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Alfred and Emily

Real and imagined parents

Doris Lessing
Fourth Estate, 273pp, £16.99,

Philip Hensher

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Philip Hensher on Doris Lessing's account of her parents' lives

It seems an extraordinary, almost inconceivable life now. Probably nowhere in the world is now as remote and cut off as rural Rhodesia was in Lessing’s childhood. In her account, her parents went there for no better reason than, on leave from Persia in London, they visited the Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

And the Southern Rhodesian stall had great mealie cobs, and the invitation ‘Get rich on maize.’ Do you mean to say those idiots believed a slogan on a stall at an exhibition? But many idiots did . . .

Utterly unprepared, their life is beautifully caught in a series of novelistic images; the trunk full of evening dresses, garden- party dresses, tea gowns which, decades later, Emily’s daughter Doris unpacks, every one unworn and wrecked by moths, or the pet cow which Doris raises, like her own talent, until it takes to forcing its way from the veldt into her bedroom, half-grown. It is — an odd, Lessing- like combination — both furious and relaxed, like a recorded rant by a masterly talker.

The second half is worth the price of admission, though the first, speculative half shows some flagging of energy. I don’t think the consequences, both for Europe and for the characters, of there being no Great War are quite sufficiently explored. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires are still said to fall on cue, and there is no Spanish influenza outbreak. Whether the political upheavals of the 1920s, particularly the emancipation of women, would have proceeded in anything like the same way is difficult to envisage. Perhaps Lessing’s point, merely adumbrated, is that the long Edwardian afternoon would have entailed a continuation of the great Edwardian philanthropy, otherwise brutally curtailed.

Not many of Lessing’s books are anything but instantly engaging, in the political as well as the buttonholing sense. In this one, she explores the conviction that ‘between the clever, foresightful people of this world and the ones without imagination there is a gulf into which perhaps we will all fall one day.’ When there is no alternative there to be worth imagining, Alfred and Emily sadly suggests, the unshadowed result in lives may be usefulness, and perhaps even happiness.

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