But this is an elementary demurral. A more adventurous position on Clark’s career would be to ask whether, wanting to be a writer but lacking the talent to form a style, he might not have practised history as a genre of writing where style would matter least, and yet still have awarded himself the privileges of the artist, one of them being to make things up. I might say that my own rule, when making things up, is to acknowledge the ungovernable urge to self-glorification, and render it more palatable by invoking the likelihood that there are some historic events – the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for example – which remain important even though the part I played in them was slight.

At one stage of my career, I used to tell my contemporaries that I took part in the Battle of El Alamein. But at the time that I unfolded the vividly recollected concrete details of my desert campaigns I was still a schoolboy, and there were older schoolboys, some of them capable of elementary arithmetic, to remind me at the point of a knuckle that few three-year-olds ever went into action against Rommel. (Or, indeed, against Montgomery: sometimes I enrolled myself in the Afrika Korps.) But Clark was a grown man, indeed an old grown man, when he pretended that he had been close enough to Kristallnacht to see the broken glass. Come on. The glass had all been swept up weeks before, and it is high time by now to sweep up the fragments of the great soothsayer’s reputation for inviolable veracity, and admit that on at least one occasion he wrote unreliable memoirs.

Clive James, Cambridge, UK

Brian Matthews replies

I reckon Clive James did make some such statement about the ‘lying art’ of autobiography, but it’s years ago that I seem to remember coming across it (about the time of Unreliable Memoirs), and I’m certainly not going to push it. My interest in writing ‘What Dymphna Knew’ was to explore the complexities in which the Kristallnacht experience was entangled for both Dymphna, who was there, and Clark, who arrived two weeks later, and thus to offer some illumination of Clark’s appropriation of it. His first published reference, as distinct from mentions in interviews, to his being in Bonn on that night was in The Quest for Grace, an autobiography. If an ‘exemption’ is involved, it certainly doesn’t slide seamlessly into the writing of history, and I made no claim that it did or should. Likewise, nothing in my treatment of the events has anything remotely to do with claims, if they exist, for Clark’s ‘reputation for inviolable veracity’: what I may think about such claims for Clark cannot be gleaned from anything I’ve said in ‘What Dymphna Knew’.

Clive James’s own construction of the events – that Clark inserted himself into the Kristallnacht story of ‘mass suffering’ because ‘mass suffering didn’t mean much to him’ – is breathtaking in its glibness and is not an explanation, as it stands, that will throw much light on Dymphna and Manning’s Kristallnacht.

To offer, in my turn, an ‘elementary demurral’: when Clark arrived in Bonn on Saturday, 25 November 1938, there were, on Dymphna’s evidence, not Clark’s, abundant signs of the Ausschreitungen, as she calls them – ‘the outrages against the Jews’. There was still broken glass lying around, and many of the shops not vandalised retained the stickers they had been ‘plastered with’ – ‘Juden Unerwunscht’. The synagogue was a newly burnt-out shell. Of Clark on his arrival she says: ‘Not even his wide reading in history and politics had prepared him for what he saw and felt in Bonn.’ ‘The spectre of brutality’ drove them to escape from the streets ‘to the nearby woods’. Nazi diligence had not entirely laundered the scene; in two weeks that would scarcely have been possible. So Clark most certainly got more than a whiff of the acrid smoke and heard the crunch of glass underfoot, even if he had to supply the central action from Dymphna’s account and from his own extrapolations.

Holding Clark accountable

Dear Editor,

Brian Matthews, in his essay ‘What Dymphna Knew’, seems to want to excuse Manning Clark for positioning himself falsely as an eyewitness to an important historical event. As a reader – and I am sure I speak for most readers here – I approach autobiography with a different set of expectations from that with which I read fiction. Matthews cites the example of a mistake he made in his own memoir, where he conflated two minor visual details into one and was convinced that his memory was correct. But this was an accident; memory, after all, is slippery, and readers will make allowance for human failings. Circumstantial pressures notwithstanding, autobiographers have an ethical responsibility to tell the truth as well as they can possibly recall it. Here, although it may be only a detail, Manning Clark has deliberately told a lie and must be held accountable. And surely this casts a shadow over the rest of his work.

Leigh Swinbourne, Bellerive, Tas.

Perpetuating myths

Dear Editor,

I was shocked by John Hirst’s ill-informed polemic uncritically supporting Louis Nowra’s Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal men’s violence against women and children (May 2007). Nowra is a playwright and a concerned citizen, so can almost be excused. But Hirst is a senior academic, and his numerous comments perpetuating myths similar to those peddled by right-wing think-tanks such as the Centre for Independent Studies must be challenged.

Hirst rehearses the well-worn conservative critique that the academy somehow colludes to hide oppression of women by indigenous men. This is patently untrue, as is evident in crucial examples from writers such as Diane Bell and Topsy Napurrula Nelson’s ‘Speaking about Rape is Everyone’s Business’, published in 1989, to Peter Sutton’s ‘Politics of Suffering’ (2001). What academics debate is whether violence in Aboriginal communities has strong continuities with pre-colonial practice; or whether it is mainly due to the dispossession and marginalisation that has resulted from state and settler colonisation of the continent.

On factual evidence, it is sometimes hard to differentiate Hirst from Nowra. But the statement that ‘the policy of encouraging Aborigines to remain on their ancestral lands was prompted in part by the respect and admiration for their traditional culture’ is Hirst and is largely fiction. Aboriginal people moved onto their lands when the law gave them legal title to their ancestral lands and when the policy shift from assimilation to self-determination provided people with the means to escape authoritarian régimes on government settlements and missions. It was indigenous agency that resulted in the outstations movement, not some state or public benevolence.

Hirst’s commentary, ‘When all the men are drunk and the kids are sniffing petrol, traditional culture is not going to be passed on’, is gratuitously insulting and ignores the facts. First, the National Health Survey 2001 shows that the majority of Aboriginal people (fifty-six per cent) are non-drinkers, a higher proportion than non-Aborigines. Second, the latest results from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey (2007) shows that people living in remote and very remote communities are more likely to be non-drinkers and less likely to be high-risk drinkers than in non-remote communities. Other ludicrous comments by Hirst include the suggestion that no education is currently occurring, which is wrong, but, even if true, reflects a failure of governments and not of indigenous people; and his observation that people are on the dole in perpetuity ignores the desire of thousands of Aboriginal people to participate in the work-for-the dole CDEP scheme, a mutual obligation scheme that has been in place for thirty years.

Hirst’s policy proposals are silly. The statistical evidence from the Labour Force Survey (2006) shows that forcing ‘most of the men and young people’ from remote settlements and townships will not magically improve their employment prospects; and migration back for ‘ceremony, art and dance’ would hardly sit comfortably with mainstream labour market requirements. Hirst’s only mild rebuke of Nowra is that he does not specify how his policy recommendations (including the furphy about the media being banned from Aboriginal lands) will be effected. Hirst does no better with his proposals. The cliché ‘We learn from history that people do not learn from history’ can be readily applied to Hirst, an historian. Assimilation was abandoned as government policy because it was expensive, immoral and ineffective. Do we really want to revisit this failed state project? If Hirst is going to use a book review as a self-indulgent means to promote his own one-sided ‘history wars’ views, he should do so with more rigour.

Jon Altman, Australian National University, ACT

Tea with Elizabeth Jolley

Dear Editor,

I met Elizabeth Jolley in March 1989. She offered me tea in the kitchen of her Claremont house. She wore an apron over an old-fashioned white blouse. ‘How do you feel about your literary fame coming so late in your life?’ I asked. Her response was a grim ‘I can hack it’. She was a person whose wicked humour was hidden behind a housewifely exterior.

From that meeting until June 2002, we maintained a lively correspondence. Why with me? I think she liked to have a link in Austria, a country that might have been her home, and to which she was connected through her command of German. Sometimes she was candid about her unkind mother, the pretentious Grete Fehr from Vienna, who pretended to her family, and later to the (in)famous ‘Mr Berrington’, that she had an aristocratic background, when in reality she was a railway clerk’s daughter. In one letter sent at Christmas 2000, she writes how her mother wrecked a Christmas Eve (it must have been 1940 or 1941) for no other reason than that Elizabeth had come home late from hospital, where she was a nurse, and that, without asking permission, had run herself a bath. ‘She screamed and screamed at me,’ Jolley remembered; the evening was utterly ruined for all. A fictional portrait of her mother can be found in The Sugar Mother (1988), in which Edwin Page falls an easy prey to Leila’s mother, who offers a surrogate fatherhood to Edwin by providing sexual access to her already pregnant daughter. It is a disturbing novel considering that, if it is Grete who is portrayed, then her ‘accommodating’ Leila must bear traits of the author.

Jolley’s autobiographical fiction trilogy of the 1990s is a full-scale treatment of her stormy life and affairs from about 1940 to 1950, but the volta comes with The Orchard Thieves. From then she began a slow rehabilitation of both father (Lovesong [1997], An Accommodating Spouse, [1999]) and mother (An Innocent Gentleman, [2001]), a project that must have been draining and exhausting. Perhaps it is no coincidence that only a few months after her last novel, she began that rapid decline about which we were all so concerned and sad.

Adi Wimmer, Klagenfurt, Austria

What is art?

Dear Editor,

In his review ‘Cornflakes in Your Canon’ (March 2007), James Ley issued a provocative challenge. ‘Anyone who still thinks,’ he thundered, ‘that mass cultural forms such as ... popular music cannot develop sophisticated aesthetic principles or produce powerful works of art needs to broaden his or her horizons.’ To which I might wryly respond by saying that anyone writing such a self-satisfied sentence ought to show a greater disposition to use his words clearly and carefully. What, I wonder, does Ley mean by ‘culture’ in that manifesto? Might he not be eliding a number of different ways in which the word has been used into a single unhelpful mélange? Also, that word ‘popular’ is nettlesome in its ambiguity. And, I might further ask, is it the ‘art form’ or those who write about it which ‘develops’ these sophisticated ‘principles’? It seems a silly comment which required more careful thinking and formulation.

The real challenge, though, is Ley’s portentous reference to ‘powerful works of art’. What is this power to which he so lightly refers? Is it emotional, intellectual, social or simply brutal financial power? And, hardest of all: what is ‘Art’?

John Carmody, Sydney, NSW

One-night Wagner

Dear Editor,

Michael Shmith, in his review of Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (April 2007), asks how long it might be before a ‘Ring in one evening’ becomes a reality, given that ours is a society ‘that increasingly values brevity’. In fact, Der Ring an 1 Abend has been doing the rounds of German opera houses for more than a decade.

Although conceived by German humourist Loriot, Der Ring an 1 Abend is not a spoof as such (unlike Anna Russell’s Ring ‘analysis’), but a witty and insightful paraphrase for speaker, eleven singers and orchestra. Pre-dating Loriot’s version is David Seaman’s deadly serious four-hour ‘chamber’ Ring, commissioned in 1990 by Nuremberg’s Pocket Opera Company. Indeed, it was staged at Bayreuth’s Youth Culture Centre during the 2006 Bayreuth Festival. What’s more, it was produced by Philippe Arlaud, whose production of Tannhäuser was playing at Bayreuth’s other, more famous theatre.

Robert Gibson, Glebe, Tas.

Nussbaum and animal rights

Dear Editor,

It is a shame that Tamas Pataki, in an otherwise insightful review of Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice, describes the conclusions arrived at by Nussbaum regarding animals as ‘a little loopy’ (May 2007). This does a disservice to Nussbaum’s substantial argument that human relations with our fellow animals ought be grounded in, and guided by, considerations of justice. Whilst I assume that it is not Pataki’s intention, such a label serves to hinder serious engagement with the moral entitlement of animals.

The capabilities approach articulated by Nussbaum calls for respect for the dignity and value of the lives of all humans and animals, whilst acknowledging that what constitutes and facilitates the flourishing of individual lives will be species-specific. The important question to ask, as the English philosopher Mary Midgley points out in Beast and Man (1978), is what distinguishes humans among, not from, animals. To do otherwise would indeed result in loopy conclusions about both us and them.

Thomas Ryan, Goulds Country, Tas.

Encouraging notes

Dear Editor,

Annie Condon’s tantalising review (April 2007) of The Sleepers Almanac 2007 sent me straight to the Sleepers Publishing website to order the book. However, I beg to differ with her statement regarding the ‘patronising trend of publishers to include bookclub questions’ in their editions.

I can understand that an educated reader who is totally immersed in the world of literature may find bookclub questions at the end of a novel rather condescending. My experience with a variety of people involved in bookclubs has shown that sometimes these questions greatly assist and empower less experienced readers. Many people join a bookclub as a way into the world of literature and ideas, perhaps not having had adequate exposure to it at school – particularly women who have spent years raising their children and/or in the workforce, and who suddenly find time to join bookclubs in order to exchange ideas beyond a limited environment. Lack of education, or a phase in life when reading time is sparse, can leave readers feeling inadequate when joining a group whose discussion of a novel ranges from subjective opinions and character assessment to literary criticism and sometimes highly intellectual discussion.

For these people, publishers’ suggestions for consideration of theme, plot and characters offer ways to overcome shyness or trepidation in the company of more practised readers and to explore unfamiliar ideas. These editorial prompts are encouraging rather than condescending. Despite being an avid reader since childhood, having had the advantage of an arts education, and feeling quite confident of my ability to form my own opinions, I still regard these prompts as motivating additions. They are, after all, not required reading for those who might find them presumptuous.

Karen Brown, Port Macquarie, NSW