A short life of the author
Frederic Manning (22 July 1882 – 22 February 1935) was an Australian-born writer whose World War I novel The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) — published anonymously and later issued in an expurgated edition as Her Privates We (1930) — is one of the finest novels to have emerged from the Great War. T.E. Lawrence called it “the finest novel about the war by an enlisted man.” Hemingway placed it alongside Tolstoy’s and Stendhal’s accounts of battle. Peter Davies, one of the original “Lost Boys” who inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and himself a soldier at the Somme, called it the only novel that captured what the war was actually like.
Life
Manning was born in Sydney, the son of the mayor of Sydney (Sir William Manning). He suffered from severe asthma throughout his life, a condition that made his eventual military service remarkable. He was privately educated and moved to England as a young man, settling in Lincolnshire, where he was befriended by the scholar and churchman Arthur Galton and entered literary circles that included Ezra Pound and Max Beerbohm.
Before the war, Manning published Scenes and Portraits (1909), a book of imagined historical dialogues and prose meditations that was admired by a small circle of readers for its learning and stylistic distinction. He enlisted in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in 1914, despite his asthma and his age (he was thirty-two), and served as a private on the Somme in 1916. His health broke down repeatedly, and he was eventually invalided out. The war experience — its terror, its boredom, its camaraderie, its irreducible reality — became the subject of his major work.
The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929)
The novel follows Private Bourne — a cultivated, somewhat mysterious figure whose background is clearly above the station of an ordinary private — through the months of the Somme offensive in 1916. Bourne is transparently based on Manning himself.
What distinguishes the novel from other war literature is its refusal to aestheticise or moralise. Manning does not write about the horror of war from above (as do the war poets, for the most part) but from within — the perspective of the ordinary soldier who is simultaneously terrified, bored, hungry, devoted to his comrades, and engaged in the moment-to-moment business of staying alive. The novel’s depiction of the bonds between soldiers — the profanity, the shared rum, the black humour, the willingness to die for one another — is as authentic and moving as anything in the literature of war.
The original edition was published anonymously by Peter Davies Ltd in a limited edition of 520 copies, with the author identified only as “Private 19022.” It was uncensored, and its language — the actual language of soldiers — was too raw for general publication. The expurgated edition, Her Privates We (the title comes from Hamlet: “On fortune’s cap we are not the very button — Nor the soles of her shoe? — No, my lord, not that neither, though we are not her privates — Her privates we”), appeared in 1930 and was a critical success. Manning’s identity was an open secret in literary circles but was not publicly confirmed until after his death.
Critical Standing
Manning’s novel occupies a curious position in the literature of World War I. It is universally admired by those who have read it — writers, soldiers, literary critics — but it has never achieved the wide readership of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or the canonical status of the war poets (Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg). This is partly because Manning’s perspective is less polemical: he does not argue that the war was meaningless or evil; he simply describes what it was like to be a private soldier in it. The absence of a thesis has made the novel less useful to anthologists and teachers, but it is precisely what makes it so honest.
The novel was reprinted in a restored, uncensored edition in 1977 and again in 1999. It remains in print and is widely regarded by military historians and literary critics as one of the essential novels of the war.
Collecting Manning
The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929, Peter Davies, limited edition of 520 copies) is a major rarity, bringing $1,000–$5,000. Her Privates We (1930, Peter Davies) in first trade edition brings $200–$800. Scenes and Portraits (1909) brings $100–$300. Manning published very little, and all his first editions are scarce.