A 60-Year Error Hides Inside Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy

A libel settlement in 1967 left a textual error in Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy that has gone unnoticed for roughly 60 years. The British novelist, who died in 1980, amended her novels after a legal threat — but her publishers botched the cuts, and the residue remains in print today.

Manning carried career grudges openly. "I don't want fame when I am dead," she once complained. "I want it now." She never made the Booker shortlist. She never received a "solo review" in the Sunday papers. She was repeatedly passed over for Iris Murdoch.

Her reputation rests largely on the Balkan Trilogy — The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and a third volume — drawn from her wartime years in Romania and Greece. NYRB reissued the trilogy in 2010 with an introduction by Rachel Cusk, who praised its fidelity to lived life. "Manning's 'people' are more than literary characters," Cusk wrote. "They have the feeling of real beings who happen to find themselves in the narrative frame, like passersby caught on camera."

What triggered the libel threat?

Manning always mined real life. A prim matron in her 1951 novel School for Love was modeled on Robert Graves's sister Clarissa — Manning only changed her height. Clarissa considered a lawsuit. The poet Stevie Smith wrote a "bitchy review" of The Doves of Venus after finding a neurotic, dentist-fearing character resembling herself. Manning's husband, Reggie Smith, cautioned: "You may be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the Sunday Times readers, but there will always be those who know the truth."

In 1967 the consequences arrived. "An awful thing has happened to me," Manning wrote to a friend. In the first two Balkan novels, Manning had described the 1939 assassination of Armand Cǎlinescu, Romania's prime minister, by the fascist Iron Guard — an event she and her husband witnessed firsthand in Romania. Her fiction stated that a year later, each surviving family member was "taken to the nearest large town and shot in the marketplace." She also implied, through dialogue, that King Carol had said: "I'll get that bastard Cǎlinescu if it's the last thing I ever do."

Both claims were false. Cǎlinescu's family had not been shot. His son, Barbu Cǎlinescu, was alive and working as an architect in Cambridge. His lawyers told Manning's publishers, Heinemann and Panther, that a trusting reader would conclude the Cambridge architect of the same name was "a liar and imposter." Barbu Cǎlinescu sought damages, withdrawal of the books from print, and a public apology.

"I feel pretty sick when I think of it," Manning wrote. "The law of libel is so confusing that everyone says something different. Even the solicitors seem vague about it." She asked the managing director at Heinemann's whether the firm was insured against libel. "Yes," he replied, "but you are not."

How was the case resolved?

The publishers settled. Cǎlinescu accepted an apology, amendments to the books, and reimbursement of his costs. Manning fought Heinemann over those costs. "The firm did not commit the libel," the publisher told her. She argued that publishing a writer who draws from life invites such trouble, and threatened to leave if forced to pay. The matter was, in her account, "quietly forgotten."

The amendments themselves were sloppy. The Spoilt City was recalled and all references to the family's execution expunged — but Panther's paperback initially left intact the plural phrase "the slaughtered Cǎlinescus," corrected only in a later edition.

What is the 60-year error?

The line in The Great Fortune in which the character Galpin quotes the King was removed. But a later reference to that same conversation stayed. In a subsequent exchange, Yakimov says: "You said he said he'd get Cǎlinescu." Galpin had said no such thing — not in any edition published since 1967.

The retained line still implies Carol's complicity in the assassination just as strongly as the expunged dialogue did. It has remained in the book untouched ever since, apparently unnoticed, probably by the Cǎlinescu family above all.

The episode left Manning on high alert. When a woman at a party identified the British writer Derek Patmore as the inspiration for Yakimov — the character Cusk called Manning's "masterpiece" — Manning begged her "on no account ever to mention the books to him." "The incident made me feel so ill I had to leave the party," she recorded.

Her next lesson was darker. In Cairo during the war, Manning had witnessed an eight-year-old boy killed by a mortar shell. Three decades later she put it in a book — Penelope Lively called it "one of the most insensitive translations of experience into fiction." The child's parents were dead by publication, but family solicitors still demanded removal of the scene. This time Manning refused, insisting her character Angela Hooper bore no resemblance to the real mother, Amy Smart.

The takeaway: Manning's war fiction survived its lawyers, but the settlement's clumsy scissors left a permanent seam — one that readers can still find on any page of the trilogy today.