Matthews, Brian: Manning Clark: A Life. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2008. ISBN 9781741143782, $59.95
Brian Matthews' book on Manning Clark is modestly subtitled A Life. It is one of many possible lives. It could also have been titled 'The inner life of a writer'. The notable events and circumstances of Clark's life are well described. But the focus is on the relationship between his writing and his dramatic inner world.
The key which Matthews uses to unlock Clark's inner life is the diary that he kept intermittently in his earlier years and faithfully in his maturity.
In it he records his anguish, struggles with faith, guilt at drinking and infidelity, sense of rejection and self-laceration, particularly in the years that he prepared for and carried out his major writing: the six-volume history of Australia. These dramatic preoccupations often colour his historical and autobiographical writing.
The great virtue of Matthews' work is his attentiveness to the text of Clark's private and public writing. He weighs the text for meaning and for rhetorical colour. He does not simply claim connections between the diary and the history, but demonstrates them.
He also illuminates Clark's writing by comparing it with similar passages from other writers, like Lawson and Orwell, with whom Clark identified himself. He explores the way in which Clark's imagination worked, putting his own gifts of style totally at the service of exposition.
To carry out this delicate task, Matthews needs, and deploys, the skills of a trained reader. But he goes beyond literary criticism in his work. He inevitably invites the reader to pass judgement on Manning Clark as a human being.
Matthews is anything but judgemental, and his work finally evokes admiration of Clark and sympathy for him. The life of one who could be drawn to such a huge enterprise as the history of Australia, and who over two decades could carry it through in the face of such constant and terrible self-doubt, sensitivity to criticism, and self-laceration, is a life to be celebrated.
If Clark was oversensitive to criticism, he was also strongly, sometimes brutally, criticised by his peers and by journalists. He was an early target in what have come to be called the history wars. Matthews quotes Clark's critics, and for the most part allows their comments to judge themselves.
But the quality of his biography suggests how destructive it is to describe arguments about