by Doug Munro
consumerism, increasing affluence and economic growth and rampant
mining development. The tide of often vague, ill-directed nationalism that
accompanied the demise of British Australia, which Clark had ridden so
successfully, had helped to push Australian authors, artists and celebrities
to the fore remarkably quickly. In Whitlam’s Australia, intellectuals
were accorded a public platform and authority they had never claimed
before. Publishers were keen to capitalise on this cultural awakening and
the booming genre of autobiography was no exception. The emotive
style of Clark’s autobiographies proved an exception to James Walter’s
identification of ‘the dominance in Australian biography of an empiricist,
positivist tradition – strictly chronological, favouring the public life over
the private, description over analysis and the preservation of emotional
distance – at least up until [the early 1980s]’. But, in other respects, his
work was typical of broader literary and cultural trends. As Bruce Bennett
noted as early as 1998, so many Australian autobiographies published in
the late twentieth century, particularly those by authors such as Patrick
15 Clark to Humphrey McQueen, 7 July 1989, Papers of Humphrey McQueen, NLA, MS 4809,
Folder Addition 31.5.1990, ‘Correspondence with Manning Clark, 1988–1990’.
16 Clark to McQueen, 15 August 1988, in ibid.
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White, Donald Horne and Geoffrey Dutton, sought to trace a life as
‘part of a national allegory’.17 Clark’s autobiographies were probably the
prime example.
In The Puzzles of Childhood, Clark casts his first years in the harsh light
of his latter-day celebrity status. Thus, from the moment of his birth, he
is destined to become a national prophet. Early in the book we read his
mother’s words to the infant Manning: ‘one day [you] will be a famous
man’.18 Clark’s mother’s observation seems remarkably perceptive given
that at this stage her son had not even begun to walk or talk. Other
examples of remembering past experience through the imperatives
of Clark’s latter-day status as a national prophet abound. In The Quest
for Grace, Clark continuously complains of the English condescension
towards Australians that he experienced in Oxford. ‘It made me very
conscious of myself as an Australian.’ Playing cricket for Oxford, he
claimed that the English ‘treated [him] as an outsider … they didn’t
accept me as an ordinary human being and I’ve never forgotten it’.19 Yet
in his diary during these years there is very little if any evidence of these
sentiments. He certainly remarks on his experience of English superiority,
but the young Clark is painfully aware of what he perceives to be the far
more cultured existence in England. He yearns to be accepted. In fact,
his depiction of his experience in England in the late 1930s in The Quest
for Grace demonstrates how he has retrospectively coloured his memories
through the prism of post-Dismissal Australia. A similar rewriting of the
past can be observed in Clark’s history.
The last three volumes of A History of Australia, all written in the wake
of the Dismissal, give greater stress to Australian nationalism. The earlier
schema of the grand contest between Catholicism, Protestantism and
the Enlightenment falls away. In its place is the simplistic polarity of the
Old Dead Tree (Britain) and the Young Tree Green (Australia). Clark’s
depiction of the Anglo-Australian relationship becomes increasingly
crude. ‘Colonials don’t make their own history,’ he proclaims, ‘decisions
are made for them in London.’20 The Dismissal sharpened Clark’s anti-
17 Bruce Bennett, ‘Literary Culture since Vietnam: A New Dynamic’, in Bruce Bennett and
Jennifer Strauss, eds, Oxford Literary History of Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255; and James Walter, quoted by Bennett, ibid., 287.
18 Manning Clark, The Puzzles of Childhood (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), 48.
19 Clark interviewed in Australian Playboy, July 1981, 31–4.
20 Glen Mitchell, ‘Interview with Professor Manning Clark’, University of Wollongong Historical Journal, 1:1 (1975), 65–75.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
British sentiments. As public intellectual, historian and autobiographer,
he wrote both his life story and the nation’s history in the image of late
twentieth-century nationalism. The purpose of Clark’s life, as he told it,
was to hammer the last nail in the coffin of British Australia. He appears
to be born to oversee the end of Empire.
The opening page of The Puzzles of Childhood contains a story he first told
in 1979. It is December 1919 and Clark is four years old. He is sitting
on the backyard lawn of his home in Burwood. Looking up in the sky, he
sees a mechanical bird soaring above. Curious, he asks his mother what it
might be. She explains that the bird is the plane piloted by Keith and Ross
Smith; they are on the last leg of their flight from London to Sydney. It is
one of Clark’s first memories, but like so many of his memories, the facts
do not quite match the power of the story. In December 1919, Sir Keith
and Ross Smith landed not in Sydney but in Darwin. Due to mechanical
problems, their plane did not arrive in Sydney until three months later,
on 14 February 1920. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, it was not
the first plane that Sydneysiders had set eyes on but ‘the thrill came when
one thought, as he gazed, this plane had come from England!’ Thousands
of people stood on rooftops to catch a glimpse of the plane, which was
escorted by three others as it approached the city from the south. The
flight path did not take the planes over Clark’s home in Burwood, but over
the city’s northern suburbs. First sighted over Mascot, the Smith Brothers
flew over the heads, down to the city, then north towards Mosman, before
circling back over the harbour, down over Hyde Park and on to Mascot to
land. Even if Clark had the date wrong, he would have needed to be on
his roof at Burwood, a four-year-old boy with sure feet and a telescope,
in order to see the Smiths’ plane. Fundraising flights also took place in
the weeks after the historic occasion – perhaps Clark had mistakenly
remembered one of these flights? It is certainly possible that he did see
a plane in the sky from his backyard in Burwood in February 1920, but the
story as Clark tells it, this powerful opening image of his autobiography, is
not about the young Clark, it is about the old Clark.
His apocryphal tale of an innocent child gazing up to the sky to see the
arrival of the first flight from England to Australia is a memory tailor-
made for the grand man of history. His first memory is of a historically
significant event. The giant bird in the sky – the portent of war waged
from the air, of the coming age of technology and globalisation – brings
with it the historical forces of modernity that will shape twentieth-century
Australia. Memory obediently serves the titanic public figure, lining up
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/> family stories and national history until they seem to be one and the same
journey. Like so many of Clark’s stories, their telling allowed him to be
present in the past. He became the witness, already the historian at only
four years of age. The final effect was to make the path he chose to follow
appear as his inevitable destiny.
More than twenty-five years after Clark’s death, it is also possible to see
that Clark’s autobiographies rest on a pillar of falsehoods and half-truths.
Perhaps it is commonplace to observe that ‘autobiographies tell more lies
than all but the most self-indulgent fiction’.21 The late Gunter Grass, no
stranger to autobiographical fiction himself, reflected that in autobiography,
‘the conventions of literary reminiscence and historical recollection are
flawed’. Autobiographical truth, Grass insisted, ‘all too easily gives way
to the old literary lies. The past is elusive, memory plays tricks, the self
of narrative is a stranger to the self who writes’.22 The fictive quality of
autobiography has long been established. But Clark’s autobiographical
writings point not only to the notorious unreliability of autobiography,
resting as it does on the paper-thin house of memory, but to much larger
questions, such as the relationship between autobiographical truth and
celebrity status and the autobiographer’s right to ‘own’ their life story.
There is a wonderfully revealing moment in an Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC) radio interview conducted after the publication of
The Puzzles of Childhood in 1989. Interviewing Clark, ABC journalist
Terry Lane was perplexed by his uncanny ability in the book to know
precisely what his father and mother were thinking and feeling at any
given point in time, not to mention his astonishing recall of the thoughts
and emotions of his childhood self. ‘But how can you possibly know these
things?’, Lane asked Clark incredulously. Slightly unnerved, Manning
replied: ‘Well Terry, it’s my view of my life and my view can’t be wrong’.
Clark’s deadpan response put a swift end to Lane’s line of questioning.23
Yet it also raised a crucial question for biographers and readers: to what
extent can the autobiographer’s interpretation and recollection of his life
be challenged? Can the biographer know his subject’s life better than the
subject knows himself? ‘There is your life as you know it and also as others
21 A.S. Byatt, quoted in Allan Massie, ‘Writing of, or from, Yourself’, Spectator, 27 January 2010,
www.spectator.co.uk/2010/01/writing-of-or-from-yourself/.
22 Ian Brunskill, ‘An Added Ingredient’, review of Beim Hauten der Zwiebel by Gunter Grass, Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 2006, 3–4.
23 ‘Terry Lane Talks with Manning Clark’, ABC Spoken Word Cassette, 1990 (copy in Manning
Clark House, Canberra).
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
know it,’ wrote James Salter in his memoir Burning the Days, ‘it is difficult
to realise that you are observed from a number of points and that the sum
of them has validity.’24 It was precisely this perspective that Clark rejected.
He claimed sole authority to interpret his life. But the autobiographer’s
recollection of his life can indeed be shown to be wrong. Because so much
of Clark’s life was lived on the public record, and because he archived his
diaries and correspondence so meticulously, it is possible to test many
of the claims that he makes in his autobiographies. In fact, the issue of
autobiographical truth is crucial in understanding Clark’s role in late
twentieth-century Australia. As Salter further reflected when explaining
his methods of recollection in his memoir:
What I have done is to write about people and events that were important
to me, and to be truthful though relying, in one place or another, on mere
memory. Your language is your country Leautaud said, but memory is also,
as well as being a measure, in its imprint, of the value of things. I suppose
it could be just as convincingly argued that the opposite is true, that what
one chooses to forget is equally revealing.25
Clark concurred with Salter in so far as he relied on what Virginia Woolf
described as ‘moments of being’ – recollections that were deeply inscribed
in his memory precisely because of their self-revelatory nature.26 He did not
want to write an autobiography that resembled his impression of Kaplan’s
biography of Dickens, ‘one of those American academic biographies which
tells you what he had for breakfast but not what you want to know’.27
If memory was to be employed then it was not an instrument of reference
so much as an instrument of self-discovery.28 Yet Clark also conspicuously
failed to take account of the possibility that what he had misremembered,
invented, exaggerated or repressed was potentially more revealing than all
of the words set down in his autobiographies. ‘What I was trying to do’,
Clark explained, ‘was to draw a picture of memory … a portrait of the
inside of my head.’29 However, his claim to have relied mostly on memory
in writing his autobiography is only partially true. Indeed, the evidence
24 James Salter, Burning the Days (New York: Vintage, 1997), 4.
25 Ibid., xi.
26 Hermione Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, introduced by Hermione Lee (London: Pimlico, 2002).
27 Clark to McQueen, 30 April 1989, McQueen Papers, NLA, MS 4809, Folder Addition
31.5.1990.
28 On this distinction, see Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1999; first published in 1965), 29.
29 Clark interviewed by Peter Craven, Sunday Herald, 8 October 1989, 42.
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in Clark’s papers shows that he wrote his autobiographies in the same
way that he wrote his history, as a series of character sketches interspersed
with personal recollections, a performer improvising from primary
sources and a mystic led through life by a series of epiphanies. Far from
relying on memory alone, Clark carried out extensive research, especially
for The Puzzles of Childhood. He wrote to various churches and historical
societies seeking information on his parents’ lives. He copied documents
relating to his ancestors such as Samuel Marsden. He sourced newspaper
articles and local histories to provide historical context. And he made an
attempt to read reflections on autobiography by writers such as Michael
Holroyd.
Nor was he the only researcher. Dymphna carried out most of his research.
The archives are full of copious notes in her handwriting. She corrected
grammar and punctuation, she suggested rephrasing and she corrected
dates, places and memories. As Clark’s editor, some of her marginal
comments are telling:
did you or did you not know where you stood? …
Was it at Port Jackson (not Botany Bay) that the Aborigines told the
British to go away? …
She needs to be identified – wife or flame? … she has been doing it off
and on for 140 pages! …
Do you think it tactful to talk about [your brother’s] generosity to ‘those
his own’
Poor you, trapped in this terrible heart-dimming straitening institution,
for all these years, pitiful, come on now!
After 50 years of marriage, Dymphna was clearly exasperated by the self-
serving nature of Clark’s recollections. For her, the lack of truthfulness in
Clark’s autobiographies undermined their claims to authenticity and their
pretensions to literary greatness. For Clark, although he seemed to remain
blissfully unaware of his tendency to self-aggrandise, he was nonetheless
painfully conscious of his tendency to omit certain details and events in
telling the story of his life.30
30 Dymphna’s comments can be found in the Manning Clark Papers, MS 7550, Series 25, Box 173,
‘Correspondence and drafts relating to Quest for Grace’. The first folder includes her handwritten editing notes.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
As he wrote both volumes of autobiography throughout the late 1980s,
Clark frequently exhorted himself to tell the truth about his life. ‘How to
be truthful without exposing one’s own swinishness’, he wrote searchingly,
and ‘how to be honest without offending someone?’31 Despite his many
promises to friends such as Humphrey McQueen that he would not recoil
from writing an unvarnished account of his life (‘Is the non-truth worth
the paper on which it is written? I believe passionately we should all face
the truth about ourselves’), the pages of his diary reveal his guilt and self-
loathing because of his failure to do so.32 On 11 March 1988, as he was
beginning to write The Puzzles of Childhood, he wallowed in self-pity and
disillusionment:
Last night in bed had an attack of angina. I know my travelling and
lecturing are killing me, but, maybe, that is what I want, the pain of
living is now so intense. My wife is still taking revenge on me for my past
iniquities. My closest friend, the one in whom I placed complete trust, has
deserted me in my hour of need, the attacks on my work and character
continue and will probably go on for a while after I am dead. I have lost
faith in the autobiography.33
By the time both volumes of autobiography were published in 1990,
Clark was firmly convinced that he had failed the task of self-examination