The Frederic Manning Revival

“How would you like a trip to Sydney?” James McAuley asked me. We were sitting one morning in 1962 in his study as Head of Department at the University of Tasmania, located in one of those temporary, prefabricated huts on the new Sandy Bay Campus in Hobart before permanent buildings were completed. I had been appointed lecturer in English in 1960 following postgraduate studies at the University of London. In the January of next year the professor who had appointed me, Murray Todd, died suddenly of leukaemia. Jim arrived in Hobart shortly after in 1961 to take up a new appointment, as Reader in Poetry, a position without parallel in Australia then or since. The following year he was appointed head of the English Department.

In the existing, inadequate biographies of McAuley some recognition is given to him as a teacher. He was admired and respected, especially by his senior honours students. What has not been much acknowledged are McAuley’s merits as department head with a lecturing staff of five who had to cover the range of British literature. McAuley was concerned for the welfare of staff as well as students, encouraging the former to seek advancement in their respective fields. He was assisted in arranging equitable teaching loads by Edward (Ted) Stokes, an experienced senior lecturer. I recall Jim saying once that the department was a cosy nest, adding in typical style: “Sometimes I think it is too damned cosy!”

But Jim was always hard-headed as well as kind; he knew that if the department had not been harmonious and smooth-running he would not have been as free as he was to pursue interstate his extra-curricular political activities. He was able accordingly to juggle teaching duties in order to spend time in Melbourne and Sydney. A member of a former honours class remarked to me recently that if Jim was late for his Friday afternoon lecture the class knew this meant the plane from Melbourne was late.

Jim had asked to see me that morning because a friend, Henry Mayer, had sent him a cutting from the Sydney Morning Herald reporting the donation of some T.E. Lawrence letters to the Mitchell Library. Jim knew I was interested in archival research and wondered if I would like to study these letters. Perhaps, too, at the back of his mind may have been the possibility of an article for Quadrant, of which he had become founding editor in 1956.

In Sydney I called in at the Quadrant office, as Jim suggested. There Richard Krygier was helpful. He suggested I phone Sir Henry Manning, donor of the letters, who lived at Point Piper, so as to arrange a meeting. This turned out to be productive. The T.E. Lawrence letters were written to a forgotten Australian expatriate writer, Frederic Manning. Recuperating his life in the UK and his writings was to become my main focus, proving more interesting than the Lawrence letters.

Sir Henry was Frederic’s eldest brother and literary executor. On the phone he was welcoming. When I met him I found that the main aim of his donation was to redirect attention to Frederic, for whose memory he felt a deep affection and admiration. Sir Henry himself did not know much about his literary brother, who had lived almost his entire life abroad from the age of fourteen. However, Sir Henry had copies of Frederic’s books, and was keen to show them to me, even to lend rare first editions, and to tell me what he knew of Frederic or “Fred”, who was to become a lifelong interest for me.

My first impressions were evoked by a large portrait of Frederic hanging in the vestibule of Sir Henry’s home. The work of Sir William Rothenstein, it had a fascinating story to it. Apparently around 1899, not long after first arriving in England, and after making his first literary contacts, including Max Beerbohm, the young Frederic asked Rothenstein, well known as “a painter of poets”, to undertake his portrait. Rothenstein recalled:

He was an attractive youth, a little precious and frail, looking wise for his years. I found him to be very intelligent. He came almost daily, then he disappeared. Manning had no money it transpired. He believed his father would pay for the drawing I did of him … not so his father. And now he was afraid I might take proceedings against him. I reassured him. His father would pay some day; if not, what matter.

The portrait shows him as a slim, languid youth reclining in a chair, fashionably dressed in a frock coat, his literary ambitions suggested by pens protruding from the silk top hat resting on his knee.

During the 1960s on visits to Sydney I called on Eleanor Manning, Frederic’s niece and Sir Henry’s daughter, who had become literary executor. She lived in the family home and it was pleasant for me to greet Frederic’s portrait as I began to find out more about his life.

My next visit after seeing Sir Henry was to the Mitchell Library of Australiana. At that time it occupied a separate wing of the New South Wales Public Library. As an undergraduate at Sydney University I had not used the Mitchell because Australian literature was not then taught. As Manning was such an unknown writer I aimed initially to build up a general outline of his life and writings. The Manning papers were useful for this purpose. As well as the T.E. Lawrence letters they contained some of his own papers, including review clippings, some letters, and copies in typescript of his numerous Spectator reviews, from 1909 to 1914. Later, Sir Henry donated the precious manuscript of Her Privates We written in Manning’s fastidious handwriting and showing few changes.

In my first Quadrant article (Spring 1962) I outlined Manning’s life. He belonged to a prominent Sydney family. His father, a self-made man (an accountant) and self-taught, was four times Lord Mayor of the city. Sir Henry, known in his family as Harry, was at one time Attorney-General of New South Wales. Frederic, born in 1882, was a “delicate” child, a chronic asthmatic who suffered from ill health all his life. Unlike his siblings he was educated mainly by private tutors, the main one being Arthur Galton, who was visiting New South Wales as private secretary to Sir Robert Duff, Governor of the state.

Galton was a clergyman who changed from Catholicism back to Anglicanism. He was a gifted classical scholar with notable literary connections: he had been a friend of Matthew Arnold, his idol; of Walter Pater; of Lionel Johnson and of members of the circle of the literary journal the Hobby Horse. Galton became Frederic’s mentor, lifelong friend and companion.

Manning’s parents agreed that Frederic, a prodigy as a scholar, with possibly a brilliant literary future ahead of him, should go to England with Galton in 1898 when he was sixteen. There he met Sir William Rothenstein and with Galton’s help made other literary contacts. He returned to Australia briefly in 1900, but unable to settle, left again for England in 1903, this time to settle there permanently with Galton, who had become Anglican vicar at the village of Edenham, near the town of Bourne in south-east Lincolnshire. Both were retiring men, devoted to writing and scholarship. The hope was that with Galton’s guidance Manning would carve out a distinguished literary career.

Always retiring by nature and upbringing, Manning was used to a reclusive life, though he possibly drifted into it when he was too young and inexperienced. He became addicted to solitude, partly as a refuge, partly as a way of concentrating on his work. He steadily became more reclusive and remarked at one time that he grew more and more alone as he grew older, only a handful of friends being “real” to him. His way of living was double-edged: in a sense it cut him off from a wider, more active life but it provided a tough independence and detachment—an ability to make a virtue out of solitariness. He drew on this creatively.

Galton, himself reclusive and older, offered limited companionship. He could be at times demanding, even cranky. There is no doubt however that Galton did much to nurture Frederic’s gifts and that they shared a genuine affection. Biographers have ruled out a homosexual relationship. Manning never spoke in letters against Galton. On the latter’s death in 1921 Manning wrote:

I feel as though a part of my own mind were dead. We were so closely bound together, in our affections, in our ideals and beliefs, spiritually and intellectually … I feel that it was not a life being ended, but a life being completed. He was full of courage for himself and of tenderness for me. It was our separation that was bitter.

Manning was not, however, a complete hermit. There were letters to look forward to (two posts a day) and London was only two hours away by train from Lincoln. Though he disliked city life, Manning visited London several times a year to stay with friends. Alternatively, he invited them to Edenham.

His friends in London belonged to two prominent literary circles to which Galton introduced him. One revolved around literary hostess Olivia Shakespear, writer and Yeats’s mistress for a time, and her daughter Dorothy, who was to marry Ezra Pound. Manning was closely attached to the two women and for a time he became friends with Pound, who became an admirer and helped to get Manning’s poetry published in England and the USA. Manning in turn admired the young Pound while recoiling from his headlong manner, such a contrast with his own persona as the distanced aesthete.

Manning always related best to older women, though he was close to Dorothy. He never married. He also developed an affection for another literary hostess, Mrs Eva Fowler, a wealthy American, eleven years older. She became a “most loyal and generous friend” and at his wish he was to be buried near her at Kensal Green cemetery, London.

Manning published three slim books of poetry between 1910 and 1917, but his first book to make a mark was a prose work, Scenes and Portraits, of 1909. It was widely and favourably reviewed in London. The work shows Manning moving between two worlds: that of the classicist seeking enduring truths in the past and that of an Edwardian, a sceptical one, doubting that such could be found. The book was a collection of imaginary dialogues, set across a span of history. In a cartoon, Max Beerbohm saw Manning’s role as that of a ventriloquist with puppets. Manning broke new ground by revolving “problems of our century” in the light of classical principles and beliefs, speaking to the present by drawing on the past, wrote a reviewer. (Later critics have drawn comparisons with Eliot and Pound.)

Scenes and Portraits focuses on humanity’s efforts to reconcile itself to suffering and death, exploring the significance of the religious impulse as it is drawn towards belief by the individual conscience. By contrast, organised religion stifles religious feeling. E.M. Forster was understandably attracted to the book. He appreciated its sensitivity and irony, finding one piece “a perfect story, perfectly told … perhaps the most exquisite story of our century”. Manning’s prose style, with its irony, clarity and nuanced rhythms, appealed to other writers; yet he still had not found a form strongly expressive of himself and his times.

Manning was principal reviewer for the Spectator (again through Galton’s influence) from 1909 to 1914. This helped to keep his name prominent, but the bright literary future expected of him was not forthcoming. When war came Manning enlisted as a ranker in the British infantry, fighting for a time on the Somme and at Ancre before being withdrawn from action on health grounds. Rothenstein wrote:

of all my friends it was Frederic Manning who gave me [through letters] the most poignant account of his life in France … Manning enlisted as a private. It was difficult to realise [him] with his fastidious tastes and habits, living with Tommies in the trenches …

Out of these experiences, but much later—in 1929—emerged a novel that at last made Manning’s name. It first appeared anonymously (written by “Private 19022”) as The Middle Parts of Fortune, published by Peter Davies in a limited, boxed edition under the imprint of Piazza Press. In 1930 an expurgated version appeared in one volume as Her Privates We, by which name the work became generally known until recently, when a reversion to the original has taken place. The expurgation has not been closely studied but apparently it involved swearing.

Both titles derive from Hamlet (II.2):

Guildenstern: On fortune’s cap we are not the very button …

Hamlet: Then you are about her waist, in the middle part of her favours?

Guildenstern: Faith, her privates we.

Jim McAuley chortled over the second title of the popular edition. It is to my mind the wittier and more pointed title.

Sometimes considered the best of the war novels, though preceded by works by Graves, Sassoon, Blunden, Zweig and Remarque, it was highly praised by Forster, Arnold Bennett, T.E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, and was reprinted six times in 1930.

T.E. Lawrence quickly penetrated the novel’s anonymity through its style. He remarked on the paradox that the only novel of the war to identify with “rankers” should be written by the reclusive Manning: “Its author loved Pater when he was young and wrote very preciously. In this last book he has written hurriedly and nobly, yet with astounding sympathy and liveliness.” Lawrence reflected: “I suppose his [Manning’s] not being really English, and so generally ill, barred him from his fellows. Only not in Her Privates We … so hot-blooded and familiar!” Manning makes his part-autobiographical protagonist, Bourne, into an outsider, thereby providing one of the hints that he is not British, “not really English”, as Lawrence commented.

Bourne is the name of a town near Edenham but another allusion is to Hamlet (while suggesting the Ultima Thule of death that Richard Mahony journeys towards). Bourne sympathises with his companions yet he is detached, implicitly superior to them in intelligence and education. He becomes their sympathetic interpreter, as well as letting them speak for themselves, but he is also a commentator, acting as a kind of chorus, as he reflects on the nature of war. Her Privates We is structured to combine reflection with action.

Though explicitly concerned with the First World War, the novel views war sub specie aeternitatis, as being “in the nature of things”, as “a peculiarly human activity”. It is more than a record of one man’s war or the experience of a group: war may present “the ultimate problem of life stated barely, pressing for an immediate solution, but this is not an essential difference in kind”. Its human problems are presented as co-extensive with those of life, as it strips man bare, leaving him “to face a fact as naked and inexorable as himself”. The horrors and the tragedy are present, but as part of the larger human predicament. There is a tenderness in the novel as Bourne gains from the rankers his revelation of “the spiritual thing that grows stronger as beastliness increases”, of the paradoxical co-existence of faith and hopelessness of a kind that had given a religious dimension to Scenes and Portraits.

The comradeship of war is new to Bourne (as for Manning) but it is not sentimentalised. It “can rise to an intensity which friendship never touches”, yet it is essentially temporary and limited. Each man was forced to recognise that ultimately he stood alone, for “such self-reliance lies at the very heart of comradeship”. Jim McAuley was impressed by this view, which contrasts with the sentimental view of Australian mateship. Some reviewers suggested that Her Privates We is not primarily a “war novel”, a limiting category, but a novel making use of war as a setting. It is a distillation of Manning’s lifelong concern about “the ultimate problem of life”, first revolved in the imagined settings of Scenes and Portraits, but here rising to a personal intensity, as Lawrence remarked, under the pressure of inescapable social realities.

This is the outline of Manning’s life as given in my Quadrant article (Spring 1962). Jim McAuley had bylined it in advance (in a proof) as a definitive critical study, but dropped this description after reading it, letting the essay stand as the introductory, historical piece it was. This editorial openness was welcome in a time when Leavisite criticism was influential in Australia. Yet McAuley was not personally attracted to Manning’s liberal humanist ideas. Indeed in conversation he refused to “dignify” them as ideas in the philosophic sense, seeing them rather as representing what he sometimes dismissed as twentieth-century “wishy-washy” (or was it “milk and water”?) liberalism. He did not, however, change anything in my essay. (Jim could be hard-line, outside his teaching and literary editing. For instance, he offended some members of the University of Tasmania by arguing that sociology and education were not true academic disciplines.) Nevertheless, as Quadrant editor he found Manning an historical figure of potential interest to readers. Later he commented ruefully that Brian Elliott had reviewed the issue on the ABC, commenting favourably on the Manning essay but not on the political pieces which were important to Jim as editor.

My interest in Manning did not end with my Quadrant article. In appreciation of it, Sir Henry gave me in 1962 a first edition of The Middle Parts. Believing it should be republished, preferably in Australia where it was hardly known, out of the blue I sent it to Peter Ryan, Manager of Melbourne University Press, to test the possibilities, but without success. (An Australian edition appeared only recently, no doubt delayed because of copyright problems, published in paperback by Text in 2000.)

As the Vietnam conflict raised new questionings about war, a new edition (following a resetting of 1943) appeared in 1964 (reprinted in 1970). In 1977, the first unexpurgated edition was republished and from around this time Manning’s work began increasingly to be included in literary histories, anthologies and in critical studies, in Australia and abroad. Increasingly, too, articles appeared in magazines. Recently, in Quadrant (March 2009), Peter Ryan regretted that “Manning’s great book is so little read”. But it is unlikely to fall again into the neglect that commonly follows initial success or a writer’s death. If not a popular classic—as few such works are—it will nevertheless remain one of those precious books that readers interested in fine literature will continue to seek out.

Soon after my Quadrant essay I edited the unpublished letters to T.E. Lawrence (Southerly, 1963) and followed this with other letters to Manning’s fellow Australian poet James Griffyth Fairfax (1886–1976), from the NLA collection (Southerly, 1979). Fairfax was a member of the prominent Sydney newspaper family, who lived abroad all his life, mainly in England. He may have met Manning through family connections. Apart from Dorothy Shakespear, Fairfax was the only person of his own age who was a close friend of Manning, who visited Fairfax at Oxford and invited him to Edenham. Fairfax, a member of the Shakespear circle, knew Pound, who took him less seriously as a poet than Manning. I also published part of Manning’s correspondence to Rothenstein (Quadrant, July-August 1970), written from the war front, which I had traced to Harvard. This encouraged Jonathan Marwil to write the first biography of Manning, published in 1988 (Frederic Manning: An Unfinished Life).

Following my initial Quadrant piece, however, there was sporadic interest in Manning. Shortly afterwards, Geoffrey Dutton, then one of the editors (with Max Harris) of Australian Letters, an Adelaide journal not friendly to Jim McAuley or Quadrant, wrote to me asking why I had not mentioned a 1959 article by Richard Aldington on Manning in Australian Letters. I could only reply that I simply did not know about it, as there were at the time no comprehensive guides to recent Australian literary criticism. Dutton responded generously by inviting me to contribute a bibliography, partly remedying this deficiency, to the Penguin book The Literature of Australia (1964, enlarged 1974), the first modern history of Australian literature, which he was then editing.

Shortly after Dutton first contacted me, Stephen Murray-Smith, apparently unaware of both my Quadrant article and the Aldington piece, wrote a review, “The Manning Revival”, for Overland (October 1964), apropos of a Heinemann reprint of Her Privates We. Murray-Smith claimed the novel for Australian literature, yet praising its “validity for all mankind … In this it remains, with Richard Mahony, almost alone among books by Australian writers.” Manning’s novel had appeared in the same year (1929) as Ultima Thule, the third volume of Henry Handel Richardson’s Richard Mahony trilogy. Both were works by expatriates, the one arising from Manning’s emigration to Britain, the other from a fictional emigration to Australia.

In the 1970s Jim McAuley passed on to me a letter from the English poet Donald Davie seeking information about Manning, probably because of my initial Quadrant article. Davie was writing about “Pound and the Edwardians”. He considered Manning and Allen Upward (1863–1926) the “most instructive figures” from that “vanished world”; but because there was little information on either—no collected letters or biography—he settled for Maurice Hewlett. More had been written about him and he was closer to centres of power. Davie (Trying to Explain, 1979) made passing comments on Pound’s reaction against Edwardian poets, including Manning, thus revising earlier admiration for his work.

Jim McAuley liked my early work on Manning. My interest in archival research and literary history may have been one of the reasons why he invited me in 1963 to become foundation editor of the first, and until recently, the only scholarly journal devoted to Australian literature, Australian Literary Studies (see my article “Starting a Journal”, ALS, 4, 2000) The journal was his idea but he gave me free rein as editor to develop it. I did so until 2001. It continues, now in its forty-sixth year.

Increased interest in Manning led to two biographies being published: Marwil’s Frederic Manning (1988) and Verna Coleman’s The Last Exquisite (1990). They made complementary contributions to the understanding of their subject—a formidable task, since information was fragmentary and his papers had been lost.

Marwil unearthed new and valuable information, including facts about Manning’s military service. Along with others, I had previously argued that Manning enlisted as a private because of his democratic Australian sympathies, which he himself downplayed. Marwil discovered that Manning had tried to enlist as a British officer, both before and after his period of active service, but that both attempts failed. The second, during officer training in Dublin, led to his resignation, for he was threatened with court martial because of his drinking. Apparently Manning had this hidden problem for much of his life, though Marwil was unable to discover much detail about it. Manning’s solitariness, then, had its dark side.

Marwil denied that Manning’s Australian origins had any influence on his work, arguing that Manning considered himself English, an Edwardian with connections to emergent modernism. Marwil’s is the most thoroughgoing study from this point of view. However, as he and others pointed out, there was a duality in Her Privates We. Bourne was sympathetic to fellow rankers yet he also remained detached, an outsider, sympathetic also to Australian soldiers and their anti-officer attitudes. While these aspects are not stressed they suggest that Manning’s Australian affiliations may have entered, however subtly, into his novel. The very name of Bourne, with its Hamlet echoes, suggests that he is not only an outsider but also something of an alien Antipodean.

Verna Coleman’s meticulously researched biography restored the balance by filling in details about Manning’s Australian background and his continuing relations with his family, his siblings and especially his mother, who often visited Britain (as Dorothy Shakespear pointed out in a letter to me). These influences may have been “subterranean”, suppressed by Manning in his adaptation to English life, but they must surely be indirectly, perhaps mysteriously, a part of him (as I had argued in my review of Marwil’s book in Quadrant, August 1989).

As Verna Coleman commented, Manning was an expatriate of a special kind. While cut off intellectually from the provincial homeland of his times, he nevertheless remained an outsider in Britain, even if he was partially accepted by some other writers. This is the case with other expatriates, including Peter Porter, Pound, Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, though they were all individual. Coleman also showed that Manning was not as neglected in Australia as Marwil dismissively suggested.

One of the loose ends I had tried to follow up in my Manning studies was a connection between Manning and T.S. Eliot. Rothenstein reported that the latter was the only literary figure at Manning’s funeral, so I decided to take the momentous step—as it seemed to me then—of writing to Eliot, telling him I hoped to write a biography of Manning and asking for assistance. Eliot replied in October 1962 saying he had been “racking his brains” to think of anyone he could refer me to who knew Manning. The only old friends he could think of were Rothenstein and his wife. As they were dead the only alternative, Eliot said, was “Ezra Pound himself”. Eliot added that he did not give people’s addresses to others without their permission, but that if I wrote to Pound, care of himself, he would see that my letter was forwarded.

A reply came, not from Pound but from his wife Dorothy (nee Shakespear), then still living in Rapallo. She had resided there with her husband before he left her and began a liaison with Olga Rudge, living with her in Venice after the Second World War until he died. Dorothy Shakespear wrote to me with brief reminiscences about Manning, and including a few odd letters and verses. She recalled (in November 1962) that Manning, “an entertaining and nervous character … lived with a very old friend of my mother and myself”, Galton, and that “members of his Sydney family came to Europe most years … we knew his mother and his sister ‘Trix’”. To Dorothy Shakespear, “Fred always seemed … to belong to the ‘nineties’ rather than the 1900s”, but she had lost touch with his later work, including Her Privates We, when she and Pound left Britain.

Eliot had written to me that he did not know Manning well, though they had “met several times”, directly after the First World War, and remarking that he (Eliot) had a “precious copy of Her Privates We”. He could not recall having “many letters from Fred Manning” but went on to say that he remembered him as “a very careful and meticulous letter writer”. Eliot feared that any letters he may have had were “hopelessly lost, as it was so long ago”. Eliot added that he had never met any member of Manning’s family, his mother or his sisters, “who presumably live in Australia”. Eliot thus remembered Manning as an Australian, and knew indirectly of his family. “I am sorry I cannot be of more use to you,” he concluded.

When Marwil’s biography appeared I discovered that Eliot had not been altogether straightforward with me and also that my background research had not been as careful as it might have been. While it is true that Eliot did not know Manning well as a person, Eliot invited contributions from him to the Criterion between 1924 and 1927. Along with the meetings and letters involved, this relationship indicates they shared literary interests if not opinions. And there were letters. Marwil comments that when the manuscript of his biography had been completed he “flew to London for the sole purpose of reading Manning’s letters to Eliot”, previously withheld by Mrs Eliot. Marwil relates that he was not shown all the letters, only “two thirds of them”. Those he saw “clarified the relationship between the two men”, though Marwil offers no detail, commenting mystifyingly that the two “were, in several ways very much alike”. How, one wonders? Perhaps in their erudite knowledge of classical and French literature and in the individual attraction each showed to religious questions. One may wonder also what the Manning’s letters could have contained to require restriction. Eliot wrote in an obituary:

[Manning] was an excessively fastidious writer, and spent as much time in rewriting and destroying what he had written to account for a number of books … he was without ambition for notoriety. And had a style of writing, and frame of mind, suited to a more cultured and better educated age than our own …

This is a sympathetic summary yet it can be read as somewhat condescending. Ironically, no one knew better than Eliot the immense effort it took writers like himself not only to produce literary work but also to build a reputation, especially if they were not English. The obituary avoided complexity in suggesting that Manning’s fastidiousness, which was left unexamined, side-tracked him from concentrating his powers.

On the July 1924 cover of the Criterion, Manning’s name appeared alongside that of Proust, Yeats and Virginia Woolf, suggesting heights he might have aspired to. Eliot’s reference to Manning’s rewritings applies particularly to a medieval romance, “The Gilded Coach”, that he worked on for most of his writing life and never finished. (There is a fragment in the Mitchell collection.) It was highly praised by contemporaries who read manuscript drafts. In 1920 Pound sent some “delicious pages” of it to the New York Dial to try and arrange serial publication.

When I began my study of Manning I had no knowledge of him, of where my study might lead and how attractive I would find his work and his elusive life. Nor could Jim McAuley have realised what would come from the trip to Sydney he initiated in 1962, though I think he was pleased. What he did, I realised later on, was to offer me an opportunity in research which at the same time might help to develop the department of which he had recently become head. The trip not only introduced me to a neglected Australian writer but also started me along the long road of Australian literary studies; a new world to me and to others at the time. The field was just opening up, along with the growth of universities. Ahead lay much historical recuperation and revaluation, which reached their height around the late 1980s. Participation in this work enriched my life.

Note: The Dorothy Shakespear mss and the letter from T.S. Eliot are deposited with my personal papers at the Academy Library, UNSW@ADFA. Copyright conditions apply.

Laurie Hergenhan’s most recent book is an edition, with Ken Stewart and Michael Wilding, Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009). Clarke went to school in London with the brothers Cyril and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Cyril wrote a life of Clarke, which is held in manuscript form by the Mitchell Library.