True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  The wider culture was also disposed towards the idea, though; Kipling’s age liked the chance to identify with predators, in accordance with new ideals of masculinity that were shaping literature and society. Thirty or twenty years earlier, a wolf-child’s adventures in the jungle would not have been plausible subject-matter for ambitious writing. Then, the settings for serious literature had been primarily domestic, its most influential authors as likely to be women as men, its audience assumed to be mixed; the novel itself had been acknowledged to be a form moulded by female experience and female sensibility. Since the death of George Eliot in 1880 (to choose a date that contemporaries sensed might represent the end of an epoch) a pronounced, masculine revolution had taken place, whose effect can be measured by comparing the old and the new sets of luminaries. Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens: as against Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad. A genre that one critic calls ‘the male romance’ had been launched, or rather retrieved from the ghetto of writing-for-boys and shifted into the centre of current literature, where stories of ships and the sea, or work and machines, or animals, gained unprecedented degrees of psychological subtlety, without losing their masculine emphasis. The human types thought worth investigating changed; became more extroverted and reticent, more occupied by toil, shame and vigorous activity. Kipling himself reserved a special admiration for wily, capable men. His heroes in India had been the young, close-mouthed colonial officers who administered districts remote from formal laws and the trappings of power. In his mind (he never joined the company of his idols) these men had the stature of myth; and his version of admirable masculinity accordingly referred again and again to the qualities he thought he had glimpsed. Strength, for him, involved the possibility of violence. So it should not be unexpected that in his Jungle (where almost every creature is male, except Mother Wolf) the predators should furnish the eyes through which we watch and pounce. He expected his readers to covet, as he did, the chance to identify with ‘lordly beasts’.

  Yet nature in the Jungle is not a gory ruck, a perpetual munching scrimmage. ‘The law in this world’, wrote Angus Wilson in his biography of Kipling,30 ‘is far from Darwinian . . .’ Kipling wants us to come to a sensuous realisation of ferocity, and accept it as a badge of realism, a sign of things-as-they-are. But the violence of the Jungle is rule-bound, constrained by the Law (though the Law never protects the weak from the strong as such), and constrained too by the Aesopian, fabular quality of the stories. Only Shere Khan, that shabby tiger, is an indiscriminate killer, the wrong sort of predator in the predatory fantasy. It is important that Shere Khan arouses the fear we don’t feel for Mowgli in the jaws of the wolf, the coils of Kaa, the claws of the panther or the paws of the bear. In fact we notice how often the memorable tableaux of Jungle life approximate to the traditional images of the peaceable kingdom of the beasts. With a certain difference, of course: here the lamb would be snapped up if it lay down with the wolf, but predator and prey, killer and killed, all form a community of tough laws and tough loyalties, with Mowgli’s safety expressing the trust it is right to feel in the nobility of all the killers bar one.

  On the other hand, we learn something quite different about Kipling’s preference for predators from his rejection of the monkeys in ‘Kaa’s Hunting’. Here he departs for once from the characters of species given in his father’s Beast and Man in India. Lockwood Kipling observed the ‘sudden petulance’ the bandar-log were prone to, reported their skill as ‘daring and mischievous pilferers’ – he tells the story of a complete wedding cake removed from a reception in Simla by a chain of monkeys who passed it down the hill piece by piece. He also commented that ‘the sudden flash of interest in a triviality and its abrupt cessation remind one more of lunacy than sane humanity’: yet his dominant impression was melancholic. His monkeys were trailing, ‘wistful’, patriarchal bands, sitting impassive in the rain. Rudyard takes only the playful portion of the characterisation, then makes it malevolent. ‘They have no law’, Baloo explains:

  They are outcaste. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their mind to laughter and all is forgotten.31

  The worst of the monkeys seems to be their pretensions. From the borrowed collapsing grandeur of the Cold Lairs, the ruined human city they have colonised, they ‘pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest’. Again, ‘they scratch for fleas and pretend to be men’. No other animal feels this wish to seem more than it is; no other animal possesses so threateningly unstable an identity. The monkeys’ dual refusal of the stately register of the Jungle speech, and the immutable imperatives of the Law, remove their chance to own the splendid self-possession of a Bagheera or a Baloo. One might have thought that their anthropomorphism – their manlike shape, their clever hands – would make the monkeys the natural companions of a wild child: after all, in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, a sort of pulp derivative of the Jungle Books, they were to have just that role. But it is the anthropomorphism that is the problem, the point of maximum instability, for Kipling can only see it as anarchic and presumptuous, and even parodic, as if the monkeys were debased copies of humans who violate the proud sufficiency the other beasts feel in being themselves. Even Shere Khan has more dignity than they.

  Kipling was never especially interested in the real details of natural history; but here it seems that natural history is left behind altogether, and we need to think of the implicit parallel between the animal cast of the Jungle Books and the dramatis personae of Kipling’s Indian Empire. He consciously conceived the Jungle as a microcosm. The lessons Mowgli learns are transferable to the overtly human society at the periphery of the stories which he must one day return to, because the society of beasts is also a disguised vision of human society, seductive yet schematic. And his lessons (though this description strips away their richness unfairly) revolve around the question of power, and the place he is to find for himself on the ladder of power. As he grows, Bagheera cannot meet his gaze. Baloo, sage of all the Seoni, master of local wisdom, defers to him once Mowgli has understood his teaching and gone on where Baloo cannot follow. Given the purpose as an idealised allegory of empire, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, on the magical ground of the forest floor, the Indian boy stands to the beasts as, on the real ground of British India, the white man is supposed to stand in relation to Indian men. He must give the respect commanded by the proper denizens of a wild place, but knows that it requires his own greater vision to complete the local lore. To be able to do this, he must humbly absorb all that the Jungle has to offer; live by its rules and honour its ways; yet in the end the roles allotted to him and them are utterly, satisfyingly distinct. Which is only right, according to this vision of empire, for the animals are proudly content to be different from the boy. Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa exhibit, so to speak, the right difference from him: but what of the monkeys, who wish to close the gap, who claim to resemble him?

  In other stories, Kipling wrote Indian characters he admired as he admired the dignified ferocity of Bagheera. Kim, for example, has Mahbub Ali, the scarlet-bearded horse dealer from the north, a man of honour and of honourable violence. He preferred these human predators, so securely different, so rooted in the Indian environment as he envisaged it, to Indians who troubled the distinctness of rulers and ruled by resembling Europeans in unexpected ways. Kipling had known India at the time of the Raj’s maximum placidity. The memory of the 1859 ‘Mutiny’ (a bloody uprising against the British) had receded to a safe historical distance, and Queen Victoria’s pomp-swathed installation as Empress of India in 1877 seemed a promise of permanence. Mass nationalist agitation had scarcely begun, but though they did not challenge it effectively yet, the chief internal irritants to Br
itish rule were the assertive Hindu intelligentsia of Bengal, who had just founded the Congress movement. These Calcutta journalists, advocates, functionaries, landlords, doctors and poets – lumped together as ‘Babus’ – argued law and literature, policy and government, sometimes on Western terms, sometimes in the light of Hinduism. Derisive remarks about their comical English and their absurd pretensions formed a staple of Anglo-Indian conversation, as Kipling heard it among the armchairs of the Lahore Club, at home with his family, and on his journalistic travels. Ever more intelligent than his prejudices – able to send one part of his mind scouting beyond the limits of his own fixed views – Kipling did, however, share in this communal contempt. Bengalis who presumed to meddle in public affairs were, he agreed, merely denying their Indian identity on the strength of a veneer of Western education. ‘They talk too much, and do too little’, Kipling wrote in 1887, sticking to the stereotype while selecting the (supposed) failing that most contravened his personal gospel of stoical industriousness. In the analogy between Jungle and Raj, the bandar-log surely correspond to the Babus.

  It is important to realise, though, that Kipling did not intend a racial caricature. He was concerned with transgressions against good order, as he understood it, and against intelligibility, order’s equivalent in language. The monkeys’ sin lay in crossing the boundaries of identity. Kipling’s world had many necessary boundaries – between the public and the private, for example – which the individual neglected at his peril, and, once formed vividly in his mind, he used the symbol of the bandar-log promiscuously, for whomever he distrusted. At one time it was the London literary scene that habitually called to his mind the image of an ape ­troupe: metropolitan chatterers (thought Kipling, recoiling) whose light talk and dinner-party intimacies obscurely threatened the springs of creativity. He had packed such mythic potency into his animals, he produced such a strong and immediate sense of their physical existence, that they could never serve as simple shadows of his opinions. The game of spotting real-world counterparts to the Jungle creatures went on inexhaustibly among Kipling’s readers, even after his death. During the Second World War, General Wavell identified Shere Khan as a premonition of Hitler, and the jackal Tabaqui with Mussolini.

  ‘Now these are the Laws of the Jungle’, runs Kipling’s verse digest of Baloo’s teaching in The Second Jungle Book,

  and many and mighty are they;

  But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the

  hump is – Obey!

  If the Jungle Books were merely fables of hierarchy and proper subordination, they would not offer the sense they do, to adult readers as much as children, of a palpable enlargement of possibilities. Mowgli’s experience of the Jungle is our gateway to it, and Mowgli’s anomalous position, poised between two worlds, is the crucial thing here. Not only is he far freer physically than any human-reared child could ever be, swinging along the ‘tree-roads’ with the monkeys in a dizzy rush, or bathing in deliciously cool brown forest pools; he experiences the lessons of power as a dimension of his self-discovery. His is not the story of a life lived within the strict confines of the Law. In the Jungle, but never entirely of it, he learns how the Law does and does not contain the actions of an unprecedented being like himself. What code will govern him, he must decide for himself – twice over, because there is also the village to be considered, where at first, as he says to himself in ‘Tiger! Tiger!’, ‘I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in the jungle.’ The Jungle Books speak to the fluid condition of learning the world and its laws, rather than the static one of obeying them. In the same way, Kim, with its child-hero able to dart and forage at will through multiplicitous ‘native’ India, yet destined to join the ranks of India’s governors, only narrates the first wondering discovery of the secret means by which the diverse splendours around Kim are maintained. Moving freely himself, Kim does not see the structures of rule as an iron lid over the country, but as aspects of his own complicated nature. Kim and the Jungle Books alike give a poetic view of power – power still as dewy, flexible and exciting as adolescence.

  Most important of all, again like Kimball O’Hara whose famous cry ‘Who is Kim?’ expresses the void left untouched by the learning of many rules, Mowgli is mysterious to himself, mysterious beyond the powers of his pedagogues to explain, though Bagheera can tell him (like a naturalist) that the water on his face is tears ‘such as men use’. He asks unanswerable questions in his song of himself that he chants at the Council Rock:

  The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it falls.

  Why?

  The Law cannot help on this brink of emotion. It never can, in Kipling, whose lifelong belief in the necessity of law grew, precisely, out of his awareness of the inward confusions it cannot regulate. Notoriously reticent in his private life, Kipling was also notoriously and remarkably unwilling (for a major writer) to probe or fathom his characters’ psychologies directly. He would take them to the brink of turbulent feeling, then specify only that cliffs of fall had opened beneath them, leaving the job of communicating the crisis in the hands of brilliantly suggestive external description. He conceived the Law defensively, as a forever insufficient bulwark against the consequences of questions like Mowgli’s. It was something to hold on to, rather than a cage. Accordingly, his sense of the direction in which danger lay was quite different. The danger in the Jungle Books, as in Kim, is less that the Law will prove intolerably harsh and confining, than that a sensory overload – in the calling, populous Jungle or among the endlessly varied crowds flowing with Kim along the Grand Trunk Road – will press intolerably on the lonely individual.

  The state of being suspended between worlds, neither an insider nor an outsider, furnishes one of the threads connecting the three Mowgli stories to the four other tales in The Jungle Book. Kotick, the albino-pelted hero of ‘The White Seal’, is separated from his gregarious, complacent tribe both by his colour and his unwillingness to accept the customary decimation of the seal people. He sees the Aleut hunters plain, as they club the tranquil seals, instead of ‘staring stupidly’; and undertakes a solitary odyssey among other sea species in order to change what only he can understand is changeable. Small Toomai in ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, son of a government mahout or elephant driver, will soon have a place in the scheme of things, but does not yet: and he, loose where the adult drivers and even the sage Petersen Sahib are fixed in the firmament of tradition, alone rides into the midnight forest on the wrinkled back of Kala Nag to see the rumoured dancing of the elephants. The grateful English family in ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ feed ‘their’ mongoose banana and boiled egg at the breakfast table. His other existence, exploring the intricate animal societies of bungalow and garden, is largely invisible to them, except when it results in a dead snake; yet he is a newcomer to his wild role as much as to being petted, intensely curious, exploring the customs, the alliances and the hostilities of his two domains. ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ lets the reader overhear the night-talk of bullocks, camels, horses and elephants whose animal natures have been recruited to the different ends of the Indian Army.

  This last story, however, so neatly productive of an imperial moral, is also the least successful in the book, because it regiments, it tidies to the point of imaginative death, another important common strand of The Jungle Book. ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ only collects the supply-beasts’ views of human warfare. Their independent existences have been reduced to a set of routinely different reactions, sometimes comically partial ones, to the moment when the big guns go off, or ‘the red stuff’ soaks into the ground. His dog lies beside the listening narrator: and you might say that the entire animal cast have been spanielised, turned into spaniels with humps, spaniels with horns, and large grey spaniels with trunks. Elsewhere in the book, it takes a very special kind of fool to draw a human-centred conclusion from the wild world – like Buldeo the hunter, confidently announcing Shere Khan incarnates the soul of a lame money-lender (‘cobwebs
and moontalk’, says Mowgli), or the Aleut seal-clubber who thinks Kotick ‘is old Zaharoff’s ghost. He was lost last year in the big gale.’ The English father in ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ is wiser. He knows Rikki is to be treated with respect, and his cobra-killing services accepted as the voluntary, inexplicable gift they are. The idea that Kipling patterns into triviality in ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’, and otherwise deploys throughout The Jungle Book with seductive vigour, is that it is wildness which gives obedience – or service – its value. A tamed animal has no gift to give, no dignified self-possession from which to act in chosen obedience to an order it thinks is worth obeying. Kala Nag, on the other hand, the great bull elephant, master of the government herd, serves with such force (paradoxically) in the round-ups of his wild cousins because there are inviolate parts of his nature which captivity has never altered; those same parts that respond to the summons to the secret dancing. ‘And we will hunt with thee’, offer Mowgli’s four wolf-brothers at the end of ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ The same principle is at work, of course, in Mahbub Ali’s decision in Kim, from out of his own stylishly murderous nature, to serve the Raj in the Great Game against the Russians – for we return here to the human underpinning of the animal tales, and Kipling’s ideal portrait of imperial relations.

  Mowgli’s future among men can be imagined. In fact, it does not need to be: as the envoi of ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ suggests (‘But that is a story for grown-ups’), Kipling had already written it. ‘In the Rukh’, the story in question, never appeared in any of the editions of the Jungle Books. Kipling conceived it first, before any of the famous Mowgli stories, and, looking at it and his next work, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, realised that the latter had the germ of imaginative growth in it, while the former did not. Though good in his vein of adult colonial tales, it had to be kept apart from the two collections because it abolishes Mowgli’s gloriously unresolved state in the Jungle. It shows him entirely from the outside. A young Englishman, Gisborne Sahib of the Indian government’s Department of Woods and Forests, is tending to his lonely woodland patch when an angelic visitant arrives at the scene of a recent tiger kill. ‘A man was walking down the dried bed of the stream, naked except for the loin-cloth, but crowned with a wreath of the tasselled blossoms of the white convulvulus creeper.’ Mowgli’s physical beauty – only implied previously, until his mother Messua applauds it at the very end of The Second Jungle Book, in accordance with Mowgli’s dawning adolescent self-consciousness – becomes explicit here, is insisted on and pinned down in European terms. ‘“He’s a most wonderful chap,” thought Gisborne; “he’s like the illustrations in the Classical Dictionary.”’ Like the Greek god Pan, that is, or one of the pantheon of wood spirits. What strikes Gisborne most of all, especially in comparison to his wheedling Muslim butler, is Mowgli’s total, oblivious ignorance of ‘the proper manner of addressing white people’, ‘of all forms of ceremony and salutations’. ‘His voice was clear and bell-like, utterly different from the usual whine of the native . . .’ Gisborne finds the godling’s combination of uncanny woodcraft and undeferential speech irresistible. ‘I must get him into the Government service somehow’, he thinks. And indeed, once the mystery of his origins (a soluble, short-story-sized mystery) has been solved, Mowgli elects of his own free will to join the hierarchy that defends the forest, and be Gisborne’s man. He ends married to the butler’s daughter, with steady pay and a pension. If a certain ignominy attaches to being a myth with a pension, the story’s gratifying demonstration that the wild peg fits exactly into the official hole brings a much greater imaginative loss. Kipling could not begin the Jungle Books here, nor even end them with this drab disclosure of Mowgli’s role in the imperial scheme. It’s one thing to have Mowgli’s fate implied, another seeing him dwindle to match it, as if he could only see his true reflection in the mirror of a white man’s gaze.