The Wish House and Other Stories (5 page)

Isaac is the legitimate son of Abraham born to Sarah by special dispensation—she was then aged ninety. Hagar and Ishmael are then cast out—Sarah’s preference, which Abraham is advised by God to follow. Ishmael is preserved, however, because he is the son of Abraham and God promises Ishmael that he will be the founder of a great nation (i.e., Arab Islam).

The
burden
of Kipling’s poem is the Jewish Diaspora: “Then they were scattered North and West.” Pogroms and persecution follow: “And every realm they wandered through / Rose, far or near, / And robbed and tortured, chased and slew, / The outcasts of Jerusalem.”

The further burden is Kipling’s sense of the triumphant survival of Zionist aspiration over every oppressor and tyrant: “So ran their doom—half seer, half slave— / And ages past, and at the last / They stood beside each tyrant’s grave, / And whispered of Jerusalem.”

What follows might appear to be tinged with prejudice. It refers to Jewish financial acumen. It forgivably caricatures Jewish movie moguls. But it is replete with respect for Jewish tenacity and the refusal of the Jews to intermarry and assimilate. “We do not know what God attends / The Unloved Race in every place / Where they amass their dividends / From Riga to Jerusalem. // But all the course of Time makes clear / To everyone (except the Hun) / It does not pay to interfere / With Cohen from Jerusalem. // For ‘neath the Rabbi’s curls and fur / (Or scents and rings of movie-kings) / The aloof, unleavened blood of Ur, / Broods steadfast on Jerusalem.” Ur was ruled by Chaldeans, so the line means that Jewish blood was kept pure even when Abraham lived in Ur.

The moral of Kipling’s poem, as opposed to its burden, is in the last stanza: “Yet he who bred the unending strife, / And was not brave enough to save / The Bondsmaid from the furious wife, /
He
wrought thy woe, Jerusalem.”

Kipling
isn’t
blaming Sarah, the fierce wife. He’s blaming Abraham for cowardice, for the failure to exercise authority invested in him. He should have been the arbitrator. So the allegory is an allegory of rule—justice should be impartially exercised rather than being left to the disputants. The white man’s burden.

T
HE
G
ERMANS

Kipling is rabidly anti-German. On August 31, 1905, he writes to Jules Huret, who had interviewed him for
Le Figaro.
A note by Thomas Pinney, editor of
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling
, tells us that Kipling deleted from the proofs conversational, off-the-cuff remarks that were exaggerated and indefensible:
viz
that the Germans had done nothing special in commerce, industry, or science; that he, Kipling, owed nothing to German literature (his letter says “in literature I know that I owe much to Heine”); that German troops had done nothing effective in South-West Africa.

Clearly Kipling’s considered views weren’t just snow jobs, but more closely approximate to the truth of his views.

After this admission to Jules Huret in August 1905 that he owed something to (the Jewish) Heine and that the German contribution to science etc. wasn’t completely negligible, Kipling went rapidly and insanely anti-German—because England was at war and because his son was killed by the Germans and because Kipling believed all reports of German atrocities (some of which were true, of course).

Kipling sees the war aim not as victory “but a war of extermination for their race.” At first, there is a hint of defensiveness: he denies “hatred,” denies “something our friends might take for brutality, but which isn’t.”

To Theodore Roosevelt (April 21, 1918), he recommends reprisals on the American Hun “citizens.” To Frank Doubleday (August 21, 1918) he suggests that Germans should always be referred to by the pronoun “it” in Doubleday books; he recounts how a woman went to a crashed zeppelin to savor the smell of burnt Hun. To Sir Almroth Wright (1916) he suggests that Germans exploit sexual perversion in their politics and that their sadism attracts the masochism of pacifists and conscientious objectors.

When he hears that the Germans are melting corpses for pig feed, Kipling writes a poem in which a German woman spreads a dead, rendered German on her bread as fat. Of course, it was never printed, but it is there in a letter sent to Andrew Macphail on April 21–22, 1917.

On January 14, 1919, he mounts a theory that the Germans have been systematically undermining his literary reputation since the Boer War. He even blames Hun prisoners of war for an outbreak of foot and mouth disease—caused, he alleges, by their throwing away scraps of infected Hun meat (December 14, 1919). He finds them a sort of “werewolf people” in fact—subhuman, animal, “the baser
side of humanity.” As for a railway strike, nominally, “It is the railway men and the Trades Unions who are doing it. Actually, it is the Hun, the Bolshevik and the Jew of Poleland chiefly. In spite of their best efforts to speak and act like white men, one sees in the cruelty practised on the railway horses, the hand of the Hun.”

In November 1919, Kipling is denouncing Einstein’s theory of relativity: “Do you notice how their insane psychology attempts to infect the Universe? There is one Einstein, nominally a Swiss, certainly a Hebrew, who…comes forward, scientifically to show that, under certain conditions Space itself is warped and the instruments that measure it are warped also…. The more I see of the Boche’s mental workings the more sure I am that he is Evil Incarnate, and, like all evil, a pathetic Beast. Einstein’s pronouncement is only another little contribution to assisting the world towards flux and disintegration.”

What are we to make of this? On July 15, 1919, Kipling writes that “Nothing matters much really when one has lost one’s only son.” To Sir Hugh Clifford, another bereaved father, Kipling writes on November 18, 1918: “Glad you escaped the peace celebrations. I bolted home from town and had my dark hour alone.” Kipling never allowed himself public expression of his grief. His letters insist that his son’s death was a noble sacrifice. Kipling believed this. He could not believe anything else. And it drove him mad. The recurrent accusation that the Hun is deranged is a reflection of his own derangement. Kipling wasn’t a racist. Poor Kipling. He was a father driven mad with grief.

W
E
need to think again about Kipling. He is our greatest short-story writer, but one whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognize. When the talkies arrived in Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin ruefully considered the future: ‘It would mean giving up my tramp character entirely. Some people suggested that the tramp might talk. This was unthinkable, for the first word he ever uttered would transform him into another person. Besides, the matrix out of which he was born was as mute as the rags he wore.’ There is no evidence that the patchily-read Chaplin ever glanced at Kipling. If he had, he might have realized that Kipling, in his different field, had already wired a silent world for sound. The centre of his achievement is that he made talkies out of the mute matrix he shares with Chaplin. He is our greatest practitioner of dialect and idiolect – a writer whose ear for inflection and accent is not just ebullient technique, a prose virtuosity, but the expression of a profoundly democratic artistry, however eccentric that claim may appear to those for whom his politics are repugnant and his transcriptions of demotic speech condescending.

In his best work, Kipling extends the literary franchise to the inarticulate. The mute are given a say in things – and this generosity extends even to those machines which Henry James found so distressingly preponderant in Kipling’s later work. In
Ulysses
, Leopold Bloom meditates in the typesetting room of a newspaper: ‘Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forwards its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.’ In Kipling, too, everything speaks in its own way, not just people.
Kim
gives us ‘the sticky pull of slow-rending oilskin’ and ‘the well-known purr and fizzle of grains of incense’. In ‘Through the Fire’, there is the charcoal-burners’ fire: ‘the dying flames said
“whit, whit, whit”
as they fluttered and whispered over the white ashes.’

Kipling’s eye was extraordinary right from the beginning. There is no shortage of brilliant local detail in his work. One has only to
remember the corpse in ‘The Other Man’, ‘sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning-stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache’. One thinks of the water in ‘At Twenty-Two’ which floods a coalmine – ‘a sucking whirlpool, all yellow and yeasty’. Or of the unforgettable, bloated, two-day corpse of Hirman Singh, from ‘In Flood Time’, which the hero uses as an improvised life-jacket. Kipling’s ear, though, was initially less perfect – in particular the sometimes excruciating Irish of Mulvaney, which isn’t properly perfected until “‘Love-o’-Women’” in
Many Inventions.
This faultiness is detectable, too, in the narrator’s voice of
Plain Tales From the Hills
, where it is occasionally unclear whether Kipling endorses the tough moral pokerwork with which several stories begin. In ‘Beyond the Pale’, Kipling clearly uses the story to ironize the flat fiat of his opening sentence: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race, and breed.’ The tale illustrates the dangers, but the Kipling who interprets the object-letter of Bisesa so ably cannot possibly underwrite the statement that ‘no Englishman should be able to translate object-letters’. (An object-letter being a collection of objects by which the illiterate communicate with each other since they cannot write.) On the other hand, there is no indication that Kipling dissociates himself from the repeated notion that callow young men are like colts who need violent use of the bit. Indeed, his last work,
Something of Myself
, reiterates the advice
in propria persona.

But Kipling’s own voice, over-confidently confident, is always less plausible than the alien voices he chose to assume. The latter make a long list. ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ is a faultless pastiche of Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding.
‘On Greenhow Hill’ is narrated in Learoyd’s Yorkshire accent, ‘“Love-o’-Women”’ in Mulvaney’s Irish, ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’ in Indian-English, ‘The Wish House’ and ‘Friendly Brook’ in broad Sussex. The prose of ‘The Bull that Thought’ is delicately tinged with French idiom and ‘The Judgment of Dungara’ and ‘Reingelder and the German Flag’ exploit the German accent and word-order, perhaps a trifle crudely, but comedy is always Kipling’s least successful mode: ‘“We will him our converts in all their by their own hands constructed new clothes exhibit”.’ As Kipling reaches maturity, his mastery of dialect comes to depend less on orthography. Fenwick, the lighthouse-keeper who narrates ‘The Disturber of Traffic’, is given a circling delivery that is naturally conversational. His prose isn’t good in the conventional sense, but it is dramatically appropriate: ‘those streaks, they preyed upon his intellecks, he said; and he made up his mind, every time
that the Dutch gunboat that attends to the Lights in those parts come along, that he’d ask to be took off.’ Kipling’s ear at this stage was perfect. And later, like Joyce’s ‘Clay’ and ‘Counterparts’, Kipling in ‘The Gardener’ deploys disguised interior monologue for a story which appears to be impersonally narrated. Just as Joyce’s leaden, ponderous style in ‘Counterparts’ mirrors the mental process of its alcoholic protagonist, so the Home Counties accent of Helen Turrell informs ‘The Gardener’: ‘She learnt that Hagenzeele Third could be comfortably reached by an afternoon train which fitted in with the morning boat, and that there was a comfortable little hotel not three kilometres from Hagenzeele itself, where one could spend quite a comfortable night and see one’s grave next morning.’ Those three ‘comfortable’s’ in the same sentence, like the three ‘that’s’ in Fenwick’s, are artfully calculated to convey to ‘one’ the stifling propriety of Helen Turrell’s protective carapace. They are designed to make ‘one’ feel ‘uncomfortable’ about her version of events – and to show that her lie has infected her very thought-processes. She doesn’t just act a lie – that her illegitimate son is her nephew – she
thinks
a lie even to herself. And Kipling conveys this without external, explicit comment.

‘“The Finest Story in the World’” explains why Kipling chose to use such a bewildering number of different narrative voices. In it the clerk, Charlie Mears, like Jonson’s Dapper, has literary aspirations: ‘He rhymed “dove” with “love” and “moon” with “June”, and devoutly believed that they had never so been rhymed before.’ His confidant, the narrator, is necessarily sceptical until Charlie tells him the fragment of a story about being a galley-slave. The details are extraordinary and vivid: “‘When that storm comes…I think that all the oars in the ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their chests smashed in by the oar-heads bucking”’; ‘“he’s on the lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatchways and through the oar-holes. Can’t you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through between the handle and the hole and wobbling about as the ship moves?’” These details are, in fact, not imagined at all. Charlie is merely remembering, in a completely unliterary way, two previous existences – a hypothesis Kipling somewhat clumsily corroborates by a fortuitous meeting with Grish Chunder, a Bengali acquaintance with whom the narrator can discuss metempsychosis before he is dismissed from the story as summarily as he was introduced into it. The baldly functional Grish Chunder isn’t the story’s only flaw. There is also the melodramatic detail of dead rowers being cut up at
their oars before they are ‘stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces’ – evidently, but unconvincingly, to terrify the living remainder. Here we feel Kipling’s design on his reader. He means to shock us, but we can see the electrodes in his hands.