By Nigel Farndale
At 88, Doris Lessing is still raging - at communists, war, Mrs Thatcher, the 'bloody Swedes' who awarded her the Nobel Prize... but most of her venom is reserved for the subject of what she says will be her final book - her mother. She talks to Nigel Farndale. Portrait by Reme Campos
It takes Doris Lessing just four minutes to come out with something, if not actually controversial, then at least unexpected. It's about Hitler. She says she understands him. This from a former member of the Communist Party. (She left in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Congress, the one in which he denounced Stalin.) We are talking, I should explain, about Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She recently read another of his books, about three German soldiers who, like Hitler, return from the Great War to the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. 'They see people carting millions of marks around in wheelbarrows and, being old comrades, they stand by each other. And as you read that you suddenly understand Hitler.'
Doris Lessing: 'I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars'. She's not condoning Hitler, of course, merely explaining his early popularit y. I mention her comment to show her endearingly cavalier way with language. She doesn't care what people might think. She is past caring. And there is a greatness to this lack of care. How many 88-year-olds do you know who have become a worldwide phenomenon on YouTube, for example? She did, last year, when the press descended on the house in West Hampstead where she has lived for the past 30 years, the house in which we are sitting now. As she emerged from a black cab with her son, Peter, who, eccentrically, was wearing a boa of fresh onions around his neck, she was told she had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was asked for a comment. This was the first she had heard of it, yet she was heroically unimpressed. 'Oh Christ,' she said, waving the question away. 'I couldn't care less...I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one.'
She was more gracious later, saying all the right things, but now when I ask about that Nobel moment she reverts to form. 'Who are these people? They're a bunch of bloody Swedes.'
'They sell a lot of dynamite, Doris,' Peter says. He has shuffled in to say hello, wearing a tea cosy on his head. He lives here, debilitated by diabetes. They had been returning from the hospital on that day of the Nobel announcement.
'This is my son,' Doris says, unnecessarily.
'The other one being dead.' Peter adds, equally unnecessarily. (Her elder son, John, a coffee farmer in Zimbabwe, died of a heart attack in 1992.)
'Why have you got a tea cosy on your head, Peter?'
'Because I've got a cold, Doris.'
The answer seems to satisfy her. 'Anyway,' she says, turning back to me, 'the whole thing is a joke. The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune. I know several people who have won and you don't do anything else for a year but Nobel. They are always coming out with new torments for me. Downstairs there are 500 things I have to sign for them.'
After I was buzzed into the house, I had indeed passed many boxes on my way up the stairs. I had also seen Peter at the end of a corridor, sitting at the kitchen table in his pyjamas. He nonchalantly, wordlessly, pointed a thumb in the direction of the sitting-room. That was where I found his mother, who is 5ft tall, with a soft, creased face, framed with grey tendrils that escape from a carelessly assembled bun.
The room, by the way, is everything you would hope a literary giant's sitting-room might be: splendidly chaotic, more like a junk shop. Someone once said that Lessing seemed to camp out in her own home. There are stacks of books, some teetering precariously, a globe, a tray of nick-nacks, African masks, oil paintings, rugs rucked up on the floor. She lives in here now, sleeping on a red sofa because her backache, caused by osteoporosis, makes it difficult for her to sleep on a bed. She shares the sofa with her huge cat, Yum-Yum, the name taken from The Mikado. 'One day I'll fall over Yum-Yum and have to be carted off to hospital,' she says, stroking the cat. Lessing is clear-minded and clear-voiced, but she does seem to gnaw at words, biting them, talking through gritted teeth like Clare Short. It gives even her moments of frivolity a certain sternness.
This most prolific and unconventional of writers has written the novel she claims will be her last (she has done more than 50 and 'enough is enough'). The first half of Alfred & Emily is a novella about how life might have turned out for her parents had it not been for the First World War. The second half is a biography of her parents. Her mother was a nurse during the war. 'She was warm-hearted but insensitive,' Lessing says. 'Nursing the wounded must have been hell. They would arrive by the lorry load, some already dead. That must have torn her up. It took me a long time to allow her that.'
Read on....
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2008
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Seniors World Chronicle adds:
Alfred and EmilyYear First Published: 2008
First Published by: Fourth Estate
Category: Novel
This Edition: British First Edition
ISBN: 978-0007233458
From the book jacket:
I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.
