BOOKS
Stranger than he himself knew
Philip Hensher
RUDYARD KIPLING by Andrew Lycett Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 659 Kipling, in some ways, is a vulgar flirt. Half or more of his immense output amounts to a disappointment. Most of Kipling has an incantatory, visionary force which enchants the reader at the time, and in the disabusing light of rereading, is seen to have been held together by pounding rhythms, second-hand props and a good deal of luck. There is a quite incredible lot of rubbish in Kipling. I've often thought that his standing would now be higher if he had taken the simple decision never to try to write about children in their own voices. He couldn't do it, as he couldn't do lots of things, and the result always makes the reader wince with embarrassment. Plenty of intelligent readers have thought that Kipling was a cynic, writing what he could get away with. That's occasionally true, but then there is the other half of his work, where the rhetoric has not been heard before, where he doesn't seem to be shout- ing his single meaning in the reader's ear, where he seems to know how hollow all that posturing is in the end. He is an infuri- ating writer, but one of mesmerising strangeness.
In a way, though this is quite a good book, one would rather be left with the illusion that Kipling didn't always mean what he said. He has always been a writer peculiarly prone to misrepresentation, and in the last 20 years or so one sort of mis- representation has started to enrich his meanings considerably. In the past, the quotation of one line or another out of context has done a great deal of damage by making him seem less complex than he is. `East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet' is always quoted so as to suggest the exact opposite of Kipling's meaning, which is that it is only the points of the compass, and not men, that cannot be brought together. Even the line 'A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke' is not quite as bad as it seems when read in context as part of a dramatic monologue by a fictional misogynist; and we all know that the 'lesser breeds without the law' are not the subject peoples in the colonies but the Germans.
These popular misreadings of Kipling's most memorable tags have almost disappeared in recent years, to be replaced by another sort of misreading, one which it is difficult to deplore. One of the effects of reading a biography of Kipling is to suggest that the human weakness and frailty he seems so powerfully to explore are in fact his own weakness, silliness and frailty. It is easy to know what we would think if, in one of his stories, we came across someone describing a horsewhipping; the whip
was of a rhinoceros hide and it curled, Madam, it curled all round and about him, and he squealed after the manner of hares when you capture them squatting in the snow. It was good; even the account of the flogging from the man who had administered it cheered me immensely.
This isn't, however, a fictional exploration of sadism, but just a paragraph from one of Kipling's letters. There is plenty of similar stuff in his private writings, plenty of casual racism, too much to be worth quoting or bothering to deplore.
And many of what we now think of as Kipling's most remarkable works seem more interesting and complex than Kipling's professed intentions. Stalky and Co., for instance, seems to us like a half- hateful, half-sinister exploration of the cer- tainties of the imperial mind, in which fantasies of rebellion and authority are played out in the harmless setting of a boarding school. To us, its fascination lies in the ambiguous attitude to the boys' bru- tal nature, but it is very doubtful whether that ambiguous attitude is Kipling's own.
Where Kipling is least susceptible to an ambiguous reading he is least to our taste now; the verse, which even at its most tawdry retains the power to thrill, no longer seems at the front of his work. Kim is magnificent and, all in all, is Kipling's fullest statement of what he could do, and has the benefit of a fascinating subject. Like much of Kipling's Indian writing, how- ever, it has a lush biblical rhetoric which has the knack of embarrassing the modern reader. What Kipling is now, it is safe to say, is one of the two or three greatest writ- ers of short stories in English.
The short stories display a variety of form and invention unequalled by any of his contemporaries. At the centre of them are two recurrent and complementary fig- ures which one feels are Kipling's versions of himself. The first is a sort of idiot savant, who, through some sort of spiritual agency, takes on an authority and wisdom beyond his own grasp. The boy in 'The Finest Story Ever Told' finds himself, through metempsychosis, knowing all sorts of impossible details about slaves in ancient Greece, much to the disgust of the learned authorities.
So far as I can ascertain, it is an attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek on the part of an extremely illiterate person.
The finest of the short stories, 'Wireless', has a chemist's assistant, delirious with tuberculosis, picking up inspiration from the ether and rewriting Keats's odes.
That theme, that there is much more in the world than men understand, is a gener- al one, and sometimes put to uses of terri- ble banality, as in the late story about the bereaved aunt meeting Jesus in a first world war cemetery. But Kipling's intuitive grasp of the truth that people's motives are not apparent to themselves puts him firmly among the moderns, a contemporary of Freud. The terrifying 'Mary Postgate', in which a spinster lets a downed German air- man die horribly, may be read forwards and backwards; each time new intimations of her desires emerge. Next to these stories, there are a lot of ideas about imposture and charlatanism which seem to taunt Kipling's critics with the most recurrent of their assaults. For Max Beerbohm, who loathed Kipling' and his defection from the aesthetic cause he grew up in, he was quite simply 'the man who would be king'. Beerbohm's frequent vicious attacks — 'Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin' day aht, on the Blasted 'Eath, along with Britannia, 'is gurl' — might as well be one of Kipling's characters passing off as the God-King of Nuristan, or whatever. What Beerbohm wilfully refused to see was how strange and memorable the trajectory of something like 'The Man Who Would Be King' really is, starting in the low comedy of the royal rituals being eon: cocted out of odd bits of Freemasonle mumbo-jumbo, slowly rising to a fury of violence which the barrack-room style of the narrative only just keeps at arm's length; and rising himself, too, to an uncomfortable acknowledgment of the opposite of Kipling's own opinions, that once the subject people of the empire realise that their rulers are 'not a God nor a devil but a man!', they will turn and bite and kill. That willingness to follow a story, an idea, beyond the constraints of literary form always marks Kipling at his most won- derful. Who could ever predict the way in which 'The Village that Voted the World was Flat' orchestrates its own wickedness, as a brutally comic revenge on a country magistrate quickly escalates and the House of Commons is turned into a taunting, igno- rant mob?
Kipling's story has been told many times, and this is a good, workmanlike retelling which will do until the next time. Andrew Lycett doesn't seem to have unearthed a great deal of new material, but he tells the fascinating story unobtrusively and convinc- ingly. His great virtue is never apologising for his subject, even when Kipling is loving- ly dwelling on a horsewhipping or getting interested in crank philosophies of the Beyond. Like most of Kipling's biographers, he has the unaccountable belief that Kipling was interested in sex, whereas there is no convincing physical desire anywhere in all his writings. He can do thwarted or erot- ically-driven sadism, as in 'Mary Postgate' or `Baa Baa, Black Sheep', but the nearest he comes to the proper article is a luxuriant poem like 'Mandalay', which is more con- vincingly about nostalgia than desire. Lycett's book is fine for now, but it won't replace the most interesting and character- ful of studies of Kipling to date, Angus Wilson's.
All the same, after everything you can say against Kipling, he is going to survive. He had something which you cannot argue against, the ability to coin a phrase which, even if it is tawdry, sticks in the brain and trips off the tongue: 'The captains and the kings depart', 'the critics, who will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, say what they can'. At the end, there is Kipling, who is not only more subtle than we know, but, still stranger, than he himself khew. It is telling that, at the last World Cup, Des Lynam, the commentator, infallibly caught the mood by reading 'If to a hugely appre- ciative audience. The nation won't stand for poetry, as we know, but there was something which, despite all repetition and mockery and vulgarity, still managed to mean something, and to speak with what Kipling, with his unerring instinct for a good phrase, called 'the common touch'.
Previous page
