Clio's Lives Read online

  sake of a good story and the moral that went with it, he continued to place

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  himself among the broken glass, even when he knew this to be untrue.

  He was knowingly in contravention of the autobiographer’s pact that he

  tell the truth and be accurate.

  One of the biographical issues raised by comparison of the two chapters

  was famously addressed in Samuel Johnson’s dismissive comment on

  Oliver Goldsmith’s treatment of the life of Thomas Parnell: ‘nobody can

  write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in

  social intercourse with him’.15 It can, of course, cut both ways. McKenna

  did not know Manning Clark, but – via Clark’s massive archive, through

  interviews, and in communication with Dymphna – he probably ended

  up ‘knowing’ his subject better than all but Clark’s closest associates.16

  Wright, by contrast, has interviewed Ramsay Cook, who preferred to stay

  at arm’s-length. Biographers, moreover, are only likely to have known

  their subjects for a phase of their lives, usually in the latter stages. Adam

  Sisman mentioned this with regard to Hugh Trevor-Roper. There were two

  Trevor-Ropers, with the younger firebrand being quenched by an older,

  mellower version, and it is this later persona that comes out more strongly

  in Sisman’s account. Sisman himself recognises that he ‘may have been

  influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude’ to a man he only

  got to know in his softer twilight years.17 Such caveats apart, it is surely

  doubtful whether any biographer would claim it a disadvantage to have

  known his or her subject. With the unexpected death of Ramsay Cook

  in July 2016, Wright experienced a sense of personal loss as well as being

  deprived of a key source.18 McKenna, on the other hand, has different

  sentiments with regard to his own subject. Given Manning Clark’s desire

  to control the narrative of his life and his intolerance of criticism, he

  probably would have disliked reading An Eye for Eternity, and McKenna

  notes that ‘when it comes to writing Clark’s life, I’d rather him dead than

  alive’.19 All the same, to have known Clark at some point in his life might

  well have been useful to his biographer.

  15 John Wilson Croker, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson: Including their Tour to the Hebrides (London: John Murray, 1848), 235.

  16 On Clark’s archive, see Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011), ch. 2. McKenna was given unimpeded access to the Clark

  Papers by Clark’s eldest son and literary executor, Sebastian Clark.

  17 Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010), xvi.

  18 See Don Wright, ‘Ramsay Cook, 1931–2016: Scholar and Friend’, activehistory.ca/2016/07/

  ramsay-cook-1931-2016-an-obituary (accessed 17 October 2016).

  19 McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, 23. The other major biography is Brian Matthews, Manning Clark: A Life (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008). See also Doug Munro, ‘“How Illuminating It Has Been”: Matthews, McKenna, and their Biographies of Manning Clark’, in Philip Payton, ed., Emigrants and Historians: Essays in Honour of Eric Richards (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2016), 98–131.

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  The third section turns to the biographical study of historians who exerted

  a major influence on the definition and emergence of the discipline of

  history. Alastair MacLachlan’s study of the intersecting lives and careers

  of G.M. Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey underlines how, in the context

  of the development of professionalised history, two historians who shared

  social and intellectual influences in nineteenth-century England could

  move in contrasting directions. While Trevelyan ultimately became part of

  the academic mainstream at Cambridge, and politically well-connected,

  Strachey remained as ‘an irritating gadfly – and a supercilious intellectual’

  in the eyes of formal historians.

  Ironically, Strachey is the better known of the two, largely thanks

  to their divergent personalities and despite the efforts of Trevelyan’s

  biographer, David Cannadine.20 Whereas Trevelyan was a high-minded

  model of rectitude, Strachey moved in the free-thinking Bloomsbury

  circle, which makes for better copy. Strachey’s higher profile also owes

  something to films such as Carrington (1995) and to a lesser extent

  Al sur de Granada (2003). Far more influential is Michael Holroyd’s

  ‘full-frontal’ biography of Strachey, which was a circuit-breaker in that it

  exponentially expanded the licence of biography to expose and disclose,

  and to venture into the realms of what had previously been considered

  off-limits and purely private.21 The result would have horrified Trevelyan,

  who wrote an unrevealing autobiography and laudatory biographies, most

  notably his Garibaldi trilogy. Trevelyan had to have conquering heroes

  (and vanquished villains) to write about, in the same way as Strachey

  needed hero-figures to debunk. Ultimately, for MacLachlan, ‘history is

  written with ideas and philosophies as well as with words’, and to explain

  the movement of Strachey and Trevelyan from friendship to antipathy

  requires the biographer’s engagement with ‘their families, backgrounds,

  lifestyles, assumptions, moments and milieus’.

  Studying the early years of a much later and very different British historian,

  Sophie Scott-Brown also probes these biographical elements in emphasising

  the emergence of Raphael Samuel as an organiser – in a political sense

  and in the development of his intellectualism. For Scott-Brown, it is

  important to recognise that ‘thinking is a fundamentally social activity’,

  20 David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: HarperCollins, 1992); and more recently Laura Trevelyan, A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and their World (London: I.B.

  Tauris, 2006).

  21 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography (2 vols; London: Heinemann, 1967–8).

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  and that Samuel’s early life shows that values and skills are inseparable.

  The young communist activist moved on to become the central figure in

  the efforts of the History Workshop movement to democratise the writing

  and dissemination of history, and Scott-Brown defines the importance

  of Samuel’s ‘distinctive form of applied intelligence’, which provides

  insight into the political approach of the Workshop as well as into

  Raphael Samuel’s own ‘complexity as an individual thinker’. The essay

  also provides an implicit reminder that matters of reputation lie at the

  heart of biography. Historians typically have short ‘shelf lives’; their

  writings are soon overtaken and readily forgotten by the next generation

  of practitioners. Samuel died as recently as 1996 and despite his being

  the subject of several journal articles, he may already be entering that

  liminal phase of being remembered or else forgotten. Scott-Brown’s

  analysis of the linkage of intellect and biography goes far to establishing

  that distinctiveness in Samuel’s life and work that will continue to be

  recognised for its influence on the discipline of history.
<
br />   Finally in this section, Sheridan Palmer connects the search for identity

  of Bernard Smith, the eminent Australian art historian, with the sense of

  anonymity that stemmed from being an illegitimate child and a fostered

  ward of the state. Smith emerged as a scholar fiercely committed not

  only to subverting uncritical views of Australian culture but also to the

  establishment of an Antipodean identity and of the country’s cultural

  autonomy. Smith was thus comparable in some respects with Manning

  Clark who, in his different way, was also deeply involved in addressing

  such concerns.22 Yet Smith also shared with Raphael Samuel the crucial

  influence of Marxism, never surrendering his ‘Marxist humanism’, or –

  as he himself put it towards the end of his life – his ability as ‘a utopian

  communist’ to believe in a future characterised by human progress. As an

  intellectual and in his influence on history as a discipline, however, Smith

  was especially noteworthy for his deployment of the skills and sensitivities

  of the art historian to trace the emergence of an ‘Antipodean psyche’ and

  to frame antipodeanism by disentangling ‘the historical, scientific, cultural

  and political forces that moulded Australian art and its modern cultural

  identity’. His often polemical but always historiographically sophisticated

  challenge to imperial forms of cultural hegemony was a defining element

  in the emergence of modern Australian cultural history.

  22 See also Sheridan Palmer, Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith (Sydney: Power

  Publications, 2016).

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  The fourth and final group of essays deals with collective biography.

  While having some affinities with histories of the historical profession –

  such as Peter Novick’s study of the fate of the ‘noble dream’ of objectivity

  among US historians, Donald Wright’s analysis of the professionalisation

  of the discipline in English Canada, or Tamson Pietsch’s examination of

  the British academic world in the era of settler colonialism23 – collective

  biographical studies nevertheless have a different and distinctive goal.

  They are characterised primarily by their focus on the intertwining of

  the lives of historians brought together by networks of varying kinds –

  whether, in terms of the essays in this section, those in a formative era

  of Australian historiography, those associated with a scholarly endeavour

  such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography ( ADB), or those associated

  with an approach to US colonial history embraced by the ‘imperial school’

  at Yale – but are frequently disparate in personal, social or gender-related

  background. While having the additional value of placing individuals

  in wider historiographical and institutional contexts, such studies more

  importantly define the impact on the lives of multiple individuals of their

  professional and other interactions.

  Thus, Geoffrey Bolton’s study of the networking that underpinned the

  emergence of a professionalised body of historians in Australia spans

  the era from the founding of state universities to the establishment

  of the Australian Historical Association in 1973. The role of Oxford

  connections, notably through Balliol College, is examined, as is that

  of post–Second World War growth that stimulated the desire for

  a specifically disciplinary organisation through which networks could be

  formalised. Bolton draws attention to the role of the School of History

  at the University of Melbourne. Under the leadership of R.M. Crawford,

  the Melbourne history school was regarded as the finest in the land from

  the mid-1940s through to the mid-1960s, and strategically placed to

  23 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816345;

  Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks, and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), doi.org/10.7228/

  manchester/9780719085024.001.0001. There are also histories of history departments, notably William Palmer, From Gentleman’s Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1840–1980 (Charleston, SC: BookSurge Publishing, 2008).

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  exercise patronage and exclusion.24 Women had little place in the scheme

  of things before 1973. It was only in the 1970s that a younger generation

  of female historians began consciously to organise their own networks

  that sought to avert the constraints of reliance on male patronage –

  especially as innovative fields developed in areas such as women’s history

  and Indigenous history. Bolton’s chapter provides a solid basis for further

  exploration of his theme, informed by his insistence on the dynamism of

  ‘the conversations that enabled communication among historians from

  both the newer and the older fields of historical endeavour’.

  The interaction of older and newer directions of enquiry is also central to

  Melanie Nolan’s examination of the evolution of Australian biographical

  writing in the context of the role of the ADB, including consideration of

  the historians who have been contributing authors and of its biographies

  of historians. The ADB began under the influence of W.K. Hancock at

  The Australian National University. Hancock exerted a profound personal

  influence on the project, but also worked in close association with the

  leading historians of his era. One of his earliest initiatives was to call a major,

  four-day conference in 1957, which brought together academic and non-

  academic historians from all parts of Australia, with the twin goals being

  ‘to gauge the state of Australian history and to begin a conversation among

  Australian historians’.25 From the first, therefore, the ADB was not just an

  indispensable work of reference but also a living project, thriving on the

  interchanges among diverse historical authors whose lives and careers were

  profoundly influenced by their participation in this collective enterprise.

  Not surprisingly, the result was an evolutionary process that linked the

  ADB with broader currents in history and biography. These included

  the increasing prominence of biographies of women, in a sophisticated

  gender-related context, as well as the conspicuous development of an

  interest on the part of both male and female historians in writing about

  their families in a way that melded biography and autobiography. Within

  the academy, Nolan concludes, historians have tended recently to return to

  24 See also Fay Anderson, An Historian’s Life: Max Crawford and the Politics of Academic Freedom (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005); Geoffrey Bolton, ‘The Problem of History’,

  The Kenneth Binns Lecture, given at the conference, ‘An Open Book: Research, Imagination and

  the Pursuit of Knowledge’, National Library of Australia, 29 April–1 May 2005, www.nla.gov.au/

  professor-geoffrey-bolton/the-problem-of-history (accessed 31 December 2015).

  25 Melanie Nolan, ‘“Insufficiently Engineered”:
A Dictionary Designed to Stand the Test of Time’, in Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon, eds, The ADB ’s Story (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), 16.

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  the genre of biography ‘to write about themselves and/or other historians’,

  on the principle that ‘how, and in what circumstances in all its fullness,

  one writes helps to understand the history that a historian constructs’.

  Finally, John G. Reid seeks to define the explanatory power of collective

  biography in reference to a group of aspiring and established women

  historians in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

  The so-called ‘imperial school’ at Yale has been credited by some historians

  with providing a nurturing intellectual space for women doctoral students,

  and collective biographical analysis reveals some truth in this assertion,

  although also important limitations. The unquestioned leader of this

  grouping of historians was Charles McLean Andrews, who had come to

  Yale from a short sojourn at Johns Hopkins but also a much longer one

  at Bryn Mawr, where he became accustomed to supervising the work

  of women graduate students. While Andrews was no radical in gender

  terms, the evidence suggests that at Yale, female graduate students in the

  US colonial field did believe that they benefited from an environment

  in which their work was valued both by mentors and in the context of

  their own networks. The women were characterised by a degree of social

  diversity – showing that their Yale careers had profound biographical

  significance – although those who attained their doctoral degrees

  gravitated disproportionately to faculty positions in women’s colleges.

  This in itself showed, of course, that important constraints remained. Yale

  provided, the essay concludes, ‘a fragile ecology’ within which women

  from varying social backgrounds could pursue their scholarship and even

  aspire to ‘life patterns that allowed for the balances between employment

  and research and between career and family to become negotiable, though

  always within limits’.

  In all of these areas, therefore, this book links biography and autobiography

  with broader intellectual and social currents that influenced historians

  and their discipline. The goals of the collection include not only bringing