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I have not yet been able to do more than pick up and flick through a copy of Brian Matthews’s biography of Manning Clark. In my brief look it was actually a bit hard to get past one of the opening epigraph, a quote from Anthony Beevor:

I find official records can be full of rubbish and official lies while a diary is more historically valid. It is contemporary and written in a real voice with no reason to lie.

Really? A diary has no reason to lie?

That aside for a minute, Beevor seems to be implying that official records are not ‘contemporary’ or written in a ‘real voice’. Perhaps he has read too many of the records of politicians and senior military commanders, people who have every reason to manipulate official records. Perhaps he’s even thinking of the published or unpublished memoirs of such people; they are obviously not ‘contemporary’. But the average bureaucrat, and I should know because I am one, creates a lot of records in the course of their work and they are often thinking more about what they will eat for lunch than the effect their words will have on posterity. Such records can be perfectly frank and impartial. I say ‘can be’, for of course it is not invariably so. It will be up to the researcher to decide, based on whatever contextual information is at hand.

But back to diaries. Reviewers of Matthews’s book seem unconvinced about the way Beevor’s words have apparently guided Matthews’s use of Manning Clark’s very extensive diaries. Referring to the diaries Geoffrey Bolton (in The Australian) remarks that the biographer is ‘under challenge to resist being beguiled by the old storyteller’s myths about himself.’ Clark would have known that his diaries would become historical sources.

Alan Atkinson (The Australian literary review) suggests that Clark’s writing in all its forms, including the diary, was always ‘a kind of performance’. He adds a thought from Harold Bloom, that ‘ “self-overhearing” is a driving force in all western literature’ since Shakespeare. Clark, Atkinson says, was addicted to ’self-overhearing’. So a diary, I reckon, is the key medium for that to take place.

For The Age Peter Cochrane wrote that ‘The main problem arising from literary-leaning biography of this kind is the preoccupation with the private self.’ Matthews, Cochrane thinks, is ‘mesmerised’ by the riches of the diaries: ‘ .. captured by them and so, in a way, has become as obsessed as Clark - obsessed with his private thoughts, his utterly tormented and self-hating conversation.’ The result is imbalance in the biography in favour of the private man over the public one. Still, Matthews is able, according to Cochrane, to show how the private man flowed into the published work. So the personal record of one person has had a significant effect on the how Australians view their past.

Most reviewers suggest that it is a pity that we do not get much of a sense of how Clark operated in the real world, of his successes as a teacher and mentor. ‘If you take Clark’s dairy conversations as the man entire,’ Cochrane says, ‘you’d assume he was a social defective. He was not.’ Humphrey McQueen, for The Canberra times, is grumpy on this point, and further adds that Dymphna Clark falls victim to Matthews’s ‘dependence’ on the diaries.

There is now, of course, an edition of Clark’s letters, edited by Roslyn Russell, which is the place to explore Clark through different eyes. After published suggestions that Lyndal Ryan had had an affair with Clark in 1972, Ryan wrote a lengthy denial for The Canberra times yesterday pointing to the letters between herself and Clark as proof that this was intellectual partnership, not a sexual liaison.

From all this it sounds like there could hardly be a life more profoundly shaped, and made more influential, by records and records-creation, than this one.