The most vapid and insignificant class of human beings which so far has been evolved in history [is] the modern urban lower middle class of the West.
The absurd thing is that in India Aryan racial pride still has point; in Europe it has little. Of this pride Chaudhuri’s book might be seen as the latest expression. He is not European; with his poetic feeling for rivers and cattle, his insistence on caste, he remains Aryan.
Make a European society with India’s religion. Become an occidental of occidentals in your spirit of equality, freedom, work, and energy, and at the same time a Hindu to the very backbone in religious culture, and instincts.
This is not Chaudhuri. It is Vivekananda, the Vedantist, writing at the turn of the century. A Bengali, like Chaudhuri, a reformer, a product of the Anglo-Bengali culture; and the message, with all its imprecisions and contradictions, is like Chaudhuri’s. The Anglo-Bengali culture survives. To its passionate introspection The Continent of Circe is a late addition, quirky, at times wild, but rich and always stimulating.
1966
Theatrical Natives
THE KIPLING revival is curious. It seems to be mainly academic—and therefore self-perpetuating—and its interest seems to be less in the work than in the man. Kipling is more complex than his legend. It is easy for the critic to be made possessive by this discovery and to go through the work just looking for clues. It can be shown, for instance, from a story like “The Bridge-Builders,” that Kipling was not insensitive to the subtleties of Hindu iconography. The fact is interesting, but it doesn’t make the story any less obscure or unsatisfactory. The fact is also awkward: it doesn’t fit with other facts. And so it happens that attempts to set the legend right often end in simple tabulation, of matter and motif. This is the method of Mr. Stewart’s Rudyard Kipling, which does little more than celebrate a reading of the Kipling canon.
The legend survives. “The Kipling That Nobody Read”—the title of Mr. Edmund Wilson’s essay—is still the Kipling nobody reads. Kipling revaluations are self-defeating, since they lead back more surely to the only Kipling of value, which is the Kipling of the legend. It is the legend of the brief serene decade of British India, when the Mutiny finally became a memory and nationalism was still to come: a moment of order and romance, vanishing even as it was apprehended, later to embarrass, sadden, anger and be explained away, until it became historical. The legend can be accepted now. Mr. Cornell accepts it: it is one of the merits of his book. Kipling in India is the most balanced analysis I have read of Kipling’s literary achievement. Mr. Cornell says that his subject is Kipling’s apprenticeship, which contained the legendary achievement: the fixing, for all time, of that moment of British India.
It was the unlikely achievement of a very young man who took his unimportant journalistic work seriously; who abandoned the graver literary ambitions of his school-days to become a kind of club-writer; who aimed at ordinariness, and feared above all to offend. The club was at first the Punjab Club, of which Kipling became a member at seventeen. Soon it was all British India. This artificial, complete and homogeneous world did not require explanations. “Dedication,” Mr. Cornell says, “walked hand in hand with triviality.” The triviality was the triviality of “good-fellowship, not savage mockery”; there were limits to self-satire. Kipling followed the rules and didn’t sink. Like the Lama in Kim, he acquired merit.
Mr. Cornell is right to stress the club, for it is from his function as a club-writer that Kipling’s virtues came, and especially that allusive, elliptical prose, easy but packed, which, almost one hundred years later, still seems so new. Mr. Cornell’s account of the development of this prose is fascinating. This is Kipling at seventeen, describing a Hindu pageant in Lahore:
To the great delight of the people, Ramachandra and his brothers, attired in the traditional costume and head-dress, were mounted aloft and held the mighty bow, the breaking of which shook the world to its centre. But it must be admitted that Sita, uncomfortably astride a broad-backed wicker-work bull, supported by an uneasy Rama, buried in tinsel and attended by bearers … was a spectacle more comic than imposing.
This, as Mr. Cornell says, is cheap, obvious and anonymous. It is without Kipling’s later “visual clarity.” It is also the work of an outsider: the Anglo-Indian was closer to the country. But two years later the tone changes. Here is another fair scene:
Presently the bolder spirits among them would put out a horny finger, and carefully touch one of the bullocks. Then as the animal was evidently constructed of nothing more terrible than clay … the whole hand would be drawn gently over its form; and, after an appreciative pat, the adventurous one would begin a lengthy dissertation to the bystanders at large.
The outsider has drawn closer. And sixteen months later the prose is like this:
Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes’ Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true.
This is the accomplished club-writer. He has mastered his subject and he knows his audience. He deals in an irony so private it might be missed by an outsider. To the Anglo-Indian, as Mr. Cornell points out, simple phrases like “a great friend of mine” and “a real mud roof” would have precise meanings. On the difference between the first and last quotations, he writes:
In the earlier piece, Indian life appeared as no more than a passing show to be judged and dismissed on its aesthetic merits by a superior—and very young—English spectator. In the 1886 story, however, Kipling has penetrated to the heart of the Anglo-Indian’s historical dilemma with amazing swiftness and economy.
The judgment is typical of Mr. Cornell’s balance and perception. He has not been tempted to make use of “The House of Suddhoo” to amend the legend; he makes a literary judgment, and it is correct.
Kipling’s prose was later to go beyond this. It was to become a superb instrument of narration, concise, full of flavour and speed, and wonderfully pictorial. But the club-writer always needed the club, the common points of reference; he needed the legend, which perhaps his own stories had helped to create. Kipling can best be savoured in a group of related stories: to this extent the tabulators are justified. A story by Chekhov is complete in itself; a story by Kipling isn’t. It is either too slight or too long-windedly anecdotal. A legitimate delay in an Indian story would lose its point elsewhere.
There were the usual blue-and-white striped jail-made rugs on the uneven floor; the usual glass-studded Amritsar phulkaris draped to nails driven into the flaking whitewash of the walls; the usual half-dozen chairs that did not match, picked up at sales of dead men’s effects … The little windows, fifteen feet up, were darkened with wasp-nests, and lizards hunted flies between the beams of the wood-ceiled roof.
“William the Conqueror,” from which the passage is taken (it is quoted by Mr. Stewart), is not a good story. It is pure comic-strip and—it is a love story set against a background of famine and corpses—it is horrifying to some. But details like these make it a true and acceptable part of Kipling’s Indian work. In another setting comparable details would tell less. They wouldn’t be as intimate; the “usual” would have less meaning; and “dead men’s effects” would not speak of that dedication which was part of the Anglo-Indian’s myth. Kipling’s Anglo-Indians are always slightly embarrassing when they are on leave in England; there is a similar embarrassment, of ordinariness, it might be said, even in an Indian story like “The Gadsbys,” from which India is almost totally subtracted.
Just as in that passage detail adds to detail, and we would be without none of them, so each of Kipling’s Indian stories adds to the others and is supported by them. Kipling’s stories are not lik
e Chekhov’s; they are like Turgenev’s hunting sketches or Angus Wilson’s stories of the late forties. They make one big book; they have to be taken together. They catch—or create—a complete society at a particular moment. It is in its search for the independent, good Kipling story that Kipling criticism becomes aggressive and tabulatory. Even Mr. Cornell succumbs. He notices the frequency of disguises, hoaxes and frauds in the stories; and he makes much of this. He should have ignored it. The fact would have been important if Kipling were more interested in people than in the types with whom he filled his club, never allowing himself satire, mockery or anger beyond what the club permitted. As it is, such tabulation shows up the limitations of the too homogeneous club as a source for material, and it shows up the limitations of the club-writer, whose closest literary friend, later in England, was to be Rider Haggard.
The irony, like the legend, remains. The “long-coated theatrical natives discussing metaphysics in English and Bengali”—threats to order and romance, and therefore to be ceaselessly satirized—were to lead to a writer like Nirad Chaudhuri and a film-maker like Ray. The club has disappeared. By becoming its spokesman and jester, by brilliantly creating its legend, Kipling made the disappearance of the club certain.
1966
Conrad’s Darkness and Mine
IT HAS TAKEN me a long time to come round to Conrad. And if I begin with an account of his difficulty, it is because I have to be true to my experience of him. I would find it hard to be detached about Conrad. He was, I suppose, the first modern writer I was introduced to. It was through my father. My father was a self-taught man, picking his way through a cultural confusion of which he was perhaps hardly aware and which I have only recently begun to understand; and he wished himself to be a writer. He read less for pleasure than for clues, hints and encouragement; and he introduced me to those writers he had come upon in his own search. Conrad was one of the earliest of these: Conrad the stylist, but more than that, Conrad the late starter, holding out hope to those who didn’t seem to be starting at all.
I believe I was ten when Conrad was first read to me. It sounds alarming; but the story was “The Lagoon”; and the reading was a success. “The Lagoon” is perhaps the only story of Conrad’s that can be read to a child. It is very short, about fifteen pages. A forest-lined tropical river at dusk. The white man in the boat says, “We’ll spend the night in Arsat’s clearing.” The boat swings into a creek; the creek opens out into a lagoon. A lonely house on the shore; inside, a woman is dying. And during the night Arsat, the young man who is her lover, will tell how they both came there. It is a story of illicit love in another place, an abduction, a chase, the death of a brother, abandoned to the pursuers. What Arsat has to say should take no more than fifteen minutes; but romance is romance, and when Arsat’s story ends the dawn comes up; the early-morning breeze blows away the mist; the woman is dead. Arsat’s happiness, if it existed, has been flawed and brief; and now he will leave the lagoon and go back to his own place, to meet his fate. The white man, too, has to go. And the last picture is of Arsat, alone in his lagoon, looking “beyond the great light of a cloudless day into the darkness of a world of illusions.”
In time the story of “The Lagoon” became blurred. But the sense of night and solitude and doom stayed with me, grafted, in my fantasy, to the South Sea or tropical island setting of the Sabu and Jon Hall films. I have, unwillingly, looked at “The Lagoon” again. There is a lot of Conrad in it—passion and the abyss, solitude and futility and the world of illusions—and I am not sure now that it isn’t the purest piece of fiction Conrad wrote. The brisk narrative, the precise pictorial writing, the setting of river and hidden lagoon, the nameless white visitor, the story during the night of love and loss, the death at daybreak: everything comes beautifully together. And if I say it is a pure piece of fiction, it is because the story speaks for itself; the writer does not come between his story and the reader.
“The Lagoon” was parodied by Max Beerbohm in “A Christmas Garland.” Writers’ myths can depend on accidents like that. “The Lagoon,” as it happens, was the first short story Conrad wrote; and though later, when I read the parody, I was able to feel that I was in the know about Conrad, from my own point of view “The Lagoon” had been a cheat. Because I was never to find anything so strong and direct in Conrad again.
There is a story, “Karain,” written not long after “The Lagoon.” It has the same Malayan setting and, as Conrad acknowledged, a similar motif. Karain, inspired by sudden sexual jealousy, kills the friend whose love quest he had promised to serve; and thereafter Karain is haunted by the ghost of the man he has killed. One day he meets a wise old man, to whom he confesses. The old man exorcises the ghost; and Karain, with the old man as his counsellor, becomes a warrior and a conqueror, a ruler. The old man dies; the ghost of the murdered friend returns to haunt Karain. He is immediately lost; his power and splendor are nothing; he swims out to the white men’s ship and asks them, unbelievers from another world, for help. They give him a charm: a Jubilee sixpence. The charm works; Karain becomes a man again.
The story is, on the surface, a yarn about native superstition. But to Conrad it is much more; it is profounder, and more wonderful, than “The Lagoon”; and he is determined that its whole meaning should be grasped. All the suggestions that were implicit in “The Lagoon” are now spelled out. The white men have names; they talk, and act as a kind of chorus. So we are asked to contemplate the juxtaposition of two cultures, one open and without belief, one closed and ruled by old magic; one, “on the edge of outer darkness,” exploring the world, one imprisoned in a small part of it. But illusions are illusions, mirage is mirage. Isn’t London itself, the life of its streets, a mirage? “I see it. It is there; it pants, it runs; it rolls; it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you didn’t look out; but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as the other thing.” So, romantically and somewhat puzzlingly, the story ends.
The simple yarn is made to carry a lot. It requires a more complex response than the plainer fiction of “The Lagoon.” Sensations—night and solitude and doom—are not enough; the writer wishes to involve us in more than his fantasy; we are required—the chorus or commentary requires us—to stand outside the facts of the story and contemplate the matter. The story has become a kind of parable. Nothing has been rigged, though, because nothing is being proved; only wonder is being awakened.
In a preface to a later collection of stories Conrad wrote: “The romantic feeling of reality was in me an inborn faculty.” He hadn’t deliberately sought out romantic subjects; they had offered themselves to him:
I have a natural right to [my subjects] because my past is very much my own. If their course lies out of the beaten path of organized social life, it is, perhaps, because I myself did in a sort break away from it early in obedience to an impulse which must have been very genuine since it has sustained me through all the dangers of disillusion. But that origin of my literary work was very far from giving a larger scope to my imagination. On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters outside the general run of every day experience laid me under the obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations. The problem was to make unfamiliar things credible. To do that I had to create for them, to reproduce for them, to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of actuality. This was the hardest task of all and the most important, in view of that conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact which has been always my aim.
But the truths of that story, “Karain,” are difficult ones. The world of illusions, men as prisoners of their cultures, belief and unbelief: these are truths one has to be ready for, and perhaps half possess already, because the story does not carry them convincingly within itself. The suggestion that the life of London is as much a mirage as the timeless life of the Malayan archipelago is puzzling, because the two-page description of the London streets with which the story ends is too literal: blank faces, hansom cabs, omnibuses, girls �
��talking vivaciously,” “dirty men … discussing filthily,” a policeman. There isn’t anything in that catalogue that can persuade us that the life described is a mirage. Reality hasn’t fused with the writer’s fantasy. The concept of the mirage has to be applied; it is a matter of words, a disturbing caption to a fairly straight picture.
I have considered this simple story at some length because it illustrates, in little, the difficulties I was to have with the major works. I felt with Conrad I wasn’t getting the point. Stories, simple in themselves, always seemed at some stage to elude me. And there were the words, the words that issued out of the writer’s need to be faithful to the truth of his own sensations. The words got in the way; they obscured. The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon, famous books, were impenetrable.
In 1896 the young H. G. Wells, in an otherwise kind review of An Outcast of the Islands, the book before The Nigger, wrote: “Mr Conrad is wordy; his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences. He has still to learn the great half of his art, the art of leaving things unwritten.” Conrad wrote a friendly letter to Wells; but on the same day—the story is in Jocelyn Baines’s biography—he wrote to Edward Garnett: “Something brings the impression off—makes its effect. What? It can be nothing but the expression—the arrangement of words, the style.” It is, for a novelist, an astonishing definition of style. Because style in the novel, and perhaps in all prose, is more than an “arrangement of words”: it is an arrangement, even an orchestration, of perceptions, it is a matter of knowing where to put what. But Conrad aimed at fidelity. Fidelity required him to be explicit.
Literary Occasions Page 17
