It is in this context, a context of the sustained posthumous harassment of Manning Clark's shade as not just a tilter at windmills (with the deep ambiguity the figure of the dreaming Don Quixote always yields) but as disastrously deluded or worse, that Stephen Holt has published this useful little book about Manning Clark. It is not a biography -- for that we will have to wait for Brian Matthews -- nor does it bespeak personal intimacy. It is not in the fullest sense a work of historiography but it does have the virtue of being temperate, easy to read and very clear and fluent about the relationship between Clark's work and his life. Manning Clark seems to have the capacity to make even moderate men like John Hirst sound buccaneering and he can engender a kind of forensic ferocity in a Humphrey McQueen so that in some ways the most singular virtue of Stephen Holt's workaday account is its quietness: it restores perspective.
Manning Clark
I'm not sure that he's right that Clark was an intensely political figure. He seems in some respects to have been more of a political agnostic whose personal mythology became conflated with the dreary mechanisms of celebrity in this country so that both sides were ready to plague him. We should never underestimate the old Australian ratbag phenomenon which is something of a two way mirror. Was Geoffrey Blainey political or Helen Garner or Patrick White? We can show so little respect for the integrity of the tall poppies we honour like the improbable extrusion of a desert that they become so many rabbits caught in the spotlight, the one index of the celebrity they do not want, their inability to handle it by cutting their cloth to the diminished image we have of them.
Manning Clark always used to make me want to weep. I thought his kindness was extraordinarily moving and genuine. I did not see pharisaism in the God-haunted manner, I thought he had an ear for the mystery and the gentleness of things that went with it. In a way the sardonic side, the capacity to stack a turn which seems never to have left him was the other side of it, a nearly innocent vanity and orneriness that seemed child-like. A few others who knew him better have thought otherwise but even Peter Ryan (whose denunciation remains the most vivid thing ever written about Clark) says that it would be unthinkable not to have known a person of such richness.
Edmund Campion said once that in Australian history you're either for Ned Kelly or Redmond Barry: the bushranger or the judge who hanged him. That's true, I think, but Manning Clark was a man who was for many things, not least the moodiness of his own contradictions. Holt says that the Long Dorm at Melbourne Grammar formed him and gave him his lifelong identification between philistinism and cruelty and the Yarraside establishment of a Melbourne that believed any second coming was just for them. At the same time he could never finally decide what intellectual contradictions to bring to bear on the turbulent dramas he apprehended or imagined. Was Nettie Palmer speaking truth when she espoused the Republican Cause in that 1930s debate about the Spanish Civil War and if so why did Manning thrill to Bob Santamaria's cry of 'Viva el Cristo Rey'. Of course he could never decide what side he was on because his eye was on the gestures and the vision that lay behind them. As R.P. Blackmur once said of Shakespeare, Manning Clark had a provisional faith in many things. His intelligence as a historian seems to have been essentially dramatic and this fact in itself is often misunderstood because he was a technically imperfect writer who was never completely in control of his own tone. Chris Wallace-Crabbe once put his finger on this when he said Clark might be surprised to hear how much closer his voice was in tone to Dickens and Thackeray than to Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
Manning was therefore an extraordinarily ambivalent writer because what he was aiming for was point of view writing, that most sophisticated of styles which is coloured by the idiom of a particular speaker but does not state this fact. And he used this technique (of all techniques) more or less chorically in grand narrative history (of all things) and with every possible provocation towards self-parody including Clark's own weakness for fustian and grand themes.
No wonder he confused them. He confused himself. One thing which Stephen Holt brings out rather well is the extent to which Clark's ambitions were always epical and artistic. It's sometimes forgotten that it was Manning Clark who defended Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore by saying that he showed history could be the greatest show on earth. I think it was Jim Davidson who said, penetratingly, of the whole History endeavour that it was bound to seem a bit belated in Clark's case because the task was attempted so late. (And this is in fact consonant with much of Australian literature: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is the country's great 19th century novel, Patrick White has his affinities not only with Faulkner but with Hardy.)
I was grateful to Holt for his quotation from an American historian, Robin Winks, about Clark's history: 'It is lonely, a bit driven, a bit despairing and exciting in a way few twice-told tales can be.' And it's interesting in this respect that some of Clark's best writing is in fact in his Short History where the facts are burnished to the point of epigram. Holt is modest in his representation of the man and puts his finger on the contradictions but not the personality which contained them. He has a thing about D.H. Lawrence and imagined that Clark had more of one than he did: despite his sympathy for 'how beastly the bourgeois is' Manning Clark was much more open to ordinary humanity than his critics on either the left or the right allowed. Hence the rather touching collocation, almost at the end of this book, of his end of the year speech at Mt Albert State school (which he had attended) and the speech launching Barry Humphries' Sandy Stone book in a Malvern op shop. (Humphries -- never missing a trick -- thanked 'Sir Rupert Clark'.)
Like Humphries though, Manning Clark was an ambiguous populariser. He gave back to a whole generation the image of their own history as a grand, if half-farcical, story. I found this thrilling as an adolescent in a way pretty directly analogous to the first revelation of reading Patrick White.
Stephen Holt could have made rather more of the fact that Clark's vision managed to madden both the Marxists and the sheep and money men. It's there in the exasperation of Peter Ryan's attack. Ryan is a conservative who understands the left and cannot believe in Clark's contempt for the little person. No one was very amused by the early Manning Clark deconstructively saying the Cons tended to be hardened criminals and the diggers of Eureka were entrepreneurs on the make. This was part of the devilment of the Manning Clark who at the time of the 1949 election wrote to Max Crawford that Australia could imperil itself by being 'contemptuous of conservatism and too timid for radicalism'.
He did not begin to fathom the political visions of the different creeds he heard the music and drama of. At one point Crawford is chafing at Clark's hurt pride because he doesn't look like getting the Ernest Scot chair at Melbourne University and he says in exasperation, 'There's a lot to be said for plain blokes who have never read a line of Dostoyevsky.' Dostoyevsky, though, knew about the drama of polyphony and dialectics.