Why couldn’t Kipling follow the Tibetan Buddhist Lama into a life of contemplation in the Himalayas, as Kim does at the end of that remarkable novel (or whatever you want to call it, because it isn’t like any other novel ever written)?
At times, you feel that in Kipling Sahib Charles Allen too shares this impatience with his noisy, ink-spattered hero. Why didn’t Kipling follow the intuitive, Indian side of his head? Why did he moulder down in that gloomy house in Sussex with a wife nobody liked, churning out patriotic verse for a public that had become disenchanted with such stuff? Allen has written copiously on India, Kipling and the Raj in various combinations, but of all his books this account of Kipling’s Indian years is the one he felt destined to write. Like Kipling, he himself is a child of the Raj, or rather an orphan of it, cast out of Paradise at an early age and seemingly abandoned by his parents in an alien land among unknown people. The young Kipling worked for Allen’s great-grandfather’s newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette, in Lahore, in which many of Kipling’s first and finest stories appeared. In the dining room of the Allen grandparents’ home in East Sussex, there hung two of the ten plaster plaques made by John Lockwood Kipling to illustrate the first edition of Kim, those odd muddy images which, like everything to do with Kipling, have a tang which is quite unlike anything to do with anyone else. Who else ever thought of asking his father to illustrate his novel with photographs of plaster plaques?
With delicious detail and an unfailing command of his material, Allen recounts these brief, intense years which make up the total of Kipling’s experience of India – the five years of infancy at Bombay (even those broken by the trip to England for the birth of his sister, Trix), then the ‘seven years hard’, as he called them, up to the age of twenty-four sweating on local newspapers in Lahore and Allahabad, then a couple of years later when he was already famous, a brief final visit to Lahore. He said goodbye to his ayah, and never saw India again. By the time he finished Kim, he had exhausted his reservoirs of experience. As Allen says, he was pretty much written out at thirty-five. ‘The craftsmanship stayed with him for the rest of his life.’ As T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘There is hardly any poem in which Kipling fails to do what he has set out to do.’ But Allen is surely right in discerning that the spark of genius that gave his writing its sharp, dangerous crackle was almost gone, along with the desire to jolt that had made the best of his early work so electrifying to his Victorian readership.
In fact, Allen seems now and then a little doubtful about the value even of that early work. It is not simply the imperial attitudes that seem out of date; for him the freshness of Kipling’s literary techniques has faded too: ‘The shock-value of “Danny Deever”, “Tommy” and the best of the Barrack-Room Ballads has faded over the years – and the rest have not aged well. “Mandalay” sounds almost maudlin. Kipling’s cockneyfication seems contrived.’
This isn’t how I feel at all. I still shiver when the ballad of ‘Danny Deever’ turns nasty. And I am still stirred by the old Moulmein Pagoda lookin’ lazy at the sea. All those dropped hs and gs are indeed a contrivance, but a magnificent in-your-face contrivance, a rubbing-it-in way of making palpable the soldiers and engineers who built the Empire and who for Kipling are not only as good as Gunga Din (and vice versa) but as good as the Colonel’s Lady. What other writer has had Kipling’s ingrained democratic curiosity? In those seven years as a young reporter in India, he was everywhere, annoying the officers’ mess, pumping the sergeants and privates for their experiences on the North West Frontier, prowling the alleys and brothels and opium dens of Lahore all through the night. He was always scrounging for copy, picking up the jargon of engineers and jockeys and bureaucrats, so that they began to think he must have spent time in their trade instead of just being an inky magpie. At the same time, he was an intensely literary writer who mastered every metre from the music-hall ballad to the sestina. He might not have gone to university, but at Westward Ho! he read everything from Dryden and Donne to Pushkin and Oscar Wilde.
As for the early short stories, there is nothing like them in English – you would need to go to Maupassant or Lermontov to find any competition. But even the foreign masters don’t change mood with such an audacious flip as Kipling does. At one moment you are reading a light anecdote full of the persiflage that was later to be done so delightfully by Saki and Wodehouse, and then suddenly the characters are plunged into bewilderment and disaster. Within a short space – most of the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills and Wee Willie Winkie are only 2000–3000 words long, to fit a ‘turnover’ in the Civil and Military Gazette – their whole lives are weighed and, well, not always found wanting. Kipling can be charitable as well as pitiless. In ‘False Dawn’, the characters set out for a moonlight riding picnic by an old tomb in the desperate heat. Saumarez, an arrogant civil servant, resolves to propose to the elder Miss Copleigh in the romantic atmosphere, but a terrible duststorm gets up and in the confusion he proposes to the wrong sister. That is all there is to it, a story Kipling probably picked up in some out-of-the-way station. Yet ‘False Dawn’ leaves you sweating and the throat parched as if the sand had blown up off the page.
Kim itself switches mood and theme to and fro as casually as Don Quixote, which Kipling took as his model. At one moment it is a spy story, at another a spiritual adventure or a travelogue or the story of an abandoned child. Some people have found it hard to get on with, as I did when I first tried it in my teens. I returned to it about ten years ago and was transported. To this day it is the English novel that Indian writers most often mention with gratitude and affection.
That intensity, that miraculous compression which marks his best work did not come cheap. Under his rowdy front, he had always been abnormally sensitive and inclined to melancholy, and even as an adult was fearful of the dark and hated to be alone at night. Like all the great books for children (like the great books for adults too) the Jungle books are full of the smell of fear:
Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere the Monkey People cry,
Ere Chil the Kite sweeps down a furlong sheer,
Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh –
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.
When Kipling was decanted upon strange foster parents in Southsea, the ‘House of Desolation’ as he called it, he began to have hallucinations and contracted neurotic habits, hitting out at trees as if they were threatening him and running across the room to check that the walls were real. When he went to stay with his Baldwin cousins after five years of maltreatment by ‘the Woman’, as he called her, his cousin Stanley, the future prime minister, said that he was ‘half blind and crazed to the point of suffering delusions’. Now and then biographers have tried to minimize the ordeal he and his sister Trix suffered when abandoned by their parents to the harsh mercies of Mrs Holloway. It has been suggested, for example, that Kipling might have borrowed from David Copperfield the story of being paraded through the streets of Southsea with a placard on his back saying LIAR, but Trix confirms the story, and in any case Mrs Holloway might herself have borrowed the idea.
It does not seem so odd to Allen that Alice and Lockwood Kipling should have abandoned their children to two total strangers for more than five years. The same thing happened to Allen himself and thousands of other children of the Raj. Yet I think he rather skates over the behaviour of Alice, the prime mover. She had, after all, plenty of sisters in England whose homes could have offered Ruddy a warmer lodging, especially the Burne-Joneses and the Baldwins, of whom he was so fond. All Allen can report is that there were ‘complications’ which led her to answer the Holloways’ newspaper advertisement. Perhaps she was ashamed of having to ask for her sisters’ charity. It has to be said that Alice sounds an unappealing character, more interested in making a good impression on the Viceroy with her caustic wit.
The remarks of hers about Ruddy which Allen quotes sound patronizing rather than supportive. To the headmaster at Westward Ho!: ‘The lad has a g
reat deal that is feminine in his nature and a little sympathy – from any quarter – will reconcile him to his changed life more than anything.’ She felt compelled to apologize to the departing Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, for Ruddy’s poem ‘One Viceroy Resigns’, which purported to be His Excellency’s late-night reverie: ‘I and my husband have been grieved to note from time to time offences which no cleverness, not even genius can excuse. His youth and inexperience in the world in which he does not live are I feel sure the explanation.’
As for his abilities as a storyteller, Alice told her son, ‘you know you couldn’t make a plot to save your life’. All in all, Alice strikes me as a social-climbing bitch. And despite his protestations of devotion to ‘the Family Square’, I think it is of his mother that Kipling is thinking when he writes in the last paragraph of his story ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, which describes his and Trix’s life in the House of Desolation: ‘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 that knowledge.’
By contrast, Carrie Kipling has had a bad press, which I don’t think she deserves. Only Adam Nicolson’s little book about her, The Hated Wife, makes some amends and shows how she carried Kipling through and what a lot she had to put up with. Most biographers have preferred to ignore Carrie as far as possible and instead sought to ferret out a homosexual or at least homoerotic streak in Kipling, especially in his relationship with Carrie’s brother Wolcott Balestier: the principal evidence being the brutal speed of Ruddy and Carrie’s marriage after Wolcott’s death, and the fact that he changed ‘Dear Lad’ to ‘Dear Lass’ in his poem ‘The Long Trail’. The latter strikes me as no more than the artist’s economy of effort shown by Elton John in substituting ‘England’s Rose’ for ‘Norma Jean’. The wedding was indeed a weird and brisk affair. According to Edmund Gosse, one of the four men who attended the ceremony at All Souls, Langham Place (Alice and Trix were both down with the flu), it was as if Ruddy had been hurried into matrimony, like a rabbit into its hole. ‘At 2.8 the cortège entered the church and at 2.20 left it. Both bridegroom and bride are possessed by a very devil of secrecy.’ Henry James, who was giving the bride away, described her as ‘a hard devoted little person whom I don’t in the least understand his marrying’ – and nor one feels can Charles Allen.
Yet the first time Alice set eyes on Carrie, she exclaimed, ‘That woman is going to marry our Ruddy’. She might, I suppose, have meant ‘because she is a hard little American who wants to marry a world-famous young author’. But I think rather that she could see that Ruddy, a fragile character who had always been solitary and was now in a frantic state, wilfully withdrawing deeper into himself, needed someone who could take him in hand and look after him, someone older not just by the two years of the calendar but in terms of being grown-up and capable, the sort of older woman that he had always gone for as a companion, even while he was whoring in Lahore. Allen describes him as ‘locked in an increasingly bleak marriage’ even before the death of his beloved elder daughter Josephine from whooping cough, not to mention the death of his son Johnnie in the Great War. But I very much doubt whether any other woman would have made him happier. He was bleak by nature. And his misfortunes only intensified the way he was. He became obsessively secretive too, he and Carrie holding periodic bonfires of all his papers. His autobiography, Something of Myself, could, as Charles Allen remarks, more accurately have been entitled ‘As Little About Myself As I Can Get Away With’.
Yet his self-obliteration, his wilful absence as a person, only enhanced his eerie sharpness of perception. It was partly because he had been away from India for eleven years that he could see how fragile, how absurd, yet how amazing the whole edifice of the Raj was and what a permanent lowering shadow had been left by the Mutiny twenty-five years earlier. No longer did the British in the subcontinent speak of themselves as ‘Indians’ but as ‘Anglo-Indians’, and for many of the whites the ‘natives’ were now ‘niggers’. The racial divide had become an abyss. He wrote ‘home’ to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones: ‘Underneath our excellent administrative system; under the piles of reports and statistics; the thousands of troops, the doctors, and the civilians of the Indian Civil Service runs wholly untouched and unaffected the life of the people of the land – a life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian Nights.’
The gorgeous apparatus of the Raj might be blown away in a moment and the roles of master and servant reversed, as they are in the story called ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, a literal-minded civil engineer who finds himself in the Village of the Dead, which turns out to be a republic where he has to obey the rule of the Brahmins. ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, perhaps the most famous, certainly the most filmed of all Kipling’s stories, is a hideous parable of the rise and fall of British rule, where a couple of deadbeat rogues, Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, first terrorize the distant native kingdom of Kafiristan with the power of their guns and use Masonic ritual (to which Kipling was devoted) to inspire awe, then start building bridges and holding councils, before the inevitable mutiny and hideous bloody end.
Kipling was an imperialist, yes, but he was the most apprehensive and morally demanding imperialist who ever lived. And it would be a sad thing if the political correctness of today separated Kipling from his mass readership. How horrified he would be to think that he had become more admired by highbrows than the general public, for there was nothing he abominated more than the society of intellectuals and being forced to:
Consort with long-haired things
In velvet collar-rolls,
Who talked about the aims of Art
And ‘theories’ and ‘goals’.
For Rudyard Kipling went beyond the art that conceals art to the art that conceals the artist. And he concealed himself too well for his own good.
GEORGE GISSING: THE DOWNFALL OF A PESSIMIST
In some moods, I would rather read George Gissing than any other nineteenth-century English novelist. In the 1890s he was ranked with Hardy and Meredith, at a time when they had finished writing novels and he was only just getting into his tortured stride. Orwell called The Odd Women ‘one of the best novels in English’. But somehow Gissing has fallen off the shelves, not out of print but of public regard, fatally obscured by a reputation for gloom and pessimism. Gissing – the very word is like a South London street on a wet Monday. He himself rather revelled in that reputation. When he discovered that the next tenant in his old lodgings in Brixton had killed himself, he noted in his diary: ‘The atmosphere I left behind me, some would say, killed the poor man.’
Yet reading any of his best novels – New Grub Street, Born in Exile, In the Year of Jubilee – is in fact an exhilarating experience, like splashing through icy puddles with the rain in your face. They move at a breakneck pace, partly because he wrote them at unbelievable speed, making other famously facile writers like Trollope and Simenon look positively constipated. He finished The Odd Women – 336 pages in the Virago edition – in fifty days. His mind was always bubbling with new plotlines, which generated any number of false starts. In the year after finishing Born in Exile, he began and then abandoned at least nine other novels. It comes as a shock, though it shouldn’t, that someone who wrote so much about defeated people – struggling writers, devitalized shop assistants, unloved spinsters – could himself master anything he tried his hand at. The son of a Suffolk pharmacist with literary tastes who migrated north to Wakefield, George Gissing passed out top in the whole country in English and Latin when he sat his London BA at Owens College, Manchester, a feat never achieved before. He also taught himself Greek, French, German, Italian and Spanish. He chucked out Christianity, read Darwin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, walked fifty miles in a day, was a competent illustrator and knew more about flora and fauna than Thomas Hardy. He was a handsome man too, with a great mane of swept-back hair, grey-blue eyes and a profile as fine as Rupert Brooke’s. For all his grouchiness, he didn�
�t have an enemy in the world – until he got married. E. W. Hornung met him in Rome towards the end of his life and said: ‘Gissing is really a sweet fellow, he has charm and sympathy, humour too and a louder laugh than Oscar’s. That man is not wilfully a pessimist. But he is lonely – there has been a great sorrow and ill-health too.’
So what went wrong? Well, that is the question pipe-sucking professors used to put, and though professors may no longer suck pipes, at least on college property, that is the question Paul Delany can’t stop asking. This is a highly enjoyable life of Gissing, lucidly written and carefully researched. Unfortunately, it is also so horribly bland, so wretchedly wrong-headed from start to finish, in the most important aspect of that life that it made me want to seek out the nearest ninth-storey window to hurl it from. However, let us remember our anger-management training and strive to condemn a little less and understand a little more.
The facts of Gissing’s first downfall are well-known. They remain startling. At the back of the estimable Owens College, which later turned out Nobel prizewinners in droves, were the slums along the River Irwell. And in the handily situated brothel in Water Street, Gissing met Nell Harrison and fell in love with her, or with the idea of reclaiming her from her fallen state, or both. He stole books and clothes from his fellow students to raise money for her boozing and her VD treatment. He bought her a sewing machine too. Then he stole 5s 6d and was caught and sentenced to a month’s jail with hard labour, which meant the treadmill: climbing the equivalent of 10,000 feet a day. After his release, far from making a big deal of his month inside, he never spoke of it and did his best to keep it dark for the rest of his life. The governors of the college remained keen to help their star pupil, and raised about £50 to speed him on his way to America where he could forget Nell and be himself forgotten.
English Voices Page 11
