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HISTORIANS - SUSPECT HISTORY: A REVIEW |
| CRAVEN
ON MCQUEEN ON CLARK Peter Craven Humphrey
McQueen It
is hard to recall a more shameful episode in the history of Australian
journalism than the saga of Manning Clark, the Communist Spy. The
Courier Mail, under Chris Mitchell, cobbled together a story which
suggested that because the nation's best-known historian had once been
seen, in 1970, with what some people may have imagined was an Order of
Lenin, then he was an agent of influence for the Soviets. The Press
Council, responding to a group of complainants which included not only a
former Governor-General (Sir Zelman Cowen) and a former State Governor
(Davis McCaughey) but the widow of Geoffrey Fairbairn -- the man
supposedly appalled by the medal wearing -- thought the paper should
publish a retraction. And, if there is anything cheering about the whole
ugly business, it is that the nation's broadsheet press and, more
particularly, its -- often `conservative' -- op. ed. columnists, like
Paddy McGuinness and Robert Manne, dismissed the charges brought against
Clark as drivel, even if they were a little inclined to lecture his
ghost about history and the evils of being soft on communism. Of
all the pieces which the Clark cock-up provoked, none came within cooee
of the long essay on the subject by Humphrey McQueen which was published
in Australian Book Review. It was an impassioned piece of
demolition work which also managed to be a generous portrait of some of
the other players like Geoffrey Fairbairn. In this remarkably rapid
expansion of that essay McQueen maintains much of the vivacity of this
(even if he spreads his riches somewhat thinner) in the first half of
the book but then in the second turns back to snarl at the Robert Mannes
of this world, as well as the Geoffrey Blaineys. At least at first
glance it is a vain, grandstanding performance which exhibits a
self-regard that is at the edge of the grotesque. But
first things first. The demolition of The Courier Mail's evidence
is done with great forensic gusto. We now know that the medal in
question was not an Order of Lenin. McQueen makes barristerial mincemeat
of the recollection of Les Murray who does not know what time night
falls in Canberra, had always been inclined to think the country was
dominated by Marxist élites and who admitted to David Marr that, in any
case, Manning's assertion that the gong was real may have been
'puckish', that is, facetious and leg-pulling. According
to McQueen, Geoffrey Fairbairn's supposed outrage to the journalist
Peter Kelly may have been an example of the same kind of jape. McQueen
is particularly good on the courtly Fairbairn, a passionate
anti-Leninist who commanded the respect of the radicals who enrolled for
his classes on 'Revolts and Insurgencies' and someone who defended
Manning Clark's jeremiads in the post-'75 period, saying that his
'noble' friend was immune to the disgusting 'insouciance' of the times.
His widow says, quite flatly, that if Geoffrey Fairbairn had believed
that Clark was the recipient of the Order of Lenin he would have walked
out of the ANU History Department. McQueen
attempts to place Clark's friendship with Ian Milner, who seems to have
'defected' to Czechoslovakia in 1950, in the context of Clark's vast
array of versatile friendships (with Barry Humphries and Blainey and
Zelman Cowen) and à propos of his enduring gratitude to Milner for
giving him his first academic job. He spoke of him too, in his memoirs,
as a true believer who would never try to convert you to the communist
cause. If
McQueen's grasp slackens at all in the first, masterly, part of this
book -- the negative half -- it is in his defence of that very odd book,
Meeting Soviet Man. It's not edifying to be reminded that Clark's
trip to Russia came three days after the Soviet Writers' Union (his
specific hosts) expelled Pasternak for allowing Dr Zhivago to be
published in the West. Clark worries this question in the book, as he
would, but does say that of course the Soviets had a case. This is not
something to rend garments over but it has to be admitted that Humphrey
McQueen's defence of Clark's remark that Lenin was Christ-like in his
compassion remains unconvincing for all the vigour of his hand stands. Anyone
who has ever been a romantic left winger remembers the passage quoted in
both Lukacs' biography and Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station
(derived, I think, from Gorky) in which Lenin says that there is nothing
greater than Beethoven's Appassionata and how the trouble with
music is that it makes you want to stroke heads whereas now we have to
knock them and knock them hard. Manning would have loved it. But we
don't really need Humphrey McQueen telling us that we need to have
recourse to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity to
understand Clark's equivocations about the Soviet Union and the figure
of Lenin. Yes, he appalled Judah Waten by wanting to have a bob each way
but it is disconcerting that, in the wake of the suppression of the
Hungarian uprising, Manning could say that he believed Soviet society
was 'the first to create equality and fraternity'. In
the latter part of his book, Playing the Man, McQueen gives a
vivid portrait of Manning Clark as an individual while being needlessly
dismissive of those he disagrees with. There are stories of Clark, as
head of the History Department, saying that he represented the general
as opposed to the popular will and there is an especially vivid touch
where McQueen says that Manning although their relationship was distant
and correct (in other respects) would come up behind him, grasp him by
the upper arms and say, 'Remember the first is love.' Apparently this
always happened after lunch. Manning
Clark was not wrong to enjoin the greatest of the commandments on
Humphrey McQueen. Indeed there are moments in Suspect History
when his anecdote of Fairbairn's providing him with a doorknocker with
the McQueen coat of arms -- they agreed it was three bastards rampant --
takes on a new meaning. He is appalled that Robert Manne, in particular,
can have defended Clark against the scurrilous charges only to treat the
Courier Mail campaign as 'a grave injustice to his own
high-minded campaign to demolish Clark's history'. This
is unfair, even if you do weary of Manne's tendency to suggest that
everyone who has ever flirted with communism is tainted with the crimes
of Josef Stalin, and it leads McQueen to a volley of ugly and needless
sneers about Manne's literary critical competence (which seems fine to
me) as well as the gross inaccuracy that he has never taken on board the
historical significance of the slaughter of the First World War -- a
charge which Manne refuted very soundly in The Australian by
citing his review of the great Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, whom he
admires. McQueen's
references to literature work like a nervous tic in this book. Not only
does the reference to Empson verge on pretentiousness but he is capable
of remarks like 'I am less selective...and more like George Orwell'. He
also says that Gertrude Stein's remark about the 'village explainer'
which he applies in a somewhat complex moment of loyalty to Clark was
said of Ford Maddox Ford. 'Excellent if you are a village. If not, not'
was in fact said not of that metropolitan Englishman but of Ezra Pound
and is a much more penetrating comment on Pound's sometimes hokey and
often folksy harangues. McQueen
clearly has his reservations about Clark's prophet-like stance, post
1975, and cites Manning's own tip that he was a bit like Clym Yeobright
at the end of Hardy's The Return of the Native, preaching on
sound and obvious topics. He is himself sound enough, however, when he
says that Clark attempted to tell the story of Australia in its own
voice or in the medley of voices, refracted through whatever Victorian
version of Biblical or Prayer Book English, of the players he chose. He
is right that Clark was never in any sense a Marxist and that even the
dark mutterings about the philistine middle class owe more to De
Tocqueville than Marx. For McQueen, Clark's History 'told of a
clash of belief systems around a cluster of biographies'. He thinks the
last volume is the most flawed, not least because the narrative voice is
not so precisely adjusted to the content and because the cut-off point
means he has to foreshorten both Menzies and Curtin before they reach
their days of greatness. This would seem, on the face of it, like
a rather qualified two cheers for Manning Clark, the historian, but it
is linked, in practice, with an intense defence of Clark as an innovator
who was more revolutionary than we realise in putting Australian history
on the map and who, as Russell Ward said, has taught us to take for
granted the religious formations that shaped our society. McQueen who is
at his best a more 'natural' writer than Clark is also passionate in his
defence of the man who as a syllabus maker would never budge on the
necessity of his students reading the great narrative masters:
Thucydides, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. He cites Geoffrey Blainey's
question: who in the history of writing in Australia has produced the
sheer volume of polished prose that Clark has? |