One may write a life in five volumes, or in a sentence. How about this? Alfred Tayler, a vigorous and healthy man, was wounded badly in the First World War, tried to live as if he were not incapacitated, illnesses defeated him, and at the end of a shortened life he was begging, “You put a sick old dog out of its misery, why not me?”
Doris Lessing follows this factual summary not so much with a refutation of it as with an amplification exposing its inadequacy. She cites the actions, the energies and abilities it excludes. Yet even doing this doesn’t satisfy her. There remains a part of the man, apprehensible enough but always hidden beneath his everyday persona, a part beyond all assimilable data, surviving largely irrespective of exterior circumstances and their exigencies. Perhaps only fiction can do justice to such a thwarted individual as Alfred, Doris Lessing’s father – or to his wife, her mother, the scarcely more fulfilled Emily McGough. So in Alfred and Emily, Lessing sets herself the task of creating for her parents a happier alternative to the lives they actually lived. The foundations she builds on are all the give-away half-conscious hints, involuntary gestures and inconsistencies of speech or behaviour she observed in them during her difficult years as their daughter in Southern Rhodesia, before and during the Second World War.
An exercise so conjectural, however revelatory, could not content a writer as analytic as Lessing. In her 1971 preface to The Golden Notebook (1962) she wrote that her central character “recognizes she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness . . . . But from their fragments can come something new, The Golden Notebook”. This method also applies to Alfred and Emily. A foreword of arresting directness gives us the essentials about her parents and about her own authorial intentions. Then comes a novella telling the story of their translated lives, which duly receives an “Explanation”, followed by an illuminating little history of the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where both the real and the fictional Emily McGough worked. This makes us feel that Lessing’s project, for all its speculative inquiry, is anchored in English actualities.
A passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the epigraph to Part Two, a warning that psychic wounds never heal as swiftly, or as thoroughly, as physical ones can: “And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst”. We are now ready to move into that territory which gave Lessing herself such deep-seated wounds that even in old age she must still treat them, and as a result help readers deal with their own. This is the existence, never properly thought out beforehand, constantly rocky and disappointing, that the Taylers forged in Southern Rhodesia and imposed on their two offspring, Doris and Harry.
Lessing’s readers will already be familiar with this territory. Interestingly she refers here to only two of her earlier novels, both of them pertinent. “Martha Quest was, I think, the first no-holds-barred account of a mother-and-daughter battle. It was cruel, that book. Would I do it now? . . . I would say Martha Quest was my first novel, being autobiographical and direct . . . . The Grass is Singing was the first of my real novels.” In Martha Quest (1952) she actually calls her father Alfred; the fidelity in name was, we now see, matched by fidelity to his general situation and to the details of his daily life.
Few can forget Alfred Quest, diabetic, unable to make a go of his modest Rhodesian farm which nonetheless emotionally absorbs him, a man who lost a leg in the First World War and who in conversation keeps referring to the terrible experiences he underwent alongside so many young men of his generation: “We came out of the trenches, and then suddenly the war was bad form. The Great Unmentionable”. In his sleep Alfred dreams of lost, mutilated or slain comrades; awake, he ponders a dreadful future, and turns to the chiliastic paranoid fantasies of British Israelitism for dubious guidance. Yet he has some satisfactions: surveying the spacious kopje-crowned landscape stretching before him, or observing its copious wildlife. In Part Two of Alfred and Emily, Lessing beautifully evokes Alfred’s patient watching of birds nest-building, spiders web-weaving. As a sporting young man back in Essex he had spent his most treasured hours in the company of the local farmers’ boys, and dreamed of having a farm of his own, something which would have been beyond his means in England. He never spoke to his daughter more cheerfully than when recalling his rural youth; in Martha Quest he tells her stories about his cousin George, a thatcher, and about horses known and loved. Always there is the assumption that the English countryside is the general desideratum.
And it is there that Lessing keeps him in the novella she has composed for his other, better life; she makes him an admired cricketer, popular in his community, and, though not rich enough to buy himself a farm, close enough to a well-to-do farmer to secure himself the kind of life suited to him. He who in reality cried out, when middle-aged, “The men who were killed and wounded, the men in my company, they were such fine chaps!”, now enjoys the companionship of his best mate, Bert, and is always around horses. And, as for the Great War itself, which cost Alfred his leg, his friends and his mental and bodily health, Lessing boldly constructs a future without it, a world in which it simply never happened.
The war-free England that gives Alfred his harmonious, productive life has conserved its Edwardian/Georgian self with remarkable purity. Its dominant culture is bucolic; sport, practical and neighbourly charity, and a cheerfully carnal uxoriousness are its outstanding features. Prosperity has continued, though poverty, mostly urban, does exist, and is fought by individual dedication and private resourcefulness. (The People’s Budget of 1909 clearly had no real sequence.) In the wider world, we learn that Austria-Hungary and Turkey imploded in the earlier 1920s, affecting little in English life except metropolitan fashion. But men – in accordance with Lessing’s usual reading of males – do come to feel a lack in their lives which they think only wars can fill. Alfred’s sons, though not Alfred himself, will hear the call to battle.
The mother of these boys is not Emily, for in this “what-if” history, related with limpidity of style and rich suggestive detail, Alfred and Emily do not marry; their lives touch but never entwine. There is a kinship between the two – as we stand back for a Golden Notebook moment of synthesizing comprehension – because this alternative England suits Emily McGough as well as it does Alfred. It caters for her enterprising nature, her inventive flair, in a way that neither historical England nor her colonies ever could. In this other England she can be fulfilled, without being either wife or mother; here, her ten-year marriage to an eminent doctor has legal and social meaning only. She addresses other people’s children, through her wonderful storytelling, which leads her to found successful progressive schools and, later, to set up refuge shelters for mothers and children.
Thus neither parent goes to Africa, where the real Taylers decided to emigrate because they were impressed by the Southern Rhodesian stall at the Empire Exhibition. Yet their daughter’s art is unimaginable without the wildness of that continent, and the precarious nature – economic, cultural and moral – of its colonization. These elements, from her two first novels onwards, have given her work its universality and authority.
“I hated my mother. I can remember that emotion from the start”. These sentences from Part Two of this book are still shocking. At Lessing’s own admission, this hatred permeates Martha Quest where it is rendered with visceral force, even if it is not always explicable. And in The Grass is Singing (1950), Mary, who is unhappily married to an improvident farmer not unlike Alfred, and whose life turns her frustrations into a paranoid suspicions of “kaffirs”, also must partly derive from Emily. Is Lessing less harsh on her mother now? Has she spared her the earlier resentful repudiation? Not entirely. Lessing accords her dignity, honours both her ability to create a home in a barren place and her attempts to educate the labourers in health matters. Most importantly, she pays generous tribute to her mother’s narrative gifts, which she has so prodigiously inherited. The compelling prose of Alfred and Emily and the subtle artistic intricacy of the work (the younger Emily was a discerning reader) are in themselves an act of redemption. Paradoxically, the unlikelihood of the future world imagined for Emily serves to reinforce the nobility of this double portrait.
Doris Lessing is D. H. Lawrence’s heir in the unflagging creativity of her verbal harnessing of nature; there is a beautiful account here of her earlier self’s relationship to a bull-calf. The epigraph from Lady Chatterley’s Lover is therefore especially appropriate, for Alfred and Emily can be likened to what Lawrence himself might have written had he survived into old age to review his mother and father, the Walter and Gertrude Morel of Sons and Lovers.
ALFRED AND EMILY
274pp. Fourth Estate. £16.99.
978 0 00 723345 8