MEMOIRS OF AN AEON

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33307, 18 August 1973, Page 10

MEMOIRS OF AN AEON

Once Is Enough. By Frank Sargeson. Reed. 133 pp. (Reviewed by H. D. McN.)

It is more than 20 years since “Landfall” published an abridged version of Sargeson’s memoir “Up onto the Roof and Down Again.” “Landfall 100” brought an extract from “Third Class Country,” a continuation of the memoir, and the promise of the whole lot being published in book form. Here, at last, it is: “Once is Enough,” which consists of “Up onto the Roof” and "Third Class

Needless to say, there are no big surprises about this book. Even though the last page is dated “1950-1971,” it is coherent and stylistically self-assured almost to a fault: there do not seem to have been any great sessions of soulsearching behind its composition, and one feels that the whole thing could conceivably have been dictated into a tape-recorder in a single day. Certainly, though, the volume is not uninteresting. Broadly, it covers Sargeson’s development up to his emergence as a writer, and it is particularly interesting in the attention it pays to the forming of his private values: his puritan conditioning, his family relationships, his sex problems, and his early work experience. It is not very difficult to relate the man portrayed in this book to the man who wrote the short stories in the 19305. The young man oppressed by an irrational sin-conscious-ness, meekly following the career that was expected of him, hero-worshipped a relative who could liberate him from the problems of home, unable to hold his own in pub society, and taking

refuge in an imperfectly-understood relationship with an older man — all this, in a sense, consummated in the short stories.

Much more elusive is the connection between the man who wrote this book and the man portrayed in it. Forgetting the forty-odd years that separate them, there seems to be an uneasy parity in their relationship: Sargeson seems to have his younger self so tidily compartmentalised that in places one senses that the book is hovering close to an exercise in role-playing, Sargeson senior wryly scrutinising his youthful

self, selecting the bits that have the

potential for development, and presenting them with a flavour of coy selfindulgence. Of course, most of this is probably a subconscious process and it is obviously consolidated by habit, but it is nevertheless an uncomfortably short-circuited sort of memoir. Basically, “Once is Enough” seems something of a return to the area of “I Saw in my Dream,” with the difference that the veil of the book has now been replaced with best-quality plate glass. A memoir is not the same thing as an autobiography, and Sargeson probably has little need for a ghost writer, but his memory, one feels, could do with a certain amount of prodding; it is obvious, for example, that a lot of detail which came out incidentally in the Beveridge interview (“Landfall” 9394) finds no place in this book. In fact, "Once is Enough” seems an amazingly self-centred book: certainly, it is refreshing at first to find no namedropping of the “Picnicking with Jane Mander” variety, but by the end of the book one is desperately eager for Sargeson to break out of his vacuum.