Customer Reviews

Alfred and Emily

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a somewhat unusual book. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing chose to write about her parents, Alfred Taylor and Emily McVeigh, but rather than stick to their actual lives she took the liberty in the first half of the book to imagine them as they might have been had there never been a World War I. The second half of the book deals with them as they actually were.

Lessing imagines her parents as what they seemed to have wanted to be-a farmer and a head nurse-who never married each other. The farmer had a wife and family. The nurse married a doctor who was not a very loving individual and who died young. Alfred and Emily met each other, but never were a couple, in their daughter's imagination.

The imagined story is stilted and old-fashioned in style. Possibly because the main characters were people she knew well in other circumstances, Lessing doesn't do much with their development. While events occur, she doesn't really give any insight as to why the individuals behave as they do. Toward to end of the novella she finally gives them some life, but by then it is hard remain interested.

The second half of the book that tells about their real life is rather rambling and disjointed. Lessing is 87 years old and in the manner of many older people she seems to repeat herself fairly often while describing her parents' life.

The real Alfred Taylor wanted to be a farmer, but he went to "The Great War" and lost most of his right leg from shrapnel wound. He spent a very long time in the hospital recovering and that is where he met his wife, Emily McVeigh, a nurse. She was a wonderfully talented upper-middle-class woman who decided to defy her father's wishes and became a nurse. After the war they moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Alfred tried to farm, but nothing about the land was like the English farm of his dreams. Emily suffered from a nervous breakdown and Alfred was always suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I suspect that readers who are very familiar with Doris Lessing and her other works might find this book enjoyable. I don't feel that it holds up well alone. Lessing seems to expect that the reader already knows a great deal about her life. That, coupled with the disjointed style, makes the book less than I had hoped for from a writer of her stature.

Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer's comments.

In the first part of the book Doris Lessing imagines her parents lives as if they had lived easier and happier lives, lives in which they did not marry each other. Lessing is a first- rate storyteller and thus this part of the work is readable. But it is not really deep in feeling and not compelling on an emotional level.
In the second part she tells the story of her father who lost a leg in the First War, and also lost most of his good friends there. A tough and determined character haunted by nightmares of the war he went on to make a new life for himself and his family- though the injuries of the war soon got to him and he died quite young at sixty after suffering greatly. Her mother who nursed the father during the war and enjoyed the time of their social whirl in Tehran also had an extremely difficult life. Lessing speaks of her terrible conflict with her mother and her having married to get away from her. She describes the world of her Rhodesian early years and the period of her early adulthood right after the war. She has a great ability to create an atmosphere of Time and Place. In speaking of her parents difficult emotional lives she makes the comment that 'children learn the emotions of their parents'. Certainly she gives a sense of having some of the same kind of toughness, and determination that her parents had. She also speaks of her mother's remarkable storytelling ability and how this was transmitted to her. This comes as a kind of grudging thank- you note to a mother who she repeatedly accuses of having interfered too much her life. Lessing also tells the story of her brother who narrowly survived the sinking of his ship in the Second World War, and who lived for many years with what she calls a kind of 'dullness' of mind. In an incident which sounds like it comes from one of the books of Oliver Sachs her brother received a knock on the head in his latter years, and it suddenly brought back the clarity of consciousness he had had before the ship incident. He died not long after claiming that most of his adult life he had lived being absent from himself. Here too Lessing describes the life of one she is very close to in a very effective way, but somehow without great warmth or loving feeling.
For Lessing Life seems to be hard even if one is able to make a remarkable story of it.

"Alfred and Emily: A Novella". Alfred Taylor is a farmer who becomes affluent and marries a warm caring local. Ignoring the rage of her father, Emily McVeagh leaves town and goes to London where she becomes a nurse who marries a doctor. World War I never occurs so they never meet as a wounded soldier and a nurse.

"Alfred and Emily; Two Lives. Alfred Taylor was severely injured in combat on the continent. He was medically evacuated back to a London hospital. There he met Nurse Emily McVeigh. As he healed, they fell in love and got married. They move to Rhodesia after the war and have two children Doris and Harry, but their colonial farm fails.

This is a fascinating combo historical biographical fiction and a short biography. The novella is a terrific alternate history of the author's parents while the biography provides a short guide to compare what if to what happened. Fans of the great author will appreciate this fine book although the fiction overwhelms the nonfiction as the latter is too minute for newbies and too repetitive for fans while the former provides an intriguing look at probably what would not have happened if the liberating of the masses did not happen because the mechanism WWI was never fought.

Harriet Klausner

In the first part of this double biography (a fictitious and a real one), Doris Lessing asks herself what would have happened if ... the First World War had not taken place. `That war squatted over my childhood. And here I am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy. And trying to get free.'

But during and after that war, another brutal, but psychological one was fought between mother and daughter: `My battles with my mother were titanic. I hated my mother.'
After all those years, Doris Lessing is still yelling as a madwoman because her mother projected all her love on her younger brother (and left nothing for her): `I can remember (my hate) from the start ... by the birth of my brother.'

In the `if-biography' of her parents, the latter don't even marry. Doris Lessing wouldn't have been conceived. She seems to say that in an `idyllic' world there is no place for war, be it a real or a psychological one, and no place for her. She wouldn't (shouldn't) be there with the monstrous rucksack mounted on her back for the rest of her life.

In `idyllic' England all `war efforts' could have been spent on a higher living standard for everyone. Instead, in `real' England the young generation was slaughtered as cannon fodder. As her father said, `they were such good chaps, such fine men. And they all died in the mud of Passchendaele.'

What saved Doris Lessing's life was literature: `No books have ever had such an effect on me as the great Russians.' But, that `I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books.'
There are also the feminist notes in these pages: `A fate worse than death, a woman without maternal instinct and no birth control.'

If ... this astonishing non-biography had been real, we wouldn't have known the great writer, Doris Lessing, with her titanic emotional outburst and desperate cries for love.
A must read for all fans of world literature.

There are some lessons to be learned from Doris Lessing's new book, "Alfred & Emily", but one among them is that older people harbor feelings with much more depth than most of us realize. In this two-sided offering, Lessing does a remarkable job in first giving us the fantasy world in which her parents might have lived, then completes things with a look at her real life growing up, much of it in Rhodesia.

The first half (and the more enjoyable one) breezes along at a good clip with characters based on friends of her parents. This is a solidly British book. Lessing's second half levels things quickly, but it has a tendency to wander and her parents, perhaps justifiably so, become somewhat of less interest. By this point we know she has empathy for her wounded, diabetic father, and can't stand her mother. A lifetime of unrequited emotion has evidenced a toll on Lessing...enough to write a book, at least.

"Alfred & Emily" is composed of a great idea and one that comes close to working perfectly. It's worth the read, especially the fantasy section.

This work is a little like looking at an endless series of reflections in multiplied mirror images. Although the book is ostensibly about Ms. Lessing's parents, you feel a quest for her self-identity in every sentence. She seems to have a sort of survivor's remorse for having prospered in literature after having sprung, almost miraculously, from the stunted roots of her parents' shattered dreams.

The book opens with a novella in which Ms. Lessing imagines what her parents' life would have been like if World War I had not occurred and her mother had married the doctor of her dreams. From there, Ms. Lessing provides a brief note about the Royal Free Hospital from The London Encyclopedia. In Part Two, Ms. Lessing recounts the lives her parents lived after they married and her youth in Rhodesia.

The pain of World War I is so great that Ms. Lessing has trouble incorporating it into the novella or the nonfiction narrative. Clearly, the demands on her father, a badly wounded soldier, and her mother, an overwhelmed nurse dealing with casualties shipped fresh from the front, created more than the straw that broke the camel's back of normalcy. From that point of view, it's an antiwar book more than anything else.

What would her parents' great energy have led them to do in the alternative? She sees her father as a successful small-scale English farmer, rather than a failed Rhodesian one. She sees her mother emerging as a force behind better education rather than as a woman who is felled by a breakdown in Rhodesia.

It's natural to think of your parents as heroes and heroines, but that must be most difficult when their heroism mainly consisted of dealing with pain and frustration.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is to contemplate your own parents and to ask, "How would their lives have turned out differently if . . . ?" From there, you can cogitate all you want about the effect on whether you would have been born . . . and how you would have been different.

In a sense, it's a play on the common childhood fantasy of believing that one is a royal orphan who has been placed with commoners for safekeeping before the evil contenders for the throne can kill you.

Is it interesting? Yes. Is it something you must read? No.

I have to admit that I read "Alfred and Emily" backwards. I read the account of the actual lives of Lessing's parents before I read the story of the fictional lives that she gave them. I had read, in reviews, that the story of the fictional lives is unexceptional and the reviews are correct. Indeed, neither part of the book is brilliant but the book itself is a moving example of a woman (Lessing) in her old age coming to terms with memories of her parents and of the way they behaved towards her and towards one another. Those of us, in middle age and older, whose relationships with our parents were far from what we might have desired, would do well to ponder, as this book makes us, what our parents lives would have been like without, for example, the Depression, World War 2, or the Holocaust.
Lessing's fictional lives of her parents, her account of who they might have been and how they might have found satisfaction in life, should stimulate her readers to imagine other lives for their own parents. In these other lives, our parents might have been more loving and tolerant, less judgmental and withholding, and more satisfied and fulfilled. However, in Lessing's fictional account of her mother's life, she implies that her mother's greatest regret was that she never had a child. Thus, there is a lesson to be learned from "Alfred and Emily" that Lessing teaches us with skill and dignity.

I had not read before any of Lessing's books but I wanted to get to know this Nobel Prize winner writer... First book I found was Alfred & Emily... The first part, I was reading it and asking myself how this "Barbara Cartland"ish style could have won such an esteemed prize... It was so "soapy", "pink", "superficial" in every sense... However, I hung on, I made it to the second part... And there, I made acquaintance with the genious writer in Doris Lessing's person... The abrupt change of style was remarkable... The sentence structure which was so subtle in the soapy part, became shattered when telling the tale of shattered lives... The style which was so easy going in the pink part, became devious in describing the "no way out" life of her parents... Such sofistication of mastery of language is so unique.... Even if only for experiencing this sofistication, you should take "Alfred & Emily" into consideration...

I was not too pleased with the first fictional part of this book but when I read the second part I understood why Doris wrote the first part. What a hard life they all had in Zimbabwe once known as southern Rhodesia! But such a wonderful life: the story of the black bull calf touched my heart. and the food! and wasn't her father handsome? The boring life she invented for her parents living separate lives might not have been one they would have liked it at all. That is the puzzle of life. Love makes hardship worthwhile. But of course, war screws everyone but George Bush and his friends. Krupp was the Bush family of World War one. Does it matter? No. Doris' parents seemed to her to have been crushed by an early eqivalent of the Bush family. She couldn't wait to escape. And now she revisits her childhood and pities her parents even though she was aloof to her mother for ages.

At the age of 88, Ms. Lessing has created a hybrid biography of her parents. The first section is an alternate history of their lives where they do not marry and go on to happier, fulfilling lives. The second part is the reality of their unhappy marriage (and Ms. Lessing's unhappy childhod) and the negative impact that World War I had upon their lives with the many deaths they were exposed to. One has the sense that this book is a summing up and looking back on her life to where it all began.