His mother had been his world, and he, out of touch with other boys, perhaps unconsciously to please her, had remained rather too ‘fresh’ and ‘innocent.’ Anyway, it didn’t please everyone. He became conscious suddenly of his own developing attitude to life. Now he was alone in the world, it was just as well he couldn’t remain a little boy all his life.
Olivia Manning’s School for Love is as gimlet-eyed as her Balkan and Levant trilogies—more so in some ways, as its focus is much narrower. It is essentially a coming-of-age story about young Felix Latimer, who, following the death of his beloved mother, ends up in Jerusalem rooming with a sort-of relative, Miss Bohun. Jane Smiley’s introduction to the NYRB edition notes that in early reviews Miss Bohun was “compared to such great English literary monsters as Mrs. Havisham in Great Expectations.” First of all, Mrs. Havisham? That’s a shocking slip, as her unmarried status is pretty much the whole point of the character! But beyond that, Miss Havisham is not nearly as close a match for Miss Bohun as Miss Clack, in The Moonstone, who is similarly passive-aggressive, repressed, and evangelical.
Miss Clack is played more for laughs, though, while Miss Bohun, while sometimes inadvertently laughable, is too mean and destructive to be genuinely funny, wielding her power as a landlord at a time of widespread hardship and displacement with grimly gleeful pettiness and greed. Near the end of the novel one of the refugees she tutors in English, provoked beyond endurance by Miss Bohun’s hypocrisy, remarks that it is often remarked about her “that so mean a pay goes ill with so much religiosity.” Indeed it does, but Miss Bohun is angered, not shamed, by this reckoning, which if anything accelerates her mission to secure as much as she can for herself.
There are moments in School for Love when it is possible to sympathize with Miss Bohun, mostly because we see her primarily through Felix’s eyes. Grieving, lonely, and naïve, he accepts Miss Bohun’s account of herself and others for a long time and enjoying his occasional role as her confidant. She does take people in, after all; she has taken him in when he was otherwise unwanted and at a loss, although the terms of her “kindness” (as we see much more clearly than Felix) are anything but generous. It is a sad part of Felix’s maturation that he has to give up believing the best about people, an attitude nurtured in him by his mother. He is helped along in this shift towards realism (or, perhaps, cynicism) by the arrival of the refreshingly frank widow Mrs. Ellis, who becomes the subject of his first intense crush and, through her resistance to Miss Bohun’s pretenses, an agent of his “developing attitude to life”: “Venturing into reality,” Felix thinks, “Mrs. Ellis was the guide for him. Almost every time he was with her some incident widened his understanding of life, or of himself.”
Like the Balkan trilogy, though on a much smaller scale, School for Love is populated with people set adrift by the fortunes of war—out of place, uncertain of themselves and their futures. Felix himself is waiting for a transport to England: only late in the novel does he (whose recent memories are all of his family’s life in Iraq) come to see this as a potential homecoming, one that he approaches as an occasion to act for himself, as a man rather than a boy. It seems significant that he finds the courage to assert himself in his devotion to Faro, the Siamese cat who has been his only friend and comfort since his arrival in Miss Bohun’s cold, alienating house. Animals are, perhaps, better than people, or maybe they are just easier to love because they are less likely to disappoint or betray. “You don’t understand,” kindly Mr. Jewel says to Felix, who cannot understand why Mr. Jewel, who has been very badly treated by Miss Bohun, is ready, not just to forgive but to join forces with her. “You’re young,” Mr. Jewel goes on,
You’re strong and independent. You’ve got all your life before you. You young ones are a bit hard on us old ones—you don’t know what it’s like to be old . . . We’re all human; it’s not for us to be too hard on one another. You’ll find that out some day.
This is a gentler conclusion, both about Miss Bohun and for the novel, than I expected from Manning, who was not known for her benignity. It seems consistent, though, with the novel’s title, which comes from a discussion between Felix and Miss Ellis about some lines she recites from a poem by William Blake:
And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
“What does it mean?” Felix asks. “I suppose,” Miss Ellis replies, “that life is a sort of school for love.” Felix still has some lessons to learn.
Novel Readings 