African Laughter by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

intervals, giving facts. Sometimes he wrote me a polemic, but in fatherly style, thus: ‘If communists like you and McCleod think you can get away with it then I am afraid I have to tell you that our Affs are sensible people, and know which side their bread is buttered.’ This was just two months before the end of the War and the election of Robert Mugabe. (Ian McCleod was a Tory Minister.) From his point of view my very existence was an embarrassment, and for him to write at all must have been difficult. After all, the community he belonged to did not have much good to say about me (to put it mildly). It was hard for me to write to him.
    Then researchers turned up to interview him, as the brother of the author, and this way he learned that there were people who thought well of me. I understand that, considered as interviews, the results were unsatisfactory. If I had been asked, I could have said, Don’t waste your time. And, too, I was angry because of the lack of courtesy. I preserve the old-fashioned view that a writer’s life is her or his property, at least until we die. This view begins to seem quaint, if not eccentric. I was not even middle-aged when a would-be biographer presented himself, with evident confidence that I could scarcely wait to tell him everything about myself. Suppose you decide you don’t want a biography written at all? Writers who have left instructions to this effect have been ignored. A British judge decreed that Philip Larkin’s wish not to have his life laid open to the curious and the lubricious was ‘repulsive’. The only other people treated as if their wishes count for nothing are the mad. This attitude, that writers are fair game, can make life hard for their relatives. My brother had remarked, so someone told me, that the people who came to see him had a very funny way of looking at life, and that he was afraid I was in bad company.
    I knew it was unlikely he had ever read a word of what I had written, and at that time he had not. After all, he knew that what I wrote was communist propaganda.
    Everything about my life must seem wrong-headed to him. Except for the War years, (his war, the Second World War) and a couple of years after the War ended, his life was spent in the bush. He got up at five or five-thirty, was out of doors all day, and often spent hours walking by himself in the bush. He was always in bed by nine.
    Looked at impersonally, and I certainly had been forced to do that, my brother was interesting from a cultural point of view. My parents thought of themselves as modern people, and kept abreast of ideas and new writers. The books on our shelves on the farm, all classics, were only part of it. My mother had progressive ideas about education, admired Ruskin, Montessori. My father might quote Shaw and Wells in an argument. The battering life gave them on the farm shook off that layer of culture. What came to the farm through the 1930s were newspapers from England, and Stephen King Hall’s Newsletter . It was politics that absorbed them, and that was because of the First World War and its aftermath, which caused both of them anguish and anger, since everything in England was being mismanaged, and what they believed in betrayed. The books on the bookshelves remained unread, except by me. They subscribed to book clubs, but the packages of books that arrived on maildays were nearly all memoirs and histories of the War.
    My brother did not read, as a boy, and later spent his life among people who did not read. This was partly because some books have ideas in them, and most of the whites in the Southern Rhodesian lager could not afford to consider ideas that might upset their idea of themselves as the noble and misunderstood defenders of civilization. Later, he took to reading the violent and semi-pornographic books you find in airports. He told me that when waiting for a flight to leave, he had been surprised to see so many books. He liked Harold Robbins and particularly