Olivia Manning by David Deirdre;

Author:David, Deirdre;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2012-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

8

The ‘Booksey Boys’ and the Woman Writer

‘I think anyone who wants to return to Britain in the Fifties is on to an insane project. The society was so oppressive and so false, particularly sexually. Neighbours had this prurience and primness and this awful kind of policing of each other’s lives … Nobody could now imagine how dull things were and how respectful people were and how dead they were from the neck up.’

David Hare, 1999.1

Angry Young Men

A few weeks after arriving in Bucharest in August 1939, Olivia Manning had written to Stevie Smith begging for news of what might be happening back in London. An exchange of gossip about mutual friends had long shaped their friendship and in her letter Olivia offered the latest about a group she termed ‘the booksey boys,’ men such as Walter Allen, Reggie’s friend from Birmingham days and her pal when they both worked as script readers for MGM, and John Mair, the detective-fiction author who might have been her lover when she met Reggie Smith (according to Neville and June Braybrooke, Reggie told friends that when he first met Olivia, ‘she was living with a young chap called Mair’).2 She passed along the news that Louis MacNeice was still in Ireland, waiting for clearance to travel to the United States, that every letter from mutual friends was full of hatred of the war, and that ‘all the booksey boys seem to be having a bloody time.’ Some fifteen years later, in that decade to which no one in his right mind would wish to return, says David Hare, a different crowd of ‘booksey boys’ was having anything but ‘a bloody time’ in England. They were the ‘Angry Young Men,’ riding a celebrity crest of critical and popular acclaim.

Olivia’s attitude towards this new literary crowd in the 1950s differed substantially from her friendships with her male chums back in the late 1930s; then, she had felt no rivalry, only an ambition to join the club, not smash it to smithereens. But in the early 1950s, despite the critical praise for School for Love, she felt sidelined by young male novelists whose alienated protagonists, ironically, bore some resemblance to a number of her male characters. Had Hugo Fletcher in A Different Face, for example, possessed the cheeky confidence and cold determination to advance himself displayed by Joe Lampton in John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), in all likelihood he would not have ended up as broke and friendless as he does. Olivia regarded A Different Face as her most successful novel to date, designed, she said, as ‘a novel of shock—the shock of discovering postwar England,’ and despite reviewers dismissing it as dismal and depressing she always regarded it as one of her best books.3 In creating characters such as Hugo Fletcher, Olivia had worked outside the conventions generally associated with British women novelists, since these writers had been drawn more frequently (and still were) to tracing romance and domestic life from the perspective of

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