Now there was a poor widow at Dymchurch under the Wall, which, lacking man or property, she had the more time for feeling; and she come to feel there was a Trouble outside her doorstep bigger an’ heavier than aught she’d ever carried over it. She had two sons – one born blind, an’ t’other struck dumb through fallin’ off the Wall when he was liddle. They was men grown, but not wage-earnin’, an’ she worked for ’em, keepin’ bees and answerin’ Questions.
Has any writer ever used capital letters with more authority or to greater effect? Kipling not only reproduces the dialect exactly and with complete conviction, he also, as it were, reproduces an authentic dialect of thought – which barely distinguishes between the relative importance of ‘man or property’ or between ‘keepin’ bees and answerin’ Questions’. Picasso once said that Van Gogh invented boots: ‘Take Van Gogh: Potatoes, those shapeless things! To have painted that, or a pair of old shoes! That’s really something! ‘ In the same way, Kipling extends the literary franchise. To the speaker, Tom Shoesmith, himself a covert Pharisee, bees and Questions are equally natural and the reader is persuaded by his matter-of-factness. Without dialect, there can be no entrée to his mind and the story is literally inconceivable, except in the terms in which Kipling frames it. The voice provides its own inherent conviction. Its accent and tone brook no questions.
In almost every way, Kipling is the opposite of Henry James, his devoted but not uncritical admirer – and not only in the way he so frequently opts for dialect. The sophisticated author has the burden of explanation, the transcriber of dialect has the different burden of accuracy, however much both are, finally, inventing. T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Milton, brilliantly observed that ‘the style of James certainly depends for its effect a good deal on the sound of a voice, James’s own, painfully explaining’. Kipling never explains. He asserts. On political and moral issues this assertiveness is often irksome to contemporary taste, but in matters of description Kipling leaves James agonizing at the starting line while he has breasted the tape. ‘Deep away in the heart of the City, behind Jitha Megji’s bustee, lies Amir Nath’s Gully, which ends in a dead-wall pierced by one grated window.’ In fictional terms, the place-names mean everything. They are authoritative and unarguable. Contrast the beginning of The Spoils of Poynton: James sets out to establish the vulgar tastelessness of the Brigstock family seat. As often, he is fabulously wordy and relies on the transmitted opinions of Mrs Gereth rather than on direct evocation. The tone is comprehensively Jamesian. We take on trust the fiction that Mrs Gereth is the actual source:
What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience, but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered them almost tragic.
There is a pleasing, if tasteless, asperity in the reference to the blind, but essentially this is James painfully explaining kitschiness in the abstract. What are ‘strange excrescences’?
This style is wonderfully adapted to the exploration of intricate cul-de-sacs in the minds of his ‘super-subtle fry’, but it is frankly embarrassed by anything more concrete than a perception. Kipling, however, can arrest kitsch in a sentence of brisk description: ‘Besides fragments of the day’s market, garlic, stale incense, clothes thrown on the floor, petticoats hung on strings for screens, old bottles, pewter crucifixes, dried immortelles, pariah puppies, plaster images of the Virgin, and hats without crowns.’ This isn’t one of Kipling’s great lists like the remorseless, tragic inventory of childish things to be burned in ‘Mary Postgate’, but it serves to show how little Kipling needed to explain. To the objection that James has the more difficult task of describing expensive kitsch, as opposed to Kipling’s vulgar kitsch, one might cite James’s evocation of the butler, Brooksmith, fallen on hard times:
There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the place, and there was a hot moist smell within, as of the ‘boiling’ of dirty linen. Brooksmith sat with a blanket over his legs at a clean little window where, from behind stiff bluish-white curtains, he could look across at a huckster’s and a tinsmith’s and a small greasy public-house. He had passed through an illness and was convalescent, and his mother, as well as his aunt, was in attendance on him. I liked the nearer relative, who was bland and intensely humble, but I had my doubts about the remoter, whom I connected perhaps unjustly with the opposite public-house – she seemed greasy somehow with the same grease…
Certainly, this is better, but there is something desperate in his reliance on the adjective greasy. You feel that James made seeing difficult for himself by allowing himself to wrinkle his nose so floridly.
But, then, James was a natural novelist and suffered agonies of introspective dieting when The Spoils of Poynton, promised as a short novella, proved after all to be a novel. With James’s tirelessly greedy appetite for complication, every snack turned out to be a banquet. Kipling, on the other hand, was a natural short-story writer, whose inborn instinct was for economy and limitation. Even in his most successful novel, Kim, he doesn’t explain. Take Lurgan, the healer of pearls: we hear of him first, not by name, but by his title. When we meet him, Kipling is both intensely specific and ultimately baffling. Having created in the reader an itch to know what a healer of pearls is, Kipling successfully refuses to scratch the itch properly. Just as ghost-daggers are mentioned but never explained, so the healer of pearls meditates on his art:
‘My work is on the table – some of it.’ It blazed in the morning light – all red and blue and green flashes, picked out with the vicious blue-white spurt of a diamond here and there. Kim opened his eyes. ‘Oh, they are quite well, those stones. It will not hurt them to take the sun. Besides, they are cheap. But with sick stones it is very different.’ He piled Kim’s plate anew. ‘There is no one but me can doctor a sick pearl and re-blue turquoises. I grant you opals – any fool can cure an opal – but for a sick pearl there is only me. Suppose I were to die! Then there would be no one…Oh no! You cannot do anything with jewels. It will be quite enough if you understand a little about the Turquoise – some day.’
It is a brilliant sleight of hand. Kipling has done what the short-story writer must do: he has convinced us that he knows, so that, for a moment, we believe we do, too.
Kipling, of course, could explain the arcane. He explains the way an object-letter works in ‘Beyond the Pale’:
A broken glass-bangle stands for a Hindu widow all India over; because, when her husband dies, a woman’s bracelets are broken on her wrists. Trejago saw the meaning of the little bit of glass. The flower of the dhak means diversely ‘desire’, ‘come’, ‘write’, or ‘danger’, according to the other things with it. One cardamom means ‘jealousy’; but when any article is duplicated in an object-letter, it loses its symbolic meaning and stands merely for one of a number indicating time…
And so on, until the meaning is spelled out and the reader has learned something he never knew before. It is a process which is instantly gratifying, but it is also deliberately misleading: it promises explanation everywhere, whereas Kipling’s point is that the whole tale is exactl
y like its setting – a blind alley leading nowhere. So that, when the denouement comes and Bisesa displays her ‘nearly healed stumps’, Kipling refuses to enlighten us: the circumstances remain unclear and ‘one special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the front of Durga Charan’s house. It may open on to a courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha Megji’s bustee. Trejago cannot tell.’
The balance, in this early story, between the rigorously specific and the rigorously withheld, is a mode which Kipling discovered right at the beginning of his career and maintained thereafter. The short story is like lago – whose final words are: ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:/From this time forth I never will speak word.’ ‘Beyond the Pale’, is, in its way, as difficult as any of the more notoriously obscure late stories.
‘The Wish House’, for example, is described by Eliot as a ‘hard and obscure story’. To Eliot, every reader of Kipling owes a great debt. Most of us came to Kipling via Eliot’s finely judged recommendation. All the same, I think cautious dissent is the appropriate reaction in the case of ‘The Wish House’. The meaning of the story is never in doubt for a minute: Kipling allows one of the inarticulate to speak, Grace Ashcroft, a widow who, for love, has taken on the burden of her ex-lover’s physical pain. Kipling’s theme, as in much of his late work, is the undying, secret passion which persists even in old age and which is prepared to sacrifice its life for another. This is the theme, too, of ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, in which the disturbed Strangwick pretends to be haunted by memories of thawing corpses in a trench-wall. In fact, their creaks terrify him less than the proof he has had of an all-consuming passion between his ‘uncle’, John Godsoe, and his aunt Armine – ‘an’ she nearer fifty than forty’. It is a passion for which death is no obstacle, merely the opportunity to meet freely at last beyond the grave. The force of the feeling is achieved by Kipling’s judicious contrast, by which the corpses facing the trenches are as nothing, and by Strangwick’s struggle to express the inexpressible: ‘“It was a bit of a mix-up, for me, from then on. I must have carried on – they told me I did, but – but I was – I felt a – a long way inside of meself, like – if you’ve ever had that feelin’. I wasn’t rightly on the spot at all.’” The broken speech is at once banal and brilliant, like Charlie Mears’s banjo-string.
In ‘The Wish House’, Kipling again rejects a conventional literary treatment in favour of something more authentic. The supernatural machinery is fantastic, but the details sustain our belief – from the adolescent sapphism of Sophy Ellis (’But – you know how liddle maids first feel it sometimes – she come to be crazy-fond o’ me, pawin’ and cuddlin’ all whiles; an’ I ’adn’t the ’eart to beat her off…’) to Grace’s ‘waxy yellow forehead’ and her cancerous leg with the wound’s edges ‘all heaped up, like – same as a collar’. All this, and more, is rigorously specific. It is only the Token which is unexplained and, therefore, ‘hard and obscure’. Even here, though, Kipling volunteers the information that a Token ‘is the wraith of the dead or, worse still, of the living’. In this case, the Token is a wraith of the living – which is why Sophie’s and Grace’s accounts differ, each being a version of the teller: a ‘gigglin” girl and a ‘heavy woman’ who walks with difficulty. This partial explanation, of course, did not satisfy Eliot, nor does it satisfy us. But I do not think Kipling means it to. He knew that the Token’s potency in the story is dependent on its precise obscurity.
I turned into the gate bold as brass; up de steps I went an’ I ringed the front-door bell. She pealed loud, like it do in an empty house. When she’d all ceased, I ’eard a cheer, like, pushed back on de floor o’ the kitchen. Then I ’eard feet on de kitchen-stairs, like it might ha’ been a heavy woman in slippers. They come up to de stairhead, acrost the hall-I ’eard the bare boards creak under ’em – an’ at de front door dey stopped. I stooped me to the letter-box slit, an’ I says: ‘Let me take everythin’ bad that’s in store for my man, ‘Any Mockler, for love’s sake.’ Then, whatever it was ‘tother side de door let its breath out, like, as if it ‘ad been holdin’ it for to ’ear better.
Should Kipling have given more information than this unaspirated, compelling, methodical account?
The answer must be negative. In fact, the hypothesis can be tested: ‘In the Same Boat’, a tale of drug addiction, shows two protagonists haunted by appalling hallucinations. They exchange horrors. Conroy’s involves ‘a steamer – on a stifling hot night’. Innocuous details – like rolled-up carpets and hot, soapy swabbed decks – are interrupted by the hooting of scalded men in the engine room, one of whom taps Conroy on the shoulder and drops dead at his feet. It is a powerful scenario, but perhaps less so than Miss Henschil’s: she walks down a white sandy road near the sea, with broken fences on either side, and men with mildewy faces, ‘eaten away’, run after her and touch her. For a time, these horrors retain their undisclosed power and rank with Hummil’s vision, in ‘At the End of the Passage’, of ‘a blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes, a blind face that chases him down corridors’. One thinks, too, of ‘A Friend of the Family’, in which we hear briefly and inexplicably of ‘the man without a face – preaching’ on the beach at Gallipoli, before and after his death. It is a parenthesis which lurks in the mind long after the rest of the revenge tale has been forgotten. And it remains there because Kipling never explains. ‘In the Same Boat’, however, provides a joint explanation of the scalded engineers and the mildewy faces: their respective mothers, while pregnant, have brushed against an engine-room accident and a leper colony. Under the influence of their addiction, Conroy and the girl relive these traumas which have penetrated the womb. The pat psychology is an artistic blunder, and the tension in the tale, palpable as a blister, leaks away uncharacteristically. The reader is left with the thing that Kipling, miraculously often, managed to avoid – mere writing, Wardour Street psychology in which the mystery is plucked, trussed and oven-ready.
Normally, the exigencies of the form prevent anything more than necessary assertion. Soon it will be over – the secret of the short story is known to everyone. From the moment it begins, it is about to die and the artist knows that every word, therefore, must tell. Digression is a luxury that must pay its way ten-fold. As it does in ‘The Gardener’, when Mrs Scarsworth begins her confession with the observation, ‘“What extraordinary wallpapers they have in Belgium, don’t you think?’” It is bizarre, yet convincing psychology – a last-minute reluctance to proceed with her embarrassing disclosure. But whenever Kipling is literary, he falters, as in the self-conscious reference which flaws ‘The House of Suddhoo’: ‘read Poe’s account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man, and you will realize less than one-half of the horror of that head’s voice.’ This is a rare failure.
Kipling, more than any other writer, except perhaps Chekhov, mastered the stipulated economy. His openings are packed: ‘The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storeyed, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows.’ In ‘The Limitations of Pambé Serang’, Nurkeed is instantly established as ‘the big fat Zanzibar stoker who fed the second right furnace’. In that ‘second right’, what might seem an embellishment is actually a stringent economy. Chekhov outlines the principle in The Seagull when Kostya Treplev complains:
The description of the moonlit evening is long and forced. Trigorin’s worked out his methods, it’s easy enough for him. He gives you the neck of a broken bottle glittering against a weir and the black shadow of a mill-wheel – and there’s your moonlit night all cut and dried. But I have a quivering light and the silent twinkling of the stars and the distant sound of a piano dying on the calm, scented air. This is agony.
Or painful explanation.
Because the short story is always haunted by the sense of its ending, there are thin
gs – convoluted plots, ambiguous motivation, extended histories – which it should not attempt to tell, as well as those it must retail with the maximum efficiency. In the course of a long writing career, from 1890 to 1936, Kipling both abides by this principle and subtly violates it. The oeuvre of any good writer exhibits two opposite, but perfectly consistent tendencies: certain features will persist throughout (‘in my beginning is my end’) and there will also be a trajectory of change and development. So far, we have considered Kipling from the first point of view – that of consistency. His arc of change more or less follows the development of the short story itself. This can be roughly summarized by the difference between, say, Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’, with its notorious trick ending, and, say, Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’. Admirers of Maupassant claim that ‘The Necklace’ is untypical of him, but actually even his best work is essentially anecdotal: ‘Boule de Suif, despite its length, has little particular characterization and is designed merely to expose the hypocrisy of the French upper and middle class; ‘The Trouble with André’, ‘The Piece of String’ and ‘My Uncle Jules’, to take a broad sample, are all anecdotes. ‘The Piece of String’ is the story of a peasant who is unjustly accused of theft, exonerated by the facts, yet sent into a rather implausible decline by the refusal of the community to believe him. He has parsimoniously picked up a piece of string, not the wallet he is accused by an enemy of taking. Maupassant’s talent is to dress up this amusing but thin tale with a vivid opening that describes the Normandy peasants going to market. ‘Boule de Suif shows a prostitute sharing her food with her fellow passengers, whose hunger conquers their moral repugnance. Yet when, to oblige them, she has slept with an occupying Prussian officer who is holding up the coach till she complies, they refuse to share their food with her. The irony is typically pat and not unlike that of ‘The Necklace’, in which the lost diamond necklace, replaced after years of scrimping, turns out, after all, to have been paste. Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’, on the other hand, avoids this fearful symmetry by abjuring plot: Nick Adams goes angling, but does not feel able yet to fish in the swamp. In terms of plot, a meal is a big event. The story’s power resides in its brooding implications which, though never made clear, involve the attempt to regain the simple life after the trauma of war, symbolized by a fire which has razed the whole area about the river. In other words, the short story moves away from anecdote, the neat tale, to a plotless genre of implication. This, of course, is a generalization and Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’ shows that the anecdote, if brilliantly enough handled, will always continue to have a life. There the Irish boxer has to lose a fight because he has bet on his opponent. However, in a double-cross, his opponent has bet on him. The upshot is that, in order to lose, Jack Brennan is forced to call on enormous reserves of courage by going on after he has been hit low. The narrator, his trainer, puts this down to Brennan’s meanness in money matters, which he overemphasizes throughout: Hemingway, though, is more interested in the paradox by which Brennan’s cynical decision to throw the fight has to be sustained by brute heroism. The ‘cowardly’ route proves to be its opposite.