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  • Doris Lessing's Work of Forgiveness
  • Tom Sperlinger (bio)
Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing. HarperCollins, 2008. £16.99. ISBN 978 0 00 723345 8

Doris Lessing has recalled giving a lift to a hitchhiker, a young soldier 'in an unusual state of mind'. He 'could not stop talking', she writes, 'he was in love'. During the journey, he pulled out a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) and said that 'he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn't really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it'. Lessing suggests that 'this youth, who was soon going to be married, was Lawrence's ideal reader'.1 A quotation from Lady Chatterley forms the hinge between the two halves of Alfred and Emily:

And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is, really, only the mechanism of re-assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered.

(p. 49)

The same passage appears in Lessing's recent introduction to Lady Chatterley, where she notes, perhaps with her own book in mind, that she no longer reads Lawrence's novel as a love story: 'Now I think this is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. How was it I had not seen that when I first read it?' (p. xxi). The First World War is the 'wounding shock' that damages the fictional Chatterley and Mellors and the [End Page 66] real-life Alfred and Emily. In her own book this quotation divides a biographical account of her parents from a preceding fiction, in which Lessing imagines how they might have lived without the intervention of war.

This impact of war on Lessing's life is not a revelation to her, nor will it be to her readers. One of her early fictional triumphs was the 'Children of Violence' sequence in which the inheritance of conflict is central, from the eponymous teenage heroine of the 1930s in Martha Quest (1952) to the descriptions of post-1945 London in The Four-Gated City (1969). Similarly, in the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), she wrote: 'I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak'.2 The recurrent 'now' is characteristic of the vivid immediacy of Lessing's best writing, and also of the cycles and repetitions there are in her work, which are evident in this book.

The factual second half of Alfred and Emily is made up of a series of vivid sketches. A full account is not given of how Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh grew up, met, married, survived the war, came to Persia and then left it, or settled in Southern Rhodesia. Instead there is an emphasis on particular aspects of the narrative, some of which Lessing has written about before. For example:

I have written about my father in various ways; in pieces long and short, and in novels. He comes out clearly, unambiguous, all himself. 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, illness 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?'

(p. 152)

In spite of how frequently Lessing has written about her father, he remains an elusive figure, only partly because his life was broken substantially by the time his daughter...

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