Lessing Looks Back on Shadows and Parents
Doris Lessing once declared that “fiction makes a better job of the truth” than straightforward reminiscence, and while that might well be true of her celebrated and semi-autobiographical Martha Quest novels, it’s an observation that doesn’t apply at all to her latest book, “Alfred & Emily,” an intriguing work that is half fiction, half memoir. The sketchy, insubstantial first half of the book imagines what her parents’ lives might have been like if World War I had never occurred. The potent and harrowing second half recounts the real life story of her parents, and the incalculable ways in which the war fractured their dreams and psyches and left them stranded in the bush in Africa, eking out a meager existence on a tiny farm in Rhodesia.
This portrait of her parents is familiar in outline from Ms. Lessing’s 1994 autobiography, “Under My Skin,” but whereas the author adopted a detached, matter-of-fact tone in that volume, she writes here with a visceral immediacy, conjuring the awful, unrelieved hardship of her parents’ lives in Rhodesia, and the aching disappointment that shrouded their daily existence.
In the first half of this book Ms. Lessing tries to give her parents the lives they might have had in a world without that awful war. Alfred becomes the English farmer he dreamed of becoming, marries a woman named Betsy — instead of Emily — and becomes a father not to Doris but to twin sons.
Emily, meanwhile, marries the doctor she thought she loved, but finds this marriage cold and unfulfilling; she never has any children. After her unloved husband dies, she uses the tidy fortune he has left her to establish a charity that sets up schools in impoverished neighborhoods and counties. Although she does not find personal happiness, this Emily goes on to become a beloved figure in society, renowned for her good works.
The fictional Alfred and Emily are curiously abstract figures, fleshed out with few psychological specifics; like the people in the author’s weaker recent books like “The Sweetest Dream,” they are spindly line drawings, assigned a single quality or two and sent on generic social peregrinations. These characters suggest that Ms. Lessing has a hard time imagining her mother and father as people other than her parents, or, for that matter, imagining a reality in which she herself did not exist.