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 10 novels. As well, there were plays, poetry, short stories and an autobiography. By the time Memoirs came out White had also come out, through his 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.

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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 the logic of dreams.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patrick White #3 (1980) by William Yang. Photograph: William Yang

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patrick White at anti nuclear march 1981. Photograph: Patrick Riviere/Getty Images

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.

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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.

Memoirs is a Queer novel, and that Queerness encompasses everything from syntax to the social order, grammar to God

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?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The work of Australian writer Patrick White is displayed at the National Library of Australia. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

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.

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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.

• This is the introduction to a new edition of Memoirs of Many in One by Patrick White, out through Text Classics on 4 June