Letters to the Editor

The duty to truth

Dear Editor,

Brian Matthews makes an eloquent defence of Manning Clark’s Kristallnacht fantasy, but I was surprised to find myself being drafted as a witness simply because I once said that autobiography is ‘a lying art’ (May 2007). Actually, I can’t remember ever having used quite those words, but, as Brian Matthews well argues, memory plays tricks. I might have said it. If I did, however, I hope I would have added that an historian should be the last kind of writer to avail himself of the autobiographer’s supposed exemption from the duty to truth. My own interpretation of Manning Clark’s eagerness to get his personal story closely involved in such an outstanding instance of mass suffering was that the mass suffering didn’t mean much to him. This would square well with his slowness to notice that the death toll in the Soviet Union had put paid to the régime’s humanitarian credentials.