Book Review - Henry Lawson: the Man and the Legend by Manning Clark

 Henry Lawson: the Man and the Legend by Manning Clark

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995  (first published 1978 as In search of Henry Lawson)

ISBN 0522846955

There is no doubt that Henry Lawson is one of the formative figures in the great flowering of Australian literature that bloomed from the 1880s through to the early years of the Twentieth Century, and one of the writers to describe what it was like to actually live in Australia during this time, especially in the Bush.

His life in many ways was a long drawn out tragedy - the life of an alcoholic writer - early promise, a period of intense successful activity, and a long decline to an inevitable early death. Although their stories are different, the arc of Lawson's life is similar to other such writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald (You can read my review of The Thirsty Muse, which goes into detail about these three writers and others, here).

Lawson very much saw himself in his moments of grandeur as the voice of Australia, as did the author of this biography of him. Manning Clark saw himself as an oracular historian of our land, with his theories of "enlargers" and "straighteners" and a view of Australian history that was intensely nationalist. These views, aligned with Clark's orotund and florid prose style, mean that this book is at times lop-sided, more difficult to read than it needs to be, and conclusions reached that don't necessarily follow the known facts.

Firstly I have to address misogynism - not Lawson's, but Clark's. He consistently downplays or slurs the women in Lawson's life, particularly his mother Louisa. Louisa Lawson was a pioneer for the rights of women in Australia, a successful businesswoman, and a litterateur in her own right (there is a great biography of her written by Brian Matthews, which I have reviewed here), but Clark paints her as the ultimate straightener in Lawson's life. On the other hand, Clark praises Lawson's father, who was an itinerant drunk. He doesn't describe Lawson's wife Bertha in a kind light either, although she worked hard as she could for Henry and especially their children. It's very noticeable and very odd, and an indication that Clark has a particular story to he wishes to tell, rather than necessarily following where the story leads him.

Clark sees Lawson in this book as a genius with a terrible flaw (the "monster" - alcohol). In terms of literary output, Clark sees the short stories - especially those written in the 1890s about the Bush - as the pinnacle of his achievements, comparing them in some ways to Chekhov and Dostoyevsky in their insights into human nature and the struggle to survive. He also shows how they reveal a developing purely Australian character type, which Lawson's stories helped solidify as the mythical "true Aussie" - phlegmatic, tough, and always ready to help his mates in their times of trouble.

His poetry gets less praise from Clark: although he lauds the sentiments, he notes that in terms of craftsmanship he was somewhat lacking - his disease meant that he quite often would dash off verse (especially later in his life) for money.

Indeed for his whole life money (the lack of it) was a problem for Lawson. He was unable to hold down any "normal" job, and as he continually pointed out there was not enough money in poetry and prose in Australia to make a living. This led him to write for newspapers both as a regular job (with The Boomerang in Queensland) and also to contribute to muck sheets such as The Truth. As he descended into full-blown alcoholism he took to begging and borrowing from friends and strangers to not only pay for the drink, but maintenance for his wife and children (the failure to do so landed him in jail on more than one occasion).

Clark is desperate in this biography to portray Lawson as a true great, a gifted genius with real insight into the human condition. I think that he fails to make the case, even though he has skewed this version of Lawson's life to try and do so. Which is not to state that Lawson was a minor figure - far from it.

Is this book a successful biography of Henry Lawson? On so many levels it isn't... yet, it has given me the desire to go back and read his stories and poetry again, so it isn't all bad.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler's Army by Omer Bartov

 Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich by Omer Bartov

New York: Oxford University Press, 1991                        ISBN 0195068793

This book was written at a hinge-point in our modern history: published in 1991 when the certainties of Cold-War Europe were disappearing and a new united Germany was allowed to come to be. This change in the political scene led to a wellspring of historical effort and post-revisionism about Germany's recent history. It had suited Cold-War confrontation to paint the horrors of the Third Reich as the result of an appalling dictatorship imposed on an unwilling populace - the Germans were all "victims" of the Nazis. This view posited that the soldiers that served in Hitler's army were not Nazis or Nazi sympathisers, did not willingly partake in the horrors of the regime, and were in many respects dupes of the hierarchy, such was the revisionist history of the mid Cold-War era.

In Hitler's Army Bartov sets out to question this idea, positing that - especially on the Eastern Front - the Wehrmacht was indeed more than willing to engage in criminal acts, spurred by an internalization by the troops of the tropes of Nazi propaganda and ideology.

Bartov's first steps in setting out this argument require him to dispel the idea that the Wehrmacht was merely an army rather than an instrument of Hitler's will. He demolishes the idea that Germany fought for so long because a) they were highly mechanized, and b) the army was organized around a "primary group" of soldiers drawn from the same area, and that these two things helped make them better fighters.

Through the use of simple statistics Bartov successfully demolishes both positions. Even in June 1941 when Germany invaded Russia, it was the Soviets who were the more mechanized army. This gap widened dramatically as the Germans failed to replace lost materiel and the Russians (and Americans via Lend-Lease) massively increased their production.

The staggering losses of men during the war in Russia (losses which rapidly rose from the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa) very quickly made the idea of a "primary group" impossible to maintain. In fact even by 1943 many groups were already ad-hoc, with whole regiments disappearing and joining with other remnants into "battle-groups".

So, if the revisionist historians were wrong: that it was not technical prowess and group cohesion that kept the Wehrmacht in the field, what was it that did? This is the major focus of Hitler's Army. Bartov contends that far from being duped by the Nazis, many (most?) soldiers duped themselves, by twisting reality to the point where they almost saw the War backwards. Soldiers saw Russian brutality and squalor at the Front as confirming what their propaganda had told them, without reflecting that what they were seeing was the brutality and squalor inflicted on the Russians by Germany.

They even came to believe in a sense that they were engaged in a preventative war, stopping the invasion of Europe by the Untermensch. The soldiers came to believe that they had a civilizing mission (even while destroying villages, massacring Jews and "Partisans") and so became increasingly frustrated when Russians continued to fight. 

This combined with an almost religious belief in the rightness of Hitler became in the end a fatal self-delusion: for example the thought that Hitler would sacrifice his soldiers pointlessly (in Stalingrad for example) was too absurd to be believed, so it wasn't.

Some of this thinking - this self-delusion - has an internal rationality when looked at from the viewpoint of an individual soldier. No soldier can find it easy to admit that their sacrifice will be in vain, or is in pursuit of an evil cause. Irrational belief in a final victory when all the evidence suggests the opposite must be maintained to avoid despair. These are in some ways natural responses.

As is the attempt after the defeat to try and deflect any responsibility for their actions, or indeed responsibility for believing in the cause. When your victors in pursuit of their own ends allow that deflection to stand, and indeed re-use some of the same men in rebuilding German armed forces, then alternatives to the truth easily become the accepted version of events.

A lot of the above is now well known and accepted by the serious student of Nazism and World War Two, but in 1991 Bartov was one of those scholars (like Goldhagen and Evans) who brought a new unprejudiced light to bear on the evidence. His arguments are mostly sound.

This is one for the serious student of World War Two.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell