Memoirs of Many in One

Grace Cossington-Smith, Extravaganza (1921)

“The figure at least is mine… but the face has come out blurred, it could be anybody’s.”

Memoirs of Many in One, by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray

Plot: The aged Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray tells her story (in papers edited by her reliable if uninteresting friend Patrick White). It is a history of complete unreliability, near-senility, and constant invention. From Alex’s ancestors in Smyrna across the Middle East, to her time performing in a travelling theatre company throughout the Australian outback, to her rebellious relationship with her daughter Hilda. And now “they” are out to get her. Is she mad? Or just someone whom the mundane cannot fully understand?

Editions:

• Jonathan Cape (UK, April 1986, 192pp)
• Viking (US, October 1986, 192pp)
• Irwin Publishing (Canada, 1986)
• Penguin (AU, 1987)
• Gallimard (trans: Jean Lambert: Memoires Eclates D’Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray,1988)
• Claassen (Dolly Formosa und die Auserwaehlten: Die Memoiren der Alex Xenophon Dimirjan Gray, Herausgegeben von Patrick White, 1988)
• Text Publishing (AU, 2019, introduction by Sophie Cunningham)
• Bolinda (Audiobook, read by Deidre Rubenstein and Alan King, 2019)

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History: PW had abandoned a novel, The Hanging Garden, in 1981, and felt that he would no longer write another, an attitude he held as late as August 1983. By 1984, however, with no more theatrical projects on the horizon, PW needed something to keep himself creatively occupied. He began work in late 1984, saying that he was writing a novel about “premature senility”. PW sped through the process, completing his second draft by June 1985. David Marr notes that this was the only novel for which PW did not write a third draft, the standard process where he would shift from handwriting to the typewriter, with the aim of working through the text one final time. PW did not want to spend any more time on this novel, worried that “my own senility might overtake me”. This was an unusually short period for any of his works. Some of the material came from his earlier abandoned novel, The Binoculars and Helen Nell, especially the theatre sequences. Alex’s one-woman show, “Dolly Formosa”, comes from the title of another unfinished work.

PW submitted the novel to his publishers in late 1985, with the conceit that it was “written” by Alex Gray and only “edited” by her friend Patrick White, who also appears in the novel. His publishers on both sides of the Atlantic wanted PW’s name on the cover as writer, but the author was determined.

In 1988, PW donated the original handwritten manuscript to Manuscript Appeal, the Canon-Collins Education Trust supporting education and anti-apartheid causes in South Africa. The manuscript was subsequently auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1991 and purchased jointly by the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales at a price of £12,650. (see SMH 25/9/1991.) For years it was assumed to be the only surviving PW manuscript until his papers were revealed by his former agent Barbara Mobbs in 2006.

Paul Bruton, manuscript curator at the Mitchell Library, noted that there were corrections in the manuscript which are not reflected in the final draft, and thought it might be a deliberate prank to screw with academics. This theory was shared with the press and got some attention at the time. This theory was largely disproved in 2006 when the other manuscripts showed up, and it seemed consistent with them.

Notes: Memoirs of Many in One is PW’s most formally digressive novel since The Aunt’s Story forty years earlier. The post-modern construction reflects Alex’s deteriorating mind, shifting in time and showing us that the woman is going mad even if she doesn’t quite realise or accept it. Alex’s name was remembered from that of Madame Xenophon, the wife of a Greek millionaire whom he met in France in 1934. Harry Kippax, the Sydney Morning Herald theatre critic who had given PW some rough reviews in the 1980s, comes in for serious savagery under a lightly disguised name. Hubber & Smith speculate that PW could only include himself as a character now that he had written through all of his own personal demons, in Flaws in the Glass and The Twyborn Affair.

Sales: The UK print run was 15,000, and included a specific Australian first edition of around 5,000 copies for the first (and only) time.

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Reviews:

• B. Maddox, Listener, 3/4/1986
• Ron Shepherd, Editor or Author?, CRNLE Reviews Journal 1986
• A.S. Byatt, TLS 4/4/1986
• Kerryn Goldsworthy, National Times 4/4/1986
• Thomas Shapcott, SMH, 5/4/1986
• David English, The Age, 5/4/1986
• David Rowbotham, Courier-Mail, 5/4/1986
• David Malouf, Weekend Australian, 5/4/1986
• B. Martin, Spectator, 12/4/1986
• W.L. Webb, Guardian, 13/4/1986
• Susan McKernan, Bulletin, 15/4/1986
• Bethwyn Brown, West Australian, 19/4/1986
• G. Wilce, New Statesman 25/4/1986
• David Tacey, “Patrick White: The End of Genius”, Meridian (May 1986)
• Philip Horne, London Review of Books, 8/5/1986
• Veronica Sen, Canberra Times, 12/5/1986
• Elizabeth Jolley, Fremantle Arts Review 1.5 (May 1986)
• A.P. Riemer, Southerly 46.2 (June 1986)
• J. Neville, London Magazine 26.1 (1986)
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Australian Book Review 82 (Jul 1986)
• David Tacey, The Age 19/7/1986:
  • “White can do anything, write even the most ordinary work, and somehow it is all justified under the wondrous banner of gayness.”
• Publishers Weekly 15/8/1986
• Leonie Kramer, Quadrant 30.9 (Sep 1986)
• David W. Henderson, Library Journal, 1/9/1986
• Laurie Clancy, Overland 104 (Sep 1986)
• Kirkus Reviews, 15/9/1986
• S. Whaley, Toronto Globe & Mail, 25/10/1986
• Jonathan Baumbach, NYT Book Review, 26/10/1986
• Axel Clark, Scripsi 4.2 (Nov 1986)
• Peter Wolfe, Antipodes 1.1 (March 1987)
• Ann Nugent, Blast 1 (Autumn 1987)

Also published in 1986: Elizabeth Jolley, The Well; Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils; Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Christopher Koch, The Doubleman; Christina Stead, I’m Dying Laughing

Previous novel: The Hanging Garden

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