Clio's Lives
Page 16
that he had set for himself:
The two volumes of the autobiography suffer from my failure to address
myself to three subjects which have caused me much pain and made me
the instrument of pain to other people. They are – First – my infidelities
to Dymphna, infidelities of the heart more than the body, and my failure
to examine when and why they began. I remember in the beginning my
fear of whether I could keep her individual love, or whether she ever loved
me. Second, my corruption of other people … my [name deleted] who
became a drunk just as I was wiping the filth of the gutter off my body.
I made a drunkard seem attractive to him … Third, those volumes do not
confess to another fatal flaw … inwardly I go to pieces when criticised,
can never speak again to the character sketchers or critics who list the
errors in my work. I never forget and never forgive. I do not retaliate,
I punish them with silence and do not speak to them again … a curt nod,
a blank face, a horrible face … cutting them, avoiding them. I have not
31 Ibid.: Clark’s notes to self on first draft of The Quest for Grace.
32 Clark to McQueen, 28 July 1988, McQueen Papers, NLA, MS 4809, Folder Addition
31.5.1990.
33 Manning Clark, Diary, 11 March 1988, NLA, MS 7550, Series 2.
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CLIo'S LIvES
really tried to change, but I doubt whether I could change, that rush of
blood to the head floods the rational me. I shake inwardly … there has
been no improvement except in surface courtesy.34
These reflections scribbled hastily in Clark’s diary appear far closer
to the truth. They demonstrate a capacity for self-criticism that his
autobiographies conspicuously lack. As did one particularly frank note
that Clark left for his biographer in his papers. In a folder marked
‘Illustrations’ for The Quest for Grace, there is a handwritten list in ink
of the photographs and the order they appeared in the book. They are
numbered with the captions from 1 to 10. Then, a line is drawn at the
bottom of the list, in what appears to be fresher ink than the list above,
almost certainly added at a later time, most probably as Clark pored
over his papers in the last months of his life leaving comments for those
he knew would come to his papers after his death. Underneath the line
drawn earlier he wrote in fresh ink: ‘The photographs, like the book, say
nothing – the book is a lie, as it says nothing of what I lived through’.35
Clark sets up a conversation with the biographer whom he knows will
come sniffing like a bloodhound to the archive he has constructed. He
plays with his own truth, giving prominence to earnest descriptions of
his virtues on the one hand, while at the same time suggesting that the
whole edifice of his self-invention is nothing but a charade, as if he does
not know the truth himself.
Combing through Clark’s autobiographies and finding examples of factual
errors or misremembered encounters is a pastime one could indulge in for
many years. In the pages of The Puzzles of Childhood and, The Quest for
Grace things happen that never took place. People are born before their
time. They die six years too early or four years too late. They stand for
Labor Party preselection when they never did and they are remembered
for doing all manner of things that never occurred. Consistent with Inglis’s
observation that Clark’s recollections of others were often more about ‘self
than subject’, his portrayal of many characters serves merely as a vehicle
for dispensing praise to himself. And, of course, Clark’s memories of his
parents differ from those of his siblings, both of whom stated after the
publication of The Puzzles of Childhood that they could not recognise their
parents’ marriage in his agonised portrayal, just as his accounts of events
34 Ibid., 13 March 1990.
35 Manning Clark Papers, NLA, MS 7550, Series 25, Box 175, Folder, ‘Illustrations for Quest for Grace’.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
and friendships differ from the memories of others, some of whom wrote
forcefully to tell him how disappointed they were in his recollections.
These differences of memory and perspectives are not unusual. And
catching Clark out is not my purpose. But a handful of Clark’s untruths
and fabrications go to the heart of his credibility as a historian.
The most notorious example that I discovered of Clark’s misremembering
– his claim to have been present in Bonn the morning after Kristallnacht in
November 1938, one repeated frequently in public during the last years of
his life – still unsettles me because so much of the circumstantial evidence
suggests that he knowingly lied. It was Dymphna who was in Bonn the
morning after Kristallnacht. She wrote to Clark, who was then in Oxford
and would not arrive in Bonn until three weeks later. It was her memories
of Kristallnacht that Clark largely appropriated in order to claim a greater
role for himself in one of European history’s darkest moments. Clark
had actually omitted the story of his presence that November morning
in Bonn from all the drafts of The Quest for Grace that Dymphna edited
before the book’s publication. Not until the final typescript draft, when
he finally decided on the title and Dymphna’s editing was complete, did
he decide to insert the claim that he was present in Bonn and that he
had indeed seen the smashed glass from the Jewish shop windows on the
streets and watched as the smoke from the burning synagogues filled the
sky. It was not until the book was published that Dymphna read Clark’s
last-minute insertion, although she had certainly heard him make the
claim previously on radio and television. It is possible that Clark chose to
wait until the final draft to insert the claim of his presence the morning
after Kristallnacht so as to avoid her marking up his claim as false. As she
acknowledged after Clark’s death in a private interview, ‘[Manning] says
he arrived the morning after Kristallnacht. That’s not true’.36
Writing about their peers, mentors and influences, let alone their
achievements, historians are adept at making the activities of their own
kind appear momentous. Nonetheless, Clark’s autobiographies do so to
a far greater extent than those of most of his peers. He saw himself as the
leader of an intellectual vanguard whose self-appointed responsibility was
to lead Australia out of its Anglo-centric torpor towards an independent,
republican, multicultural and more Indigenous-centred future,
a completely new vision of the nation. However, this is not to suggest
36 Quoted in McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, 638.
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CLIo'S LIvES
that many of his pronouncements were not prescient. In 1981, when he
was asked to name Australia’s national day, Clark argued that the country
had yet to agree on one. He pointed out that Indigenous Australians were
absent from the national anthem and invisible in the national flag and
constitution. ‘Our national day in the future,’ he said, ‘will be that day in
&n
bsp; which we made the great step forward on the Aborigines and on the non-
British descendants and on [the] question of what sort of society are we
going to have in Australia.’37
Janet Malcolm has written that ‘[i]f an autobiography is to be even
minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what
you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not
be afraid to invent. Above all he must invent himself’.38 Manning Clark
heeded Malcolm’s advice. His autobiographies were an attempt to adapt
his life story to the needs of Australia at Empire’s end. His recollections
are always pointing to the future, his authorial voice always pleading for
entrance to Valhalla. Clark’s autobiographies provided the great man’s
origin story and they further invented him as a national prophet, the man
who would lead Australia out of the wilderness of what he called ‘British
philistinism’ towards a largely unknown and ill-defined but somehow
more enlightened Australian future. Towards the end of his life, he sensed
that the way in which he had framed this quest – the old dead tree versus
the young tree green – was quickly becoming irrelevant. ‘The problems of
my generation, or the way I formulated them have passed away – maybe
are [already] rotting in history’s ample rubbish bin.’39 Like so many of his
intellectual contemporaries, Clark was also alienated from the nation he
sought to advance. He told McQueen that he had grown tired of living
in ‘a country inhabited by a people who display a vast indifference to
what matters in life – and an unwillingness to listen to what you have
to say’.40 This seems a strange comment coming from someone who was
listened to more than any other intellectual in late twentieth-century
Australia. No matter how much of a national figure Clark became, he
still craved to be showered in even greater public acclaim. As he wrote
to Humphrey McQueen in 1984, ‘On Tuesday 22 January at 4pm
37 Clark interviewed by Alan Tate, The Virgin Press, October–November 1981, 20.
38 Janet Malcolm, ‘Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography’, in her Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013), 297–8.
39 Clark to McQueen, 24 April 1989, McQueen Papers, NLA, MS 4809, Folder Addition
31.5.1990.
40 Clark to McQueen, 12 March 1990, in ibid.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
a BRONZE BUST of me will be unveiled in the Chifley Library. My
LITERARY SLANDERERS will not be there. My friends will be. Please
come if you can’.41
In the last weeks of Clark’s life it was rumoured that he was writing
a third volume of autobiography. A rough draft clearly existed, as his
diaries appear to indicate. Ian Hancock, Clark’s former colleague at ANU,
recalled that the departmental secretary was ‘shocked’ as she typed up
the first pages of the manuscript. ‘She was shaking when she told me
about it. It was full of scandalous revelations. But I think Dymphna put
her foot down and refused to allow its publication.’42 Perhaps Clark had
finally decided to abide by his many exhortations to bare all. But no such
manuscript has survived in his papers.
In early 1990, convinced that his death was now ‘only a year or so away’,
Clark looked again to posterity when he penned the final line of his last
letter to Humphrey McQueen before McQueen left Japan for Australia:
[I] have tried, but alas failed to recreate the experience in [ The Quest for
Grace] of the confessions of a great sinner, & a failed human being … This
ends the Clark part of the Clark-McQueen correspondence. I enjoyed it.
You have always been very good to me. My love to you, Ever, Manning.43
In the months ahead, Clark read the reviews of Quest in the literary pages
of the broadsheet press, which, as with most of his later work, shifted
dramatically from almost foolish adulation to snarling condemnation.
Friend and fellow historian Noel McLachlan claimed that Clark had
produced ‘the first Australian intellectual biography’, one ‘as revelatory
as Rousseau’s but better’, in which ‘astonishingly little seems to be held
back’, while Andrew Riemer politely referred to Clark’s ‘parochialism’
in which Clark presents ‘the world seen from Melbourne’, riding forth
‘like a latter-day Quixote, tilting at windmills perhaps, but keeping alive
the noble flame of his idealism’.44 Richard White, however, had come
closest to revealing Clark’s literary conceit: ‘Manning Clark’s Australia
is Manning Clark himself.’45
41 Clark to McQueen, 19 January 1984, in ibid.
42 Ian Hancock to author, May 2007.
43 Clark to McQueen, 12 March 1990, McQueen Papers, NLA, MS 4809, Folder Addition
31.5.1990.
44 McLachlan’s review in The Australian Magazine, 20–21 October 1990; Riemer in Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1990.
45 White, review of The Quest for Grace.
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CLIo'S LIvES
Clark’s autobiographies – clearly unreliable, undeniably self-indulgent
and yet somehow strangely compelling despite their countless literary
flaws – stand not only as allegories of national awakening but also as the
final expression of Clark’s fictive historical style. For Manning Clark, it
was not the facts of history that shaped us but the impression – emotional,
intellectual and spiritual – that the telling of history and one’s life story
left behind. As he told Playboy magazine in 1989: ‘I remember very
vividly that one of my boyhood roles at school, both the state school
and at Melbourne Grammar, was the telling of stories. I don’t mean fibs
of course, but I was a storyteller.’46
Appendix: Clark’s books
There were many reprintings and subsequent editions of Clark’s works.
Only the first editions have been itemised.
A History of Australia
Vol. 1. From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1962.
Vol. 2. New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land, 1822–1838. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1968.
Vol. 3. The Beginning of an Australian Civilisation, 1824–1851. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1973.
Vol. 4. The Earth Abideth for Ever, 1851–1888. Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1978.
Vol. 5. The People Make Laws, 1980–1915. Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1981.
Vol. 6. The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green, 1916–1935.
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987.
46 Clark interviewed by Australian Playboy, July 1981, 31–4.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
Short history
A Short History of Australia. New York: New American Library, 1963.
Other monographs (during his lifetime)
Meeting Soviet Man. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1960.
The Discovery of Australia: 1976 Boyer Lectures. Sydney: Australian
Broadcasting Commission, 1976.
In Search of Henry Lawson. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978.
Books of documents
/>
Select Documents in Australian History, 1788–1850. Sydney: Angus
& Robertson, 1950.
Select Documents in Australian History, 1851–1900. Sydney: Angus
& Robertson, 1955.
Sources of Australian History. London: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Edited volume
Making History, with an ‘Introduction’ by Stuart Macintyre and other
chapters by R.M. Crawford and Geoffrey Blainey. Melbourne/
Ringwood: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1984.
Collection of essays
Occasional Writings and Speeches. Melbourne: Fontana/Collins, 1980.
Scholarly pamphlets
Abel Tasman. Melbourne: Oxford University Press [in the ‘Australian
Explorers’ series], 1959.
The Quest for an Australian Identity. Brisbane: University of Queensland
Press, 1980 [James Dulig Memorial Lecture].
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CLIo'S LIvES
Children’s history
The Ashton Scholastic History of Australia, by Manning Clark, Meredith
Hooper and Susanne Ferrier. Sydney: Ashton Scholastic, 1988.
Autobiographies (during his lifetime)
The Puzzles of Childhood. Ringwood: Viking, 1989.
The Quest for Grace. Ringwood: Viking, 1990.
Short stories
Disquiet and Other Stories. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1969.
Manning Clark: Collected Short Stories. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1986.
Posthumous
A Historian’s Apprenticeship. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
1992.
Manning Clark’s History of Australia, abridged by Michael Cathcart.
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993.
Dear Kathleen, Dear Manning: The Correspondence of Manning Clark and
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, 1949–1990. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1996.
Speaking out of Turn: Lectures and Speeches, 1940–1991. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1997.
The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Dymphna Clark, David Headon and
John Williams. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000.
Manning Clark on Gallipoli. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Publishing, 2005.
Ever, Manning: Selected Letters of Manning Clark, 1938–1991, ed. Roslyn
Russell. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008.
102
6
Ceci n’est pas Ramsay Cook:
A Biographical Reconnaissance
Donald Wright