Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Puzzles of Childhood
(both Penguin 1990).

One way I judge the worth of a book is the number
of ‘quotable quotes’ I file from it. These two autobiographies
rank among the best, with about 200 categories of memorable sayings,
and about 300 to file altogether…

Manning Clark describes himself as a polyphon, a
man of many voices. He viewed life as generally a tragedy, ‘where
individuals could not get what they wanted because of some flaw
in their being.’ He yearned for someone, somewhere, ‘up above
the sky so high’ or here on Earth who would take pity on us all
and forgive everyone. He loved cricket, and Carlton Football Club,
and Mozart’s Magic Flute, and the idea that rearranging the ownership
of the means of production, distribution and exchange would usher
in a millennium of peace for all mankind.

The refrain, cited at least fifteen to twenty times
through the two volumes, is taken from the words of Karamazov
in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, ‘I want to be there when
everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.’ Once
or twice he adds the next sentence: ‘All the religions of the
world are built on this longing, and I am a believer.’ And once
or twice Ivan’s ‘great truth’: ‘There is no sin, no crime, only
hunger’.

Compulsory reading – understand a complex, somewhat
cynical man who all his life searching for certainty in three
fields: the authentic Australian ethos, a compassionate political
ideology, and a Christian conviction…

Several sub-themes/refrains: * mother sinned-against
by a mysterious Dark Secret prompts his mother wish that ‘Mann,
dear,’ never discovers – – and which is hinted at towards the
end of Grace. But his somewhat pathetic father is also sinned-against
– by the Moore College-type ‘straighteners’. He ended his days
‘breeding ducks in the back yard of the vicarage at Mentone, ducks
which laid the eggs no one wanted.’

Clark’s bitterest diatribes are leveled against these
people and this mind-set: calls them the ‘miserables’, ‘frowners’,
‘life-deniers’. The Christianity of the straighteners focusses
on the punishment of transgressors. They are the ‘dry souls of
the Christian Church.’ They speak of religion ‘as if it were a
theorem in geometry.’ They have a morality but lack charity. ‘They
give us all a morality but not a faith.’ They ‘have corrected
Christ’s work… [these churches] have been captured by the Pharisees.
[They are] so confident of their virtues, so smug, have such a
cocksure air…’ They thank God constantly that they are not like
other people – adulterers, and liars and drunkards. Manning Clark
mocks these Protestants who believe they alone will have reserved
seats in the Members’ Stand on Resurrection morning…

* His clergyman father’s certainty about things like
Jesus’ resurrection when he preaches (‘I am more certain…’),
but about which he can’t give a personal apologetic. This man
wanted ‘all of us to be nice to each other because he [went] to
pieces if anyone [was] not nice to him’.

There were two unmentionables in Manning’s boyhood
– sex and death.

Manning Clark was attracted to Christ – ‘the Galilean
fisherman’ (sic several times!) – but not Christian dogma. The
words of Christ and the ideals of the Russian revolution were,
for him, the great hopes of humanity.

Holds a mirror so that we wowsers may see ourselves
as we appear to be to many others.

Great sadness – so near the kingdom, and yet, he
felt, so far from it: or, at least, the kingdom as interpreted
by the evangelicals/pharisees. He was an excellent asker of questions,
but not so good at finding answers. (‘It was all there [in the
words of the Anglican Prayer Book] if only it were true.’ Does
Australia have to be a kingdom of nothingness? His life is a wistful
and plaintive search for truth, and faith, and reality.

…..

In an interview with Terry Lane on the fiftieth anniversary
of the Second World War: Loss of religious faith in Australia
after the Second World War. Two most terrible events of that war:
the Holocaust, and Hiroshima. Summed up in the song by Noel Coward,
‘Twentieth Century Blues’: ‘In this strange confusion/ chaos and
illusion/ people seem to lose their way. / What is there to strive
for/ love or keep alive for/ Say "Hey hey call it a day…!"
Why, if there’s a God up in the sky/ why doesn’t he grin/ On high
above this twentieth century din…’

Some months later, Terry Lane talked with Manning
Clark again, on the release of The Puzzles of Childhood. The title
didn’t suggest itself until he was well into writing… Puzzles…
1929: the year when the shadow fell. Still not easy to talk about
it; diagnosed as having epilepsy, which stayed with him until
middle life. Those were the days when there was a gigantic cover-up
about lots of things… Manning says he grew up in a generation
when if you were ill there was thought to be something wrong with
you. His father: ‘If you’ve got something wrong with you, rub
it off with a rough towel boy!’ Some things in life you just can’t
rub off with a rough towel.

Whole of first book a commentary on the suffering
of his father. TL: How can you be so sure of your father’s thinking
and motives? ‘One of my roles in life from very early on has been
that of an observer… I stood a pace or two apart from lots of
other people, and watched closely… If you’re going to write
about others you’ve got to have the gift of empathy. It was said
of D H Lawrence that he knew what it was like to be a cow.

Manning’s father and mother experienced differences
in childhood upbringing and social class, temperament, and fundamental
values. ‘My mother,’ he told Terry Lane, ‘was a good woman…
She was just naturally good. My father: his heart was a battlefield.
Whatever you are confronted with, life has many contradictions,
but is always immense… We all fall for the temptation to be
something we can’t be. I was tempted to be someone else when I
was younger.

‘For my father the church was one way out of St Peters
(his working-class suburb in Sydney)… A man and a woman courting
each other then living with each other are caught up in what Thomas
Hardy calls "a fret and a fever".

Mother: ‘Mann, dear, you’re not like the others…
I worry about what’s going to happen to you…’

‘Death should not exist, but it does. Drawn strongly
to the remark by Philip Larkin, the English poet, about death:
[It’s] "the anaesthetic, from which none come round…"’
When my mother died, the secular humanists around Melbourne whom
I’d known for years made superficial remarks about [death]. They
didn’t seem to acknowledge not only the unanswerability of it
but why one should be so deeply moved by death… And I haven’t
found an answer to it quite frankly.’

TL: ‘But you seem to be like the character in the
‘Hound of Heaven’ – you keep coming back to the Galilean…’ ‘In
the second volume there does exist the possibility of grace; one
can find a serenity… I try to show in the second volume that
I’m a firm believer in two points Mozart made before he died.
The first point is made in The Magic Flute, that enlightenment
is one way humanity can be liberated from ignorance and superstition,
and can be made aware of a larger and fuller life (which is the
same remark Christ made about having life and having it more abundantly).
He’s about to die as he’s writing The Magic Flute. But at the
same time he’s writing The Requium – it’s the other side of the
human hope, that there must be someone somewhere who can forgive
us all for our folly and our madness and have pity on us. There
isn’t such a person, but the longing for that understanding is
there…

‘The second volume is much more hopeful and much
more serene.’