The Wish House and Other Stories (10 page)

By the story’s end, everything has been reversed. His grief is such that Miss Florence pities him: ‘ “And, d’you remember, I called you lucky – once – at first. You who must never come here again.’” The narrator is included in the democracy of grief, but when his heart is opened the pain is so great that the consolation provided by the children of the House Beautiful is, after all, no consolation but an unbearable torment. The unseen touch of
his
dead child is just not enough – and therefore too much. Finally, Kipling’s attitude is there in the inverted commas which surround his title, “They”’: the children are wraiths, necessary to some, but they do not exist, and it is this which the narrator finds impossible to endure.

Kipling’s poem, ‘The Road to En-Dor’, specifically warns against dabbling in the supernatural and in
Something of Myself he
is equally firm: ‘I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds
on the road to En-Dor to take one step along that perilous track.’ Still, “They”’ is an exploration, even if Kipling does turn back: the tallies which feed Miss Florence’s fire are an example of a more ancient form of communication; both the narrator and Miss Florence know about ‘the Colours’ and ‘the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see’. Kipling doesn’t explain what either is, though the Egg may be the Egg of the Universe, deposited by the First Cause from which Brahma came. It isn’t important: the mere mention is enough to open up possibilities about the potential of the human mind – a theme Kipling considers in ‘“Wireless”’.

There, a consumptive chemist, Mr Shaynor, is in love with a girl called Fanny Brand, ‘a great, big, fat lump of a girl’, who distantly resembles ‘the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement’. Shaynor, weakened by TB, takes a drink prepared by the narrator from random drugs and goes into a trance. Once under, he stares at the advertisement and writes snatches of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and the ode ‘To a Nightingale’, occasionally lapsing into the deadest prose. The poetry (Shaynor has never heard of Keats) is inspired by his surroundings – vulgar druggist’s dross, a hare hanging up outside
the
(Kipling’s use of the definite article is always superb) Italian warehouse next door and so on. The narrator, desperate for an explanation, tries analogies with radio waves and faulty receivers, since the story is framed by some early broadcasting experimentation. The frame, however, is completely ironic, though the jargon of Cashell, the enthusiast, comes so thickly that Kipling’s deflating irony is easily missed in the welter of Hertzian waves and coherers. “That’s all,” he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder.’ How much more wonderful, Kipling implies, is the transmutation of life’s pitiful fragments into art-Spinoza, falling in love, the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking. Eliot’s comment on his list might have been Kipling’s: ‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.’ Kipling prefers a description closer to Yeats’s rag-and-bone shop of the heart: ‘Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose – the naked soul’s confession of its physical yearning for its beloved-unclean as we count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material…whence Keats wove the twenty-sixth, seventh and eighth stanzas of his poem.’ Beside the miracle of the gifted human coherer, that rare occurence, stand the pathetic transmissions achieved by science –
‘Signals unintelligible’.

This fascinated respect for the miracle of the mind isn’t logically opposed to a disbelief in the supernatural. But perhaps the more exact word for Kipling’s position would be distrust. Clearly, he felt it dangerous to meddle, as we can see from ‘The Disturber of Traffic’, where the lighthouse-keeper, Dowse, is driven mad by his ceaseless contemplation of ‘the wheel and the drift of Things’. The prefatory poem pleads, ‘Lay not Thy toil before our eyes’, and in the story itself Kipling touches in the same message, alluding to I Corinthians 13:12, as the narrator is lent ‘a pair of black glass spectacles, without which no man can look at the Light unblinded’. As often in late Kipling, the narrator, Fenwick, is unreliable: he takes Dowse’s account more or less at face value, though Challong, with his webbed hands and feet and the ability to survive being tipped into the sea from the Light, is patently a figment of Dowse’s imagination. Challong is, we are told, an ‘Orang-Laut’ – that is, a man of the sea. The epithet points us towards the old man of the sea, Proteus, the god renowned for constantly changing his shape. Dowse’s madness takes the form of a fascination with shapes and patterns: when he is finally rescued, he is barely able to speak because ‘his eye was held like by the coils of rope on the belaying pin, and he followed those ropes up and up with his eye till he was quite lost and comfortable among the rigging, which ran criss-cross, and slopeways, and up and down, and any way but straight along under his feet north and south.’ Once Dowse is absorbed in the changing shapes of things his mental stability deserts him. The Protean world doesn’t bear looking at, any more than the Light.

Kipling’s attitude is similar to that of Stephen, the abbot in ‘The Eye of Allah’, who takes the decision to destroy the microscope-even though his mistress is dying of cancer. The possible benefits are outweighed by the immediate dangers – inquisition and execution (‘“You can hear the faggots crackle’”) and the longer-term threat to the Christian religion, whereby the war between Good and Evil would become merely an endless struggle between two morally neutral forces of creation and degeneration – without any hope of a final outcome. The short-term danger of ‘more torture, more division’ is clear enough, a transparent conclusion, but the route to it is subtle and any reading must account for the details of the story.

‘The Eye of Allah’ groups itself naturally with ‘The Manner of Men’, a story in which Kipling describes the progress of St Paul (described by one of the narrators, from his limited viewpoint, as ‘a Jew philosopher’) by sea from Myra to Rome, with a shipwreck at Malta
en route.
Like Browning’s Karshish, who witnesses the raising
of Lazarus by one he describes as ‘a leech’, Quabil and Sulinor are witnesses whose testimony is reliable as to fact, but perhaps unreliable as to interpretation. Sulinor is the more sympathetic to Paul, who has nursed him through dysentery and, more importantly, intuited Sulinor’s life-long fear of the Beasts in the circus. As an ex-pirate of dubious status, Sulinor is justifiably leery and the Beasts are a grumbling presence through the story: even the
‘hrmph-hrmph’
of the oars in a trireme reminds Sulinor ‘of an elephant choosing his man in the Circus’. The story poses the question: who has saved the ship? From a Christian standpoint, Paul is clearly responsible – with God’s help. From the seamen’s position, it is finally their skill which brings off the safe beaching of the boat. Kipling, I believe, doesn’t express a bias, unlike Browning, and the reader is left to adjudicate between the rival claims of miracle and pragmatic technique. Either way, Paul’s fearless calm, whether justified or not, plays its part in the operation. If, at the story’s outset, Kipling appears to incline towards Paul – since Quabil mistakes Paul much as he himself is mistaken for a land-lubber when he is actually a master-mariner – the finale’s emphasis is on technique, pure seamanship, as Sulinor and Baeticus indulge in a war game.

The theme of miracle versus the purely natural explanation of phenomena is central to ‘The Eye of Allah’, taking the form of medicine or metaphysics. Despite the monastic setting, sceptics are well represented. John of Burgos, the artist, is an unbeliever, although he is attached to St Illod’s:
“‘Thy
soul?” the sub-cantor seemed doubtful.’ Roger Bacon is a freethinker:
“‘Every
way we are barred – barred by the words of some man, dead a thousand years, which are held final.”’ Roger of Salerno also resents Church interference. The infirmarian, Thomas, won’t be other than a lay-member of the community because he fears his heresy: “‘I confess myself at a loss for the cause of the fever unless – as Varro saith in his
De Re Rustica
– certain small animals which the eye cannot follow enter the body by the nose and mouth, and set up grave diseases. On the other hand, this is not in Scripture.’”

The story shows, however, that the ‘certain small animals’
are
in Scripture, since they now form part of John of Burgos’s illustration for the Gadarene swine. How does Kipling want us to interpret this? Are we to believe that scientific discovery is inherent in the gospel once it is
illuminated?
After all, in a glancing reference to Colossians 4:14, Stephen reminds John that Luke is a physician. Similarly, when Roger of Salerno sees John’s picture of the devils leaving Mary
Magdalene, he immediately recognizes what has been depicted-not a miracle but “‘epilepsy – mouth, eyes, and forehead – even to the droop of her wrist there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and, afterwards, sleep natural.’” He pays the artist a physician’s compliment: ‘“Sir, you should be of our calling”’. This reconciliation of the theological and the physical is matched by another profound pun, however, to set against that of ‘illumination’: John’s great Luke begins with the Magnificat and he has literally
magnified
the Lord, using the microscope, so that what, when unexplained, seemed miraculous, becomes part of the natural world. The Lord is no longer outside his creation: he
is
his creation, a position which is theologically untenable. Christ – if this line of argument is pursued to its conclusion – is nothing more, or less, than the gifted leech identified by Karshish. Stephen seems the only person to reach out towards this possibility – and he destroys the microscope, to save a system which, however imperfect, ensures a necessary order against chaos. The chaos he fears is not purely social. He fears, too, ‘that man stands ever between two Infinities’ and I think Kipling shared this fear.

The impersonal scale of things and the smallness of the individual made him flinch, as Kim’s crisis and breakdown show: ‘He tried to think of the lama – to wonder why he had stumbled into a brook-but the bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked thought aside.’ And at last the outcry of the threatened ego is heard: “‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’” Mental breakdown interested Kipling. He himself was twice afflicted as a young man and his sister was troubled for most of her life. He treats the subject directly in ‘The Janeites’, where the shell-shocked Humberstall is restored to a sanity of sorts by Macklin, who persuades him to memorize the works of Jane Austen, by pretending that they will give him an entrée to a quasi-Masonic society of ‘Janeites’, with attendant perks. It is, of course, a gentle conspiracy of a different kind – to exercise and re-educate a mind which has been disturbed by trench warfare and experiences that are the more horrific for Humberstall’s insouciant Cockney retelling: ‘“then I saw somethin’ like a mushroom in the moonlight. It was the nice old gentleman’s bald ‘ead. I patted it. ’im and ‘is laddies ‘ad copped it right enough.’” I
patted it.
Kipling didn’t flinch from much.

Eliot, Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, Borges, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, and the most gifted Kipling critic of all, Miss J.M.S. Tompkins, have all spoken out for Kipling – without success.
His work remains ignored by the literary intelligentsia, largely for political reasons. Yet his politics are more various than their reputation. It isn’t difficult to find attitudes in his work which are unpleasant and one could compile a damning little anthology. There is the anti-Semitism of ‘“Bread Upon the Waters’”, where McPhee remarks, ‘“Young Steiner – Steiner’s son – the Jew, was at the bottom of it”’ and the prejudice is reinforced by McRimmon’s ‘“there’s more discernment in a dog than a Jew’”. Sometimes it is possible to write off remarks like this as elements of characterization. For instance, the racial prejudice of Curtiss in
The Story of the Gadsbys:
‘Hang it all! Gaddy hasn’t married beneath him. There’s no tar-brush in the family, I suppose.’ Kipling’s ‘Lispeth’, ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, or ‘Beyond the Pale’ show clearly enough that, though he saw the difficulties of mixed marriages, he was disinterested enough to register disapproval of the ‘white’ position: the clergyman in ‘Lispeth’ is exposed as a mendacious hypocrite. Similarly, Ortheris’s prejudice is undermined by Learoyd’s report of it: ‘“Orth’ris, as allus thinks he knaws more than other foaks, said she wasn’t a real laady, but nobbut a Hewrasian. Ah don’t gainsay as her culler was a bit doosky like. But she
was
a laady.’

All the same, there is, for example, Kipling’s anti-Irish prejudice to consider. In
Something of Myself
, he asserts: ‘the Irish had passed out of the market into “politics” which suited their instincts of secrecy, plunder, and anonymous denunciation.’ There is, too, a callous Darwinism which is hard to accept, a sense that some life is acceptably cheap: ‘the weakest of the old-type immigrants had been sifted and salted by the long sailing-voyage of those days’, he writes, deploring the imperfection of later immigrants to America who were preserved by the shorter steam voyage. And in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, he is cool about the function of cholera in this Malthusian aside: ‘it was a red and heavy audit, for the land was very sick and needed a little breathing space ere the torrent of cheap life should flood it anew. The children of immature fathers and undeveloped mothers made no resistance.’ Perhaps Kipling intends his tone to be stoical.
Tant pis
, it comes across as simply callous.

But if there is no difficulty in mounting a case against Kipling, it is also worth pointing out that his opinions are by no means as stereotypical as biased accountancy can make them. In
Something of Myself
, he also deplores the extermination of the American Indian: ‘I have never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little
New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind. This wonder I used to explain to Theodore Roosevelt, who made the glass cases of Indian relics shake with his rebuttals.’ The Boers, too, are seen clearly and prophetically by Kipling: ‘we put them in a position to uphold and expand their primitive lust for racial domination.’ He blames the white man for the importation of disease into Africa, ruining a ‘vast sun-baked land [that] was antiseptic and sterile’. And for an establishment figure, Kipling is capable of savaging the highest, as in this plea for regulated prostitution as a way of controlling venereal disease: ‘visits to Lock Hospitals made me desire, as earnestly as I do today, that I might have six hundred priests – Bishops of the Establishment for choice – to handle precisely as the soldiers of my youth were handled.’ This isn’t the predictable voice Kipling’s detractors would have us expect, and if it doesn’t excuse other lapses into illiberalism, it certainly complicates our picture.