“School for Love” (nyrb 2009) is a 1951 novel by the British writer Olivia Manning. The title comes from a conversation between the main character, Felix, and one of his housemates, Mrs Ellis, after she quotes from memory for Felix from the William Blake poem “The Little Black Boy,” from “Songs of Innocence”:
Look on the rising sun – there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away;
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love… (166)
Felix asks what it means, and Mrs Ellis says, “I suppose it means that life is a sort or school for love.” She doesn’t mention Blake by name, and is surprised Felix doesn’t know the poem, presumably mandatory reading for English schoolkids, but Felix has not had a typical British education. The reference comes in the last chapter, when Felix is about to complete his studies in this book that is a school for irony. The novel is set in Jerusalem at the end of World War II, where Felix, a young and naive teenager, having lost his father to an absurd fighting tangent and his mother to typhoid, comes to live in the house Miss Bohun has craftily usurped and uses like some evil landlord to manipulate and take advantage of her tenants. Finally, Mrs Ellis boldly confronts Miss Bohun:
Mrs Ellis, breathless, her voice having about it a sort of glow and confidence of fury, said: ‘There you are Miss Bohun! I hear you are plotting to let my room….I thought I’d let you know you’re not getting rid of me so easily….’
Miss Bohun’s voice was still mild, but her pleasantness had about it a quiet venom: ‘I thought when I saw you there was something about you . . . something vulgar and immoral. . .’
Mrs Ellis broke in furiously: ‘I wouldn’t bring up morality or immorality, if I were you, Miss Bohun. What about you? A hypocrite, a liar, a cheat, a dirty-minded old maid’ (182-183).
Miss Bohun of course tries to sell herself to others in terms opposite those characteristics. She does appear to have helped others, appears to hold an active and positive role in her community, and Felix is reluctant to revoke his loyalty to her for taking care of him when it seemed he had no one else to turn to and nowhere else to go. But he undergoes a slow awakening at the charges gradually revealed against Miss Bohun brought by Mrs Ellis. And Miss Bohun does not own the house in question, but has in effect stolen (saved, she would argue) the lease from a prior tenant whose family she then forces first into servitude and then out altogether. And she’s getting paid by the British for Felix’s room and board, while an element of absurdity is added to the plot when it’s divulged the curious, carefully furnished and clean but vacant front room is being saved for the Second Coming. And then it’s uncovered that Miss Bohun is receiving rent for that room also. She’s a kind of carpetbagger opportunist, and she’s very good at it, and she’s very good at explaining why she feels put upon and unappreciated.
The characters live close to the weather and flowers and trees and one another, hungry and cold, hungry and hot, victims and refugees, and even when news comes the war is over in Europe, they can’t celebrate, because it’s assumed the local political friction will now grow much worse. Perhaps it’s too simple to say “life goes on,” but it does, and these are the people who see to it that it does, in spite of their losses or their measly gains that often come at disastrous costs to others. Miss Bohun hides all her deceitful behavior behind a facade of do-good intentions. Does she herself believe her intentions are good? Everything she’s taken she argues was a win-win. One wonders in the end what Mr. Jewel will have won. But he seems to be entering the renewed relationship with Miss Bohun with a clear vision of its costs and rewards.
“I’m a lonely old man; she’s a lonely old woman,” Mr. Jewel tells Felix. A match made in heaven, though one can hardly imagine two people less compatible. In any case, as Mr. Jewel has already told Felix, “a wife and a fortune, they go together” (192).
The book begins with winter snow when Felix arrives in Jerusalem and ends in summer as he’s preparing to leave for London, and throughout, Olivia Manning describes the changing weather, the landscape, walks through the colonies and to the cafes and hotels and gates and courtyards, with deft brush strokes, like impressionistic water colors, and the weather and plants are melded with the characters:
On either side of the road the rocks were like great flints, the earth pinkish and bare as desert, and over all a silver glimmer fell from a dark sky (8).
The garden was green and cold; the house colder. Most days the sky was stormy (24).
Here the rains, following one another at intervals through the winter, carpeted the naked spring earth with a green as vivid as light. Later the grasses were enriched by the intricate leaves of trefoils, ranunculuses, anemones and vetches, and the spears of the bulb and tuber plants. Shortly before Mr Jewel was taken I’ll Felix saw the green cyclamen buds open, each dropping a screw of petals like a wrung-out cloth. In a day these had become flowers, alert and delicate as the ears of a gazelle (81).
The summer was coming. There was no more rain; the sun’s heat grew, the spring flowers wilted, dried, turned to dust, and the fields grew bare. Now the beauty of the day came with the sunset and the sky turned from a pure, bright green to a peacock blue in which the stars shone each evening larger and more brilliant. The sunset translucence and colour lingered, perhaps until dawn (138).
And there is the cat, Faro, another character in the book, that Felix loves, who gave him comfort night and day when he missed his mother so he cried helplessly alone:
She was lying dozing along a bough shaded by ferns. Her fur, extremely soft and fitting like a loose glove, was pressed into folds along her legs and the line of her belly. Her summer coat had come in pale; there was a sheen over her whole body and a glisten of silver-white at her throat (172).
A coming of age book, even if Felix does decide to keep the cat, adopt her as his own, and take her with him to London, another displaced, lower deck passenger, which is where Olivia Manning seems to find most of her characters:
The liners had been turned into troop transports and perhaps the pets’ quarters had been dismantled – if so, there would be nowhere where he could shut her up at night. As a male civilian he would have no cabin. The army officers would have cabins to themselves in ‘A’ deck; the women and children would sleep about nine a cabin on ‘B’ deck; the civilian men, of whatever age and rank, would be allotted hammocks with the troops on the lower deck (175).
The Coming of the Toads 