidly, with little opportunity for second drafts and revisions. The result was The Middle Parts of Fortune, published anonymously by Peter Davies and the Piazza Press in a numbered limited edition of 520 copies in 1929, which are now collector's items. The book is an account in the vernacular of the lives of ordinary soldiers. The protagonist, Bourne, is the filter through which Manning's experiences are transposed into the lives of a group of men whose qualities interact in response to conflict and comradeship. Bourne is an enigmatic, detached character (a self-portrait of the author) who leaves each of the protagonists alone with their own detachment, privy to their own thoughts.