| Book Review | Labour History, 96 | The History Cooperative

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.

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.

Brian Matthews' new biography rests heavily on Clark's remarkable journals, a structure that proves simultaneously a strength and a weakness.

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'.

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'.

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.

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'.

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'.

That's surely not true. Clark was, for most of his life, a public figure who presumably knew that his journals would be read, and thus possessed just as much incentive to lie there as anywhere else. In any case, you can't read his lacerating self-descriptions without at least considering that his journal performs a particular psychological function, with no necessary connection to objective reality. Clark might have been genuinely convinced of his own stupidity but in the real world he became a professor at age thirty-four. This obsessive confessor of indolence rose at 6am each morning to contribute that day's measure to the millions of words he amassed in his lifetime.

If Matthews' approach works well in locating Clark textually, it's less effective in situating him in the external world. In the diary & and thus the biography & Clark's struggle with alcohol provides a central and ongoing theme: Matthews opens with a moving description of Clark praying to a deity in whom he never quite believes for the strength to permanently abstain. Yet there's never any objective referent for his inebriation. Yes, Clark writes about 'the shame and degradation of my behaviour when drunk' & but then his diary confesses shame and degradation in just about every aspect of daily life. What did others make of Clark in his cups? Was he really as odious as he suggests? We never learn.

Equally, Clark's interior preoccupations obscure as much as they illuminate his infidelities and his relationship with his wife Dymphna. His propensity to write obsessively to and about women with whom he felt close creates the impression of a serial philanderer. But Lyndall Ryan, the object of some of Clark's most fervent passages, has recently insisted that no actual affair took place between them, again throwing into question the objective reliability of the journal.

It's useful, then, to turn to Roslyn Russell's Ever, Manning, a selection of Clark's voluminous correspondence. Reading these letters chronologically, one is struck by the process of Clark rather self-consciously becoming himself, with the dull, somewhat priggish correspondent of his early years abroad transmuting into the distinctive epistolatory stylist of maturity. In August 1950, for instance, he writes to Dymphna:

Two days ago I had thought that life in Melbourne would be good for us. But now I am appalled by the smugness, the parochial outlook, the pose of omniscience and so on. I felt yesterday that I should shout out in anger against them, drive them out of their temple of learning with a whip.

It's an image in which the public Clark is immediately recognisable. Similarly, a trip to Wymah prompts the Clarkian observation: '[T]he country here does not care of us as human. It is not alien, or harsh, or cruel or malicious but indifferent.'

Such letters are themselves performances, drawing on the same textual references and writerly techniques Matthews identifies in Clark's published works. Which is not to imply insincerity & indeed, the literary confidence of the mature Clark facilitates the most moving letters in Russell's collection, such as the beautiful note he sent to Ann Moyal about the death of her mother. He writes:

I remember when it happened to me ... that apart from the grief, the rage and the guilt, which no one could share, or relieve, and the ache which came from a part, a very precious part, being ripped from one's body ... there was also, to one's surprise, something else which one had not expected. This was a sharper sense of who were the people whom one loved and, with it, a sense of what mattered in life. It was this tenderness which was my phoenix bird from the ashes of death.

The point is that personal writings & diaries as much as letters amp; do not give unmediated access to the self and thus need, just like the published works, to be analysed in context.

From a twenty-first century perspective, it's impossible to read Clark's collected correspondence without stumbling over all kinds of ironies. The same Peter Ryan who these days excoriates Clark and all his works appears in Ever, Manning as an enthusiastic booster of the History & it's Clark, in fact, who urges Ryan and MUP to reduce the print run of the book. Elsewhere, Clark berates Stephen Murray-Smith for attacking Quadrant & leaping to defend the publication that now routinely derides him.

And that raises a final point about Manning Clark: A Life. Matthews' approach forces us to think more deeply about Clark's inner life and his book will therefore become essential reading for anyone else studying the man. But his treatment of Clark as writer eclipses considerations of him as historian. Or, to put it another way, while we learn more about what bedevilled Clark, we don't become much clearer on why Clark bedevils the culture: why, long after his contemporaries have been forgotten, Manning Clark is still being argued about.

In that respect, despite the heft of these two books, there remains more to be said about Clark. One awaits Mark McKenna's forthcoming biography with interest.


Editor of Overland	JEFF SPARROW

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