Biographies of Historians – or, The Cliographer's Craft

Abstract

There is a recent named sub-set of biographies—cliographies—dealing with historians. This article will explore who are the subjects and authors of cliographies and what are their nature. My quest is both normative and explanatory in seeking to analyse the practices and issues of these works, not least the way cliographies are changing, and what cliographies might tell us about the historical discipline. I will argue that cliographies, while not always innovative given where they sit in the profession, are nonetheless significant histories in themselves.

Notes

^*The colleagues who imparted specific information in personal communications are acknowledged in the footnotes. Comments on earlier drafts were gratefully received from Jim Davidson, Robert Tristram and Christine Winter in particular, and from Frank Bongiorno, David S. Brown, Kathleen Burk, Peter Hempenstall, Stephen Holt, Stuart Macintyre, Mark McKenna, John R. McNeill, William Palmer, Greg Pfitzer, John G. Reid, Ian Tyrrell, John C. Weaver and Donald Wright.

¹John Clive, ‘English Cliographers’ (1978), in Not By Fact Alone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989): 191–201.

²Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 69. See also Richard Vinen, ‘The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical Writing’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol 46, no. 3 (2011): 531–54.

³Popkin, 90.

⁴Kenneth R. Dutton, Auchmuty: The Life of James Johnston Auchmuty (1909–1981) (Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 2000).

⁵Clyde W. Barrow, More Than A Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000); Gerald L. Fetner, Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

⁶Adam Sisman, A. J .P. Taylor: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994); Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Chris Wrigley, A. J. P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Stephen Holt, A Short History of Manning Clark (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999); Brian Matthews, Manning Clark: A Life (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008); Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011).

⁷S. G. Foster and Margaret M. Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University, 1946–1996 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 288.

⁸Roslyn Russell, ed. Ever, Manning: Selected Letters of Manning Clark, 1938–1991 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008), 358.

⁹Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

¹⁰Tim Beaglehole, A Life of J. C. Beaglehole: New Zealand Scholar (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), 17.

¹¹Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor; Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010).

¹²Stephen Holt, e-mail to author, 19 January 2011; Holt, Manning Clark and Australian History, 1915–1963 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1982).

¹³David Renton, Sidney Pollard: A Life in History (London: Tauris, 2004), 77; Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 19–117, 119–219, 221–80.

¹⁴Jacqueline Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), xiii; John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward: Southerner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). Roper did, however, interview and correspond with Woodward.

¹⁵Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 255.

¹⁶David S. Brown, Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 67–70.

¹⁷John Thompson, The Patrician and the Bloke: Geoffrey Serle and the Making of Australian History (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006), 29–182 and 183–299.

¹⁸David Cannadine, e-mail to author, 5 August 2009; Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: HarperCollins, 1992).

¹⁹Stuart Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 205; Macintyre, e-mail to author, 5 April 2010.

²⁰R. M. Crawford, ‘A Bit of a Rebel’: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), x; Thompson, xix–xxii.

²¹Linda Colley, Namier (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989).

²²Matthews, 485.

²³Beaglehole, 296.

²⁴Jim Davidson, A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian WK Hancock (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010) xi.

²⁵Haslam, passim; Anderson, 371; Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1979), 275–76; Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 140–1, 162.

²⁶Mark McKenna, in Local Conversations with Richard Fidler, 20 June 2011, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/06/20/3248206.htm

²⁷Donald Wright, e-mail to author, 19 January 2011; Wright, ‘Reflections on Donald Creighton and the Appeal of Biography’, Journal of Historical Biography, 1 (2007): 19. http://www.ufv.ca/jhb/Volume_1/Volume_1_Wright.pdf.

²⁸Gerard Willem van Loon, The Story of Hendrik Willem van Loon (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972); Cornelis A. van Minnen, Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 265 (quotation).

²⁹William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), 60–2, 68–9; McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 64–9, 190; William Palmer, e-mail to author, 25 January 2011.

³⁰C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

³¹Crawford, 368–9.

³²Susan Magarey, ‘Three Questions for Biographers: Public or Private? Individual or Society? Truth or Beauty?’, Journal of Historical Biography, 4 (2008): 5–8. http://www.ufv.ca/jhb/Volume_4/Volume_4_Magarey.pdf.

³³Rachael King, ‘Introduction’ to Michael King, The Silence Beyond (Auckland: Penguin, 2011), 7.

³⁴Quoted in Davidson, Three-Cornered Life, 419.

³⁵Mark McKenna, e-mail to author, 27 September 2009.

³⁶Cannadine, 243–4.

³⁷Frank Eyck, G. P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London: Macmillan, 1982), xiii.

³⁸Haslam, xii (quotation); Sisman, Trevor-Roper, xv–xvi; David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: A Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 272; William Palmer, Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), xvi–xvii.

³⁹Burk, ‘Author's Response’ [to Paul Addison's review of Burk, Troublemaker], http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/burk2.html

⁴⁰Nick Salvatore, ‘Biography and Social History: An Intimate Relationship’, Labour History, 87 (2004), 189.

⁴¹The imagery is from Michael King, ‘Political Biography – A Comment’, in Jock Phillips, ed. Biography in New Zealand (Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 36.

⁴²Ian Hancock, ‘Biography and the Rehabilitation of the Subject: The Case of John Gorton’, in Tracey Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna, eds. Australian Political Lives: Chronicling Political Careers and Administrative Histories (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), 62.

⁴³Exceptions include the painful honesty in W. H. Oliver, Looking for the Phoenix (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2002).

⁴⁴Jim Davidson, ‘Bouncing on the Trampoline of Fact: Biography and the Historical Imagination’, Australian Book Review, 323 (2010): 44; Davidson Three-Cornered Life, viii.

⁴⁵Matthews, 419.

⁴⁶E.g. Keith Sinclair, Halfway Round the Harbour (Auckland: Penguin, 1993), 9–37; Oliver MacDonagh, Looking Back: Living and Writing History, ed. Tom Dunne (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2008), 3–92.

⁴⁷Popkin, 152.

⁴⁸Notably, Sisman, Trevor-Roper, chs.13–14 (‘Lover’ and ‘Husband’); Davidson, Three-Cornered Life, ch.12 (‘Theaden: Portrait of a Marriage’).

⁴⁹Burk, Troublemaker, 76; McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, 215–6; Margaret Cole, The Life of G. D. H. Cole (London: Macmillan, 1971), 91–5.

⁵⁰An exception is McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, ch.19 (‘The Teacher’).

⁵¹Beaglehole, 349–521

⁵²Davidson, Three-Cornered Life, 322–73; Gregory M. Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison's Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 147–69.

⁵⁴Robert Cole, A. J. P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), x. At the opposite extreme, it is difficult for biography (and biographers) to be taken seriously when some media reportage focuses entirely on over-dramatised titillation; e.g. Gia Metherell, ‘The Secret History: Clark's Lovers and Self-Loathing’, Canberra Times, 15 November 2008.

⁵³Discussions include Patrick O'Brien, ‘Is Political Biography a Good Thing?’ Contemporary British History, 10:1 (1996): 60–6 (with responses by Pauline Croft, John Derry and Nigel Hamilton, 67–86); David Nasaw, ed. ‘AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography’, American Historical Review, 114:3 (2009): 573–661.

⁵⁵Brown, Hofstadter, xviii.

⁵⁶Colley, 4.

⁵⁷Haslam, xii; Anderson, 7; Wrigley, vii. See also Ronald Fraser, ‘A Fox in Spain’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 July 2011: 3–4.

⁵⁸Stefan Collini, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110.

⁵⁹Goggin, passim; Novick, 472–91 (quotation, 490).

⁶⁰Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks, eds. Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), vii. An example of overt categorisation is Bob Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979).

⁶¹Fay Anderson and Stuart Macintyre, eds. The Life of the Past: The Discipline of History at the University of Melbourne, 1855–2005 (Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2006); William Palmer, From Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940–1980 (Lexington, KY: Booksurge Publishing, 2008).

⁶²Davidson, ‘Bouncing’, 44.

⁶³The characterisation is Popkin's, 266.

⁶⁴Matthews, ch.14; Holt, Short History, 127, and phone conversation, 23 March 2009.

⁶⁵Stuart Macintyre, ‘The Manning behind the Mask’, Australian Book Review, 306 (2008): 15–17; Peter Cochrane, ‘Manning Clark: A Life’, The Age, 15 November 2008.

⁶⁶Matthews, 306 (also Matthews, ‘Pleading Heart’, The Australian, 6 August 2008); Lyndall Ryan, ‘Affectionate Intensity’, Overland, 194 (2009): 84–6.

⁶⁷Matthews, Manning Clark, 456.

⁶⁸See Frank Bongiorno, review (of Matthews, Manning Clark), Journal of Australian Studies, 34:1 (2010): 110–12; John Hirst, ‘A Grand History’, The Monthly, May 2011: 68–9. Several friends and acquaintances of Clark have expressed difficulty in reconciling his diaries entries (and his letters) with their own recollections of the same events, as did his wife. McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, 36–7, 40, 353, 367, 684–6.

⁶⁹McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, 27–34.

⁷⁰McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, 663.

⁷¹Kathleen Burk, e-mail to author, 29 December 2010; Burk, Troublemaker, xiv.

⁷²Brown, Hofstadter, xii; ‘David S. Brown Responds’, American Historical Review, 113:1 (2008): 310.

⁷³Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 311–12.

⁷⁴David Cannadine, Making History Now and Then: Discoveries, Controversies and Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 7–8.

⁷⁵Novick, 8. As John G. Reid has pointed out (e-mail to author, 19 January 2011), histories of the historical profession fit into the expanding literature on professionalisation as a social phenomenon, not just in the academic professions but across a wide spectrum of occupations that have sought self-advancement by such means.

⁷⁶Maxine Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1886–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ronald T. Ridley, Jessie Webb: A Memoir (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1994); Shirley A. Leckie, Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

⁷⁷See Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), ch. 5 (‘The Importance of Being Sexist: The Masculinization of History’).

⁷⁸Susan Janson, ‘Jessie Webb and the Predicament of the Female Historian’, and Susan Davies, ‘Kathleen Fitzpatrick: Sculptor with Words’, in Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas, eds. The Discovery of Australian History, 1890–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 91–110, 159–73, respectively; Patricia Grimshaw and Jane Carey, ‘Kathleen Fitzpatrick (1905–1990), Margaret Kiddle (1914–1958) and Australian History after the Second World War’, Gender & History, 13:2 (2001): 349–73 (quotation, 351); Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997); Jacqueline Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the Historical Profession: Women Historians and the American Historical Association, 1890–1940’, American Historical Review, 97:3 (1992): 769–802.

⁷⁹John G. Reid, e-mail to author, 19 January 2011; Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian's Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

⁸⁰Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 277.

⁸¹McNeill, Toynbee, vii.

⁸²William H. McNeill, letter to author, 30 August 2010.

⁸³Popkin, ch. 9 (‘Historians and the Reshaping of Personal Narrative’).

⁸⁴Fitzpatrick, 1–8.

⁸⁵Norman Gash, ‘A Modest Defence of Historical Biography’, in his Pillars of Government and Other Essays on State and Society, c.1770–c.1888 (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 182, 184.

⁸⁶John Sutherland, ‘When Stephen met Sylvia’, The Guardian, 24 April 2004.