These themes are pursued through the medium of literary biography. It is carefully plotted, following the subject’s life-course and the posthumous revelations, but looping back to take up particular moments as their larger significance becomes apparent. It also breaks off periodically to consider Clark’s writings and their reception, and some of them receive a sustained treatment. The life and the work are layered, the documentary evidence restricted in its coverage and context, but read in the light of Clark’s memoirs, correspondence and, above all, the diaries he kept for more than fifty years.

It is a literary biography also in its range of allusions, not just to Clark’s own canon of writers – Tolstoy, Hardy, Ibsen, Dostoevsky – but to sustained, and occasionally strained, comparisons between Clark and other storytellers such as Charles Dickens and critics such as George Orwell. Rather as in Peter Ackroyd’s life of Dickens (1990), Matthews’s Clark is always present within his writings, sometimes deliberately, as in his conscious identification with Henry Lawson, and sometimes unwittingly, as in the projection of his own concerns onto the leading figures of A History of Australia (1962–87). Finally, it is a biography that eschews any overt explanatory method, relying instead on the author’s reflections on what he finds. Matthews does not shy from censure of Clark’s betrayals and self-absorption, but sees his lifelong preoccupation with his failings as the source of his artistry.

Brian Matthews began this biography in 1996, five years after Manning Clark died, and with the support of his widow, Dymphna. Brian was a friend of their son Axel, and a literary scholar, creative writer and essayist who had written an innovative biography of Louisa Lawson (1987) and had recently returned from the chair of Australian Studies at the Menzies Centre in London. He was undoubtedly well equipped to take the measure of Manning, the writer and public commentator; there was keen interest in how he would deal with the complexities of C.M.H Clark, the historian.

Hostilities had already commenced. In 1993 Quadrant published the posthumous attack on Clark by his publisher Peter Ryan (Matthews deploys to good effect Ryan’s earlier extravagant praise). Carl Bridge edited a volume of essays on this and other aspects of Clark’s career in 1994. In 1996 the Courier-Mail gathered eight pages of vituperation to accompany its accusation that Clark had been a Soviet agent; and Humphrey McQueen’s rebuttal, Suspect History, appeared in the following year.

Meanwhile, John Iremonger commissioned Michael Cathcart to undertake an abridgment of Clark’s six-volume History for Melbourne University Press, which subsequently published Clark’s postgraduate thesis on Tocqueville (2000). The establishment of Manning Clark House promoted further remembrance, and Roslyn Russell’s selection of Clark’s letters appeared earlier this year.

As Matthews worked on his biography, Stephen Holt published A Short History of Manning Clark (1999), which built on his earlier historiographical monograph and drew on a wide range of new information from archival sources. More recently, Mark McKenna began a more substantial biography, which is likely to appear soon. McKenna provided an early instalment of his findings in an essay on Clark and Kristallnacht that appeared in a book I edited last year with Sheila Fitzpatrick (and Matthews gave his own reading of this episode in an essay published in May 2007 by ABR).

In 1996, then, Matthews seemed to hold the omega stone of this charged subject; ten years later it appeared there was little left untold. He began with exclusive access to the Clark diaries, but they were subsequently opened to others, and more than one reader in the Manuscripts Room of the National Library was hunched over the contents of the Clark papers. What was left for the original authorised biographer to disclose? How might the familiar elements of the life be worked anew? Could the discordant parts of this singular figure be brought into coherent unity?

The vigils at the shrine provide the biographical motif. Manning Clark was a man of acute intelligence and low self-esteem, restless and impatient, oversensitive and emotionally volatile, consumed by his failings. The early chapters relate the tribulations of his parents’ marriage, the father an Anglican vicar of humble origin, the mother socially superior and nursing her resentments. She projects her ambitions onto her second son, who carries them into Melbourne Grammar as a scholarship boy and recoils from the brutality of the boarding house. Clark rehearsed these early experiences in autobiographical fiction and arranged them in his first book of autobiography, The Puzzles of Childhood (1989). As Matthews explains, this book was shaped by its author’s subsequent preoccupations (‘it is remarkable how little childhood there is in The Puzzles of Childhood’), and he made memory serve them. It was while writing Puzzles, late in life and tormented by his own marital betrayal, that he discovered his father’s adultery.

Clark’s marriage is central to this biography, and its consequences are far-reaching. Manning Clark and Dymphna Lodewyckx met as undergraduates at the University of Melbourne and travelled together as graduate students in 1938, he to Oxford and she to Bonn. Her parents thought him a poor match for their talented daughter, and no daughter-in-law could please his mother. From Manning’s loneliness and uncertainty in England came the precipitate marriage that cut short Dymphna’s studies and led to early motherhood. From his stratagem for bringing her to him came the visit to Germany in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht. And from his hostile relationship to the Lodewyckxes came the fanciful account of what he had witnessed in Nazi Germany.

The unequal nature of this relationship is quickly established. Dymphna had given up much for him, and he lent heavily on her. ‘Life with H,’ Matthews quotes from the diary in February 1939, ‘makes me feel good, almost righteous, and very, very strong.’ But it was a needy strength. From the beginning, Manning looked to Dymphna for support and approval. She was the custodian of his frailties: Manning, she told Matthews, felt keenly his lack of military service during the war (apart from his epilepsy they both knew he would ‘physically crumble under the strain’). She had to accommodate his career, including the repeated uprooting of the family, his initial frustrations, later success and black despair in the face of criticism.

Then came his overwrought attachments to other women and his need for forgiveness. As Matthews observes, Clark’s distress was remarkable for its self-absorption. Even when Dymphna was most wounded, he could only see her as punishing him. ‘My life is built on two big lies,’ he writes in his diary in 1963. ‘My wife hates my work and therefore hates me.’ A decade later, when he learns he might have endocarditis, he records that he was ‘promptly punished and whipped by Dymphna, who, when most needed became punisher and avenger for my crimes against her’. The same self-pitying reproach is sometimes apparent in his relations with his children, when he feels them to be inattentive to his direction or repeating his own failures; but the intense love and loyalty of the family outweigh this sentiment.

All of these vulnerabilities came to be contained in the outwardly grave demeanour, the beard, the hat, the prophetic manner. This was Manning’s mask, the mask of the celebrated historian and public figure. The two went together, though the latter came to dominate in his last years, when he was constantly accepting requests to apply his gnomic phrases to the most unlikely subjects, even as his health collapsed. ‘Why am I doing this?’ Matthews has him asking himself in the bicentennial year. Part of the answer seems to be that he was drawn to the limelight, part that he drugged his discontent with incessant activity.

But before then the creator of the great History was uppermost. Matthews provides an extended account of how the History was conceived, and productive readings of the early volumes. He is mindful of the literary technique, the imaginative purpose, the pitch and rhythm of the prose. He is attentive to the diction and style, and the editorial challenges it presented to the publisher. As in his similar treatments of Meeting Soviet Man (1960) and In Search of Henry Lawson (1978), the literary analysis is discriminating and observant. Citing John Hirst’s assessment, Matthews suggests a growing loss of control over the later volumes of the History, and his treatment of them is more perfunctory.

The diaries enable Matthews to reveal the depths of Clark’s despair in the face of criticism, and the determination with which he persevered. He summarises reviews of each volume, but it is here that the dichotomy of the man and the mask breaks down, for the reviews give little sense of the torment they aroused. Neither Clark’s personal anguish nor public gravity convey the issues at stake in the writing and reception of the History, for that requires consideration of Clark as an historian.

In the prologue, where Matthews anticipates the man of unremitting doubt and stern, unsmiling visage, he records that Clark would become ‘one of the great university teachers of his age’ and ‘then revolutionised the whole discipline with his heterodox views’.

The claim for Clark as a teacher is pursued first in his time as history master at Geelong Grammar, where the recollections of a former student, Bruce Anderson, are a principal source, and then at the University of Melbourne, where Peter Ryan performs the same role. The restricted testimony is odd; others at Geelong Grammar have recalled Clark as their teacher, as have other Melbourne undergraduates. Some of them, such as Ken and Amirah Inglis, and Geoffrey Blainey, could amplify the record. Kathleen Fitzpatrick was the acknowledged exemplar as a teacher, initially censorious of Clark and later one of his closest friends, but she has the most shadowy presence in this book, and her own papers were not used.

We are told that Clark was a ‘born teacher’ but very little of what he taught and how he taught it. The records of the history department at the University of Melbourne contain a paper that Clark wrote to guide new tutors in how to conduct classes, for the department was attentive to pedagogy and he took it particularly seriously. Some of his former students, such as Ian Turner and Noel Ebbels, reappear later in the biography, but the nature of their connection to Clark goes unexplained. So, too, his colleague ‘Gardiner’ appears in a letter back to the Melbourne department describing the ‘young and enthusiastic staff’ at the Canberra University College, without any recognition that this was Laurie Gardiner, who would subsequently teach at Melbourne.

For that matter, Clark’s own study of history remains vague. Why did he choose to major in it? What subjects did he study and what sort of introduction to Australian history did it provide? We are told that at Oxford he had read ‘works on Luther, Hayes and Ruggiero’. He might well have read works on Luther, but he was drawing on Guido de Ruggiero’s study of European liberalism and the American historian Carlton Hayes’s survey of European history.

These are not the only failures of historical context. There was no Uniting Church in Belgrave when Clark’s father took charge of the Anglican one, nor was Methodism a product of the Reformation; the linkages of the family religion with Melbourne Grammar and Trinity College are overlooked, and Jill Roe’s exploration of how the Reverend Charles Clark was caught between the competing traditions within the Church of England is missed. Matthews relates how Clark attended a lecture by the Duchess of Atholl while at Oxford, but fails to observe that this celebrated dissident, the first woman to serve in a Conservative ministry, was a leading critic of appeasement.

Clark made his career as an academic historian and became something else. The question of when and why he rejected the discipline and its professional conventions is crucial. Matthews provides a thumbnail sketch of the professoriate at the time Clark joined it, though he misses Fred Alexander, Gordon Greenwood and John Ward, who led three of the eight (not seven) history departments in 1950.

Clark was appointed to the newest of them, at Canberra University College, and his major publication at that time, the first volume of the Select Documents in Australian History (1950), was a model of academic orthodoxy, providing the primary sources for students to learn the practices of historical interpretation in the format of the time. The second volume (1955) signalled a departure from the conventional understanding of the subject, as Matthews notes, but he fails to see the connection with Clark’s inaugural lecture, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, where his challenge to the ‘false comforters’ of secular meliorism was delivered.

Here, Clark was breaking from the radical nationalist tradition of his Melbourne circle, and surely he was also recoiling from the controversies his involvement with the left had created in Canberra. It was this alternative reading of Australian history that attracted the attention of Peter Coleman, who sought to enlist him in the Association for Cultural Freedom’s ‘counter-revolution in Australian history’. Clark would become a member of the editorial board of its journal, Quadrant.

It was at this juncture, also, that Clark sought to return to Melbourne and the new chair of history created in his former department. Matthews relates the problems this caused Max Crawford, his former mentor, and John La Nauze, who would fill the chair, though he misses the complexities in their earlier and subsequent relationships, on which the La Nauze papers would have guided him. Clark’s dealings with Keith Hancock, the professor of the privileged research department up the hill from his own teaching one, are also omitted, apart from Hancock’s ill-conceived attempt to have Clark edit the Australian Dictionary of Biography in partnership with the impossible pedant Malcolm Ellis.

These professional tensions came together in the arguments over the History. The first volume attracted a fierce attack from Ellis, which was cast as an antiquarian’s correction of an academic, along with more measured criticism from academics disturbed by its departure from their norms. Coleman’s attempt to bridge the rupture between Ellis and Clark at a special seminar of the Association for Cultural Freedom resulted in Clark’s indignant defence of Dymphna’s translation of non-English sources, and his eventual withdrawal from the Association. Crawford and Hancock were among the university historians who appreciated what Clark was trying to do, but their reassurance did not salve his injury. Nor did he distinguish between the different grounds of criticism of the first volume. From this time he turned his back on the Dryasdusts and withdrew from much of the disciplinary activity of the academic profession. Far from revolutionising the discipline with his heterodox views, his vast and idiosyncratic History sat outside it.

All this is to say that Brian Matthews’s lack of familiarity with history leaves his life of the historian incomplete. This is not a biography that encompasses its subject’s working life or explores the historiographical dimensions of the subject – but then Manning Clark always insisted that the scaffolding should be removed from the finished work. Rather, it is a perceptive and absorbing account of the personal and public demons that haunted this singular artist.