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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Rudyard
Kipling (1865-1936)
‘They’ (1904)
First collected in Traffics
and Discoveries (1904).
‘They’ is one of the first pieces of literature about motoring, a modern theme that it combines with an ancient one: the age-old reality of child mortality. The narrator’s driving is his way of grieving, but the car cannot bring back his child; nor can it save another dying child though it flies busily hither and thither to acquire a nurse.
Also set beside the half-ghostly poetic writing about the charmed estate is an unidealized vision of rural working life: the greedy Mr Turpin, the cheerfully gossiping neighbour, and the rude Mrs Madehurst at the sweetmeat shop – the narrator at that early stage in the story is intemperately judgmental - ; she, however, later becomes the narrator’s friend. Personal grief and new technology, together, open him to an understanding overview. Her “fat woman’s hospitable tears” provide a down-to-earth alternative to the eerily beautiful voice of the blind Miss whose name is not told to us. The bereaved villagers have to walk in the wood (unlike the narrator, who eventually finds his own child indoors) because their social status denies them easy access to the house.
During the very brief period memorialized by ‘They’, cars were luxury items owned only by the gentry, and there were very few around, so Kipling could reasonably conceive the car as an instrument for solitary flights, a way of dropping down into other people’s stable existences, as if one had suddenly been gifted wings, and (by natural extension) as a vehicle for entering the otherworld. Already, however, the car – perhaps more precisely the engine – is felt to bear an incipiently quotidian symbolism, which is why the children keep away from it.
I’m saying “the narrator” but of course we think Kipling (keen motorist that he was, he in fact never drove his cars himself but had a driver). At one point the narrator becomes upset not by his loss but (as happens when people are distressed) by something apparently unconnected to it. He says to “Miss”, when she complains that people laugh at her: “That sort laugh at everything that isn’t in their own fat lives.” – (Evidently Mrs Madehurst is still in his mind.) The blind lady talks of her lack of defences, her single skin. He goes into a thought:
I was silent reviewing that
inexhaustible matter – the more than inherited (since it is also carefully
taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of
the West Coast nigger is clean and restrained. It led me a long distance into
myself.
This meditation has a minor function in the story, since it leads on to the discovery that the blind lady sees the intensity of his anger as colours. Kipling (himself extremely myopic and scared of blindness) might be thinking of unforgiven childhood experience. Yet momentarily the primary meaning seems to be that he recognizes his own brutality – and Kipling is, not infrequently, one of the most brutal of authors.
(2006)
*
Limits and Renewals (1932)
I don’t seem to be very original when it comes to judging Kipling. I admire the stories that everyone calls great, and I feel dispirited by the rest. This says something about me, no doubt, but the general consensus says more about Kipling. The nature of his art seems to involve a certain obviousness of achievement, or else an obviousness of non-achievement.
My diffidence is all the greater because the best essay on Kipling, Edmund Wilson’s The Kipling that Nobody Read (1941) is available on the Internet. Angus Wilson, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, and Craig Raine are others who have written well about Kipling; he seems to attract formidable authors; Edmund Wilson’s own short stories (in Memoirs of Hecate County) are brilliant. Lionel Trilling in his own fine essay suggests a reason for this rush of good criticism; he proposes that, for many of his own generation (enthusiasts of Kipling in childhood), the decision to "reject" Kipling was the first literary-political decision they had to make. Such experiences tend to be formative and more earnestly thought through than subsequent judgments of the same sort. (Trilling also writes well about the effect of Kipling's gnomic style - without, perhaps, fully taking into account its originality - ; and about the issue with Kipling not being his imperialism per se, but the temperament that lies behind it - he makes a contrast with Scott's toryism (admirable while Kipling's is not), which all liberals will understand though I think the surface contrast may be misleading; Scott's beliefs were rougher than he wished to reveal in his books; Kipling, on the other hand, wanted to appear a bruiser.
I would like to add Randall Jarrell to this list, but I’m too conscientious – I can’t remember anything he said. T.S. Eliot’s essay on Kipling, like some of his other essays, strikes me as vacuous.
Limits and Renewals (1932) is fairly typical of Kipling’s short story collections in that it contains three masterworks, ten pieces of dirt and only one item (“Unprofessional”) that perhaps falls somewhere in between. (I seem to recall that one collection, The Day’s Work, contains no masterworks at all, but that’s exceptional.)
Of course it’s more complicated than that. The lesser stories are often “minor” rather than “failures”. Often the magic inventiveness and the magic style are still in full effect. (For example, in Fairy-Kist the brick lorry and its roped girders, “cocked up backwards like a pheasant’s tail”, which “swiped along the bank of that lane like a man topping a golf-ball”.) But minor Kipling is usually distasteful. For the record:
“Dayspring Mishandled” – masterwork (10).
“The Woman in his Life” – elaborate, queasily sentimental tale of jet-black
“The Tie” – a trivial squib, mildly nasty entertainment (1).
“The Church that was
at
“Aunt Ellen” – improvised farce, which makes the participants, especially Kipling, laugh a great deal. We don’t (2).
“Fairy-Kist” – freemason amateur detective story in which another traumatised man is redeemed (2).
“A Naval Mutiny” – slight naval parrot yarn, good on the lower deck but spoilt by fawning on admirals (3).
“The Debt” – slight Indian yarn that fawns on the King (1).
“The Manner of Men” – masterwork (8).
“Unprofessional” – a group of friends get together and save mankind; well, they save one woman, anyway. The tale, thrillingly told in parts, is also presented with great reticence, as if it meditates on its own impossibility (5).
“Beauty Spots” – unsympathetic revenge farce (1).
“The Miracle of Saint Jubanus” - redemptive farce, which makes the participants laugh (2).
“The Tender Achilles” – traumatised bacteriologist redeemed by fraudulent operation (2).
“Uncovenanted Mercies” – angel civil servants (1).
Dayspring Mishandled
Despite the critical consensus, there is considerable scope for disagreement about details of these stories, particularly the good ones. Phillip V. Mallett’s 1987 account of “Dayspring Mishandled” seems to me quite inadequate, mainly because I’ve had the good fortune to read Craig Raine’s remarks in the introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Prose (1986). Kipling leaves the account of Castorley’s original sin very shadowy, but throws plenty of clues around. I think Raine is obviously right to point out that the words “and, it was said, proposed to ‘Dal Benzaguen’s mother, who refused him” describe a cover-up story intended to save face for all parties. The truth is that he refused her, having just become a man of independent means, and presumably having formerly seduced her with promises that he now reneges on. This, Raine argues convincingly, is the only interpretation that makes sense of the dying Castorley’s statement that “There was an urgent matter to be set right, and now that he had The Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily and he would be well again.” Besides, the theme of public deception is a dear one to Kipling (e.g. in “The Gardener”); unlike the Zola that he so admired he was able to view these genteel hypocrisies sympathetically, and many of his best stories are structured around the tactful uncovering of long-nurtured secrets. So Raine’s insight is compellingly Kiplingesque, but it is far from clearing up all the murk, and in fact Kipling did not intend it to be fully cleared up.
[Kipling directs us to his story of 1913, “The Village that Voted
the Earth was Flat” .
This is in several respects a companion-piece to “Dayspring Mishandled”;
it shares some of the settings, e.g. hack journalism and the music hall, and
has some seeds of the
distinctively witty style. It is also a story of revenge, but unlike “DM”
exemplifies the all-too-common type of Kipling revenge story in which
everything goes to plan and, in the words of Edmund Wilson, “The Wrong is made
a guy from the beginning, and the
‘Dal can be envisaged as about seventeen years old, which means that,
though we are told she was born after the events in the opening pages of “Dayspring
Mishandled” , it cannot have been very long after. In strict fact, this is
impossible. The Graydon/Neminaka era is clearly the early to mid-1890s – and in
fact the Dowson poem quoted by Manallace is of 1896. But the fictional date of “TVTVTEWF”,
though basically contemporary (i.e. with 1913, the date of publication) is
bound to be imagined as having taken place a few years earlier, as stories that
describe fictional events of national scope always are. In fact, it must be
1904 or not very long after, since the death of Nellie Farren (a real
music-hall performer) is referred to by one of the characters as if it’s fresh
news. So there isn’t actually time for Vidal Benzaguen to grow up. But this is
to ignore the magical illusions of the music-hall, and of course the starry
fantasy in which both stories are dipped, especially this earlier one. ‘Dal’s
name is very possibly only a stage name. “Benzaguen” (more commonly
“Benzaquen”) is Jewish, most frequent in
The historical figure of Nellie Farren hangs over all this. She was a
singing, dancing, comedy actress of the 1880s and early 1890s, especially
associated with the Gaiety Theatre. Among other things she was a well-known
performer in Gilbert and Sullivan operas such as Trial by Jury. Her
popularity was unrivalled, but her career was cut short in 1892 by a spinal disorder
that crippled her. She died in 1904. In “TVTVTEWF” the narrator, making
avuncular conversation to the young Vidal (to whose sexiness he, like the young
Olyett, is highly responsive – she “stood behind us all alive and panting”),
has talked about Nellie as her famous predecessor in his own heyday. The
details of this conversation aren’t reported; perhaps he said “You remind me of
her”. Anyway, she captures Vidal’s imagination. Later she interrogates him:
“Did you love Nellie Farren when you were young?” and he answers: “Did we love
her? ... “If the earth and sky and the sea” – There were three million of us,
‘Dal, and we worshipped her.” The narrator, of course, is deflecting the
personal nature of the question. On the other hand Nellie’s somewhat otiose
presence in the story is surely meant to be seen as a touching personal
tribute. But fan-worship grades quickly into passionate love when there is
opportunity. In the same story Olyett, who “in common with the youth of that
year... worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil immensely and
unreservedly”, later gets engaged to her. So I imagine that when, near the
start of “DM”, we are told that Manallace “adored” Vidal’s mother...” this subtly chosen
word implies that his love began, though it did not end, as a member of the
theatre audience.
None of this aside is definite enough to be turned into a piece of
detective-work along the lines of John Sutherland’s books. What it does do is illuminate some of the
subtler shades of meaning in “DM” . For example it explains why ‘Dal’s mother would
attract multiple admirers and why everyone who was part of the Neminaka scene
would know who she was; as a popular entertainer, she was a kind of public
property. And it explains why the Castorley who writes about “
Nevertheless, Raine’s insight does re-orient the story, putting a little flesh on the bones of Castorley’s undoubted beastliness. But while the story presents Manallace’s revenge as fully justified, it does progressively call into question whether anyone, even Castorley, can be finally condemned. A dying, duped and cuckolded man is always an object of pity. However awful his behaviour, how much of it was down to mere common immaturity, lack of self-knowledge, and characteristic self-centredness? A great crime does not imply a great criminal.
The moderation of this conclusion, refreshing as it is to a reader of Kipling’s work in bulk, wouldn’t be noteworthy in anyone else’s. Comparisons with Chekhov don’t exactly spring to mind. In fact the three good stories mentioned above are all founded on exactly the same warped public-school conceptions of human conduct as Stalky & Co – Kipling hasn’t got anything else in his locker. The problem, therefore, is to understand just what the great stories do achieve (we might well bear in mind Edmund Wilson’s remark that even the best of them “is not quite on the highest level”).
Like all Kipling’s best stories, “Dayspring Mishandled” creates its own fictional world; style, content, setting and image. For example, it’s just about the only Kipling story that is genuinely funny (compare “Aunt Ellen”, above).
His private diversions were
experiments of uncertain outcome, which, he said, rested him after a day’s
gadzooking and vitalstapping.
... for
‘our Dan’, as one earnest Sunday editor observed, ‘lies closer to the national
heart than we wot of’.
We were rewarded by the
sight of a man relaxed and ungirt – not to say wallowing naked – on the crest
of success.
‘and,
after all,’ he pointed out, with a glance at the mirror over the mantelpiece,
‘Chaucer was the prototype of the “verray parfit gentil Knight” of the
‘If I pull the string of the
shower-bath in the papers,’ he said, ‘Castorley might go off his verray parfit
gentil nut....’
The first and last of these quotations represent Manallace’s sense of humour, characteristically boyish and modest. The narrator’s tone is more sardonic, his humour grading into comments like “in which calling he loyally scalped all his old associates as they came up” and “an unappetizing, ash-coloured woman”. He is brisk, conversational, and effortless. Both humorists (like everything else in the story) merit our attention.
The narrator doesn’t appear openly and in the first person until a few pages and a fair few years have passed; but covertly, he has already appeared twice, first as “a man” who guided Manallace home from Neminaka’s, later as “Some member of the extinct Syndicate” who wrote to Castorley asking for help towards a new treatment for Vidal’s mother. This somewhat furtive arrival in his own story is a hint that the narrator is meant to be identified as Rudyard Kipling himself (“‘Tell me what the tale was about, though. That’s more in my line.’”) Since he is effectively abetting Manallace in a kind of murder, there’s an element of confession about the story. Like Manallace’s disastrous ink recipe, later developments “entangled us both”.
Manallace’s interests, after April 1914 when ‘Dal’s mother died, and the night of the air-raid in which he learns the truth about how Castorley behaved towards ‘Dal’s mother, are murderous. “She seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only interests in trifles.” But that was only “seemed”. When the narrator rumbles Manallace’s forgery, Manallace admits that “I owe my interests to Castorley”. It’s odd to express murderous hatred in terms of indebtedness. But in fact Manallace’s lethal intentions have required him, from the start, to get very close to Castorley, and to adopt a habit of sticking up for him (“The changes sickened me, but Manallace defended him, as a master in his own line who had revealed Chaucer to at least one grateful soul”). That’s before the narrator is in on the plot, but even afterwards Manallace continues to speak of Castorley with positively maternal affection: “I’m going to help him. It will be a new interest.... His book’s taking more out of him than I like, though...” And when he adds “And he’s just the sort of flatulent beast who may go down with appendicitis”, this hardly sounds like hatred in the first degree. His whole program, of conveying “our pleasure and satisfaction to them both”, of wrapping himself “lovingly and leisurely round his new task”, of creating “obligations” on Castorley’s part, begins to take possession of him. Manallace, who when we first meet him can produce an astonishing tale around a few random pictures, does not need anything much from his love-objects. He cared for Vidal’s mother (whose eyes betrayed her love for someone else) through years of total paralysis; and he is quite capable of caring for Castorley, a despicable egotist whom he has every reason to hate. When he comes to understand that Castorley is terminally ill, unloved and cuckolded, he throws the brakes on at once; but it didn’t need Lady Castorley to make him re-consider. Once confronted with the reality of Castorley’s suffering, he would have tried to back off anyway. Not possible, however; Manallace’s dilatoriness in fact accelerates Castorley’s decline.
‘Ah
Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe peyne.
Daiespringe
mishandeelt cometh nat agayne.’
Gertrude’s lament to some extent applies to Manallace, whose life has become curiously distorted. But it applies with much greater force to Castorley, as he dimly perceives (“’Plangent as doom, my dear boy – plangent as doom!’”). Castorley is from the start preoccupied with a fear of being “compromised”. No doubt his severing of connection with Vidal’s mother arises from a panic about entanglement. His later refusal to assist in her treatment (“he had ‘known the lady very slightly...’”), though it repulses us with its cold-heartedness, is actually down to fear – of being compromised. He has set out to manipulate his way to a successful career, coldly choosing “a speciality”, flattering, fawning, and so on. But Kipling, both as narrator and author, is honest enough to admire the sheer hard work that Castorley puts himself to. He identifies with it of course. Castorley’s failure is inevitable, however, because he is not as conscienceless as he needs to be. His last speech is a poignant fantasy of setting things right again, but “Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe”.
Castorley’s blatant desire for official recognition, though always covered with a saving phrase about Chaucer, is for himself and his insecurities. He wants the knighthood because he wants to prove to himself that his careerism, though founded on a conscious betrayal of love (his own, as well as Vidal’s mother’s), was somehow justifiable. When Castorley’s anguished conscience finally does break through it remains intermingled with this stupidity: “There was an urgent matter to be set right, and now that he had The Title and knew his own mind...”
“Dayspring Mishandled”, a story by an old, ill, distinguished writer about an old, ill, distinguished writer, is obviously unusually personal; or rather, it’s unusual for Kipling to focus on this particular element in his personal existence. But despite personal aspects of the content, the greatness lies rather in the very impersonal nature of the story that is produced; it is a great performance.
Kipling, as Edmund Wilson and many others have pointed out, is an overt admirer of “doers”, but in the context of letters, his own profession, he can for once liberate himself (that is to say, from an over-insistent reverence for people who can do what he can’t) to write a perfect demolition of “doers”. I mustn’t be vague about such precise art: it is a context of popular letters, and is alive from the first with sparkling awareness of the tawdriness, fakery, fun and optimism of that context. Clearly what is at issue here is not austere artistic vocations of the Jamesian sort; Castorley’s Chaucerian gambollings, though he obviously regards them as having a higher status (“‘Literature’”) than, say, Manallace’s historical tearjerkers, reflect the amateur and popular nature of literary studies, Middle English in particular, in that pre-Leavis era.
This setting is marvellously suited to a tale in which the achievements of “doing” are understood to be irrelevant frippery compared to the real life-choices that a human being makes. Kipling has not really changed his spots. He still values “doing”, except when it is literary. (“Manallace made a reputation, and, more important, money for Vidal’s mother...”). That’s why I said that even a story such as this is based on the morality of Stalky & Co. But of Kipling as of everyone else, one may come to see that his weaknesses are also his strengths.
The context is in fact the centre of what makes the story great; the events seem to emerge naturally from it. That’s why Phillip V. Mallett, for example, could be so appreciative even though he didn’t know as much as we now do (thanks to Craig Raine) of Castorley’s wickedness. It’s also why a page or a paragraph of Kipling can be read on its own and is still great – I mean Kipling at his best - which you wouldn’t say of Chekhov. A great Kipling story is like a poem in this respect. It differs from most poems, I think, in that the author’s painstaking research and intricate craftsmanship are not something to be distinguished from the “lasting worth” of the work. In Kipling’s case, the research and the craftsmanship are precisely the things that matter, and it’s in their terms, vulgar and unsuggestive as they may seem, that we ought to discuss him.
“The Church that was at
The title of “The Church that was at
In Kipling’s story the Christians are seen within a frame of Roman colonialism. Sergius, the head of urban police, and his nephew Valens, have all-too-obvious analogies with the British Empire-builders of his other stories; they speak Empire English and our perspective at the beginning of the story involves identifying ourselves with the Roman administrators and seeing the Antioch Christians as an alien and characteristically troublesome rabble. But as his readers are themselves Christians this perspective is always under threat, and by the end of the story it is reversed – Valens is being discussed by the two saints as a variety of “noble heathen”.
In truth Serga and Valens are far from being doctrinaire Romans; both have had corners rubbed off in the East. Kipling suppresses the alienness of Roman civilization, its appetite for mass public killings and its tendency to regard non-citizens as non-humans (Pliny the Younger’s famous exchange of letters with Trajan confronts us with quite different ideas). Both here and in “The Manner of Men” Kipling locates us in a mixed-race environment on the outposts of Empire where, as he believed, men often speak humanly. As for the Christians, their friendliness is proverbial, and in “The Manner of Men” the suspicious Quabil says of Paul, “he had the woman’s trick of taking the tone and colour of whoever he talked to”. Considering Paul’s propensity for making enemies (e.g. his eventual falling out with Barnabas over John Mark, or his address to the Jerusalem Jews), this might seem unlikely. Quabil is perhaps registering, in a thoroughly unsympathetic spirit, the Christians’ determination to turn the other cheek and to comply with earthly authority, though an alternative explanation appears below.
Valens comes to
“Father Serga” plays a large part in this, from his first remarks (“Your – er – baggage is there already..”). Genial as he is, there is a certain malice in the remark, as in the statement about Valens, “He rather fancies his legs”. Once fuelled with the “strong cup”, he enjoys singing the song about “Pickled Fish” to his Christian audience; he cuts the tremendous significance of the centurion’s conversion down to size by speaking of Cornelius as a formative drinking companion; and having put a flushed Valens on the spot chips in with a remark about “a young Sabine tush-ripe boar”. He has an easy consciousness that his squirming audience are in no position to take offence. But this mild sadism, because it reveals a sensitivity to how other people feel, wins our sympathy for “Father Serga”, at least in comparison to Petrus, who seems utterly absorbed in his own affairs. The Christians are unworldly in ways that are not beyond the story’s criticism: “...they were all extremely pround of being Christians. Some of them began to link arms across the alley, and strike into the ‘Enthroned above Caesar’ chorus”. It’s the criticism that Serga implies when he says: “Can’t either of you two talking creatures tell me what I’m to tell his mother?”
Much of the story takes place in the evening, at twilight or dusk; Kipling here showing a true instinct for Mediterranean life. For Serga this should be a time for reconciliation, for drinking, talk and sleep; for Valens and his girl it develops into love-making; for Paulus and Petrus it remains a time for work. The Christians, in fact, have difficulty in subsiding naturally; Valens has to organize them. In Kipling’s imperialist vision these too-exalted children have to learn to be natural men.
Dusk, like the urban spaces of the inner courtyard and the Little Circus, are important manifestations of the story’s inner construction (what I have called elsewhere, the performance). It would be a shame to leave nothing for another reader to explore, so I leave aside the puzzle of what Paulus means when he says, finally, “Moreover there is the concubine”.
For the same reason I will leave “The
Manner of Men” almost untouched. The title refers to 1 Corinthians 15:32,
which begins “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts...”. It is a puzzling verse; most modern commentators, I
think, interpret the conditional as “If I had fought with beasts”, on
the grounds that people who enter the arena with the beasts do not survive to
tell the tale, and also on the grounds that
The opening lines of the story,
which describe the serene arrival of a ship in harbour, are very
beautiful, and Kipling’s “performance” involves an extensive use of nautical
terms throughout. The story of the shipwreck at
The important link, however, is that the
disastrous voyage to
Additional Note on “Proofs of Holy Writ”.
Limits and Renewals is Kipling’s last collection, but his last story, too late to be
included in it, is "Proofs
of Holy Writ", which is available on the alarmingly professional
website of the Kipling Society. It isn’t much of a story. Ben Jonson visits
Will Shakespeare in semi-retirement at
(2003)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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