Manning Clark's Tragic Grandeur - in letters

Ever, Manning

Selected Letters of Manning Clark 1938-1991

edited by Roslyn Russell, Allen and Unwin

Reviewed: 9 August 2008

Historian Professor Manning Clark was a catalytic figure in the formation of Australian self-image. His quest to construct a coherent sense of what it means to be Australian could strike cynics as tendentious, and strike angry sparks from either radical or conservative historians with competing visions of Australian history. Even those who reject his historical interpretation owe him at least the debt of provocation.

What value then is this volume of selected letters, authorized by the family and far from comprehensive? The material is exclusively Clark’s outgoing letters.  Like the sound of one hand clapping, we read Clark’s intense or humorous responses to voices that we can only infer. The effect is starkest in relation to the central correspondence of his life: that with Dymphna, his great love, wife and life’s companion through significant domestic drama. What Dymphna might have said or written to Manning at certain times would likely have scorched the page, had family and publishers agreed to print it.

This collection can better be read as a progressive self-portrait, a verbal analog for the self-portrait series of visual artists such as Rembrandt and van Gogh. The earliest letters (from Oxford, 1938) portray an earnest young post-graduate seeking out how to draw maximum academic nourishment from the British tradition, while sensitive to the slights offered so casually by the British to the “colonials” in their midst.

Over the decades, there are such cultural romances with Britain, with Ireland, with continental Enlightenment Europe, with (Potemkinised?) Soviet Russia, and finally with the Harvard world of the American liberal intelligentsia.

The letters reveal a man always in the process of self-construction and deconstruction – he refers often to himself in the third person in ways that might seem vain if they were not humorous and self-deprecatory. 

From the 1950s until his death in 1991, Manning Clark gave public support to many “progressive” causes and was considered radical, almost dangerous, by conservative academics and political commentators. 

The clergyman’s son sets out like a character in Pilgrim’s Progress, determined to be recognized for good works and to overcome human frailty in himself, while suspicious of anything smelling of superficial piety. By the end of his life, significant achievements and public recognition seem not to have assured him that he has justified his life through his works.  Manning Clark, fact or fiction, emerges from this volume with a quality he often ascribes to the human condition – a tragic grandeur.

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