EVER, MANNING
Selected Letters of Manning Clark 1938-1991
edited by Roslyn Russell,
Allen and Unwin, 552pp
Reviewed: 9 August 2008
Manning Clark was a catalytic figure in the formation of Australian self-image, whose quest to construct a coherent sense of what it means to be Australian could strike cynics as tendentious, and strike angry sparks from either radical or conservative historians with competing visions of Australian history. Even those who reject his historical interpretation owe him at least the debt of provocation.
Clark’s influence was nowhere stronger than in Canberra, where and he lived and worked since the 1950s, where the Manning Clark Chair of Australian History at the ANU continues aspects of his historical project, and where Manning Clark House, the former family home in Forrest, continues as a centre for cultural and social debate in this community. Hundreds of living Canberrans acknowledge Clark as a significant influence in their life, as teacher or friend.
The field of academic Clarkology is lively. Several major studies are already published and at least two more serious biographies are in the pipeline, not to mention Clark’s own three-volume autobiography. What value then is this volume of selected letters, authorized by the family and far from comprehensive?
If read as a historical source, this book may frustrate. The material is exclusively Clark’s outgoing letters, with scarcely a line of return or incoming correspondence. Like the sound of one hand clapping, we read Clark’s intense or humorous responses to voices that we can only infer. The effect is starkest in relation to the central correspondence of his life: that with Dymphna, his great love, wife and life’s companion through some significant domestic drama. What Dymphna might have said or written to Manning at certain times would likely have scorched the page, had family and publishers agreed to print it.
Clark’s children were often away from home once they were old enough for boarding school, and some of the most joyful writing is in his caring, generous and witty letters to son Axel at school and at university. Axel himself died some years ago, after a long history of brain tumour, and his family have been generous in allowing publication of many letters from Manning to Axel. In fact, the family dimension to this book might have been rather thin without these, as it contains almost no letters written to the five children who survive.
So rather than a documentary record, this collection can better be read as a progressive self-portrait, a verbal analog for the self-portrait series of visual artists such as Rembrandt and van Gogh. The earliest letters (from Oxford, 1938) portray an earnest young post-graduate seeking out how to draw maximum academic nourishment from the British tradition, while sensitive to the slights offered so casually by the British to the “colonials” in their midst.
Thus begins a pattern repeated on several foreign sojourns: initial resentfulness of an unrecognized outsider; a warming to people who seemed to appreciate him; then a passionate enthusiasm for the apparent riches of the cultural milieu opened to him. Over the decades, there are such cultural romances with Britain, with Ireland, with continental Enlightenment Europe, with (Potemkinised?) Soviet Russia, and finally with the Harvard world of the American liberal intelligentsia.
The letters reveal a man always in the process of self-construction and deconstruction – he refers often to himself in the third person in ways that might seem vain if they were not humorous and self-deprecatory. Some letters purport to be from “Australia’s most unreliable historian”, others from “the man of Passion” or from “your loving, silly, vulgar, but now adoring husband”.
From student days on, Manning is highly aware of the politics of academic patronage and backbiting. Letters seethe with resentment against the slights of professional rivals or colleagues not sufficiently loyal on issues such as the critical receptions to publication of each volume of Clark’s monumental History of Australia.
In middle and later years, several series of letters trace a compulsion to demand not just the professional approval, but the passionate loyalty, of a succession of female academic colleagues. This placed a near-terminal strain on Dymphna’s extraordinary patience. Manning’s self-abasing letters begging for Dymphna’s forgiveness and return make some of the saddest reading in this book.
The editor’s commentary is minimal on this, as on other sensitive topics, so readers of forensic inclination must look to other biographical materials to dissect this complex man. It is significant that several women on the receiving end of his empassioned missals have been willing to make them available, and the surviving Clark family members have agreed to their publication. So, as a form of unplanned self-portrait, this collection is quite a frank and warty one.
From the 1950s until his death in 1991, Manning Clark gave public support to many “progressive” causes and was considered radical, almost dangerous, by conservative academics and political commentators. These days, most of his views would be considered main stream, and some of the views in these letters are decidedly conservative.
The Manning Clark who speaks through these letters, a clergyman’s son, sets out like a character in Pilgrim’s Progress, determined to be recognized for good works and to overcome human frailty in himself, while suspicious of anything smelling of superficial piety. By the end of his life, significant achievements and public recognition seem not to have assured him that he has justified his life through his works, and he yearns for an external redemption by faith that he suspects may lie behind the “popery” of the Catholic Church.
Let Clarkologists make what they may of this collection of Manning’s letters. In the end, this is one legacy of a lifetime of passionate commitment to a quest for Australian self-knowledge, from a pen that is by turns intense, spontaneous, funny, curious, compassionate and obsessive. If every word of it were fiction, the quality of feeling, expression and drama would make it an intensely rewarding work of literature. Manning Clark, fact or fiction, emerges from this volume with a quality he often ascribes to the human condition – a tragic grandeur.