An Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna.

An Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna. Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press, 2011, pp. x + 793, Hardback, ISBN: 978-0-522-85617-0

Manning Clark was professor of History in Canberra from 1949 until his retirement in 1974-5. Some found the man and his writings inspirational; to others, he was a mountebank.

An Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna. Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press, 2011, pp. x + 793, Hardback, ISBN: 978-0-522-85617-0

Manning Clark was professor of History in Canberra from 1949 until his retirement in 1974-5. Some found the man and his writings inspirational; to others, he was a mountebank. Mark McKenna has produced a magnificent biography, in which even the unanswered questions (how did Clark qualify for a funeral in a Catholic cathedral?) are deliberately left hanging. Big books sometimes scoop awards before second thoughts consign them to semi-oblivion. If McKenna's book should recede from prominence in years to come, it will be because he has extracted the opium from the tall poppy of his perplexing subject.

            Since McKenna never met Clark but understands him well, so it seems egotistical to outline my own slight encounters with 'Manning', as he was known to friend and detractor alike. In the 1970s I was a research fellow in History in the Research School of Social Sciences -- part of the original Australian National University of 1946. Clark's appointment had been to Canberra University College, an offshoot of Melbourne. In 1960 it was merged into the ANU, a clumsy solution which subordinated the teaching departments as the School of General Studies. There was little contact with 'our colleagues across the creek', as the SGS staff were dubbed with formal politeness: the divide was purely mental, for no creek separates the Coombs and Haydon-Allan Buildings. My senior colleagues distrusted Clark: in a moment of impish confidentiality, J.A. La Nauze remarked that he was not really a historian but a novelist. Among the younger crowd, mention of his name triggered ribaldry about the 'fatal flaw', Clark's formula for skewering the personalities he portrayed. I wanted to meet the author whose Short History of Australia I had first read across the world, although even then I had been puzzled by the confidence with which he had described his subjects. You might deduce character from portraits by Raeburn or Reynolds, but how could you discern 'darker forces' in Arthur Phillip from a giant cigarette card of a corner-shop painting?

            I was warned that Clark might not welcome me, since -- a rash and brash young Pom -- I dived into the controversy over the founding of New South Wales. In fact, I found him friendly and, when I edited a collection of readings on the Botany Bay debate, he permitted the inclusion of his Historical Studies article. My last contact was a postcard approving the transfer of book's small income to the Menzies Centre in London: 'Readers are better than royalties.' My lingering image of Manning Clark was of an amiably narcissistic eccentric, defined by his goatee beard and a wide brimmed and jauntily angled hat.

            I first handled McKenna's biography in wine-connoisseur fashion, skimming the pages and looking at the photographs. Here was my first shock. The early Clark was usually hatless, and definitely clean shaven, not the Manning of memory, but a doppelganger for the herbivorous primary school teacher who steered me through the Eleven Plus. The beard, grown on a visit to Russia, was a tribute to Lenin, while McKenna believes that the hat was an echo of Thomas Carlyle, author of a grand narrative history of the French Revolution. Both the identifiers that a cartoonist would have highlighted were artificial add-ons. More than in most biographies, McKenna's task has been to separate the superficial from the core reality.

            Through his mother, Clark was descended from Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain in early New South Wales. This link probably explains his sense of ownership of early Australian history: he was transfixed with veneration when shown Marsden's signature in the Admissions Register of Magdalene College Cambridge in 1964. Clark the historian was tough on Marsden -- as he was censorious of his own faults -- but he probably back-projected himself into his forebear. In Volume II of his massive History, published in 1967, Marsden (like Clark) was in his fifties, the age 'when honour, the respect of his fellow-men, and recognition of his achievement should have been his.' Instead, his hard labour of twenty-seven years (about the time Clark had been in Canberra) had yielded Marsden only the 'curses not loud but deep' of his enemies. Clark's father, a working-class Londoner who retained a Cockney accent, became an Anglican clergyman thanks to a mentor, Reverend James Manning, after whom Clark himself was named.

            In 1921, Clark's mother suffered a breakdown, and the six year-old Manning and his siblings were sent to maternal grandparents for several months. Decades later, Clark discovered that his father had begotten a child by the housemaid -- but there were clues to a sex scandal, enough to explain his fixation with fatal flaws. Clark once related that his grandmother remembered the pastoralist John Macarthur visiting her family home, adding with Manningesque flourish: 'So young is Australia!' Although he was capable of colonising memories, for instance annexing his wife's experience, in her students days in Bonn, of Kristallnacht, the overlap was possible: Catherine Hope was born in 1825 (and lived to be 92); John Macarthur died in 1834. Perhaps during those bewildering months when his parents separated, the frightened child anchored himself to the reassurance of Australia's earliest years?

            Clark suffered from epilepsy, with attacks severe enough to make him drop out of school for some time when he was fifteen. Epilepsy is an affliction still wrapped in embarrassment, and McKenna effectively disentangles the slight evidence. It drew Clark to Dostoyevsky, a fellow sufferer, and excused him from wartime military service. Epilepsy also disqualified him from the Rhodes Scholarship, but in 1938 he went to Oxford by other means. Although he spent only a year at Balliol, where he recalled Edward Heath as contemporary, Clark briefly took the place by storm. In the freshmen's cricket match, he 'kept wicket remarkably well', and impressed with fluent array of strokes with the bat. He was immediately selected for the University team, and played three matches against county sides. Unfortunately, Clark was a Twenty20 player sixty years ahead of the game. Against Yorkshire, he was 'itching to "have a go"' but, despite the prediction of The Times that 'he looks to have plenty of runs in him', his performances in both innings were disappointing: Leyland bowled him for 12 -- after he had been dropped in the deep -- and Verity for 10. Alarmingly, too, he was 'far from being a good judge of a run', over-keen on snatching a risky single. His downfall came against Middlesex, where there was a faint chance of batting out a draw if Clark could build a stand with the University's last specialist batsman. Instead, he made a poor call and ran his partner out. Being dropped meant more than 'wounded pride' (172): a cricketing career that collapsed inside two weeks was a public humiliation that probably explains why he was keen to leave Oxford. For Cricinfo, it was a life sadly wasted: 'He returned to Australia in 1940 to teach history and played no more serious cricket.' If there is one element in McKenna's biography where I should have liked more, it is cricket. Clark coached at Geelong Grammar, and later played in recreational matches. Yet, in all his explorations of the Australian soul, Clark wrote very little about the game. The Short History was written for Americans, but does that explain why it is one of the few overview studies to omit mentioning Bodyline?

            Clark was not simply a selfish person, but the cynosure of his personal universe. It was immaterial that his parents could not read the annual letter that he taped to their gravestone: the devoted son was the admiring audience of his own star performance. He treated the naming of his six children as an exercise in memorialising his muses. It took some insensitivity to attempt to call his son 'Wolfgang' in 1940; left to Clark, a later child would have become 'Dimitri Alyosha'. As lecturer, tutor and mentor, he could be inspirational, but he despised the routine administrative detritus, writing 'lordly one-line references' (507) and dismissing essays with enigmatic mottos. Bright undergraduates saw through the pose. Greeted in passing with a pretentious Latin tag, one student upstaged Clark by riposting that it sounded better in the original Greek. He did not like that.

            McKenna's biography is a portrait of a marriage. Typically for the era, Dymphna Lodewyckx, daughter of a Flemish intellectual, sacrificed her career to become wife, mother and helper. Clark's attitude to her was ambivalent, ranging from pathetic dependence to the unleashing of angry criticism in his diary -- often simultaneously. She left him three times, the first time after Clark's shattering affair at the milestone age of forty, subsequently in response to his symbiotic interconnections between publication and flirtation. Although her children were hostages that drew her back, she kept a bag permanently packed for a final exit. In 1973 Clark denounced the limitation of women's roles to kitchen and bed. A year earlier, when a student had protested against gender bias in his department, he told her she had a nice arse and did not need first class honours, pinching her principal asset as he spoke. McKenna argues that post-Pill Canberra was a sexual jungle, but male academics were not all bed-hoppers, and in the liberation culture, 'no' was supposed to mean 'no'. Did Clark exploit his god-professor status? Distastefully, he boasted of his behaviour, although some of his bragging was fantasy. He told a colleague that he delighted in putting his hand up skirts to fondle suspender belts. She lacked the heart to explain that women had been wearing tights for years.

            Clark's scholarly standing forms a major theme in McKenna's study. It is too easy to dismiss him because his monumental History of Australia is now derided. The Short History brought the Australian past to readers both at home and overseas. Clark was arrogant in claiming that he invented Australian history, but the Select Documents did offer the first production-line course structures in the subject and -- inaccuracies aside -- they remain rich in material. Publication of the magnum opus spanned twenty five years of rapid change: Menzies was prime minister in 1962, Hawke by 1987. Despite their faults, the first two volumes of the History formed part of the new national culture of the 1960s. His popularity made him a public intellectual and an ALP guru. It was Clark who spotted that December 2nd 1972 was the anniversary of the defeat of a ramshackle coalition at Austerlitz, a coincidence that appealed to Whitlam's Napoleonic self-image. I recall sitting in the stalls during a Barry Humphries one-person show, watching Edna Everage lobbing her trademark blooms to the Canberra identities in the front rows, with the refrain, 'wave your gladdie, Manning'. In-groupish and off-putting, the cameo perhaps helps explain why the Right came to hate him, taking posthumous revenge with the preposterous charge that Clark was a Soviet agent.

            At first reading, I devoured McKenna's book, wishing it to go for ever. Then I set out again, having taken my reviewer's oath to niggle and grump, but my impressions hardly changed. One of Clark's colleagues once published a work of florid prose that was unkindly characterised as 'pidgin Manning': McKenna empathetically engages with Clark without once lapsing into echoes of his grandiose style. Could this massive study have been shorter? There were discursions where I endorsed R.M. Crawford's plea for 'plain blokes who have never read a word of Dostoyevsky' (336). In time, this biography might merit an abridged edition, if only because Clark will fade in memory. The determining factor has been the enormous size of the Manning Clark archive. Most biographers must uncover episodes their subjects preferred to conceal. By contrast, Clark preserved even the evidence of his infidelity. He annotated documents to guide future interpreters, evidently assuming that biographers would celebrate his greatness, while simultaneously resolving his contradictions. McKenna has avoided the danger of becoming a 'ventriloquist' (39). Sheer bulk creates problems not just of quantity but of meaning. It is easier to memorialise crises than to immortalise contentment: it is the laughter in their parents' marriage that his children remember. Clark's correspondents were sometimes mystified by the contrast between his angst-ridden letters and his cheerful demeanour. After his death, some readers of his diaries could not recognise their writer. Hence the fundamental question about this paper mountain: does it reveal an inner Manning or an invented Manning? After 700 pages, McKenna ends with an intriguing cameo. On a Canberra road on a sunny afternoon two years before Clark's death, a colleague caught a momentary glimpse of husband and wife driving in the other direction, sealed in the silent capsule of a saloon car, 'their faces cascading with laughter' (703). Were Manning and Dymphna mocking the elaborate imposture they had perpetrated on the world? It is an enigmatic conclusion to a magnificent biography.