Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (15 page)

Dingley makes it back to the bedside of his son. Young Archie is now pitifully weak, and asks to be diverted with stories. Yet all the stories at Dingley’s command cannot save the lad; as he expires, his last delirious words are both an echo and a mockery of his father’s militarism: ‘Victories,’ he wheezes, ‘I want victories!’ When Archie is buried on a bare
hillside near Dossieclipp, ‘Dingley felt that with his son he had also buried his finest secret – that of happiness.’ Did the Tharauds know when they wrote this line that Kipling had himself lost a child not long before – his daughter Josephine, who succumbed to pneumonia in 1899? Perhaps. But they could not have known that Kipling had reacted in exactly the same way: according to his cousin, the writer Angela Thirkell, much of Rudyard died with his daughter, ‘And I have never seen him as a real person since that year.’ Still less could the Tharauds have known that in describing the death of a boy made militaristic by his father, they were looking forward to the fate of Kipling’s only son John – the moment at which the last remnants of the father’s happiness were also extinguished.

Dingley is plunged into crisis by his son’s death: just as the Empire can be suddenly derailed by a handful of Boer farmers, so a man’s hard-built self-belief can be fractured by the death of a child. The writer’s art now appears vain to him, and also lacking: for all its descriptive power and harsh intelligence, there is little in it to refresh the soul. This is a necessary fictional crisis, and perhaps a rather French one, too: while the real Kipling grieved terribly for his two children, he never doubted or despaired of his art – indeed, its austere demands were what kept him functioning. However, it is at this point that readers might begin congratulating themselves on guessing where
Dingley, l’illustre écrivain
is heading. Grief will open its protagonist to pity, and his work will be made richer and truer by this new compassion for humanity. Who knows, perhaps his suffering will lead him to doubt the brassy tootings and hypocritical glories of the Empire?

But the Tharauds were better writers than this. They understood the world – and British imperialism with it. For at this precise moment pity is given a chance to enter Dingley’s soul, and it is refused admittance. Lucas du Toit has been taken prisoner and Dingley is asked to intercede. He weighs the
demands of friendship and gratitude against the loftier demands of Empire and the pitiless requirements of war. While Mrs Dingley writes pleadingly to the authorities, her husband does nothing except promise a memorial poem; the Boer is shot. Dingley returns to England, and the Tharauds cleverly swerve the plot first one way, then the other. The prideful Dingley writes a newspaper article criticising the war effort in South Africa, calling for conscription (as Kipling did repeatedly) and a Continental army. The newspaper publisher tries to dissuade him, arguing that the nation is not yet ready for such criticism, but Dingley arrogantly insists. Rebuke is immediate and unanimous: readers and critics desert him. In two thousand words he seems to have undone the work of all his twenty previous books. Rejection makes him feel like a ‘dispossessed potentate’, or a painter going blind (an evident reference to Kipling’s novel
The Light That Failed
).

So is this to be the moral of the story? A tale of pride rebuked? Again, the Tharauds surprise us. In a London music hall Dingley watches a cinematic newsreel of the South African war. There are many familiar scenes – including the filmed execution of Lucas du Toit. And he apprehends from the audience’s enthusiastic response that when he had withheld pity and assistance from the Boer prisoner, he was in fact deeply in tune with the mood of the British public. So he emerges knowing what he must do – write that novel on the banal yet loyal theme of a miserable cockney transformed by war into a real man. Published as peace is declared – and the women of the East End are doing ‘jigs of patriotic indecency’ – it proves a ‘colossal success’. Nowhere else, in all of his previous books, had ‘the Famous Writer expressed with greater pride the egotism of the mother country’.

The novel is thus both a critique of British imperialism – of its coarsening effects, its brutalities and self-deceptions – and a warning against literary populism. But it is also a proper novel about human failure, about the price paid (and the
public benefits reaped) when part of the human heart is suppressed. It seems impossible that Kipling could not have heard of
Dingley
; also unlikely he would have read it (not least because of the death of Archie). He seems to have made no recorded reference, public or private, to the novel; fictionalising him, I would imagine silent contempt being his reaction to such Gallic impertinence.

Dingley, l’illustre écrivain
was the Tharaud brothers’ first and probably greatest success, and they continued their fraternal collaboration on an industrial scale for half a century – their list of titles runs to more than seventy. Jérôme was received into the Académie Française in 1938 after some lengthy debate on the nicely French question of whether half an author could properly occupy a whole seat. The situation was resolved – or, perhaps, doubly complicated – when Jean joined him under the Dôme in 1946. They were, on the basis of
Dingley
, swift and efficient storytellers who, apart from anything else, showed that Kipling, or a version of him, or a part of him, could indeed be given fictional animation. André Gide returned to the subject of the Tharauds in his Journal for 12 July 1921, where he suggested that joint authorship was both their strength and their weakness: ‘Everything I have read by the Tharaud brothers has seemed to me of the best quality; the only reproach I think can be made against their books is that they are never dictated by any inner necessity; they do not have those deep and necessary relations with the author in which destiny is pledged.’

Jean died in 1952, Jérôme the following year. Jérôme’s seat at the Académie – number 31 – was taken by the ultra-fashionable Jean Cocteau, who ignored the traditional courtesies by saying ‘as little as possible’ about his predecessor, preferring instead to pay ‘ingratiating tribute’ to the Académie. It was left to André Maurois, Cocteau’s official welcomer, to supply ‘the homage to Tharaud which Cocteau had bypassed’. Another half-century later, Cocteau’s own dragonfly fame has
lost much of its sheen. If the Tharauds are unlikely to enjoy a renaissance, their
Dingley
will survive as more than just a curiosity – as a novel of both seriousness and verve – for some at least of the ‘little, little span’ that Kipling is borne in mind.

C
AMUS THOUGHT HIM
the most instructive of moralists, and far greater than La Rochefoucauld; Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill revered him; Pushkin read him and allowed Eugene Onegin to do the same; he is an admired presence in the diaries of Stendhal and the Goncourts; Cyril Connolly, another melancholy epicurean with a taste for aphorism, quoted him at length in
The Unquiet Grave
. Yet Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1741–94) remains virtually unknown in this country.

This is partly our insular fault for not translating enough: the last British edition seems to have been that from the Golden Cockerell Press (550 copies) back in 1926. But perhaps it’s also the fault of the genre in which he wrote his only enduring work: the
Maximes et pensées, Caractères et anecdotes, et petits Dialogues philosophiques
. We don’t much go for little books of wisdom on these islands. We don’t mind table talk, or profound remarks extracted from Boswell’s Johnson, or, better still, from novels (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’). But the idea of taking a social or moral observation, polishing it into literary form, and laying it out by itself on a white page as a jeweller lays a sparkler on black velvet – this seems a bit suspicious to us. In some hands, it can seem lordly, snobbish; in others, merely flash.

Take three famous remarks – call them maxims, epigrams, apophthegms as you will. Connolly: ‘Imprisoned in every fat man is a thin one wildly signalling to be let out.’ Consider the fat men you know.
Every
?
Wildly
? We are not just talking
Weight Watchers here. Is the line, as written, true of many more than the corpulent Connolly himself? Wilde: ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes.’ A ritzy, easily made reversal of a common saying. But true? True at all? Or just a look-at-me piece of verbal prestidigitation – one finally as ignorant as it is snooty. La Rochefoucauld: ‘There are those who would have never fallen in love had they not first heard love being talked about.’ This is much more impressive and authoritative. But, in the end, true? We can all think of people who fall in love ‘for the wrong reasons’, or who in our view claim to be in love when they aren’t; but that isn’t what La Rochefoucauld is saying. Again, the contention falls by claiming too much. Life, we might conclude, is rarely a one-liner.

Chamfort is not like this. Camus makes the distinction between the writer of maxims and the moralist. A maxim is like a mathematical equation – its terms are often reversible – and it is no coincidence that the same century, the seventeenth, was in France the great age both of mathematics and of the maxim. But ‘all its truth lies within itself, and it no more corresponds to experience than does an algebraic formula’. So much for La Rochefoucauld. Whereas a moralist like Chamfort rarely writes maxims, rarely depends on antithesis and formula. There is little of the Quote of the Week about him. As the Goncourts put it in their journal in 1866, Chamfort is ‘way beyond a man of letters penning his reflections. He offers us a condensation of the understanding of the world, the bitter elixir of experience.’

He was born illegitimate in the Auvergne; brains, wit, charm and good looks took him to the heights of Parisian society. He was the friend of Talleyrand, d’Alembert and Helvétius; Mirabeau said that his head was ‘electric’, and you only had to rub it for it to spark with ideas. He was a familiar of the intellectual salons, and elected to the Académie; Louis XV gave him a pension for a mediocre play which stirred the royal tear ducts. Such straightforward and visible success would
have satisfied the normally ambitious; but Chamfort was too intelligent – or too proud, or too self-hating – to be rendered anything as simple as satisfied, let alone happy. His success merely pointed up both his inner contradictions and those of the society which had applauded him. Here is his self-portrait (Reflection 2):

This fault line running down the middle is partly what makes Chamfort engaging, human, modern. In his condemnation of human motive he can be as fierce and sarcastic as La Rochefoucauld. But when La Rochefoucauld propounds a system under which self-interest is the impulse for all human activity, the implication remains that La Rochefoucauld himself is somehow exempt from the charge; he is above the moral riff-raff he is anatomising. Chamfort is different in this key respect: his condemnation of humanity includes himself, very specifically. ‘If I am anything to go by, man is a foolish animal.’

Wisdom is also more likely to arise from a familiarity with weakness, failure and misery than with strength and wealth. ‘It seems to me that, assuming they’re both equally
discerning and intelligent, a man born rich will never know nature, society or the human heart as well as the man who’s poor. The fact is that where the rich man was enjoying himself, the poor man was finding consolation in thought.’ Chamfort was only poor in comparison to those he frequented; the true poor usually have no time or energy for the ‘consolation of thought’. But he knew the stigma of illegitimacy; he suffered disfiguring disease (syphilis, leprosy and elephantiasis have all been suggested – modern opinion has settled on granuloma-tosis); and his experience of love was levelling. Having been a rakish bachelor and part-time misogynist until the great age of forty, he suddenly fell deeply in love with the wife of a surgeon, and she with him. Happily, the wife soon became a widow, whereupon the couple moved to the country to live out every townee’s pastoral idyll. Six months later she died.

A second fault line runs through Chamfort’s work – one whose irony he might have appreciated. Everything he published in his lifetime, everything by which he made his name – the plays, the essays, journalism, tributes to literary greats – has been completely forgotten. Whereas the only thing he wasn’t known for in his lifetime has made his limited but lasting fame. At some point in the mid-1780s, Chamfort began jotting down on small bits of paper his conclusions about life, along with supporting anecdotes, quotations and scraps of dialogue. There is no indication of what he wrote when, or of what, if anything, he intended doing with this accumulation; whether it was to be published, and if so, how it was to be arranged. Further, between his death and the first printed selection of his intellectual leavings, many items – perhaps as many as two thousand – were removed by a person or persons unknown, presumably on the grounds of being incriminating or defamatory. As his new translator Douglas Parmée notes, the result is ‘an academic nightmare – and a paradise for the anthologist, who can juggle them at will’. Their occasional republication has kept Chamfort’s name alive,
though we, as posterity, shouldn’t praise ourselves too openly for having the wit to appreciate him. ‘Posterity’, he wrote, ‘merely consists of the opinion of a series of publics. And just look at today’s!’