Memoirs of Many in One Read online

  PATRICK WHITE was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England and served in the RAF, before returning to Australia after World War II. Happy Valley, White’s first novel, is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains and is based on his experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales.

  In Happy Valley White found a more honest ‘lumbering after truth’ than in the plays he had written to date. He said, ‘I began to write from the inside out when Roy de Maistre introduced me to abstract painting,’ and he dedicated the book to the artist.

  White went on to publish twelve further novels (one posthumously), three short-story collections and eight plays. His novels include The Aunt’s Story and Voss, which won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair.

  He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973, and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century.

  White died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.

  SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM is the author of five books: Geography, Bird, Melbourne, Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy and City of Trees. She is a former publisher and editor, was a co-founder of the Stella Prize, and is now an adjunct professor at RMIT University’s non/fictionLab.

  ALSO BY PATRICK WHITE

  Novels

  The Living and the Dead

  The Aunt’s Story

  The Tree of Man

  Voss

  Riders in the Chariot

  The Solid Mandala

  The Vivisector

  The Eye of the Storm

  A Fringe of Leaves

  The Twyborn Affair

  Memoirs of Many in One

  The Hanging Garden (unfinished, posthumous)

  Short-story collections

  The Burnt Ones

  The Cockatoos

  Three Uneasy Pieces

  Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Patrick White 1986

  Introduction copyright © Sophie Cunningham 2019

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  First published by Jonathan Cape 1986

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2019

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Duncan Blachford, Typography Studio

  ISBN: 9781925773613 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925774429 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  On the Bed with Dog (or Possibly God) by Sophie Cunningham

  Memoirs of Many in One

  On the Bed with Dog (or Possibly God)

  by Sophie Cunningham

  HAPPY VALLEY (1939) was Patrick White’s first novel. Memoirs of Many in One, published in 1986, just four years before his death, was his last. These works bookended another ten novels. As well, there were plays, poetry, short stories and an autobiography. By the time Memoirs came out Patrick White had also come out, through his own memoirs, Flaws in the Glass (1981). He’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, and transformed from political conservative to political activist.

  Reading Memoirs of Many in One is not unlike staring at a disco ball, one that refracts and reflects a swirl and flourish of ideas, moments and fragmentary characters. I don’t doubt that White would hate the metaphor. In 1984 he wrote to the Mardi Gras committee asking for the parade to be called off: ‘I have always detested the Gay Mardi Gras nonsense particularly since so many non-gay trendies seem to have jumped on the bandwagon.’

  The purported author of Memoirs is Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. Patrick White is described as the book’s editor. Alex Gray is an irritable, contrary woman and her memoirs are, similarly, irritable and contrary. They shake off any attempt to make sense of, or contain, meaning. Time collapses, narrative collapses, gender boundaries collapse. The novel responds better if you try and intuit what it’s on about. Certainly logic isn’t a useful tool, unless what you’re bringing to your reading is the logic of dreams.

  The ageing, dementing Gray is, as the pun in her name implies, a shadier version of White himself, though she feels more like the ‘real’ Patrick than the reasonable, elderly gentleman with a walking stick who limps through the novel. By this stage of his life Patrick in drag was far more Patrick than Patrick out of it. ‘If I were a woman,’ he said, ‘I expect I should have become the most rapacious kind of cocotte, and probably would have got stoned for wearing bird-of-paradise plumes on top of everything else.’

  The novel is camp, theatrical, challenging. As William Yang has noted, White’s ‘crankiness was [a] high camp kind of crankiness, really. I don’t think it was deep-seated; it was like, more of an act. A performance.’ Gray’s pronouncements—provocations reminiscent of Edna Everage, of Germaine Greer—can be genuinely radical: ‘I am not a prostitute. Though…I was admittedly a wife.’ Memoirs is a Queer novel, and that Queerness encompasses everything from syntax to the social order, grammar to God.

  In case you think I’m imposing contemporary identity politics onto the work, I offer as evidence photos of Patrick White dressed as Alex Gray. Or I would offer such photos as evidence if they were available to the public. In 1985 White asked William Yang to photograph him performing Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray on her deathbed. A bed in St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst, was used as a set. The best photos—apparently—were the ones where White wore drag: a scarf to conceal his hair, a cashmere shawl casually thrown over a lacy top. He wanted to use the image as the book’s frontispiece but he was talked out of that—oh how I wish he hadn’t been—and the photos filed away.

  Memoirs of Many in One is the Patrick White novel for which there are the most extensive archives. These are shared between the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales. This ‘curious and contentious manuscript’ took as its starting point two works that had been abandoned in the 1960s: ‘Dolly Formosa and the Happy Few’ and ‘The Binoculars and Helen Nell’. As a result, Memoirs gives us an opportunity to consider ‘the ways White returned to and reworked themes and characters’. (This and the previous quote are from Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Webby’s essay in Patrick White Beyond the Grave, 2015, edited by Ian Henderson and Anouk Lang.) It is because of Memoirs and White’s later plays that critics started to question whether he was still one of the world’s significant modernists or whether he’d moved into the chaotic contemporary waters of postmodernism.

  The novel also has qualities peculiar to what Edward Said called ‘late style’, a style which draws out the tension between the physical decay of ageing (nature)
and the wisdom that comes from age (history): ‘a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness’. Late style is often comic, the comedy arising from the absurdity of the friction between decay and artifice. This is Alex Gray in a nutshell. Those around her see a dithering, dementing former actress. Gray, uninterested in how she is seen, continues the performance which is her life.

  While White wrote about the frailty of the human body throughout his long career, by the time he wrote Memoirs his body was failing him, and that preoccupation can be sensed in the novel. White’s earlier writings on the body, its possibilities for debasement, are more explicitly related to something that is present throughout (the body of his) work: an exploration of the sacred. Absurdity and transcendence; shit and the spirit.

  One of the pleasures of reading Memoirs is that its excesses are byzantine, its evocations baroque, though the more accurate word is Levantine. White’s partner was Manoly Lascaris, whose family had been exiled from the Ottoman city of Smyrna. In On Patrick White (2018), Christos Tsiolkas teases out this relationship and its influence on White’s work: ‘One of the great gifts Manoly bestowed on his lover, is the religion of Greek Orthodoxy…Lascaris’s devout faith cannot be divorced from his pride in the history of religion. Faith is both belief and blood.’

  Another striking aspect of Memoirs is how prescient it is. Ivor Indyk has argued for an experiential reading of White, and I agree that where and how you read White is important. You step into the life of the novel; the novel insinuates itself into your life. I read this novel after having had two fathers die of or with dementia, and that affected my reading of it, much as Indyk’s rereading of The Eye of the Storm was affected by his caring for elderly parents. Memoirs compels us to ask: how do we treat our aged? How should we treat them?

  Great writing does this. It resonates with what we bring to our reading, which is a bit like saying that the novel’s concerns are universal—but that would be oversimplifying the point. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the novel is polymorphous, perverse. It can be penetrated from many angles. This availability is one of the reasons I have always found reading White to be an inspirational experience. ‘Reading White becomes—for all of us—an act which is at once personal and social, individualistic and political, devotional and subversive, sacred and profane,’ Ian Henderson writes in his introduction to Patrick White Beyond the Grave.

  Dementia has many challenges, and one of these is its refusal of the conventions of narrative. Things happen but not in any particular order, and if they do happen chronologically it’s not clear, indeed is irrelevant, if or how they are related. Alex is at home being cared for by Hilda, a daughter as dumb as Australia. Alex is Sister Benedict, asleep under a river red gum in the park holding Sister Bernadette in her arms. Bernadette may, or may not, be dying. Alex is Cleopatra, or is it Dolly Formosa, performing for, sometimes shooting at, her audience. Alex is locked up. Alex is drugged (the current terminology would be chemically restrained). Alex is dead. Alex is alive.

  Oh, Dog! Oh, God!

  He has landed on my bed, and lies there in the lion couchant position, fringed paws outstretched, the purple tongue waiting to savour the salt of human flesh, or do his real job of absolving sin…

  Dare I get on the bed with Dog? He glares and stares. Waiting.

  White’s capacity to write out from the collapse of meaning which is the experience of dementia, to refute the importance of literal meaning, is glorious, and is something he’d been doing since his first novel. ‘I began to write from the inside out when Roy de Maistre introduced me to abstract painting,’ White told Geoffrey Dutton. ‘Before that I had only approached writing as an exercise in naturalism… As far as I was concerned, it was like jumping into space, and finding nothing there at first (the same thing when one plunges into Zen).’

  Patrick White, like many of his characters, like Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, contains multitudes: drag queen, Nobel Laureate, lover, genius, Zen master, grumpy old bastard. Read him and marvel. Read him and weep.

  Memoirs of Many in One

  Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray edited by Patrick White

  TO THE FLYING NUN

  Editor’s Introduction

  After Mrs Gray’s death I was asked by her daughter Hilda to edit the memoirs Alex had kept locked in a morocco writing case, behind arabesques in faded gilt, the work of some Turkish craftsman, which Grandfather Gray had brought back from Constantinople. (I should say the memoirs had soon overflowed the writing case.)

  Alex disliked her married name: too banal. Her father’s polysyllabic ‘Papapandelidis’ inevitably became a boring joke. As her mother Aliki saw it. Aliki preferred her maiden name, ‘Xenophon’. Alex could not very well avoid the Gray bit, but evolved the names under which she was registered in the books of the Nile Cold Storage at the Gare de Ramleh, Alexandria, and later, at David Jones, Sydney: Mme Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray.

  Alex acquired names as other women encrust themselves with jewels and bower-birds collect fragments of coloured glass. It mystified acquaintances that Mrs Gray should become, according to mood or period, ‘Llewellyn’ or ‘Diacono’ for instance, even briefly ‘Bogdarly’. It was truly amazing that she should choose to be labelled ‘Demirjian’, when her mother-in-law, one of those she hated most, had been born a Demirjian (we think). The detested Magda could resign herself to ‘Gray’ from recognising in it a kind of inverted exoticism. So each of the women was more or less content, while inwardly despising contentment and each other.

  I had known the Grays for years. We were all the incongruous descendants of Australian pastoral families. Henry was a cuckoo in the Gray nest, a scholar who wasted his years drifting through the Middle East collecting objets d’art and rare manuscripts. He brought them back to Sydney and founded an antique business which his son Hilary, my schoolfriend, developed profitably later on and the grandson Hal carried on somewhat fitfully.

  Hilary, another of the Gray mavericks, was got on a Levantine woman, another objet d’art Henry brought back from Asia Minor before the war broke out between Turk and Greek and most of Smyrna was reduced to ash and rubble.

  Henry’s wife, Hilary’s mother, was one of those women who acquire a reputation for beauty through a flair for clothes and jewels, an arresting body, and an aggressive kind of ugliness. She had her voice, too. She had her legs, and her taunting breasts. She stopped the conversation whenever she chose to appear at some Alexandrian pâtisserie during the six o’clock brouhaha. She would have stunned the Royal Sydney Golf Club if her breeding had allowed her access.

  Most of the men who ran across her hoped they might take over from her husband, or her current lover. But although Magda Demirjian Gray took lovers, there was no indication that she would leave a husband, elderly certainly, but still virile, who kept her in style. In addition, their son Hilary, to whom she was not overly attached (Magda was attached only to herself) acted as a pledge between husband and wife that could not be overlooked.

  Hilary had the appearance of a slender, green-complexioned Levantine rather than a rowdy extrovert Australian with pastoralist forebears. He had moist black eyelids and curving lashes. At school it got round that he was delicate and allowances must be made for this. He was given milk at break, and was allowed to sit in the sun reading books of his own choosing (Henry James and Proust) from under an eyeshade the colour of milk chocolate.

  We saw a lot of each other as young boys. Hilary was welcome at our house, after school, and for week-ends. We cut up a frog in the bath to watch its heart movement, we smoked a cheroot under the buhl table in the hall, and we masturbated together in bed. We were quick to tidy up and it seemed to me at the time my parents were unaware of any of these activities. They must have been. For the friendship was brought to an abrupt end. It filtered back to me through maids’ chatter and innuendo from the masters that my friend was an unhealthy influence: you couldn’t expect much from the union of an Australian gen
tleman with an Armenian? Arab? Jewess? or whatever the woman was. So Hilary and I began to avoid each other at school. His mother had never been much more than a silhouette and a perfume. She did not fit into the acceptable, that is, dull Sydney society to which my parents belonged, but went down well with her husband’s friends from the art-dealing and Bohemian worlds. (My mother heard that the Demijohn had done a belly dance on a dinner table at Vaucluse.)

  Hilary and I were brought together again in the Second World War when we went over in uniform to the Middle East. There was no mention of the past, not even the flicker of an eyelash. I forget how Magda turned up in Cairo, but she did, announcing to an entourage of officers that she was there to do war work. Of what kind, nobody dared ask, and Magda merely slapped more orange powder on her cheeks and sucked on her lipstick. She became a reflection of those superb desert sunsets to the west of Mariut. Flaring her nostrils, lowering her eyelids, she suggested an inscrutable camel. But without becoming grotesque. She was a beauty by birth and of her milieu. Even Alex, who grew to hate her, had to admit it. As for Magda, she went her own way. She valued her independence and the respect of those she despised.

  Hilary Gray was superficially wounded during the Syrian campaign. While on sick leave in Alexandria he met a girl, the daughter of Greeks from Asia Minor who had escaped to Egypt during the sack of Smyrna. I met the parents at the time Hilary was courting Alex. Once you got over the name ‘Papapandelidis’, they were very correct, even distinguished people, anglicised by governesses. They were distressed at the thought of their daughter marrying a man of whom nothing was known except that he came from a barbarous country, his father an antique dealer, his mother practically an untouchable from ‘Frango Levantini’ Smyrna.

  I was with Stepho and Aliki Papapandelidis on the Alexandrian Corniche, across the bay the mole where the Pharos is believed to have stood.