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BOOK REVIEW
Brian Matthews, Manning Clark: A Life, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008. pp. xviii + 535. $59.95 cloth.Roslyn Russell, Ever, Manning: Selected Letters of Manning Clark 1938–1991, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008. pp. xxi + 552. $65.00 cloth.
Am still depressed and filled with self-disgust and doubts and remorse for destroying my wife and most of my children and for being so hateful to and being hated by so many people.
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| That's an entry from Manning Clark's diary in 1969 & at a time when, to external observers, he seemed the very model of a successful and widely admired public intellectual. |
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Brian Matthews' new biography rests heavily on Clark's remarkable journals, a structure that proves simultaneously a strength and a weakness. |
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In the diaries, the private Clark writes like the public Clark, except more so & much, much more so. In his published writings, he made no secret of his sensitivity to 'mockers and destroyers' but his journals show him almost in physical pain after an indifferent review, with the critical knives 'cutting into my most intimate places'. He was, he tells his diary on another occasion, 'shaken by the hatred and especially by the wickedness of it'. |
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Knives? Hatred? Wickedness? This is a change of quantity into quality: if the narrator of The Puzzles of Childhood and the Quest for Grace reveals a certain Dostoyevskian angst, the diarist appears, at times, positively deranged: an utterly self-excoriating character, obsessed with the 'flaws in his clay'. 'I pretend to stand for the truth,' he writes, 'for tenderness and compassion towards everyone, but inwardly am filled with hatreds, fears, loathings, nightmarish figures and am driven on by lust and ambition'. |
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Matthews, himself a fine prose stylist, takes a very writerly approach to Clark's life, reading him predominantly against other texts. He notes, for instance, how the opening to Volume II of the History of Australia channels the rhythm, colour and atmosphere from Dickens' first paragraphs from Bleak House, the famous 'In Chancery' passage about London's muddy streets. He is at his best scrutinising Clark's prose, showing when and how Clark's stylistic tics work, as well as noting the occasions in which they get away from him. Throughout the book, he maintains a running contrast between Clark and Orwell, and, if that comparison seems somewhat unlikely, the anguish of the two as they struggle to find their voices seems, as Matthews says, uncannily similar. |
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Amidst these textual referents, the diary provides the biography with the kind of tormented interior monologue familiar from the Russian novels Clark loved, a nagging voice in which Clark relentlessly stresses his own laziness and incompetence. 'Have been appalled lately,' he writes in 1949, 'by my very great lack of ability, how even that great mass of knowledge which the vulgar confuse with native ability is receding like the tide, leaving my rotten slimy self exposed'. |
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But the very excess of such passages throws into doubt the quotation from Antony Beevor that Matthews uses as epigraph. 'I find official records can be full of rubbish and official lies', Beevor says, 'while a diary is more historically valid. It is contemporary and written in a real voice, with no reason to lie'. |
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