fieldus

Last Night’s TV:
Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1

I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and Jill Nicholls, the director, who crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist.

“I despise people who don’t experiment with their lives,” Lessing once wrote, and she unquestionably lived up to her own credo. You can’t do such a thing, of course, without also experimenting with the lives of those attached to you, which in Lessing’s case included the young children she abandoned when she walked out of her first marriage. Lessing got edgy when questioned about this, but it says something about the film that you felt persuaded of the necessity of her flight. And if you wanted proof of her poetic power as a fabulist, it came right at the end when she described a childhood memory of luring moths out of the African night with a hand smeared with honey, as good an image of the writer’s talent for drawing things out of obscurity as you could want.