The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  This is plain Jane speaking. Closer to the truth is the Jane who, just before the appearance of her phantom rider, remembers ‘certain of Bessie’s tales wherein figured a North-of-England spirit … which, in the form of a horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways …’

  This spirit first takes the form of a dog, Mr Rochester’s mastiff, Pilot, then of a horse and rider, and though ‘The man, the human being, broke the spell at once’, her apparition, her demon lover, continues to inhabit a form halfway between animal and human. When a voice tells her to stand aside, ‘I did,’ she says, ‘whereupon began a heaving, stamping, clattering process, accompanied by a barking and baying’.

  The spell of Bessie’s tale is not quite broken, and it is part of the erotic power of Jane’s narrative that Mr Rochester continues to carry into later episodes a hint, in Jane’s mind as in ours, of the Beast of fairytale and folk-story who must be transformed back into a man.

  Jane first discovers Mr Rochester’s presence at Thornfield when she finds his surrogate, Pilot, on the sitting-room rug, and it is, as she later tells him, not a philtre but the magic of a ‘loving eye’ that makes him ‘human’ again, though it is part of the book’s tenacious hold on reality that Jane is no Beauty and Mr Rochester no Prince. ‘I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth,’ she tells us at her first sight of him, ‘never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had, nor could have sympathy for anything in me.’

  There it is again: ‘sympathy’. Jane – plain-looking, plain-spoken, ‘original’; no more a conventionally attractive young woman than she was, to her aunt, a conventionally acceptable child – is perfectly fitted to this ugly, cross-grained man, whose ‘savage’ nature disguises surprising gentleness.

  With no previous experience to go on she hits immediately on the style of flirtation by which he may be caught, so that when, at the end of their first conversation, the word ‘coquetry’ drops into the text – in relation to Adèle’s perfectly conventional little imitation of it – we have confirmed what we have already understood: that Jane’s refusal to play the submissive Victorian maiden, even to a man who is paying her thirty pounds a year, is her own form of coquetry, and the most effective form of it she could have hit upon.

  What she does not see is that in failing to present him with a ‘ladylike submission and turtledove sensitivity’, in answering back so boldly, and allowing him to speak to her of his ‘opera mistresses’, she has led Mr Rochester to believe that she may also be willing to act unconventionally. He is looking for a woman who will follow him in intentions ‘that require a new stature to legalise them’, and this of course Jane will not do.

  Meanwhile, any haunting that takes place in the book is by the ghosts these lovers find in one another.

  He pretends to believe that it is a faery child he has found on the stile in Hay Lane, and when she comes back from Gateshead and confesses that she has been with her aunt, ‘who is dead’, Mr Rochester replies playfully: ‘Good angels be my guard. She comes from another world … If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you are of substance or shadow, you elf!’ (Only a moment earlier, when she came upon him, Jane’s first thought had been: ‘Well, he is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have is unstrung.’)

  When later they sit alone at supper together, she tells him, ‘You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all: you are a mere dream.’

  Dreams, premonitions, sympathies, signs …

  Jane draws the portrait of her rival and anti-self, Blanche Ingram, before she has even laid eyes on her; she sees in a dream the burnt-out shell of Thornfield; ‘Bride’ is one of the clues, and ‘Bridewell’ (prison) the solution, in the game of charades Mr Rochester’s guests engage in after dinner, but Jane’s attention is elsewhere and she misses what all this might reveal to her of the larger mystery. The moth that catches Mr Rochester’s eye in the Eden-like orchard on Midsummer’s Eve, where he proposes to Jane, is like ‘a West Indian insect’, and the chestnut tree under which they make their vows, in a sudden shift of the weather, is struck by lightning, though the riven trunk, as Jane later discovers, still has shoots of green.

  These ‘signs’ either enlighten Jane or mislead her according to whether she follows one side or the other of her nature. They are also the signs that we must interpret as readers; part of the book’s brilliantly controlled suspense. But the deeper source of our suspense is the concern we feel for Jane herself.

  Charlotte Brontë places Jane at the extreme edge of the social world. Orphaned and dependent, she is ‘less than a servant’ at Gateshead because she does nothing for her keep, and, as a governess, as Charlotte Brontë knew from bitter experience, she is in the anomalous position at Thornfield of being both a paid servant and a ‘lady’. All this makes her acutely sensitive to every sort of injustice.

  ‘Unjust – unjust!’ she cries in the first pages of the book, and it is typical of her that she should speak out both for Blanche Ingram and Bertha Rochester when she believes Mr Rochester has failed to consider their feelings or their rights.

  In the most extreme of the book’s moves after her flight from Thornfield, Jane falls out of the safe net of society into that homeless and unsettled space between houses that is the abode of Wordsworth’s beggars and of vagrant women like Alice Brown in Dombey and Son. She is saved by a couple of narrative ploys that belong to an altogether inferior sort of fiction, but Brontë recovers, and so does Jane. Faced with a subtle temptation to become conventionally submissive, she resists ‘the flame and excitement of self-sacrifice’, and with her old ‘un-feminine’ candour, tells St John Rivers, that embodiment of genuine Christian virtue and soft male tyranny: ‘If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.’

  What saves her is not only the strong sense of her own worth, but also her experience of what love really is.

  ‘He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me,’ she writes of Rivers; ‘he surrounded me with his arm, almost as if he loved me (I say almost – I knew the difference – for I had felt what it was to be loved …).’

  After 150 years this speaks as plainly and as directly to the reader as when it was written, and powerfully addresses – even now, when relations between women and men are more open and equal – questions about true feeling and the use of power that have still, in every case, to be negotiated.

  No other Victorian novel, not even David Copperfield, presents us with a childhood and schooldays more fully realised. No death-bed in Victorian literature is seen with a truer and less sentimental eye than that of Aunt Reed. No other novel in the language has produced so many offspring: from The Turn of the Screw (‘was there a “secret” at Bly … an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?’), to Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Rebecca.

  Somewhere on a scorching beach, or tucked up in a sickbed, a young reader, for whom this book is just what they have been waiting for, is about to begin the first sentence of what will be one of the great reading experiences of their life. ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.’ Their whole world is about to change.

  Introduction to Jane Eyre, Oxford Classics, 1998

  ‘DRIFT, WAIT, AND OBEY’: KIPLING AND THE GREAT GAME

  ‘KIPLING STRIKES ME PERSONALLY as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.’

  This is Henry James writing to his brother in 1892. Kipling was by then the author of Plain Tales from the Hills, Life’s Handicap (for the first American edition of which, under the title Mine Own People, James had provided a preface), a series of six Railway Books, including Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie and Soldiers Three, and a book of Barrack Room Ballads. He had survived his first period in London, which he hated, as the literary wonder of the day, had had a nervous breakdown, fled, married the sister of his r
ecently deceased friend and collaborator Wolcott Balestier, and was about to settle in his wife’s home town of Brattleboro, Vermont. He was twenty-six.

  Writing again, five years later, after the two Jungle Books and A Day’s Work, James is altogether less enthusiastic:

  My view of his prose future has much shrunken in the light of one’s increasingly observing how little life he can make use of. Almost nothing civilised save steam and patriotism … Almost nothing of the complicated soul or the female form or any other question of shades … In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have given up in proportion as he has come down steadily from the simple in subject to the more simple – from Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish and from fish to engines and screws.

  James of course is revealing his own limitations here, as well as Kipling’s. But beyond the snobberies both social and aesthetic, and its failure I think to recognise what Kipling does that is unique, this is a criticism that stands, and is worth starting from if we are to make anything of Kipling’s achievement.

  It is true: Kipling does not, by James’ standards, have a fine intelligence, or even, as The Light That Failed, his one essay at the novel of feeling, makes plain, a fine sensibility. He is too impatient, too extrovert, for those investigations into the complicated soul that James looks for in a fiction that claims to be art, and of which he himself is the undisputed master. Kipling’s world is the masculine world of doing and making, with its codes of honour and daring, respect for professional expertise, loyalty, even affection of a rough sort, but little opportunity for what James calls ‘shades’.

  It is Kipling’s being himself a maker and doer, a product not of one of the great public schools like his cousin Stanley Baldwin but of the United Services College, Westward Ho, a school founded for the training of practical men, the engineers and magistrates who were to serve as second-stringers in the management of the Raj, that leads Kipling to a character such as Findlayson of ‘The Bridge Builders’ and Hitchcock (‘a magistrate of the third class, with whipping powers’), his young second-in-command, and made Kipling, as McAndrew’s Hymn puts it, the bard of ‘Man the Artifax’, master of what H. G. Wells called ‘shop as a poetic dialect’.

  A writer’s strengths and weaknesses are one. It is Kipling’s ‘philistinism’, his having no time as a colonial outsider for the niceties of English politeness and good form – his ‘hooliganism’ as his detractors called it – that allows him to enter without apology, and with no sense of stepping down, into the lives of Ortheris, Learoyd and Mulvaney, the soldiers three, or the young scamps who, in an act of exemplary bravado, sacrifice themselves to regimental honour in ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’. It is his eye, his ‘native’ eye, for the sights and sounds and smells and colours of the great subcontinent, the particularities, as we see in Kim, of ‘how such a caste talked, or walked, or coughed, or spat, or sneezed’, his ear, in so much noisy interchange, for idiom and accent, the witticisms, and insults and curses of Tommies, street-vendors, beggars in the native bazaars, that gives his creation of British India – and it is a creation, not a piece of reportage – an energy that must have ripped like a tornado through the lilies and languors of pre-Raphaelite England; a fictional world like nothing else in our literature except Dickens’ London, that in the popular mind at least has replaced the original and become the site of its own mythology and truth.

  When Henry James sees in his list of Kipling’s narrowing interests a dehumanising tendency, a turning away from ‘life’, he misses the point, I think. One might equally see it as a widening of his sympathies beyond man and his affairs to take in the whole of creation, a capacity to enter not only into the lives of the creatures but into the life energy that is all things; a form of animism that might run counter to what James sees as ‘civilisation’ but is not necessarily beyond civilised interest, and in Kipling’s case goes back to what was deepest in his experience of India itself.

  We have only to recall what Forster’s finer intelligence made of the same material to see how much more inclusive, how much richer and less judgemental Kipling is; how much of nature, and life and living he is prepared to take in and give voice to. It is the bridge-builder Findlayson – occupied in his confrontation with Mother Gunga (the Ganges) only with piers and spans and girders, with ‘remembering, comparing, estimating and re-calculating, lest there be any mistakes’ – who is granted access, in an opium dream, to the whole procession of Indian gods in their animal forms as Elephant, Ape, Tiger, Mugger, etc.

  And for all his fineness of feeling, Forster is not open, as Kipling is, to the delicacy – which is in fact not so deeply hidden under the rough, uneducated exterior – that allows Mulvaney, of ‘Love o’ Women’, ‘The Courtship of Dinah Shand’, ‘My Lord the Elephant’, to recognise, through a form of fellow feeling, a sense of outraged honour in a rampaging jungle beast.

  Kipling may not have a fine intelligence, but he does see fineness of feeling in something more than a single class.

  It is the openness of Kipling’s writing self, his ‘daemon’ as he calls it, to pre-intellectual, pre-social modes of apprehension that allows him, like Dickens, to create fictions that have the shape, and the dark power of suggestion, the cruelty too at times, of folk-tales and dreams.

  The comparison with Dickens is worth pursuing. Both men were insomniacs, obsessively haunted by nightmares that in each case went back to a childhood trauma he had never outgrown.

  Dickens at twelve had joined the vast horde of Victorian child labourers, and, with little hope of ever finding his way back to the safe domestic world that had so abruptly cast him out, spent five months in a London blacking factory. Kipling, at just six, was sent ‘home’ to England with his three-year-old sister Trix, and, with no preparatory explanation, abandoned as he saw it to what he calls ‘the House of Desolation’ at Southsea, where over the next five and a half years he was regularly abused and even tortured. The story in which he gives an account of this, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, where he and his sister appear as Punch and Judy – it was more than forty years before he acknowledged that it was his own story – finds a happy ending in family reunion: ‘There! I told you so,’ says Punch. ‘It’s all different now, and we are just as much mother’s as if she had never gone.’ But Kipling’s truer writing-self declines to accept it: ‘Not altogether Punch,’ he adds in a final word, ‘for when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away the knowledge; though it may turn dark eyes for a while to the light, and teach Faith where no Faith was.’

  The works of both writers are crowded with lost or abandoned children: Oliver Twist, Charley Bates, the Artful Dodger; young David Copperfield, the Marchioness of The Old Curiosity Shop and Jo in Bleak House; young Bailey of Martin Chuzzlewit; in Kipling, Punch, the little drummers of the Fore and Aft, Mowgli, even Kim. These children survive, if they do, by internalising the damage that has been done to them and mastering so completely the manners and jargons of their world as to pass – at least outwardly – as confident and sometimes over-confident insiders like the rest.

  And both writers of course achieved an early and instant fame (Kipling as perhaps the first writer in English to become an international celebrity whose every deed and word was ‘news’), and paid for it with critical disdain.

  Dickens recently has been forgiven. Kipling, more disobligingly contrary, has not, though he continues, I’d guess, to be one of the most widely read of English writers; his admirers include T. S. Eliot, Auden and Peter Porter, and Borges thought his later stories surpassed those of Kafka and Henry James.

  What remains unforgivable in him is his political stance. For all his egalitarianism (like Dickens his work crosses all the boundaries of class, and relies largely on low-life characters), Kipling was from first to last dismissive of all thos
e forms of liberalism that he saw as the received ideas of his time, and compulsory if one wanted, as he did not, to be taken as enlightened and forward-looking. Kipling’s daemon, which he trusted absolutely, was of its nature regressive; pre-Enlightenment, pre-Christian, pre-social; sometimes brutal, often vengeful, and given to cruel practical jokes. Like so much that is most original in him, this too has its roots in his earliest childhood, and in ‘India’.

  Kipling had two Indian periods. We get a good idea of the first from the early pages of Something of Myself, his rather desultory attempt, towards the end of his life, at an autobiography:

  In the afternoon heats, before we took our sleep, she [the ayah] or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian Nursery Songs all unforgotten, and we were sent to the dining-room after we had been dressed with the caution, ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mama.’ So we spoke English haltingly, translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamt in.

  Such was Kipling’s life till he was six; almost the whole of his sensory experience, and everything that fed his childish imagination, picked up in a ‘native’ way in Hindi, the language he thought and dreamt in, by a small boy with an extraordinary capacity to take in all that came to him, and a memory that would be coloured forever by the light, the atmosphere, the scenes, the sounds of the world as he first encountered it.