“Memoirs of Many in One” by Patrick White (post 2): The Nobel Prize winner’s last novel is about his multiple personality, just as its title suggests.

However, White never uses the term “multiple personality.” The closest he comes to explicit acknowledgement is his reference to Alex, the protagonist, as being schizophrenic: “schizophrenics and fellow mystics” (1, p. 95). White may have made the common linguistic mistake of using the term “schizophrenia” to mean split personality (multiple personality). (Schizophrenia, a psychosis, and multiple personality, a nonpsychotic dissociative disorder, are different conditions, but the psychiatrist who coined the term “schizophrenia” did not know that.)

“The conceit [of the novel] was that he, Patrick White, had been asked to edit the memoirs of the late Alex…Gray…who, [White] admitted…‘is myself in my various roles and sexes. It gives me great scope.’ Alex Gray’s forebears and offspring are also fragments of White, and these familiar figures of his imagination are gathered together in the pages of Memoirs as friends…holding one last party before the ship sails” (2, p. 622). (This was the last novel published in White’s lifetime.)

White’s reference to the novel as being about “premature senility” (2, p. 622) probably reflected his own fears of growing old. Both the protagonist and the novel’s “editor” (“Patrick White”) are elderly. But the story of the protagonist’s multiple personalities—“Alex acquired names [of alternate personalities] as other women encrust themselves with jewels” (1, p. 9)—was life long.

“…I [Patrick White] knew I would never escape Alex…her life was mine historically, personally, and if I cared to admit, creatively” (1, p. 179).

“…I I [personal pronoun repeated in the text] — the great creative ego — had possessed myself of Alex Gray’s life when she was still an innocent girl and created from it the many images I needed to develop my own obsessions, both literary and real” (1, p. 192).

Mirror Mirror on the wall,

What’s my gender after all?

Alex (a woman) says, “The afternoon of Patrick’s visit the glass [mirror] shows me up…I can see the grains of powder trembling on the hairs of the moustache, feel the more-than-down on my forearms…” (1, p. 26).

“One last look at myself in the glass. I am Alex once more” (1, p. 27).

That is, first she sees a male alternate personality in the mirror (with a mustache and hairy arms), but then she sees her regular female self.

In this connection, recall from my previous post on Patrick White that he had said in his autobiography: “I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man or woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing.”

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” to see past posts on the fact that people with multiple personality sometimes see their alternate personalities when they look in the mirror. I have also previously mentioned that it is common for persons with multiple personality to have both male and female personalities.

Comment

This novel is often frustrating and confusing, because White does not explain Alex’s thoughts as coming from various alternate personalities. Without that explanation, Alex often seems delusional.

Evidently White, who had already won the Nobel Prize and was getting old when he wrote this novel, was more concerned with pleasing himself. What Alex said probably made more sense to White, because he knew where she was coming from: her many in one (many personalities in one person).

1. Patrick White. Memoirs of Many in One. New York, Viking Penguin, 1986.
2. David Marr. Patrick White: A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991/1992.