Laughter in the next ward
Brian Martin
MEMOIRS OF MANY IN ONE by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited by Patrick White Cape, £8.95 The sick and senile hold a grisly fas- cination for Patrick White. In The Eye of the Storm he penetrated with vivid intensi- ty the mind of Elizabeth Hunter, rendered an intellectual vegetable by age and a numbing paralysis. Now as old age embraces Patrick White himself, and, if we are to believe this book, as he advances arthritically into his seventies leaning on his walking-stick, he explores the ramb- lings of an ancient society lady, Alex Gray, who suffers chronically from Altzheimer s disease. Where Iris Murdoch is successful in assuming the character and personalitY of a man in her novels, Patrick White can do the reverse in adopting the persona of a woman.
The device of this novel is to present Patrick White's edition of Alex's autobiog- raphical memoirs, written during de- mented fantasies, together with some of his own editorial commentary. She writes, I hate myself, because I know the inner nie. My beauty is a mask, my writing a subter- fuge'; and as he says with honest ironY, `Although an Anglo-Saxon Australian on both sides, I am a sybarite and masochist, some of the dramatis personae of this Levantine script could be the offspring °f my own psyche.' They are, of course: Ale herself derives from a cosmopolitan back- ground scented by the perfumes of Arabia and the Levant. Part of the backdrop is from the world of Lawrence Durrell's novels - Cairo, Alexandria, Smyrna, Lux- or. Another of White's creations, Alex's mother Magda, 'stopped the conversation whenever she chose to appear at some Alexandrian patisserie during the six o'clock brouhaha.'
The memoirs have that quality of roam- ing, rambling discursiveness characteristic of the senile who have lost their grip on the present and talk to you as if it were 30, 40 or more years ago - and their tone has a Convincing urgency about it. Startlingly Cogent and sharp, their minds are bent on reliving short, disjointed episodes: it is when the parts are fitted together and presented whole that the madness of the structure is apparent. Such is the authentic nature of these crazy memoirs. Alex con- fesses her terror: 'I couldn't bear to be locked up - again - with a lot of mad geriatrics farting at me for the rest of my life . . .', not realising that her brilliant recreations of her past experiences lead her Inevitably to the strait-jacket. She arrives at a lunch-party given by a fabulous Lady Miriam: 'Is milady expecting you?' She tartly responds with that outsmarting glib- ndss of the deranged, 'I'm always expected When I arrive.' After a short survey of the guests, she mounts a dappled mare: `Sieg- bride stumbled on the transverse branch of a deodar. She dumped me just short of the buffet's ruined conceits . . . Could have been on a heap of horse-turd . . . There was nothing for it but to regain uncon- sciousness.' At another time, she invites the local mystic, an Aussie derelict from the neighbourhood park CI have done pretty well outer the garbage in the last few days. It's always that much tastier when a bloke's gotter fossick for it.') back to her house and hides him in a built-in cupboard, her equivalent of a priest-hole, to escape the notice of her guardian daughter, Hilda.
In the end, the geriatric ward claims her, and she succumbs to the sedation of a nurse's syringe. Patrick, her one friend through thick and thin, and Hilda, whose `prime disaster of life was her relationship with her mother', await Alex's final curtain-call. Early on she says of Patrick, `There is no reason why I shouldn't like love - the old sod (bet he blues his hair).' Together he and Hilda make for the hospital whose description rings nastily true. A recent hospital visit to a friend suffering from a sub-arachnoid haemor- rhage convinces me of that: he has been lying supine in a neurology ward for the past four weeks - a minor bedlam full of hoots and shrieks of incoherent old women and wails and groans of incontinent old men: not the sort of place to get better in. Patrick White creates the ambience exactly with a somewhat more philosophic cast of mind than mine: 'Silence broken by distant laughter, coughing, and at times the sound of someone fetching up the dregs of a lifetime.' This is where Alex's wasted head and gnarled body resign their fantasies to the ministrations of Patrick White's wri- ter's hand. She knows that 'age and arthri- tis have deprived Patrick of any but the wheelchair approach to exploration', and it appears that he is fast following her along the road to bodily decrepitude.
During a theatrical tour which takes place in her own mind. Alex Gray plays Cleopatra, which the critics find perversely `very, very funny', and she declaims her `too, too modern' monologues, Dolly For- mosa and The Happy Few. In her account of her performance she remarks to Patrick, `Reviews . . . we both know about them, Patrick, do we not? . . . Because our friends always point out the bad ones while overlooking the good.' The malice of friends will not be needed here. Memoirs of Many in One is a frighteningly convinc- ing novel, glittering with brilliant patches of imagined experience and exhibiting some profound passages of inspired in- sight. It is a tale of the sadness and pathos of the human condition, and expresses the fear of dementia and lost faculties, the possibility of which Patrick White must feel himself dangerously close to in his declin- ing years. Memoirs invites philosophical reflection, and it is a happy and appropri- ate chance that shows dimly, in the back- ground of the dust-cover photo, a two- volume edition of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, just decipherable in the gloom behind his right shoulder.
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