A child of mixtures
Isabel Quigly
Memoirs 1906-1969 Manya Harari (Harvill Press £3.50) "Fortunately she seemed to need less sleep than most people ": so they say in their notes about Manya Harari, and the somnolent rest of us must wonder how on earth she fitted so much into the twentyfour hours and guess she must scarcely have slept at all. Her memoirs cover only a small part of her activities, enterprises and interests; in fact they were unfinished and unpolished when she died three years ago and much of the book is, compared with the finished parts, little more than notes. The early part, though, about preRevolutionary Russia and schooldays in England, gives an idea of what the rough rest might have become if she had lived to arrange it; and the roughest parts give an idea of her vigour and many-sidedness — and something, though not all, of her charm.
Born Manya Benenson in 1906, she was a child of mixtures and divided loyalties. Mixed and divided she remained but it proved an enrichment: she was fully this as well as that, not half of either: Russian and English, Jewish and Roman Catholic, writer and publisher, creator and •middleman. Both her parents came from the Jewish Pale (" paradoxically Papa from Minsk and Mama from Pinsk") and, as her father was immensely rich, they lived, though not accepted by its aristocratic residents, in the most aristocratic part of Petersburg. By the age of six, she felt that wealth weighed on the family "as a tragic and evil fate." It continued to weigh: exiled they went to Berkeley. But this exile had come not from political events but through an oddity of fate, a personal (though appalling) case of violence: Papa's mistress, piqued by being told he loved his wife, flung vitriol in his face, nearly blinding, in fact nearly killing, him. So plastic surgery took them to Jena in 1914, where he lived on, though "monstrously disfigured." "Well, you slithered away just in time, didn't you?" someone nastily remarked half a century later when Manya went back to see Russia.
It was a curious exile, since they had neither the attitudes nor the deprivations of most exiles and scarcely mixed with the emigrt communities; since they had never really belonged in Russia and so were never quite to belong in England, or indeed anywhere: a life of hotels and smartish wandering and for the child, allowed to pick her own school, of Malvern Girls' College, a place both solid and bizarre to one "conscious . . . of man's permanent aloneness." There was no antisemitism there but once she found herself denying (or at least not acknowledging) her Jewishness; sometimes that seems to have clung in her memory with a burrlike sense of shame and sinfulness. She came to love Worcestershire and a number of other places: as her Jewishness was overlaid by the Catholicism she came to, so Russia, with "the wildness, the extremes, the ice, the fires," was overlaid by gentler landscapes, but never lost or forgotten. Half a lifetime later she returned there, was twice arrested, often disconcerted, more often moved to friendship or tears or to spontaneous outbursts of curiosity and affection, these sometimes greeted with suspicion in a country where native spontaneity has been crushed though not killed by a regime whose first rule is the suppression of all spontaneity. All she writes about these visits to Russia, which included a trip to her family's country house, shows without any need for emphasis the sad discrepancy between the natural Russian ebullience and, warmth, the gift for a kind of immediacy in human relations, and the caution, stiffness and sometimes plain bloodymindedness imposed from above, by fear and circumstances; the impossibility of knowing, in a land of spies, just whom to trust, how far to give.
At home, meantime, the last fifteen years of her life were spent largely on introducing the modern Russians, those victims of the system, to the west: as publisher, translator or co-translater she brought over Pasternak's Dr Zhivago, Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, Ehrenberg's The Thaw, and works by Sinyavsky, Evgenia Ginzburg, BulgakoV, Amalrik, Paustovsky. This, I suppose, is what she will be remembered for; but she was herself much more than any one thing — publisher, translator, literary figure. Nor was her quality a matter of background and interest, of remembering the old Russia, where "the impassable snow would, ring each village, blanketing it with its devils, passions, charms, vodka and spleen to brew the poison of isolation and proximity." It was something central and peculiar to herself, a matter of heart and mind and presence. "Why should I not keep the intensity and freshness of my alien gaze ?" she wondered at school. And she did, all her life; this unfinished book shows it.
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