[Editor: This article, regarding Frederic Manning (1882-1935), is an extract from the “Literary notes” section published in The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic.), 27 April 1935.]
Literary notes
Last month the author, Mr. Frederic Manning, died in London. Mr. Manning was born in Sydney, and lived there until he was 13, when he went to England to live in Lincolnshire.
In 1909 he wrote “Scenes and Portraits,” a brilliant piece of scholarship disguised as fiction, a series of studies of conversational incidents in the lives of men like Euripides, St. Paul, St. Francis, and Machiavelli.
Some wartime poems from his pen, sent home in letters, were published in 1917.
Mr. Manning served through the war as a private in the Shropshire Light Infantry. He refused a commission because he believed himself unfitted for command.
After the war, in which he was slightly gassed, he wrote an account of the war as seen by the private, and some isolated sketches were shown to Mr. Peter Davies, the publisher. With difficulty Mr. Davies persuaded Manning to undertake the book, but the author said he would not do it at all unless he was allowed to use the full vehemence of the private soldier’s vocabulary. This the law of England forbade. But by publishing the complete work (it was written in six months) privately, and a partly expurgated public edition, this difficulty was surmounted.
Before public announcement of the authorship, only one person in England guessed the secret. Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who said he had read “Scenes and Portraits” 50 times, wrote to the publisher saying that he was convinced that “Her Privates We” was by the same author — a remarkable piece of discernment when it is remembered that an interval of 20 years separated the two books.
Source:
The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic.), 27 April 1935, p. 6 (Metropolitan Edition)
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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