The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Nothing of England, or English nursery songs and stories, or the English Bible. He tells us quite specifically in ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ that he had never heard of Hell, or ‘the vindictive Christian God’, till he experienced the first in the House of Desolation and the second at the hands of the woman he calls ‘Auntirosa’, who took it upon herself, as a good Evangelical Christian, to save her small charge from heathenism, his spoiled boy’s assumption of his own importance, and his imagination, which was in her view an addiction to serial lying.

  Kipling came unwillingly to Christianity, and among what he thought of as torments. As an Englishman he is a late convert. He never liked England or the English; the Empire, in his vision of it, was meant to save the English from themselves.

  Kipling’s second period in India came ten years after the first, and began when, at sixteen years and seven months (that is, while he was still young enough to absorb all he came across with the appetite and quickness of youth), he became sub-editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette.

  As a bright young newspaper man and Sahib, he had access to all the nooks and crannies of a large garrison town, spending his days, and a good part of his nights, in messes, clubs, liquor shops, opium dens, brothels, but also in native street-markets and temples, gathering all the intelligence he needed for his newspaper work and all the observed life, and folklore and gossip, that over the next seven years would go into Plain Tales from the Hills and the Railway Books, and later into Life’s Handicap, A Diversity of Creatures and Kim.

  The result of all this is that Kipling’s apprehension of India came in two quite different forms: an earlier intuitive one, picked up without thought as it were in the vernacular – the experience of a ‘native’ – and a later one that was acquired in adolescence by a trained observer, an outsider but with a native’s grasp of the ‘why’ as he puts it in Kim, as well as the ‘what’ and ‘how’.

  It is this double view of India, and his gift from Allah of what he calls ‘the two sides of my head’, that Kipling employs with such brilliance in Kim.

  Few readers of Kim can resist its extraordinary freshness, the sense the writing gives of being awake, like its young hero, Kimball O’Hara, the Little Friend of all the World, ‘in a great good-tempered world’. For once the orphan is not an abandoned child but a little free-wheeling adventurer, streetwise, at home with every caste or class, skilled at every sort of exchange and banter, who has cast himself adrift to see what Mother India has to offer him. We can ignore the book’s plot, such as it is, and fix our attention, as in any other version of the picaresque, on the various journeys our young hero undertakes and those who share the road with him.

  Kim, with his two natures, native and Sahib, is an agent of two worlds: one is represented by the Department in which, as a secret agent of the Great Game, he will one day have a place and number; the other is the world of eternal forms in which even his name, Kim, Kim, Kim, is a mystery to him. At one moment, and in one skin, he is entirely absorbed by ‘the visible effects of action’, the perfect agent in the book of Kipling’s own activity as a writer. In the next, since he, like Kipling, has ‘two sides to his head’, equally at home in his other, his ‘sleeping’ nature:

  ‘Now am I alone,’ he thought. ‘In all India is no one so alone as I … Who is Kim – Kim – Kim?’ … He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room; rapt from all thoughts; hands folded in lap and pupils contracted to pinpoints. In a minute – in another half-second – he felt he would arrive at the solution to the tremendous puzzle.

  This is the Kim who is part of an India ‘full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues’, one of whom is the lama to whom he gives a free and unconditional love from which he never swerves; the Thibetan whose feet he kisses (though he is a Sahib) and to whom he puts himself in service as chela.

  The scenes between Kim and the childlike holy man he serves are some of the most gently humorous in the book, and perhaps the tenderest in all Kipling: ‘I had a fear,’ the lama confesses, when he comes to find Kim at the school for which he is secretly paying the fees, ‘that perhaps I came because I wished to see thee – misguided by the Red Mist of affection. It is not so …’ ‘But surely, Holy one,’ Kim protests, ‘thou hast not forgotten the Road and all that befell on it. Surely it was a little to see me that thou didst come.’

  Service is a key word in Kim. In the world of this book a man can serve two masters; Kim does. That is the peculiar grace that Kipling finds for him – a capacity to be at once in two mind-spaces; one might go further and say, to achieve a reconciliation between the two worlds of India that Forster can only point to in the great final paragraph of his Indian book. If we believe in the achievement here it is because Kim himself sees no difficulty, so long as his soul is ‘in order’:

  Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled and men and women talked to. They were real and true – solidly planted on their feet – perfectly comprehensible – clay of his clay, neither more nor less.

  Roads. ‘The Road and all that befell on it …’

  As befits a work so ‘nakedly picaresque’, as Kipling calls it, roads, highways, destinations are essential to the book: the latter-day colonial arteries of the sub-continent – the Grand Trunk Road, the Track as it is called (the Railway) – and, closely related to both in the book’s attempt to connect all the streams of Indian life and living, the Ganges (Mother Gunga), and the Way, the lama’s lifelong search for his holy river. Committing oneself, for a time or a lifetime, to any one of them is to join the stream of life itself:

  And truly, the Great Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles – such a river of life as exists nowhere else in the world … ‘Now let us walk,’ muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary they walked in silence mile after mile. The lama, as usual, was deep in meditation but Kim’s bright eyes were open.

  This broad smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded streets of Lahore. There were new people and new sights at every stride – castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience … It was beautiful to behold the many-yoked grain and cotton wagons crawling over the country roads; one could hear their axles complaining a mile away, coming nearer, till with shouts and yells and bad words they climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the local plain. Kim felt these things, though he could not give tongue to his feelings.

  Kipling does of course. We can forgive a good deal of patriotism and steam for the moment, say, when Kim wakes and feels the whole sub-continent in motion and play about him:

  The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth … India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and more excited than anyone, chewing on a twig that he would presently use as a tooth-brush; for he borrowed right-and-left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved.

  There is more than a breath of the man himself in that, and a phrase Kipling uses of Kim might stand to describe how that free spirit works as the perfect embodiment of Kipling’s writing self: ‘Kim awaited the play of circumstances with an interested soul’; that is, in a state of readiness and expectancy before whatever was about to declare itself to him. Kipling repeats the idea in speaking, in the final chapter of Something of Myself, of the agency of writing itself. ‘When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.’

  That too, as Kim lives it and as Kipling at his most Kim-like acts it out, we might call ‘the Great Game’.

  Nation Review,
1978

  (revised and expanded, 2010)

  MARCEL PROUST – THE BOOK

  I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would read it as ‘my’ readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be ‘my’ readers but the reader of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers – it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether ‘it really is like that’.

  OF THE THREE GREAT writers who carry the novel forward out of the nineteenth century and transform it in the light of the twentieth, it is Proust, for all his elaborateness of style and the extensiveness of his narrative, who seems most accessible to modern readers. His work is a single unit. We have only to enter the timeless dimension of Marcel’s night-mind as it is opened to us on page one, to submit ourselves to the narrator’s state of being, which is also a manner of speaking – a rhythm, a progression of cadences in which almost immediately the confession is made that ‘it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book’ (of any book, that is, that he happens to be reading, but also the book he has begun to write) – and we are already set for a point, three thousand pages further on, when we shall at last know everything that was in the narrator’s mind, and determined the rhythms of his thinking and feeling, when he set out. All the years and events of what is to be unfolded are contained in the timeless suspension of time with which the book opens; the great sad changes, discoveries, disappointments and losses to come are already there in the elegiac note it sounds, which is also the medium of their recovery. We have only to tune ourselves to the music and read on.

  There is nothing here of that difficulty of interest that is provided, in Mann’s case, by the unpredictable twists and turns of his writing between Buddenbrooks and Doctor Faustus, by the way the working life was refashioned by the life in time. Once Proust began on the definitive version of his great work, in 1909, he stopped time and insulated himself from events; his book was hermetically sealed. The coming of the war (not quite allowed for when it was conceived) required only a minor change of name (the substitution of Rheims for Chartres) to shift Combray far enough westward for the battle of Méséglise to wipe out the whole of Marcel’s world.

  The war did have an effect on the book, and a crucial one: by interrupting the publication of the second volume (which was already in proof) it allowed Proust to expand what he had written to three times its original length. But it did not push the novel in a new direction. The century’s apocalyptic events were subsumed, incorporated into it, recognised as the necessary form of that sense of dissolution that is in the mood of the first sentence – another of those things the narrator did not yet know which is already, as so often in Proust, inherent in what is said. Where else but in wartime Paris, one wonders, could Charlus’ sadistic and self-humiliating fantasies find their full expression – where except in Room 14b of Jupien’s ‘Temple of Shamelessness’, where amidst talk of the heroism of the trenches, in real fear, during an air-raid, and at the hands of an off-duty serviceman, the Baron in his play-world is tied up and beaten? Where else but in a male brothel staffed by soldiers could a Croix de Guerre be lost and the narrator catch a last glimpse of that flower of French soldiery, and his own soiled embodiment of the aristocratic ideal, Count Robert Saint-Loup?

  As for Joyce, whatever similarity we might find between the reduction of epic time in Finnegans Wake to a single thunderclap and the telescoping of time in A la Recherche that makes the whole work, in some ways, a single breath (as it certainly would be if Proust could manage it, since containment, the holding of all things in a single moment of awareness, is his final purpose), the narrative methods of the two writers are essentially opposed; the similarities, even the uses of pastiche, are superficial.

  The writing in Proust preserves a formal relationship between writer and reader that embodies the social conventions of a previous century – and not always even of the nineteenth.

  Proust’s digressions, elaborations, belle-lettrist set pieces, essaylike disquisitions and analyses belong to the nineteenth-century tradition of the feuilleton; his stance is that of the great memoir-writers. Complex as it is, this stance maintains, on the surface, a mannerly and confidential relationship between reader and narrator that embodies just that sense of formal intimacy, of private conversation, that occurs so often between the characters in the novel itself; in which things are revealed at leisure, and by subtle hints and evasions, and both sides are at all times aware that what is being told contains within it an element of falsity that belongs as much to seeing, telling, reading as to the falsity imposed by social conventions or to any conscious wish to deceive.

  The manner, that is, involves a critique of the very narrative technique it employs, a twentieth-century scepticism of nineteenth-century ‘realities’ and of the novelistic style that embodies them. Proust too is a Modernist, though not in Joyce’s way. Nothing could be further from Joyce’s attempt to make the narrator disappear than Proust’s use of the narrator’s voice as the entire focus and justification of his book. Proust goes back, beyond Joyce or James, or even Flaubert, to a point where the voice of the writer is all we have, but makes his narrator not only an unreliable guide to the action but a puzzled and endlessly mistaken enquirer into what really occurred, even in situations where he was himself a major actor. The book is, in the end, about the power of language itself as an instrument of perceiving and knowing; but at no point does Proust allow it to break free, as Joyce does, into a world of its own. With great politeness it tells its own secret and sometimes contrary tale under the ‘real’ one. (Proust’s Modernism too has its heirs. It is as if, along with Combray and so much else, the whole of contemporary French writing – I name only Barthes and Tournier – had opened like a flower out of that tasse de thé.)

  It was also, of course, Proust’s own unexpected flowering, this immense book-of-the-life.

  Writing to his friend d’Albufera, in 1908, Proust names some of the projects that currently attract him.

  un roman sur la noblesse

  un essai sur Sainte-Beuve et Flaubert

  un essai sur les Femmes

  un essai sur la Péderastie (pas facile à publier)

  une étude sur les vitraux

  une étude sur les pierres tombales

  une étude sur le roman

  The list, which seems likely to distract the mind rather than focus it, is marvellously evocative for those of us who know, by hindsight, how many of those subjects were to find a place in the book Proust began in the following year. What astonishes us now is just the focus of that mind that allowed them all to be included and held; how, in a quite musical sense, the various themes must from the beginning have revealed themselves to him as being variations of one another.

  The stages by which these separate works became A la Recherche are outlined very clearly by George Painter in Volume Two of his biography. Let me just remind readers of how important that ‘essai sur Sainte-Beuve’ was to be.

  Proust had begun his novel yet again (Jean Santeuil can be seen as the first version of all) in February 1909. He had at the same time embarked on a series of parodies of great French writers, and it was out of these that he conceived the notion of Contre Sainte-Beuve. He abandoned the new version of the novel in November for the essay, which was to take the form of a dialogue with his mother, in which he would discuss, each morning, what he was writing – a project that involved him in the resurrection of his mother and the whole of their life together, and led to an account of his sleeplessness, his night reading, and the occasion, long ago, when his mother had failed to give him his goodnight kiss – in fact, what we now recognise as the opening pages of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It was at this point, while he was engaged with Sainte-Beuve, that the
business of the madeleine occurred (in reality a memory of the bit of tea-soaked toast he used to be given in his grandfather’s garden at Auteuil), along with three other recollections that revealed to him the theory of ‘involuntary memory’.

  The Preface to Sainte-Beuve, without his having quite realised it, had become the opening chapter of A la Recherche. The novel was already underway. It had only to open out of itself in all its details. The process was one in which the interconnection of themes, and their metamorphosis into related or contrary forms, was essential to the creation of unity, and Wagner is mentioned often enough (obsessively, one might think) to make the term leitmotif relevant for at least one aspect of its extraordinary coherence. Proust’s use of ‘Wagnerian’ techniques offers a significant clue to how we are to read him, both in detail and in depth, and to the way the whole book came into being.

  The transexual theme, for example, is introduced quite early on, but in an exchange so fleeting, and so innocently placed, that we might miss it at first reading. (In Proust’s case, one wants to say, the only possible first reading is the second.)

  Two minor characters are involved, Sunday visitors at Combray: the Curé, who shares with the narrator a fascination with names that will itself account for many pages of the ensuing text, and one of his parishioners, Mlle Eulalie:

  ‘Why yes, have you never noticed, in the corner of the window, a lady in a yellow robe? Well, that’s Saint Hilaire, who is also known, you will remember, in certain parts of the country as Saint Illiers, Saint Hélier, and even, in the Jura, Saint Ylie. But these various corruptions of Sanctus Hilarius are by no means the most curious that have occurred in the names of the blessed. Take, for example, my good Eulalie, the case of your own patron, Sancta Eulalia; do you know what she has become in Burgundy? Saint Eloi, nothing more nor less! The lady has become a gentleman.’