The Wish House and Other Stories (7 page)

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.

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:

Or painful explanation.

Because the short story is always haunted by the sense of its ending, there are things – 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.

‘Fifty Grand’ is an exception. More typical of the short story in this century is ‘The Killers’, in which two gangsters take over a café in order to murder a customer, who doesn’t in fact appear. The dialogue we hear is full of menace, but we never discover why the men are after Andreson. The modernity of the story can be gauged when you consider how like Pinter’s
The Birthday Party
this dramatic vignette is. (Some day, incidentally, the influence of Hemingway on Pinter will be properly assessed.) ‘The Killers’ is a classic story in its open-endedness, culminating with Ole Andreson stretched on his bed, resigned to his eventual fate for some undisclosed offence.

Early Kipling is often anecdotal in the Maupassant manner, but whereas Maupassant felt constrained by the form and eventually did his best work in the novels
Bel-Ami
and
Une Vie
, Kipling made a virtue out of the limitation imposed on him by the form. By employing narrators, he was able to squeeze more into the story.
Plain Tales from the Hills
employs a catch-phrase that finally becomes irritating – ‘But that is another story’ – yet it serves as an index of Kipling’s awareness of the constraints of his chosen medium. Late Kipling, however, circumvents the difficulty. M. Voiron, for example, in ‘The Bull that Thought’, narrates a story which takes place over a number of years, but because he is a character he is allowed to edit his material openly: ‘And next year,’ he says, ‘through some chicane which I have not the leisure to unravel…’ An author could not permit himself this transition which amounts to the phrase, ‘to cut a long story short’. Kipling’s narrators allow him, without breach of decorum, to ramble, to re-cap, to circle, to back-track, to anticipate, as real people do, and therefore to deal with long periods of time over a short space. The narrators, too, permit Kipling to avoid explanation, where necessary, because the responsibility for the story appears to rest with them, the author’s role being that of auditor. In this way, Kipling crams into the short story the substance of a full-length novel, while the privilege of occlusion is retained.

‘Mrs Bathurst’ is probably the most notorious example of these techniques at work, though ‘“The Finest Story in the World’” employs them too. The narrative in the latter is, as the Kipling-figure remarks, ‘a maddening jumble’. Charlie Mears can remember not just one previous existence but two, which, in his mind, are inseparable. In fact, as the narrator finally realizes, each tale told separately would be banal: ‘The adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave was
no new thing.’ The details are luminous because they are deprived of a coherent setting and context. They exist in the dark-inexplicable and end-stopped – hence their potency. ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ further illustrates the point: for most of its length, Kipling re-visits the theme of self-haunting. (Despite his often-repeated determination never to repeat himself, he had already touched on this in ‘At the End of the Passage’: ‘the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself.’) After Parrenness has donated his trust in men and women, and his boy’s soul and conscience, to the dream-presence of his older self, he is left with his reward – ‘When the light came I made shift to behold his gift, and saw that it was a little piece of dry bread.’ Perhaps this piece of dry bread alludes to Matthew 4:4 (‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’), thus illustrating the nature of his transaction, the swap of morality for materialism. Perhaps it alludes to ‘the bread of affliction’. Either is possible. Reading the story, however, the image is strangely satisfying in itself. It tells, and tells profoundly, without explaining itself. It is the man, this shrivelled piece of bread, and hardly needs the Bible to underpin it.