September 7, 2008
By Porter Shreve
Weighing what might have been: Lessing blends fiction, memoir in portraying parents
A year ago Harvey Blume interviewed Doris Lessing for the Globe's
Ideas section, and in hindsight two parts stand out as ironic. When
asked why she thought she hadn't won a Nobel Prize, Lessing said that
"a little gray chap" from the Nobel Committee had once told her she
didn't stand a chance: "I've never found out why they don't like me."
Two months later she was named, at 87, the oldest literature laureate
ever. Blume also quoted Lessing as saying that past the age of 60, "you
float away from the personal. You have received the great gift of
getting older - detachment, impersonality."
But Lessing's first book after capturing the Nobel is one of the
most personal of her more than 50 volumes, and far from letting go of
the past she grapples directly with her fraught relationship with her
parents and their troubled bond with each other. Lessing is a famously
close-to-the-bone writer, author of two autobiographies, "Under My
Skin" and "Walking in the Shade," and of the five-volume "Children of
Violence" series, featuring the autobiographical heroine Martha Quest.
In Lessing's classic "Golden Notebook," the protagonist, Anna Wulf, is
a writer in the midst of a breakdown who resolves her crisis by fusing
her disparate roles - woman, artist, companion, activist - into one
unified self.
Like "The Golden Notebook," "Alfred and Emily" explores the boundary
where reality and imagination meet, through the use of a formally
innovative structure. The first half of the book is fiction as
alternate history: the lives Lessing's parents might have led if World
War I had never taken place. The second half is memoir and tells the
story of what really happened to her mother and father. Both sections
are wonderfully evocative, though the task of telling two life stories
in two separate genres, all in fewer than 300 pages, does make the
narrative episodic at times. But in several key places, particularly
where the book transitions to memoir, Lessing shows how she
extrapolated from photographs and family stories to imagine whom her
parents might have become. These glimpses into the creative process of
one of the world's most gifted and socially engaged writers make
"Alfred and Emily" a valuable addition to the Lessing oeuvre.
In real life, her father, Alfred Tayler, was a spirited and athletic
man who lost his leg to a shrapnel wound. During his recovery he missed
the Battle of Passchendaele, in which his entire company was killed,
and for the rest of his days he suffered physical complications from
his injury and deep, pervasive survivor guilt. "Even as a child I knew
his obsessive talking about the Trenches was a way of ridding himself
of the horrors," Lessing writes. "So I had the full force of the
Trenches, tanks, star-shells, shrapnel, howitzers - the lot - through
my childhood, and felt as if the black cloud he talked about was there,
pressing down on me."
This same cloud weighed even more heavily on Lessing's mother. Emily
McVeagh was a headstrong nurse at the Royal Free Hospital in London
when she met Alfred and helped him through his convalescence. The
couple enjoyed some good years of marriage in Persia, but at the
Southern Rhodesia stall of the Empire Exhibition Alfred saw an
advertisement - "Get rich on maize" - and cast his family's lot on the
African bush, where their dream died quickly. They found themselves
living in a thatched-roof mud hut, fighting off insects and malaria,
and enduring year after year of failed crops, racial and social unrest,
and the inescapable legacy of the Great War.
Lessing saves the memoir part of her story for the second half of
the book and presents the fiction first. This decision might seem
counterintuitive, but it underscores how she resists the happy ending
in favor of a happy beginning. In fiction, Alfred is physically and
emotionally whole because there is no World War I. He fulfills his
dream of working the land but in fertile England, not arid Africa; he's
a gentleman farmer who plays cricket on the weekends and marries a
probationer from Emily's ward.
The fictional Emily is a nurse in London, but instead of meeting a
haunted invalid she marries a successful cardiologist and gives up her
job. Though it seems for a time as if she might become like the real
Emily McVeagh and so many Lessing heroines, "women who should have been
working, should have worked, should have interests in their lives," her
husband has a heart attack at 50 and leaves Emily a fortune. She sets
up a trust to help the poor of the East End, and her philanthropy
extends to opening more than a dozen successful schools. She does
harbor some regret at never having children and never remarrying, but
it can't be denied that she's had a fulfilling life.
So why does Lessing begin with a sunny fiction and end with a bitter
truth? Because youth fades and dreams wither, because beginnings are a
long horizon and endings a narrowing corridor. And one can fantasize
about a world without war and its consequences, but in the end the
weight of history is too profound to avoid.
Porter Shreve's third novel, "When the White House Was Ours," will be published this month.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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