A Reading Diary

by Alberto Manguel

  August

  Kim

  TUESDAY

  My Kim belongs to a twenty-five-volume collection, the 1914 Bombay Edition of the works of Kipling (five more volumes were published later) that C. found for me in a second-hand Paris bookstore several years ago. It was the time of the general strike in Paris, which lasted several weeks, and if we needed to do anything downtown we had to walk from the twentieth arrondissement to the centre, down streets deserted by buses, past the closed Métro stations, among throngs of curiously amiable and talkative pedestrians. C. had saved up just enough to pay for the collection but hadn’t left himself anything for a taxi home. He realized he’d have to traipse several kilometres with the twenty-five volumes on his back, so he reluctantly asked the bookseller whether he could have fifty francs back for the fare. The grumpy old man (may he be denied the coin to pay Charon!) refused, and offered C. instead a large postal bag. With the weight of twenty-five books on his shoulder, C. set off across Paris. He hadn’t walked long when a car pulled up and a woman asked him in what direction he was headed. As it happened, she herself was only going a short distance, but when she heard C.’s story she insisted on driving him all the way home.

  In the Universal Library, the woman’s generosity balances out the bookseller’s meanness.

  The paper of my Kim is a light cream colour, the letters deep black and slightly raised, the initials Prussian blue. Inside each volume is an extra label with the title and volume number, to be used when the book is properly bound (the edition was produced in board bindings, so that each reader might bind it to suit his taste). Rudyard Kipling’s signature, on the title page of the first volume, is minuscule, reluctant, perfectly legible.

  Kim is one of the few books that constantly delights me; it grows friendlier with each reading. I want to apply to it a word used in Quebec to denote a particular state of happiness: heureuseté. I love the tone of the telling, the vividness of every minor character, the moving friendship between the Lama in search of a river and the boy in search of himself. I never want their pilgrimage to end.

  WEDNESDAY

  The yellow stones of my house reflect the August sun. In the garden, the aspen trees are in bloom, incredibly white. According to De Quincey, “the aspen-tree shivers in sympathy with the horror of the mother tree in Palestine that was compelled to furnish materials for the cross.”

  The heat of the day here in my village suits the weather in the novel. I watch a pair of turtle doves swoop down onto the grass outside my window, strut around for a moment and then fly back up onto the roof of the pigeon tower at the end of my library. They do this (apparently) for the fun of repetition. Partly, that is why I enjoy rereading.

  In Kim, everything is given from the very beginning: the inquisitive nature of Kim, the mystery of his past and future, the Lama’s quest, the fairy-tale atmosphere evoked by the mention of Harun-al-Rachid and the Arabian Nights. There is no confusion or reluctance in the telling of the adventures, except when it becomes deliberately hesitant, to encourage the reader to complete on his own a scene or a dialogue. Otherwise, Kipling knows his story and trusts even its obviousness.

  Some time ago, I asked Rohinton Mistry, who, like Kipling, was born in Bombay, to read Kim. He had not read it before and was delighted. Like Kipling, Rohinton sees no need, in his own novels, to explain the use of certain words in the Indian vernacular; their meaning shines through in the context and makes the characters’ language come alive.

  I hate glossaries.

  Rohinton told me that he finds Kipling’s dialogue, and the descriptions of the vast troupe of Indian characters, absolutely true to life. We wondered whether Kipling made up the proverbs and insults and catchphrases he used in the novel. “Those who beg in silence starve in silence.” “Thou hast as much grace as the holy bull of Shiv.” “The jackal that lives in the wilds of Mazanderan can only be caught by the hounds of Mazanderan.” And so on. …

  Among all the host of minor characters, none is as memorable as the old Indian lady whom Kim and his Lama meet on the Great Trunk Road, who loves good food and gossip, and the thrill of new faces, and who chuckles “like a contented parrot above the sugar lump.” She feels necessary in the story, as do almost all of the native characters. However, I believe that there is something artificial about the behaviour of the European characters, something impersonal, aloof. But perhaps Kipling was catching a certain false note in the Anglo-Indian mentality. The military historian John Morris noted, “The psychology of the Raj was really based on a lie. The majority of the British in India were acting a part. They weren’t really the people they were supposed to be.”

  When Kipling was a small boy in Bombay, he would be sent by his ayah into the dining room after he was dressed, with the caution “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.” I remember my governess (with whom I spoke English and German) sending me in with a similar recommendation to “speak Spanish” to my parents—a language of which I had only a few halting words.

  THURSDAY

  There is a huge, marvellous complexity in Kipling’s India that, according to Rohinton, reflects the real thing (I’ve never been there). Somewhere, Kipling says that there are places in the world where, if we wait long enough, everyone will eventually pass. One is King’s Cross Station in London; the other the train station in Bombay. The Great Trunk Road in the novel feels just like such a place. Eliot’s “I had not thought death had undone so many” echoes for me the Lama saying, “This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.”

  Kipling loves lists: carefully chosen names of people, food, objects, gems, clothing are listed, page after page, with a poet’s relish. Coleridge: “Poetry = the best words in the best order.”

  That is how Kipling describes the Wonder House: through slow, detailed lists of the sculptures and friezes at the Lahore Museum, stone after stone and image after image, given through the eyes of the Lama, who goes through the collection “with the reverence of a devotee and the appreciative instinct of a craftsman.” This is a good description of Kipling’s own literary virtues.

  This morning we took our friend Katherine Ashenburg (who is visiting us and researching a piece on Romanesque architecture) to see the sculpted white stone portal of the Church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers. Many of the images I found puzzling. Who is the man holding two branches of a tree trunk sprouting from his head? (I found out afterwards that this is the Tree of Jesse.) Who is the monster holding his splayed legs, a serpent’s head on each foot? Who are the couple embracing or wrestling? Who is the woman carrying an open book? In the small crowd of tourists, I wonder how many of us today see these things with both (or even one) of the Lama’s qualities. To be able, like the Lama, to read “incident by incident in the beautiful story … on the blurred stone.” We have lost most of our vocabularies.

  FRIDAY

  I’ve given Katherine an ex voto embroidered with the hair of a nun (according to the brocanteur) to add to her collection of kitschy religious bric-à-brac which she keeps in her bathroom in Toronto. Curiously, for a Catholic, she is able to dissociate herself completely from the supposedly numinous quality of religious objects. Perhaps the contrary impulse to that of the Graham Greene character, the once-famous French Catholic writer Morin, who, having lost his faith, continues to go to midnight mass because, he says, “I don’t want to give scandal.”

  Someone suggested that if we were able to explain thoroughly the mysteries of religion, there’d be no room for faith. Julien Green says, “There is no faith without struggle.” That does not seem to be the case with the Lama. The Lama makes no visible effort, attempts no explanations; he tells stories and follows his way, hoping that in the end he will be “free of the Wheel.”

  Kim’s fat, pedantic companion, Hurree Babu: “How am I to fear the absolutely non-existent?”

  SATURDAY

  A very hot morning. My daughter Alice rescues a hedgehog from the pool. It had fallen in and was desperatel
y swimming in circles. She carried it to a corner of the garden and allowed it to scuttle away, shivering.

  A question of endings: I skip to the last pages of Kim for sheer pleasure. The end is an exuberant epiphany: Kim is made well and the Lama finds his river. His last gesture is to cross his hands and smile “as a man may who has won Salvation for himself and his beloved.”

  We read what we want to read, not what the author wrote. In Don Quixote, I’m not particularly interested in the world of chivalry but in the ethics of the hero, and in the curious friendship with Sancho. In The Wind in the Willows, I care far less about Mr. Toad than about Rat, Mole and Badger. In Kim I am not in the least interested in the Great Game, all that infantile spy-story stuff, but I’m enthralled by Kim and the Lama’s respective quests and the brilliance of the depiction of a world I don’t know.

  Note: Literary travel is either a monologue or a dialogue, either the unravelling of one traveller’s route (Ulysses, Pilgrim, Justine, Candide, the Wandering Jew) or two characters in mutual progression (Don Quixote and Sancho, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Brother and Sister in search of the Blue Bird, Kim and his Lama).

  SUNDAY

  A second pair of turtle doves has taken up residence on the roof of the pigeon tower. They shimmer in the heat.

  Summer in the garden carries implicit all the year’s changes: the winter branches before they sprouted spring leaves, the place where the fruit fell in the fall, the sequence of flowers. The regular coming and going of the seasons, the aging and death of friends, the crumbling of the walls of our house and the gnawing loss of my memory are a given, but they are also the confirmation (and the proof) of a constancy in things. Time is circular, these events say: after someone dies, I talk to someone else who remembers him, or wants to know something about him; we build up the garden wall with the stones that fell from the barn; what I no longer recall is there, somewhere, on one of the carefully numbered pages of one of my books. And I, of course, will disappear; the new wall too will fall away, the books will be scattered. But that of which we all form part, a part however small, will stay on, fixed under the stars. And, as in the eye of a sculptor chiselling away at a stone, the whole will be all the more beautiful for our absence.

  MONDAY

  Kipling tells how his mother discovered one day a child’s hand from the Towers of Silence dropped by a vulture in their garden in Bombay. Rohinton told me that such a thing isn’t possible, because the vultures never stray that far from the towers.

  A friend sends me a clipping from an English paper, with the heading “Housewife kills 100 magpies ‘to save songbirds.’ ” To protect the birds she liked, the woman would trap magpies and then smash their heads against her garden wall.

  LATER

  Kim’s definition of love, when Father Victor asks him if he is fond of the Lama: “Of course I am fond of him. He was fond of me.”

  The Lama tells Kim stories “tracing with a finger in the dust.” Like Christ, who “stooped down, and with his finger wrote in the ground, as if he heard them not.”

  Ana Becciú wrote this in Ronda de noche: “Love happens when we stroke a textured surface, when something is told with the hands or with the mouth. The mouth uses stories to stroke, causes scattered textures to appear, textures that can be read out loud. But almost no one knows how to read.”

  The perfect first paragraph of J. R. Ackerley’s Indian journal, concerning the maharajah who employed him at his court: “He wanted someone to love him—His Highness, I mean; that was his real need, I think. He alleged other reasons, of course—an English private secretary, a tutor for his son; for he wasn’t really a bit like the Roman Emperors, and had to make excuses.”

  THURSDAY

  Title for a doctoral thesis: “The Novel as Obstacle Course.”

  The Lama believes that every obstacle in his way will be removed; Kim, that he himself is capable of either removing it or going round it. I read yesterday in Max Brod’s biography that Kafka disliked Balzac and had noted with disapproval the motto Balzac had engraved on his walking-stick: “Je casse tout obstacle” (“I shatter every obstacle”). Kafka then added his own motto: “Every obstacle shatters me.”

  Natural obstacles and political obstacles: Kipling obviously despises the white man who knows nothing of the land he lords it over. The boy who is placed in charge of looking after Kim at the barracks beats him out of contempt and ignorance. The boy “styled all natives ‘niggers’; yet servants and sweepers called him abominable names to his face, and, misled by their deferential attitude, he never understood. That somewhat consoled Kim for the beatings.”

  “There is no sin so great as ignorance,” Creighton Sahib says later.

  FRIDAY

  Years ago, Michael Ondaatje asked if I remembered the name of a certain British sergeant in Kim, because he wanted to use it in the novel he was writing.

  “Read him slowly,” says the English Patient to Hana, “you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot.”

  On page 20 of my edition of The English Patient a French gun is mentioned, made in “Châttelrault.” It should be “Châtellerault,” a town famous for its arms factory, close to which I now, years later, live. Unfortunately, the greed of local authorities has turned Châtellerault into a bleak commercial centre, ignoring the beautiful sixteenth-century buildings (the house in which Descartes’s father lived, for instance) and the elegant bridge over the Vienne, and laying out a huge parking lot, after cutting down all the trees.

  SATURDAY

  Kipling constantly turns the story to the point of view of the native characters: in Kim the British are outsiders attempting to rule, most of the time lost among the ancient alien cultures. He also understands that those over whom foreign rule is imposed (whether by Britain or by Rome) will always attempt to “drag down the State.” In “A Pict Song” he wrote:

  Rome never looks where she treads.

  Always her heavy hooves fall

  On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;

  And Rome never heeds when we bawl.

  The contempt shown by the invader renders all collaboration suspect. Rabindranath Tagore, in a letter addressed to the Viceroy of India, relinquishing his knighthood after the Amritsar Massacre of 1919: “The universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers. … The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.”

  In August, the newspapers seem devoid of news.

  MONDAY

  In my dreams, I’m never older than eighteen. The sixty-nine-year-old Mme du Deffand, writing to Horace Walpole: “I forget that I have lived, I am only thirteen.”

  I have the sense of having learned nothing since my late adolescence. The discoveries I made before are the ones that still hold; the rest seems trivial, unessential or at best a gloss. Kipling speaks of “the first rush of minds developed by sun and surroundings, as well as … the half-collapse that sets in at twenty-two or twenty-three.”

  Outside, the heat is fierce. Inside the house, because of the thick walls, it is wonderfully cool. I remember the same sensation in the hot Buenos Aires summers, lying in the almost dark, behind the grated iron shutters that allowed the air to blow through. Even sensations like these, felt now, are not new.

  Adulthood defined by Kim’s friend, the horse dealer: “When I was fifteen, I had shot my man and begot my man.”

  Looking back at my adolescent readings, the essential, the most frightening question I remember is spoken “in a languid, sleepy voice” by the hookah-smoking Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland: “Who are You?” The active form of that question appears halfway through Kim: “What am I?
” And then, a few chapters later: “Who is Kim-Kim-Kim?”

  Kipling: “A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free over speculation as to what is called identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.”

  Identity and place dissolve into what I remember or think I remember. As soon as I turn my head, it all becomes memory and changes accordingly. After the nightmarish tests in the house of Lurgan Sahib, Kim must use all of his will to affirm the reality he knows (“It is there as it was there,” he insists). Reality is that which Kim knows he sees (even if his eyes deny it), in all its kaleidoscopic strangeness.

  A brilliant touch: the woman who stains Kim’s skin to darken his colour “for protection” in the Great Game (thereby changing his outer identity) is blind.

  TUESDAY

  Other than my Bombay Edition, I have a number of Kipling books collected over time in many places. Two items I’m particularly fond of: a slim, badly tattered copy of Under the Deodars, Nifi 4 in Wheeler’s Indian Railway Library, costing one rupee and published in Allahabad in 1888, when Kipling was twenty-three years old; and a red-bound pocket edition of Stalky & Co. which the twenty-five-year-old Borges had bought upon his return to Buenos Aires in 1924, and which he gave me as a parting gift when I visited him in 1973.