Read The Wish House and Other Stories Online
Authors: Rudyard Kipling
The Wish House and Other Stories (6 page)
More vivid, and more germane to Kipling’s preference for dialect, is the description of seawater topping the bulwarks. Here Kipling offers us two versions of the same event – the educated and the demotic, the cooked and the raw. Charlie’s version (‘“It looked just like a banjo-string drawn tight, and it seemed to stay there for years’”) is far more graphic than the more decorous alternative (“‘It looked like a silver wire laid down along the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break’”). “The Finest Story in the World’” is, in its way, an expression of Kipling’s artistic credo. It explains his commitment to dialect – largely by its frontal attack on the conventionally literary: when Charlie Mears gets his head into Literature, his power is fatally diminished, his memories become tarnished and second-hand. ‘Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, coloured, and distorted by that which he had read…’ Kipling knows that Charlie Mears could never do justice to his own story, because he is incapable of telling it in his own words. Only a genius like Kipling could do that, the most unliterary of literary men.
‘“Love-o’-Women”’ makes the same point – makes it initially in exactly the same way as “The Finest Story in the World’” – by a considered use of quotation marks around the title. Here the story is given to Mulvaney, his brogue tuned down just the requisite fraction from its earlier appearances in
Soldiers Three.
It is still broad, but acceptable – an evocation rather than a phonetically pedantic transcription. The art, of course, is there in the powerful frame, which parallels the sexual vagaries of Larry Tighe, the gentleman-ranker, with those of Mackie (who is shot by a distressed husband) and with those of Doctor Lowndes, who ‘ran away wid Major–Major Van Dyce’s lady that year’. That hesitation over the name is typical of Kipling’s prodigious attention to detail: it is less flamboyant than the justly famous description of Mackie’s blood on the barrack-square, dried ‘to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozenge-wise by the heat’, but it carries weight all the same.
Larry Tighe is suffering the final stage of locomotor ataxia brought on by syphilis: ‘Love-o’-Women’ was cripplin’ and crumblin’ at ivry step. He walked wid a hand on my shoulder all slued sideways, an’ his right leg swingin’ like a lame camel.’ By the end of the story, Tighe has ‘shrivelled like beef-rations in a hot sun’ – and one cannot
read this distressingly powerful simile without recalling that banjo-string of Charlie Mears. The demotic opens on reality like an oven door. We feel the unmitigated blast, rather than a literary effect. Mulvaney is no Gigadibs. When Tighe is being diagnosed by the army doctor, Kipling carefully prepares for his boldest stroke in this non-literary milieu – a quotation from
Antony and Cleopatra.
He establishes Tighe’s superior social status and, therefore, the likelihood of such a quotation, by what might seem a gratuitous detail: ‘“Thrate me as a study, Doctor Lowndes,” he sez; and that was the first time I’d iver heard a docthor called his name.’ The immediate gain in verisimilitude is enormous: Mulvaney, Tighe, and the social gulf between them are measured as if by a micrometer screwgauge. But this detailed record of Tighe’s
sang-froid
and social politesse also means that we are able to accept his final words to the woman he has ruined: ‘“I’m dyin’, Aigypt – dyin’,” he sez.’
Dialect, the filter of Mulvaney’s accent and ignorance, is crucial here. Kipling uses it to distinguish between the effect Tighe intends and the one which is achieved. It is a gesture towards the tragic, which is typical of the man, yet the reader is left with a more bitter, less literary effect – the desperate pathos of Tighe’s borrowed gesture, denuded of its false nobility by Mulvaney’s coarse rendition of the line. As a straight quotation, it would have been sentimental. In dialect, it is redeemed, rough and powerful. Kipling manages to keep the force of the words and to place the literary gesture.
‘Dymchurch Flit’ is one of Kipling’s greatest stories. Largely told in Sussex dialect, it bears comparison with Frost’s ‘The Witch of Coös’ and probably surpasses it. Again, the use of dialect is crucial. Both Frost and Kipling renew the ballad tradition where the kind of supernatural subject matter they treat would have naturally found expression. The alterations are simple but profound. Both abandon rhyme and literary dialect-equivalent, Frost choosing real American and a flexible blank verse, Kipling going to prose and authentic Sussex speech. When Wordsworth wanted to renew the ballad, he chose to eliminate the sensational event that had been its staple. Kipling and Frost retain the macabre event, but naturalize the form.
In ‘Dymchurch Flit’, Widow Whitgift is a psychic and, therefore, a possible channel of communication for the fairies or Pharisees who have been driven into the Romney Marsh as Henry VIII’s Reformation gets under way, tearing down ‘the Images’. The Pharisees wish to escape to France where the atmosphere is more congenial, where they will be less ‘stenched up an’ frighted’. After a
typically oblique and powerfully elusive exposition of the groundwork, much like Frost’s sidling approach to his narrative subjects, the tale suddenly simplifies and accelerates:
Now there was a poor widow at Dymchurch under the Wall, which, lacking man or property, she had the more time for feeling; and she come to feel there was a Trouble outside her doorstep bigger an’ heavier than aught she’d ever carried over it. She had two sons – one born blind, an’ t’other struck dumb through fallin’ off the Wall when he was liddle. They was men grown, but not wage-earnin’, an’ she worked for ’em, keepin’ bees and answerin’ Questions.
Has any writer ever used capital letters with more authority or to greater effect? Kipling not only reproduces the dialect exactly and with complete conviction, he also, as it were, reproduces an authentic dialect of thought – which barely distinguishes between the relative importance of ‘man or property’ or between ‘keepin’ bees and answerin’ Questions’. Picasso once said that Van Gogh invented boots: ‘Take Van Gogh: Potatoes, those shapeless things! To have painted that, or a pair of old shoes! That’s really something! ‘ In the same way, Kipling extends the literary franchise. To the speaker, Tom Shoesmith, himself a covert Pharisee, bees and Questions are equally natural and the reader is persuaded by his matter-of-factness. Without dialect, there can be no entrée to his mind and the story is literally inconceivable, except in the terms in which Kipling frames it. The voice provides its own inherent conviction. Its accent and tone brook no questions.
In almost every way, Kipling is the opposite of Henry James, his devoted but not uncritical admirer – and not only in the way he so frequently opts for dialect. The sophisticated author has the burden of explanation, the transcriber of dialect has the different burden of accuracy, however much both are, finally, inventing. T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Milton, brilliantly observed that ‘the style of James certainly depends for its effect a good deal on the sound of a voice, James’s own, painfully explaining’. Kipling never explains. He asserts. On political and moral issues this assertiveness is often irksome to contemporary taste, but in matters of description Kipling leaves James agonizing at the starting line while he has breasted the tape. ‘Deep away in the heart of the City, behind Jitha Megji’s
bustee
, lies Amir Nath’s Gully, which ends in a dead-wall pierced by one grated window.’ In fictional terms, the place-names mean everything. They are authoritative and unarguable. Contrast the
beginning of
The Spoils of Poynton:
James sets out to establish the vulgar tastelessness of the Brigstock family seat. As often, he is fabulously wordy and relies on the transmitted opinions of Mrs Gereth rather than on direct evocation. The tone is comprehensively Jamesian. We take on trust the fiction that Mrs Gereth is the actual source:
What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience, but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered them almost tragic.
There is a pleasing, if tasteless, asperity in the reference to the blind, but essentially this is James painfully explaining kitschiness in the abstract. What
are
‘strange excrescences’?
This style is wonderfully adapted to the exploration of intricate cul-de-sacs in the minds of his ‘super-subtle fry’, but it is frankly embarrassed by anything more concrete than a perception. Kipling, however, can arrest kitsch in a sentence of brisk description: ‘Besides fragments of the day’s market, garlic, stale incense, clothes thrown on the floor, petticoats hung on strings for screens, old bottles, pewter crucifixes, dried
immortelles
, pariah puppies, plaster images of the Virgin, and hats without crowns.’ This isn’t one of Kipling’s great lists like the remorseless, tragic inventory of childish things to be burned in ‘Mary Postgate’, but it serves to show how little Kipling needed to explain. To the objection that James has the more difficult task of describing
expensive
kitsch, as opposed to
Kipling’s vulgar kitsch, one might cite James’s evocation of the butler, Brooksmith, fallen on hard times:
There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the place, and there was a hot moist smell within, as of the ‘boiling’ of dirty linen. Brooksmith sat with a blanket over his legs at a clean little window where, from behind stiff bluish-white curtains, he could look across at a huckster’s and a tinsmith’s and a small greasy public-house. He had passed through an illness and was convalescent, and his mother, as well as his aunt, was in attendance on him. I liked the nearer relative, who was bland and intensely humble, but I had my doubts about the remoter, whom I connected perhaps unjustly with the opposite public-house – she seemed greasy somehow with the same grease…
Certainly, this is better, but there is something desperate in his reliance on the adjective greasy. You feel that James made seeing difficult for himself by allowing himself to wrinkle his nose so floridly.
But, then, James was a natural novelist and suffered agonies of introspective dieting when
The Spoils of Poynton
, promised as a short novella, proved after all to be a novel. With James’s tirelessly greedy appetite for complication, every snack turned out to be a banquet. Kipling, on the other hand, was a natural short-story writer, whose inborn instinct was for economy and limitation. Even in his most successful novel,
Kim
, he doesn’t explain. Take Lurgan, the healer of pearls: we hear of him first, not by name, but by his title. When we meet him, Kipling is both intensely specific and ultimately baffling. Having created in the reader an itch to know what a healer of pearls
is
, Kipling successfully refuses to scratch the itch properly. Just as ghost-daggers are mentioned but never explained, so the healer of pearls meditates on his art:
‘My work is on the table – some of it.’ It blazed in the morning light – all red and blue and green flashes, picked out with the vicious blue-white spurt of a diamond here and there. Kim opened his eyes. ‘Oh, they are quite well, those stones. It will not hurt them to take the sun. Besides, they are cheap. But with sick stones it is very different.’ He piled Kim’s plate anew. ‘There is no one but
me
can doctor a sick pearl and re-blue turquoises. I grant you opals – any fool can cure an opal – but for a sick pearl there is only me. Suppose I were to die! Then there would be no one…Oh no!
You
cannot do anything with jewels. It will be quite
enough if you understand a little about the Turquoise – some day.’
It is a brilliant sleight of hand. Kipling has done what the short-story writer must do: he has convinced us that
he
knows, so that, for a moment, we believe we do, too.
Kipling, of course,
could
explain the arcane. He explains the way an object-letter works in ‘Beyond the Pale’:
A broken glass-bangle stands for a Hindu widow all India over; because, when her husband dies, a woman’s bracelets are broken on her wrists. Trejago saw the meaning of the little bit of glass. The flower of the
dhak
means diversely ‘desire’, ‘come’, ‘write’, or ‘danger’, according to the other things with it. One cardamom means ‘jealousy’; but when any article is duplicated in an object-letter, it loses its symbolic meaning and stands merely for one of a number indicating time…
And so on, until the meaning is spelled out and the reader has learned something he never knew before. It is a process which is instantly gratifying, but it is also deliberately misleading: it promises explanation everywhere, whereas Kipling’s point is that the whole tale is exactly like its setting – a blind alley leading nowhere. So that, when the denouement comes and Bisesa displays her ‘nearly healed stumps’, Kipling refuses to enlighten us: the circumstances remain unclear and ‘one special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the front of Durga Charan’s house. It may open on to a courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha Megji’s
bustee.
Trejago cannot tell.’