All posts tagged Something of Myself

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901) part 2

‘Alas! It is a great and terrible world.’
(The lama’s catchphrase)

In part one of this review I summarised Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel, Kim, chapters 1 to 9, picking out interesting quotes, and commenting. This part picks up the summary half way through the novel i.e at chapter 10. It’s not just half way through, though. Chapter ten introduces four elements which change our view of the narrative.

1. For the first time the narrator refers to all the events of the story as not being in the exciting present, following the day-by-day, hour-by-hour exploits of our daring young hero, but in the historic past. Talking about a report Kim writes for his mentor Mahbub Ali, the narrator says:

The report in its unmistakable St Xavier’s running script, and the brown, yellow, and lake-daubed map, was on hand a few years ago (a careless clerk filed it with the rough notes of E’s second Seistan survey), but by now the pencil characters must be almost illegible. (p.144)

This completely changed my attitude to the story, converting it from a tale of the present to one of the past (regarded from Kipling’s time), and so doubly past: from our time back to the time of writing and publishing (1901) and then, further back, by a distance that allows secret reports to be openly published and its writing to fade i.e. an appreciable period.

2. The second thing is related to the first, which is that the narrative (not quite for the first time but for in the first really sustained way) steps back from describing the breathless present, to take a more lofty overview of events. Previously the narrator had reported virtually every scrap of dialogue between Kim and his interlocutors; now the narrator steps back and uses just a few paragraphs to convey the passage of no fewer than three years of Kim’s life, covering his school career at St Xavier’s College. In term time he learns white boy subjects like reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, along with Latin and cricket. In holiday time he accompanies Agent C25, otherwise known as Mahbub Ali, well-known Pathan horse trader, on his ‘business’ trips to various parts of India, all the time learning spycraft on the job. Or he goes to stay with the supposed jeweller Lurgan Sahib up in Simla, where he is instructed in the arts of disguise and blending in.

In other words, after this brief overview of the passage of time, events from chapter ten onwards occur three years later than the events of the first half. We are told that Kim is now 16 years old (p.149).

3. Part of this change involves a switch from direct speech – the overwhelming majority of the text to date has been direct speech i.e. dialogue – to narrative description. It’s like stepping off a fast-moving tram onto the pavement. Suddenly the text has a completely different feel.

4. Lastly, it’s also at the start of chapter 10 that Mahbub gives Kim a gun. A gun.

A mother-of-pearl, nickel-plated, self-extracting .450 revolver.

Suddenly, at a stroke, a story which had been about a 10 or 11 year old boy having innocent adventures turns into a spy story with guns. Guns and knives had, albeit obliquely, occurred earlier, specifically in the scene where Kim warns Ali that two enemy agents are lying in wait to shoot him outside he and his employees’ campment at Lucknow railway station (chapter 8). But with Ali’s ceremonial presentation to Kim of his own gun, suddenly the story seems to have more in common with Raymond Chandler than the innocent schoolboy adventures of Stevenson or Rider Haggard.

Plot summary from chapter 10

Chapter 10

Head of ‘the Department’ Colonel Creighton and two of his best native operatives, Ali and Lurgan, have a summit conference about Kim’s future. The latter pair think Creighton should have been using Kim on missions years ago. For the first (and only) time the phrase ‘Secret Service’ is used. The phrase ‘Great Game’ had cropped up only twice before in the text (‘the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India’); from now on it occurs 15 times.

In Lucknow, Ali takes Kim to visit Huneefa the blind hoori who uses her stain to colour the now-pale Kim back to a native brown. Turns out she is also a witch or enchantress and, as Kim passes out due to heavy soporifics, she casts spells to keep traditional devils away from him. Also turns out that the obese Babu is out on the balcony observing proceedings (with repugnance). He and Ali are both a bit freaked out by the genuine witch intensity Huneefa.

So Colonel Creighton has agreed that Kim can finally definitively leave St Xavier’s. Ali supervises him being painted brown and then clothed in native dress. The plan is to let him wander the roads with his lama for another 6 months as a probationary period.

Chapter 11

So Kim is told he may travel to Tirthankars’ Temple, Benares for a happy reunion with his master, so he catches a train, with the usual casual encounters with other travellers which make the book feel so rich and full.

When he arrives at the Jain temple, the lama is predictably unemotional, shows Kim his cell, explains his devotions, explaining that he has wandered here and yon but many dreams have told him that he would never find the River of Life until he was reunited with his chela. And so he has patiently waited three years for their reunion.

He treats the fevered child of a desperate father, a Jat from Jullundur, with quinine and beef essence, curing him, but with delicacy and grace awards the credit to the god of the Jains, the lama’s hosts, who are flattered. Kipling repeatedly describes the delicacy and respect of the various native traditions, and generally contrasts them with white people’s blundering clumsiness e.g. Bennett the chaplain.

When Kim rises to ‘bless’ the child we discover that he is now, aged 16, ‘tall and slim’, like all male heroes should be (p.164)

The lama decides they will head north, so Kim arranges a train ticket. The Bankoh with the sick son accompanies them. On the train they meet ‘a mean, lean little person – a Mahratta’, who uses the special rhythm of speech and displays his amulet, to let Kim know he is one of the Secret Service, agent E23. He tells a real espionage story of travelling South with a colleague to collect vital information, they are set upon and his colleague killed, he just has time to bury the vital document ‘under the Queen’s Stone, at Chitor’, then he is chased all over central India by enemy agents, one of whom finally attacks and cuts him, before he makes his getaway onto the current train, cut and bleeding and shaking in terror.

Kim puts all his skills of disguise and uses the paintbox Lurgan gave him, to utterly transform E23.

In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred, dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes –opium takes quick effect on an empty stomach –luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs crossed under him, Kim’s brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders. (p.171)

Chapter 12

They arrive at Delhi station where a young British officer is leading a group of native policemen in a search for E23. The thing is, the opposition agents have framed him for a murder down South and his picture and description have been widely circulated, to police and officialdom outside ‘the Department’. That’s why Kim performed his makeup magic on the train.

Now the English officer, searching through the train, comes to their compartment, sees a half-naked Saddhu (E23 in disguise), a lama meditating, his chela yakking, and a big hairy peasant (the man with the sick infant) and – with what this book has to taught us to be characteristic English ignorance – dismisses them:

‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on.’

In the immense crowd of Delhi station, E23 sees a tall British officer and contrives to blunder into him, let fly a stream of abuse at which the officer arrests him. E23 just has time to explain that this is Strickland, ‘one of us’, an authority figure who appears in other Kipling stories.

The narrator intervenes to indicate the web of connections which makes up the Great Game. Soon a telegram is going from Strickland’s office in Delhi to agents in Chitor who dig up the letter, and the information, he tells us, has consequences which ripple as far afield as the Ottoman Sultan.

Meanwhile, Kim and the lama set off on foot heading north from Delhi with the foothills of the Himalayas in the background, in scenes of village life beautifully illustrated by Kipling. They are in the neighbourhood of the matron of Hulu who sends servants to invite them to her house. Here there are comic scenes as this domineering woman bosses her household and the lama, while Kim giggles at his discomfort. I realised she’s a bit like Tintin’s Madame Castafiore, imperious, bossy but loveable.

One evening she introduces them to a worker of charms who has healed her sick grandson, before departing grandly in a servant-held palanquin to tour her villagers. At which point the medicine man reveals he is none other than the obese Hurree Babu.

Three things. Babu first of all reveals that it was he who was sent down to Chitor to retrieve the buried document. He tells Kim how impressed everyone in ‘the Department’ was by his quick thinking on the train, in disguising and thus saving E23.

Then he tells him a new situation. Three years earlier the British Army, including the Mavericks, had marched off to fight, in what I take to have been the Second Afghan War (1878 to 1880). At the peace some of the northern princedoms had undertaken to have roads built. Hurree supervised the building but slowly learned that the princes, and the local coolies, all thought of the roads as being prepared for invading Russians. Now, Hurree tells him, two spies have been sent by Russia, one a Russian and one a Frenchman, under cover of a hunting expedition, to spy out the lie of the land, to make maps of the area, to prepare the way, maybe, for an invading army.

Babu says he would simply poison them and be done but the British government with its ludicrous sense of fair play is allowing them to visit and keep up the front of mere hunters. But:

‘They are Russians, and highly unscrupulous people.’

Nothing changes, then. So Hurree asks Kim to head north with him to deal with these Russkies, but not travelling together. Hurree will go ahead and asks Kim to persuade the lama to head northwards, but at a day’s march behind them, so nobody thinks they’re connected. Which is what they do.

Chapter 13

Lovely descriptions of walking up into the foothills of the Himalayas, the villages, the wildlife, the clean air, the bracingly steep slopes. The lama grows stronger as he scents the mountain air of his Tibetan homeland.

Hurree Babu overtakes them and they discuss plans. He tells them to follow his umbrella, which he will keep open at all times, then hurries past them. A few days later he catches up with the two foreign spies up in the mountains. They had bullied the 11 coolies lent them by an independent Rajah one time too many, after a particularly scary thunderstorm, and the servants had melted into the forest. At this propitious moment the Babu appeared and posed as the ‘agent for His Royal Highness, the Rajah of Rampur.’ The Russian and Frenchman are delighted.

He lets them get him drunk and complains more and more about the perfidious British i.e. lulling them into thinking he can be suborned to their cause.

For the first time we see and hear the two foreign spies. Why is one Russian, one French? Because, according to the notes, the Paranoid party in the British administration saw a threat not only from Russia via the North-West Frontier, but (far more remotely) from France, which was annexing parts of China and, it was feared, might attempt an attack on India through Tibet.

The choice of nationalities is made, then, for Kipling’s propaganda purposes. Their characters and conversation are equally propagandistic. They are made to systematically under-estimate the British, taking their (the British) apparent openness to strange travellers as weakness; and to over-estimate their (the Russian and French) understanding of ‘the Oriental mind’. Says the Russian:

‘It is we who can deal with Orientals.’

This kind of hubris, of unjustified vaunting, doesn’t go unpunished in Kipling. wo days later, they come across the lama sitting with the diagram explaining his religion, expounding it to Kim. The foreigners ask who they are. Babu explains this is a famous local holy man, and he will expound the mysteries of Buddhism. The lama is delighted to do so, while Babu takes Kim aside and tells him the foreigners have all their reports – books and reports and maps – stored in a large kilta with the reddish top.

Suddenly – violence! The Russian wants the lama’s diagram, offers money, the lama inevitably refuses, the Russian seizes it and it tears. The lama goes for his metal pencase, the Russian punches him full in the face. All the coolies recoil in superstitious horror. While the lama reels back from the blow, Kim throws himself at the Russian’s throat, rolling down the hill a little, till he can bash the Russian’s head against a boulder. The Frenchman ran towards the lama, fumbling with his revolver as if to take him hostage, but is driven off by a barrage of stones from the coolies, who scoop up the wounded lama and all disappear into the forest, as dusk falls suddenly.

The Babu runs down to Kim, tells him to lay off the Russian, tells him to run and join the coolies in the forest, where they have taken the foreigners’ bags, get possession of the bag of maps. Kim stops bashing, turns and runs. The Frenchman fires and just misses him. For the first time Kim takes out his gun and fires it in anger, missing the Frenchman, then running on into the trees.

Now the Babu takes charge, begging the Frenchman to stop shooting, assisting the injured Russian to his feet.

Cut to the coolies in the fir trees. They are outraged by the act of sacrilege they’ve just seen; one of them points out they have the foreigners’ four rifles and could simply go down and shoot them dead. But the lama, after a moment’s hesitation, rises above the situation and his own injuries and preaches true Buddhist forbearance. No. NO, he commands the coolies who quickly back down. The foreigners’ anger and impiety will bring its own reward. They will be reincarnated as worms. Kim cheerfully chips in that he kicked the Russian in the groin as they tumbled down the hillside together.

No, the coolies will take the lama and Kim back to their village, Shamlegh-under-the-Snow. Kim realises that, despite his brave front, the lama is more badly shaken than he admits. His heart is racing. He feels dizzy. The coolies then discuss how they are going to divide the spoils because they have carried off the foreigners’ entire baggage. Here Kim is canny and doesn’t so much claim the big kilta, the basket containing eight month’s work by the foreigner’s, maps and notes etc, as plants the idea that it is full of bad juju and only he knows how to defuse and turn it away.

Cut to Hurree, a mile away, on the main track with the furious foreigners, alternately shouting at each other or berating him. So he play-acts the stupid native, submits to abuse and blows, the better to stick with them. And hugs himself with glee for he knows how he will guide the losers through scores of mountain villages where they will become a byword for humiliation and ineptitude.

Chapter 14

Arriving at their village the coolies divide their loot. The lama regrets giving way to anger and meditates all night. Next morning Kim meets the Woman of Shamlegh, bold and commanding. The men have gone and left her with the kilta. In her hut Kim spills it on the floor and discovers all the foreign spies’ equipment:

Survey-instruments, books, diaries, letters, maps, and queerly scented native correspondence. At the very bottom was an embroidered bag covering a sealed, gilded, and illuminated document such as one King sends to another.

The woman of Shamlegh flirts with Kim. He is now a tall handsome young man (of 16). She appears to offer Kim her ‘hand’ and headship of the village. Kim has to tactfully decline (p.214) and again on page 218. She is really smitten by his handsomeness. Love interest very unusual in Kipling.

He asks her to take a message to the Babu. Village children are monitoring their process along the forest road. Later she returns with a reply from the Babu that all is well, that Kim and the lama should retrace their steps, and he will overtake them, once he has escorted the foreigners as far as Simla.

The lama comes to sit with the other villagers, dangling their feet over the vertiginous edges of the mountain village, laughing and smoking. He confesses to Kim that he is very sad. It was a mistake to abandon his quest for the River of the Arrow and return to the hills. He comes of the hills and loves the hills but that is precisely why it was giving in to his desires and affections to return up here. And the blow he received was a sign from the Wheel that he was slipping back into the world of emotions. No, they must return down to the plains.

The woman of Shamlegh now reveals that she had an affair with a Sahib who fell sick, who took her to the nearest mission station, taught her the piano, taught her Christianity, left promising to come back but never did. Bitter, she returned to lord it over this shabby little village and its poor menfolk. She was beguiled by Kim because he reminded her of her Sahib, but Kim persists in saying he must return to the plains with his lama till she becomes angry and bitter. She mocks the lama’s weakness, he can barely support himself against the doorpost, and so whistles up some of her men who bring out a dooli, ‘the rude native litter of the Hills’, and carefully lift the ailing lama into it.

She and Kim squabble up to the departure but then he surprises her by dropping his disguise of assistant priest to a lama, taking her round the waist and kissing her, Sahib style, while saying ‘Good-bye, my dear.’ As the litter is carried down the hill by the grunting village men, Kim looks back and sees her, a small figure waving from the door of her hut.

Chapter 15

The final chapter, tying up loose ends. We are told how Hurree Babu continued his pose of obseqious guide till he had led the foreigners all the way to Simla, where he grovellingly begged a testimonial then disappeared. Reappeared in Shamlegh where the Woman told him about Kim and the lama’s departure in the litter, and he sets off to overtake them, having lost quite a lot of weight in all these peregrinations.

Now the lama is becoming ill. When the littermen leave them at the plain Kim becomes his staff, leaned on, carrying the foodbag, the bag with the foreigners’ secrets, begging in the morning, setting up the lama’s blanket, caring for the old man who is visibly dying.

The lama is full of gratitude. Kim says he loves him and has failed him and hasn’t done enough and bursts into tears. The lama raises him up and says he is the best of disciples.

Kim had sent message ahead to the widow of Kulu, the chatterbox who hosted them before. Now she sends a litter to collect the holy man and falls into long middle-aged flirtation which the lama takes in good part. Kim is so tired he’s ill. The widow vows to nurse him back to health.

She gives him a lockable strongbox for the treasures, brews him reviving potions and force them down him, then she and another old woman give him a truly Indian massage, after which Kim sleeps for 36 hours.

When he wakes, refreshed, it’s to discover the Babu has caught up with them and the lady of Kulu, the Sahiba, has been feeding him up, too. He has appeared in his long-running disguise as a ‘humble Dacca quack.’. Now Kim formally hands over the foreigners’ treasure trove to the Babu and it is a great weight off his mind. The responsibility has been stressing him.

We learn that it is clear proof of the treason of some of the northern princes, sucking up to the Tsar, so the British will replace them. And the Babu tells how he delivered them to Simla where they tried to establish their identity at the nearest bank, having made Russia a laughing stock among peasants along the entire route.

(It’s a slight puzzle in the plot that nothing further seems to happen to the two foreign spies. They are allowed to continue on their way.)

The Babu, in his comic way, announces that Mahbub Ali has come to the house too. He has to go now, to make report, but soon they will all rendezvous up at Lurgan Sahib’s in Simla, tell all their stories and have a party. This is all very convivial and happy.

Very interestingly, Kim is portrayed as being so shattered that he feels quite alienated from the world, almost as if he’s had a nervous breakdown. Nothing will focus, nothing makes sense. Then. Click. It all slots into place.

He looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops – looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things – stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings – a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated house behind – squabbles, orders, and reproofs – hit on dead ears.

‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ His soul repeated it again and again.

He did not want to cry – had never felt less like crying in his life – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true.

It’s a rare bit of psychology, for Kipling. Kim goes outside for the first time in days and lies on the good earth and feels it healing him.

Cut to Mahbub and the lama returning from a walk. Turns out the lama stumbled into a nearby book a few days earlier, and Mahbub leapt in and stopped him from drowning. But the lama insists that this little brook was the River of the Arrow and that he has finally achieved enlightenment. Mahbub mocks, and makes sarcastic asides in his own language, but is impressed by the lama’s utter certainty. He even sees the funny side when the lama asks him to take up Buddhism and follow The Way.

Mahbub the Muslim Pathan stomps off about his business. The lama calmly sits down beside sleeping Kim and wakes him. He sits:

cross-legged figure, outlined jet-black against the lemon-coloured drift of light. So does the stone Bodhisat sit who looks down upon the patent self-registering turnstiles of the Lahore Museum. (p.239)

Neatly tying the scene back to the very opening outside the Lahore Museum. The lama proceeds to tell Kim in all seriousness how, while he (Kim) was recovering, he (the lama) went and sat under a tree, taking no food or water for two days and two nights. And then:

‘Upon the second night – so great was my reward – the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free. This I have never before attained, though I have stood on the threshold of it. Consider, for it is a marvel!’

Freedom from the silly body and its illusions and devilries. Enlightenment. Kipling indulges in a powerfully persuasive vision of the lama’s soul flying completely free of his body, free of the constraints of time and place, and uniting with the Great Soul where everything is always now.

But he felt compelled to return to the body of this poor mortal, Teshoo Lama, in order to show his disciple the way. And the last spoken words of the story are his imprecation to Kim to follow him on the road to salvation:

‘Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold of Freedom to free thee from all sin – as I am free, and sinless! Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance! Come!’

This is a very moving and persuasive end to this long rambling tale. It deliberately leaves completely up in the air the question whether Kim will follow the way and become a seeker for wisdom, or will at some point be reunited with Babu, Mahbub and Lurgan and graduate into a fully-fledged operative in the Great Game.

My money would be the mystical route, for right at the end he is hugely relieved to be shot of the box of foreigners’ correspondence and says the Great Game can go hang. Whereas his reverence for the lama is deep and unashamed.

But the point is Kipling leaves it as a sort of cliff-hanger. A Rorschach test. What you think happens next says more about you than about the story.

Scenes and descriptions

Odd and clotted though Kipling’s prose often is, he strews the book with beautiful word paintings.

In the Jain temple

Kim watched the last dusty sunshine fade out of the court, and played with his ghost-dagger and rosary. The clamour of Benares, oldest of all earth’s cities awake before the Gods, day and night, beat round the walls as the sea’s roar round a breakwater. Now and again, a Jain priest crossed the court, with some small offering to the images, and swept the path about him lest by chance he should take the life of a living thing. A lamp twinkled, and there followed the sound of a prayer. Kim watched the stars as they rose one after another in the still, sticky dark, till he fell asleep at the foot of the altar.

Climbing the foothills

They crossed a snowy pass in cold moonlight, when the lama, mildly chaffing Kim, went through up to his knees, like a Bactrian camel – the snow-bred, shag-haired sort that came into the Kashmir Serai. They dipped across beds of light snow and snow-powdered shale, where they took refuge from a gale in a camp of Tibetans hurrying down tiny sheep, each laden with a bag of borax. They came out upon grassy shoulders still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass anew.

The shikarris who save Kim and the lama

They sat down a little apart from the lama, and, after listening awhile, passed round a water-pipe whose receiver was an old Day and Martin blacking-bottle. The glow of the red charcoal as it went from hand to hand lit up the narrow, blinking eyes, the high Chinese cheek-bones, and the bull-throats that melted away into the dark duffle folds round the shoulders. They looked like kobolds from some magic mine – gnomes of the hills in conclave. And while they talked, the voices of the snow-waters round them diminished one by one as the night-frost choked and clogged the runnels.

There’s story, there’s a plot of sorts, there’s characters. But you could argue that Kim is worth reading, and treasuring, for these descriptions alone.

Secondary characters

Quite apart from the main, recurring characters, Kim has a large cast of walk-on parts, especially when Kim is on the road or on a train with his lama.

Huneefa, the blind witch or mistress of dawat
A long-haired Hindu bairagi (holy man), who had just bought a ticket, halted before him at that moment and stared intently (p.156)
a chance-met Punjabi farmer—a Kafmboh from Jullundur-way who had appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son (p.157)
A white-clad Oswal banker from Ajmir, his sins of usury new wiped out (p.158)
a mean, lean little person—a Mahratta, so far as Kim could judge by the cock of the tight turban (p.167)
A hot and perspiring young Englishman (p.173)
A tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police – belt, helmet, polished spurs and all – strutting and twirling his dark moustache (p.174); this turns out to be Inspector Strickland, an authority figure who appears in other Kipling stories
the Russian spy
the French spy
the man from Ao-chung who emerges as the leader of the rebellious coolies
the Woman of Shamlegh

Kim’s identity crises

Modern literary and art criticism is obsessed the idea of identity and the umpteen different crises it is prey to – gender identity, sexual identity, national identity, ethnic identity, religious identity. Kipling was there 120 years earlier with this story of a boy with an excess of identities: is he the orphan of a British soldier? Or a canny street kid from Lahore? Or a budding young spy for the Raj?

[Ali] ‘Therefore, in one situate as thou art, it particularly behoves thee to remember this with both kinds of faces. Among Sahibs, never forgetting thou art a Sahib; among the folk of Hind, always remembering thou art – He paused, with a puzzled smile.
[Kim] ‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’

And:

[Kim] ‘Hai mai! I go from one place to another as it might be a kickball. It is my Kismet. No man can escape his Kismet. But I am to pray to Bibi Miriam, and I am a Sahib.’ He looked at his boots ruefully. ‘No; I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?’ He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate. (p.101)

Who is Kim, indeed?

A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.

‘Who is Kim – Kim –Kim?’

He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute – in another half-second – he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with a rush of a wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his head.

When the Russian punches the lama, Kim retaliates like a hot-blooded Irishman (his father was Irish and his Irish ‘blood’ is made much of throughout the text). Then he kneels over the lama, cradling his head and speaking like a native.

Then he remembered that he was a white man, with a white man’s camp-fittings at his service.

Lachrymose literary critics, keen to make everything a crisis, lament Kim’s ‘split’ identity and are all-too-quick to make it a symbol of India itself, with some tragic divide between coloniser and colonised. But there are two other, less hysterical ways to think about the issue.

One is the obvious one that is front and centre of the story itself, which is that the depth of the white boy’s knowledge of Indian street life makes him wonderful choice of operative for Creighton and the Department: an entirely positive, good thing.

The other is even simpler, which is that it’s fun and it’s cool. It’s cool being Kim, king of the streets in Lahore, skilled manipulator of railway carriages, of resting places on the Great Trunk Road, teller of tales to big households. Street urchin, loyal disciple, schoolboy, trainee spy. Dressing up and having adventures is what Sherlock Holmes and loads of other protagonists of 1890s adventure stories love to do, and which boys of all ages who read them, wish they could do.

Kipling’s crabbed prose and plotless stories

As discussed in the first of these two Kim reviews, Kipling’s prose is crabbed, abbreviated, littered with Biblical or official or archaic vocabulary, allusive, telegraphic. He uses almost any device in order to prevent it being smooth and flowing and easily comprehensible. It’s the textual embodiment of his barely fierceness, his energy, his sarcasm, his facetiousness. Some sentences just require a double take.

Lurgan Sahib did not use as direct speech, but his advice tallied with Mahbub’s

Meaning that Lurgan didn’t say it so directly as Mahbub did. Odd locution, though, isn’t it? Examples abound. Here’s the start of chapter 11. After being handed his disguise, a small gun, and news from Ali that he’s allowed to go see his lama, Ali then leaves him alone at Lucknow train station, and:

Followed a sudden natural reaction.

Think of all the ways you’d rewrite that to make it smoother, more readable, more enjoyable. No, Kipling prefers the clipped, telegraphese.

The man who couldn’t write plots

I’d like to link this tendency with another major tendency of Kipling’s fiction, which is his struggle to come up with plots, with actual storylines. Many of his short stories do, indeed, have plots, but it’s also quite common to come across ones which are more like anecdotes which have been stretched, or sometimes just like clever ideas which have been padded out. I’m thinking of the ‘story’ of a new-built ship where he gives all the parts voices and shows how they learn to work together. Or the one about the animal inhabitants of an old mill who react to it being hooked up to electric power by its owner. These are good ideas but they don’t quite build up to be actual stories. Ditto, for example, the Just So stories. It’s a brilliant idea, but quite a few of the actual stories don’t quite live up to the original conception.

The Norton edition contains excerpts from letters and relevant writers. In particular it has several short excerpts from the autobiography Kipling wrote right at the end of his life, ‘Something of Myself’. And in these it’s interesting to read not once but twice, he himself conceding that thinking out plots was his chief shortcoming as a writer. He describes the way he chewed over a revised version of Kim with his father, chatting over their time in India over many a pipe of tobacco. It was in this process that many of the very specific details with bejewel the final narrative, its ‘opulence of detail’, were remembered and added. At which point he goes on to write:

As to its form there was but one possibility to the author, who said that what was good enough for Cervantes was good enough for him. To whom the Mother: ‘Don’t you stand in your wool-boots hiding behind Cervantes with me! You know you couldn’t make a plot to save your soul.’ (p.275)

Several things. One, it displays Kipling’s enduring bond with his parents. He was clearly very attached to his mother and father till the end of his life, and this is sweet. Two, this is a typically contorted way of making his point, hiding it behind dialogue with his mother. Three, and this may be because he’s embarrassed to admit such a cardinal failing in a writer, that he had great ideas, brilliant ideas, but struggled to work them up into plots and narratives.

You turn the page and there’s another excerpt from Something of Myself which really rams it home.

Kim, of course, was nakedly picaresque and plotless – a thing imposed from without. (p.277)

Not just this, he then goes on to write a colourful paragraph describing how he ‘dreamed for many years’ of turning the story into a good, solid, three-volume Victorian novel, with a compelling storyline, psychologically rich characters, carefully worked out symbolism etc etc. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

Not being able to do this, I dismissed the ambition as ‘beneath the thinking mind’. So does a half-blind man dismiss shooting and golf.

I think he’s being hard on himself. Tens of thousands of novels are coming-of-age stories which hang a sequence of sometimes pretty random incidents on the notion that they all occurred to the central protagonist and marked his or her ‘development’ and growth from childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Kim is no more random than many of these. In fact I think he does a good job of establishing the main characters – the lama at the start, Mahbub Ali growing in importance, Lurgan Sahib appearing half way through to add colour and variety, then Hurree Babu adding strangeness.

But clearly Kipling himself saw the novel as deficient in plot, and plot-planning as a major weakness in his abilities as a writer.

Is Kipling’s crabbed style a compensation for lack of plot?

My suggestion is that, after reading lots of Kipling, I began to wonder whether his odd, crabbed, cryptic, archaicising, Biblicising prose style was what he twisted up and contorted and worked on instead of plots. He knew he couldn’t make an impact with dramatic stories – so he developed, or jazzed up his already eccentric way of writing, instead.

I imagined him getting more and more frustrated with himself and, in his stress and anxiety, strangulating the English language into ever weirder shapes and locutions, as if the baroque overwroughtness of his prose would somehow compensate for what he himself was very conscious was an embarrassing absence of fully worked-out story.

Credit

Kim was serialised in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. All references are to the 2002 Norton Critical Edition edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.

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by Simon on September 13, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, imperialism, India, Literary criticism, Novel

Tagged 1901, adventure story, Agent C25, Ajmir, Ao-chung, Asiatics, Babu, bairagi, Benares, Bible style, Bildungsroman, Bodhisat, British Army, British government, British imperialism, Buddhism, Buddhist, Cassell's Magazine, Cervantes, chela, Chitor, Christianity, Colonel Creighton, coming-of-age story, coolies, Dacca quack, Delhi, dooli, Enlightenment, espionage, fiction, Great Game, Hindu, Hinduism, holy man, hoori, Hulu, Huneefa, Hurree Babu, identity, identity crisis, imperialism, India, Inspector Strickland, Irish, Islam, Jain, Jain temple, Jainism, Jat, Jullundur, Kafmboh, kilta, Kim, kismet, Kulu, Lahore Museum, lama, Lucknow, Lurgan Sahib, Madame Castafiore, Mahbub Ali, Mahratta, Mr Bennett, Mussalman, narrative, North-West Frontier, Norton Critical Edition, novel, opium, Orientalism, Orientals, Ottoman Empire, Pathan, picaresque, plot, Punjab, quinine, race, Raymond Chandler, Rider Haggard, River of Life, Rudyard Kipling, Russia, Russian Empire, sacrilege, Saddhu, Sahiba, Second Afghan War, Secret Service, Shamlegh-under-the-Snow, Sherlock Holmes, shikarris, Simla, Something of Myself, Spy novel, Spy Story, St Xavier's College, Stevenson, Strickland, Teshoo Lama, The Bankoh, the Department, the Himalayas, the Kashmir Serai, the Mavericks, the Rajah of Rampur, the River of the Arrow, the Sultan, the Woman of Shamlegh, Tibet, Tintin, Tirthankars’ Temple, Victorian novel, woman of Shamlegh, Zohreh T. Sullivan

Posted by Simon on September 13, 2023

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Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling (1937)

At any rate it went into the Weekly, together with soldier tales, Indian tales, and tales of the opposite sex. There was one of this last which, because of a doubt, I handed up to the Mother, who abolished it and wrote me; Never you do that again. But I did and managed to pull off, not unhandily, a tale called ‘A Wayside Comedy,’ where I worked hard for a certain ‘economy of implication,’ and in one phrase of less than a dozen words believed I had succeeded.

I made my own experiments in the weights, colours, perfumes, and attributes of words in relation to other words, either as read aloud so that they may hold the ear, or, scattered over the page, draw the eye. There is no line of my verse or prose which has not been mouthed till the tongue has made all smooth, and memory, after many recitals, has mechanically skipped the grosser superfluities.

Introduction

Kipling began work on this short autobiography in August 1935 as he approached his seventieth birthday. Although he didn’t know it, he had barely six months left to live. In her diary his wife, Caroline (‘Carrie’), wrote that the aim was to ‘review his life from the point of view of his work’. Kipling died in January 1936 but his widow thought the text complete enough to be made public and, after an unknown amount of editing by herself and one of Kipling’s oldest friends, it was published in February 1937.

The Kipling Society have made available online an introductory essay to the book by Thomas Pinney which is very balanced and informative. One of its main points is the way the autobiography completely omits huge areas of his life – not drawing a veil over his early love affairs (as you might expect) but mention of such important events as his young daughter’s tragic death in 1899 (from pneumonia aged just 6) and his 18-year-old son’s death in the Great War.

Pinney points out that Something of Myself contains a number of factual errors, as well as several striking places Kipling gives way to anger and bitterness about corruption, for example (unjustly, apparently) accusing his newspaper proprietors of taking bribes. He also highlights the several places where Kipling really lambasts American culture and society.

Something of Myself is, Pinney concludes, the work of ‘a man writing at the end of a life that had been devoted to so many causes by then defeated or discredited’.

Yes. But there are also many, many revealing passages which shed invaluable light on Kipling’s life, on his formative boyhood experiences and on his own practice as a writer. Foremost among these is the horrifying account of the brutality he was subjected to when his parents left him in England, aged just 6, at the house of a couple who had a track record of looking after Indian ex-pats’ children while they went to English prep school, but who turned out to be sadistic bullies. This was probably the defining experience of Kipling’s life and it is told in grisly enough detail.

For me the two lasting impressions of the book are

1. Wonder

Kipling’s own childish wonder at so many beautiful and fascinating aspects of the world he moved through, and my wonder at the carefree confidence with which he travelled all round the world, living in India, America, South Africa, seeing sights and sounds and smells, building cabins and observing local animals and people – what a life he had!

2. Compressed

On the down side, it has, like so many of his later stories, been worked over and over, sub-edited, pared away and compressed so that quite often it is a little difficult to grasp what he’s talking about: in some places, even after careful rereading, it’s in fact impossible to understand what he’s saying. In works of fiction this has a mysterious, deepening affect; but in a work of fact it repels and distances the reader. You long for the clarity of Charles Carrington’s wonderfully lucid and informative biography.

Something of Myself is divided into eight chapters:

A Very Young Person 1865 to 1878 (toddler years in Bombay and then the horror of being abandoned in England to the ‘care’ of a sadistic landlady)
The School Before Its Time 1878 to 1882 (bumptious account of life at the United Services College, a boarding school for sons of Indian Army officers, and the basis of Kipling’s schoolboy stories about Stalky and Co)
Seven Years’ Hard (return to India where, at age 17, he began gruelling work on a small local newspaper, The Civil & Military Gazette, exposed to the harsh world of British soldiers and the professionals who kept the Empire working)
The Interregnum (arrival back in London in 1889, after his seven years apprenticeship, with a portfolio of stories and poems about India which instantly make his name, the London music halls inspiring the Barrack-Room Ballads)
The Committee of Ways and Means (1892 marriage to Caroline ‘Carrie’ Balestier and move to Vermont in America, where he wrote The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous and much patriotic poetry)
South Africa (Kipling was very involved in The Boer War 1899-1902, moving to South Africa to work on a newspaper for the troops, distributing goods and treats to soldiers, seeing action, hobnobbing with leading British Imperialist, including Cecil Rhodes)
The Very–Own House (the final move to ‘Bateman’s in Sussex, family home for the rest of his life, with loving details of the local scenery and population)
Working–Tools (a fascinating insight into his methods and techniques of composition)

Themes

As with so many of his later short stories, the telling is so compressed and allusive that you read and reread certain passages but still have the sense that you’ve missed something. So much is implied, and so little explicitly stated. Many of the most repeatable stories are familiar from other books, most notably Charles Carrington’s definitive biography, or have been recycled in introductions or footnotes to various editions. Many themes emerge:

Muslims

Being raised in Lahore, in what is now Pakistan, Kipling is much more familiar with Muslims than Hindus. Throughout his work are many Muslim characters who are examples of rectitude and duty. Of all the gods, Allah is mentioned a surprising number of times through the book; the second sentence reads:

‘Therefore, ascribing all good fortune to Allah the Dispenser of Events, I begin’.

And then:

It pleased Allah to afflict H—- in after years…

Our native Foreman, on the News side, Mian Rukn Din, a Muhammedan gentleman of kind heart and infinite patience, whom I never saw unequal to a situation, was my loyal friend throughout.

There were ghostly dinners too with Subalterns in charge of the Infantry Detachment at Fort Lahore, where, all among marble-inlaid, empty apartments of dead Queens, or under the domes of old tombs, meals began with the regulation thirty grains of quinine in the sherry, and ended – as Allah pleased!

There is, or was, a tablet in my old Lahore office asserting that here I ‘worked.’ And Allah knows that is true also!

Those were great and spacious and friendly days in Washington which – politics apart – Allah had not altogether deprived of a sense of humour.

The word ‘Allah’ is clearly used not as by a devout Muslim, but as an indication of ‘God’, of the power that rules the cosmos, in a way which (typically of Kipling) can be ironic, playful, deprecating, but hints at a fundamental seriousness. In fact, throughout the book Kipling takes a fatalistic though optimistic view of his own life, emphasising that many things happened through Fate, with little or no input from himself. He talks again and again about Fate dealing him certain cards, the cards being presented to him, so as to make various decisions (of subject matter and books and ideas) obvious and unavoidable.

Sensual descriptions

Not something you associate with Kipling, but richly wrought descriptions are to be found throughout his work, especially in the frame sections of the stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, and there are sweet touches of it here;

I have always felt the menacing darkness of tropical eventides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs…

There were far-going Arab dhows on the pearly waters, and gaily dressed Parsees wading out to worship the sunset…

Servants

Rich Europeans had armies of servants at this time; even a not-very-successful writer like Henry James appears to have had a butler, a housekeeper and a cook. But in the Empire white men were waited on hand and foot in a way which visiting Europeans found astonishing, and which is inconceivable to us today. As a toddler Kipling had an ayah and a bearer, and was raised in an atmosphere where his clothes were held out for him to get into, his baths were run for him, and even doors were opened in front of him and closed behind him by permanently present servants. Kipling was brought up with servants to do everything. As he wrote of his life in India:

Till I was in my twenty-fourth year, I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or – I was going to say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks. I gave myself indeed the trouble of stepping into the garments that were held out to me after my bath, and out of them as I was assisted to do. And – luxury of which I dream still – I was shaved before I was awake!

World of wonder

Difficult to convey if you haven’t read it, but his autobiography, like his work, gives a fantastic, exciting, boyish sense of the size and scale and wonder of the world. There’s the sights and sounds and smells of India itself; then of the P&O liner back to England; a train journey across the Egyptian desert. Even in grim Portsmouth, the old sea captain in whose care the 6-year-old Kipling was placed, had fought at the naval battle of Navarino (1827) and been disabled by becoming tangled in a harpoon line while whale fishing. He takes the boy to see amazingly romantic old wooden sailing ships at Portsmouth Hard, including one which had sailed up into the Arctic Circle!

Later, in the 1890s, after an apparent nervous breakdown in London, Kipling goes to recuperate on an extraordinary Cook’s tour across the world, sailing in a steamer to Madeira, on to South Africa, then across the Indian Ocean to Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania, back to southern India and by train up to Lahore to see his parents and childhood home one last time, before returning to London.

Here he marries Carrie Balestier (1892) and then – embarks on another awesome honeymoon voyage, sailing west to America, taking trains across Canada to Vancouver, then right across the Pacific to Japan. Wow. And then back to the States and right across the continent to New England where the young couple settle into a primitive one-story cottage, equipped only with an elementary stove and one hot pipe, living in what today would be incredibly primitive surroundings (and in fact sounding strikingly like Robert Louis Stevenson and his bride’s honeymoon in North California, as described in The Silverado Squatters.)

Brilliant details

Kipling makes the world seem exciting and strange and full of vivid, standout details. Somehow, not being imprisoned by the clutter of gadgets which hem in our modern lives, Kipling’s boyish imagination seems to have been freer to observe and wonder. Take his description of what he saw as a child roaming the Victoria and Albert Museum with his sister:

We roved at will, and divided the treasures child-fashion. There were instruments of music inlaid with lapis, beryl and ivories; glorious gold-fretted spinets and clavichords; the bowels of the great Glastonbury clock; mechanical models steel – and silver-butted pistols, daggers and arquebusses – the labels alone were an education; a collection of precious stones and rings – we quarrelled over those – and a big bluish book which was the manuscript of one of Dickens’ novels. That man seemed to me to have written very carelessly; leaving out lots which he had to squeeze in between the lines afterwards. These experiences were a soaking in colour and design with, above all, the proper Museum smell; and it stayed with me.

And even the most humdrum accounts are enlivened by the bright detail or the telling phrase.

We parted, my Captain and I, after a farewell picnic, among white, blowing sand where natives were blasting and where, of a sudden, a wrathful baboon came down the rock-face and halted waist deep in a bed of arum-lilies.

On one trip our steamer came almost atop of a whale, who submerged just in time to clear us, and looked up into my face with an unforgettable little eye the size of a bullock’s.

By pure luck, I had sight of the first sickening uprush and vomit of iridescent coal-dusted water into the hold of a ship, a crippled iron hulk, sinking at her moorings.

Tourists may carry away impressions, but it is the seasonal detail of small things and doings (such as putting up fly-screens and stove-pipes, buying yeast-cakes and being lectured by your neighbours) that bite in the lines of mental pictures.

My verses (The Absent-minded Beggar) had some elements of direct appeal but, as was pointed out, lacked ‘poetry.’ Sir Arthur Sullivan wedded the words to a tune guaranteed to pull teeth out of barrel-organs.

Anti-American

All over the world Kipling rambled and admired what he saw, except for America. The fifth chapter is striking for its sustained attack on the vulgarity, hypocrisy, violence, bad manners and criminality of American society.

I 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.

And always the marvel – to which the Canadians seemed insensible – was that on one side of an imaginary line should be Safety, Law, Honour, and Obedience, and on the other frank, brutal decivilisation; and that, despite this, Canada should be impressed by any aspect whatever of the United States.

His time in Vermont ended badly, harassed by the growing resentment of the locals who just didn’t like a Limey making money and living among them. Anti-British feeling was exacerbated by a political crisis between the two countries over a border dispute in far away Belize (!), and was exacerbated when Carrie and Kipling fell out badly with her alcoholic sponging brother, who lived nearby. The family argument came to a head when the drunk brother threatened to kill Kipling, who unwisely took him to court – an American court. Kipling’s testimony, name and reputation were dragged through the mud by the American gutter press. It was at this point the Kiplings realised they had to leave, and retreated to Britain. But Kipling never forgave America for hounding him out of the house he had helped to build and where he spent the happiest and formative years of his marriage, and where he reached new heights of creativity with the Jungle Books.

The Burne-Jones household

It was of vital importance to him as a boy that he was able, once a year at Christmas, to escape from the house of torment and bullying in Portsmouth to the household of his mother’s sister, Georgiana in Fulham. Georgiana was married to the pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and ran a wonderfully bohemian household where the leading artists and writers of the day – Tennyson, Browning, William Morris – would call round and have dinner – where writing and art and story-telling were all encouraged and understood. The Burne-Jones connection provided a psychological and imaginative lifeline to the beaten and abused little boy and he continued his adoration of his uncle and aunt, moving to be near them when they moved to Sussex, until their deaths.

It is a vital component of Kipling’s make-up: on the one hand the violence of the Portsmouth household, and then of a fierce boarding school, and then the harsh realities of work in India – on the other, the very loving, supportive and creative environment of his artist father, and the astonishingly arty Burne-Joneses.

Violence

It is hard to comprehend the Dickensian level of violence Kipling was subjected to as a boy. He and his sister were sent to England to board with a Mrs Holloway and her sea captain husband in Portsmouth. From here he was tutored by a series of governesses and then sent to prep school. Mrs H turned out to be a tyrant and beat and thrashed the young Kipling repeatedly for every sin and slightest misdemeanour, a woman of narrow Evangelical beliefs who called on God and the Bible as she whipped the little boy. Then in the evenings, their 12 or 13-year-old son, with whom Kipling shared a room, would also beat the daylights out of him.

I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture – religious as well as scientific.

He refers to her as ‘The Woman’ and the place as ‘The House of Desolation’ and gives examples not only of the countless beatings, but the deliberate humiliations. One day, being caught out concealing a bad school report, he was made to wear a big placard on his back spelling ‘LIAR’ and walk through the streets of Portsmouth. When ‘The Son’ is big enough to get a job, Kipling learns to listen intently to the sounds of his footsteps re-entering the House of Desolation at the end of the day, being able to deduce just from the sound of the tread, whether The Son had had ‘a bad day’ and was therefore liable to beat Kipling. It was systematic child abuse on an awesome scale.

Then there was the boarding school he was sent to at age 13, the United Services College.

My first year and a half was not pleasant. The most persistent bullying comes less from the bigger boys, who merely kick and pass on, than from young devils of fourteen acting in concert against one butt.

Not only was there lots of bullying, and fighting even among friends, but also systematic corporal punishment which readers nowadays find hard to imagine.

The penalty for wilful shirking [of sports] was three cuts with a ground-ash from the Prefect of Games. One of the most difficult things to explain to some people is that a boy of seventeen or eighteen can thus beat a boy barely a year his junior, and on the heels of the punishment go for a walk with him; neither party bearing malice or pride.

But it made him what he was.

Nor was my life an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded constant wariness, the habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.

It also, according to his critics (especially the mid-century sage Edmund Wilson in his psycho-analytical essay about Kipling) left an enduring stain across Kipling’s work, in a compulsive need to have his characters behave just that bit too violently, too aggressively, too sadistically, too vengefully, even in his ‘comedies’, which often leave an unpleasantly bitter taste of revenge and humiliation.

Craft and art

In his last years at school he was grateful to the head for giving him free run of the library and taking him on for extra lessons, especially in the skill of précis, the quick summarising of other people’s texts: this was to be invaluable when he returned to journalism aged only 17, and the chapter describing his seven years’ hard labour on the Punjab newspaper emphasises the incredible hard work and long hours and dedication required. Here he gained his lifelong commitment to work, to honest labour, seen as the defining moral virtue. He was, from an early age, attracted by words and rhythms and patterns and sounds… but combined this with a tremendous ability to hold a subject or idea in his head and work it over for days or weeks on end, in his head and on paper.

Most men properly broke to a trade pick up some sort of workshop facility which gives them an advantage over their untrained fellows. My office-work had taught me to think out a notion in detail, pack it away in my head, and work on it by snatches in any surroundings.

There are extended passages about the importance of weighing and judging and deploying words.

My young head was in a ferment of new things seen and realised at every turn and – that I might in any way keep abreast of the flood – it was necessary that every word should tell, carry, weigh, taste and, if need were, smell.

Professionals

Chapter three describes the long hours, day after day, working as one of the only two staff on the Civil and Military Gazette, the daily newspaper of the Punjab. The only place of entertainment was the Punjab Club and it was here that the young journalist found himself precociously thrown into the company of professional men, acquiring an admiration for men who do things which never left him.

In that Club and elsewhere I met none except picked men at their definite work — Civilians, Army, Education, Canals, Forestry, Engineering, Irrigation, Railways, Doctors, and Lawyers — samples of each branch and each talking his own shop. It follows then that that ‘show of technical knowledge’ for which I was blamed later came to me from the horse’s mouth, even to boredom.

It is here that Kipling acquired the journalist’s enthusiasm for facts facts facts, for a full grasps of the technical and geographical and administrative background for his stories, which never left him and which critics have been harsh on.

I was almost nightly responsible for my output to visible and often brutally voluble critics at the Club. They were not concerned with my dreams. They wanted accuracy and interest, but first of all accuracy.

The range of experiences he was exposed to was extraordinary and colourful.

Later I described openings of big bridges and such-like, which meant a night or two with the engineers; floods on railways – more nights in the wet with wretched heads of repair gangs; village festivals and consequent outbreaks of cholera or small-pox; communal riots under the shadow of the Mosque of Wazir Khan, where the patient waiting troops lay in timber-yards or side-alleys till the order came to go in and hit the crowds on the feet with the gun-butt (killing in Civil Administration was then reckoned confession of failure), and the growling, flaring, creed-drunk city would be brought to hand without effusion of blood, or the appearance of any agitated Viceroy; visits of Viceroys to neighbouring Princes on the edge of the great Indian Desert, where a man might have to wash his raw hands and face in soda-water; reviews of Armies expecting to move against Russia next week; receptions of an Afghan Potentate, with whom the Indian Government wished to stand well (this included a walk into the Khyber, where I was shot at, but without malice, by a rapparee who disapproved of his ruler’s foreign policy); murder and divorce trials, and (a really filthy job) an inquiry into the percentage of lepers among the butchers who supplied beef and mutton to the European community of Lahore.

Goals and ambitions

There is a fascinating account of how his thinking developed in his first year of spectacular success in London. At first it was sufficient for the young man to make a big stir and, in the words of a music hall acquaintance, ‘knock ’em over’. But quite quickly he realised this wasn’t enough and, slowly, it dawned on him that he had a sort of duty to show the ignorant hypocritical English something of the world beyond their shores and something of the men and women to all corners of the earth who laboured long and hard to preserve Little Englanders in their peace and wealth – all those hard-working dedicated professionals back in India.

Their [his parents’] arrival simplified things, and ‘set’ in my head a notion that had been rising at the back of it. It seemed easy enough to ‘knock ’em’— but to what end beyond the heat of the exercise?… In the talks that followed, I exposed my notion of trying to tell to the English something of the world outside England – not directly but by implication… Bit by bit, my original notion grew into a vast, vague conspectus – Army and Navy Stores List if you like – of the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire.

It is fascinating to learn that the idea of justifying the British Empire, systematically, was an actual conscious thought-out strategy. What an ambition!

The strain of India

And yet, among all his other contradictions, there is the constant awareness of the psychological cost of serving abroad. It wasn’t all servants and stiff upper lips. Men went mad from the heat and strain, wasted away from horrible illnesses, and there is throughout Kipling’s fiction a sense of men right on the edge of complete nervous collapse.

One must set these things against the taste of fever in one’s mouth, and the buzz of quinine in one’s ears; the temper frayed by heat to breaking point but for sanity’s sake held back from the break; the descending darkness of intolerable dusks; and the less supportable dawns of fierce, stale heat through half of the year… Though I was spared the worst horrors, thanks to the pressure of work, a capacity for being able to read, and the pleasure of writing what my head was filled with, I felt each succeeding hot weather more and more, and cowered in my soul as it returned.

It happened one hotweather evening, in ‘86 or thereabouts, when I felt that I had come to the edge of all endurance. As I entered my empty house in the dusk there was no more in me except the horror of a great darkness, that I must have been fighting for some days. I came through that darkness alive, but how I do not know.

In the joyous reign of Kay Robinson, my second Chief, our paper changed its shape and type. This took up for a week or so all hours of the twenty-four and cost me a break-down due to lack of sleep.

The tendency to nervous prostration followed him to England and dogged the rest of his life.

But in all this jam of work done or devising, demands, distractions, excitements, and promiscuous confusions, my health cracked again. I had broken down twice in India from straight overwork, plus fever and dysentery, but this time the staleness and depression came after a bout of real influenza, when all my Indian microbes joined hands and sang for a month in the darkness of Villiers Street.

A lot that is clipped and understated and repressed and tight about Kipling must stem from this constant need to keep a harsh rein on the ever-present threat of hysteria and nervous collapse.

The uncanny

Related to this note of psychological strain, is Kipling’s persistent eye for the weird and uncanny. He has an unnerving eye for the tellingly macabre detail.

Nor did I know that near our little house on the Bombay Esplanade were the Towers of Silence, where their Dead are exposed to the waiting vultures on the rim of the towers, who scuffle and spread wings when they see the bearers of the Dead below. I did not understand my Mother’s distress when she found ‘a child’s hand’ in our garden, and said I was not to ask questions about it. I wanted to see that child’s hand.

The dead of all times were about us — in the vast forgotten Muslim cemeteries round the Station, where one’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our mud garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and at every point were tombs of the dead. Our chief picnic rendezvous and some of our public offices had been memorials to desired dead women; and Fort Lahore, where Runjit Singh’s wives lay, was a mausoleum of ghosts.

[In London] Once I faced the reflection of my own face in the jet-black mirror of the window-panes for five days. When the fog thinned, I looked out and saw a man standing opposite the pub where the barmaid lived. Of a sudden his breast turned dull red like a robin’s, and he crumpled, having cut his throat. In a few minutes — seconds it seemed — a hand-ambulance arrived and took up the body. A pot-boy with a bucket of steaming water sluiced the blood off into the gutter, and what little crowd had collected went its way.

Night walking

As a result of his childhood beatings in the House of Desolation in Portsmouth, Kipling thinks he must have had a nervous breakdown, and this turns out to be the first of many. When finally rescued from the House of Desolation and brought by his Mother to a boarding house in West London, he takes to what will become a lifelong habit of insomnia and wandering the streets wide awake through the night till dawn.

I did not know then that such nightwakings would be laid upon me through my life; or that my fortunate hour would be on the turn of sunrise, with a sou’-west breeze afoot.

Often the night got into my head as it had done in the boarding-house in the Brompton Road, and I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places-liquor-shops, gambling-and opium-dens, which are not a bit mysterious, wayside entertainments such as puppet-shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the sheer sake of looking. Sometimes, the Police would challenge, but I knew most of their officers, and many folk in some quarters knew me for the son of my Father, which in the East more than anywhere else is useful.

The writing

Style and phrases

I heartily dislike Kipling’s lifelong fondness for cod-Biblical or medieval expressions, or just old-fashioned phraseology – ‘whereupon’, ‘verily’, ‘ere’, ‘whereby’, ‘otherwhiles’, ‘forthwith’ – which I think mars lots of his prose:

We possessed a paradise which I verily believe saved me…

Often and often afterwards…

My eyes went wrong, and I could not well see to read. For which reason I read the more and in bad lights…

After my strength came suddenly to me about my fourteenth year, there was no more bullying; and either my natural sloth or past experience did not tempt me to bully in my turn. I had by then found me two friends…

My House-master was deeply conscientious and cumbered about with many cares for his charges. What he accomplished thereby I know not…

I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not…

Rider Haggard would visit us from time to time and give of his ample land-wisdom… When Rider Haggard heard these things, he rested not till he had made the Colonel’s acquaintance.

Which things are a portent.

Sparkling phrases

On the other hand, cheek by jowl with the irritating archaisms, go sudden bursts of verbal life and insight.

…the Uncle got inside the rugs and gave us answers which thrilled us with delightful shivers, in a voice deeper than all the boots in the world….

Hence our speed to our own top-landing, where we could hang over the stairs and listen to the loveliest sound in the world — deep-voiced men laughing together over dinner.

The country was large-boned, mountainous, wooded, and divided into farms of from fifty to two hundred barren acres. Roads, sketched in dirt, connected white, clap-boarded farm-houses, where the older members of the families made shift to hold down the eating mortgages.

Clipped, crabbed and obscure

The eighth and final chapter, devoted to the craft of writing, is vital. Lots is conveyed in this chapter, but particularly the power of leaving out. The presence of the omissions, the presence of the absences, is something he learned as early as the writing of the Plain Tales and which characterises all his work, including this very compressed autobiography.

A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but every one feels the effect.

He gives a section of clear explicit advice about how to winnow and prune and pare your drafts back to the bone, let them lie, and then do it again, paring away away a\way till you are left with the essentials.

Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the inter-spaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and ‘when thou hast done, repent not.’ The shorter the tale, the longer the brushwork and, normally, the shorter the lie-by, and vice versa. The longer the tale, the less brush but the longer lie-by. I have had tales by me for three or five years which shortened themselves almost yearly.

Which sounds wise and good in theory, but in practice it gives rise to things like the following anecdote.

Occasionally one could test a plagiarist. I had to invent a tree, with name to match, for a man who at that time was rather riding in my pocket. In about eighteen months – the time it takes for a ‘test’ diamond, thrown over the wires into a field of ‘blue’ rock, to turn up on the Kimberley sorting-tables – my tree appeared in his ‘nature-studies’ name as spelt by me and virtues attributed. Since in our trade we be all felons, more or less, I repented when I had caught him, but not too much.

How much of that did you understand? How much are you meant to understand? And any reader of Kipling’s, even devoted fans like Charles Carrington, freely admit that there are some stories which are clipped back so far as to be almost incomprehensible.

Conclusion

Underpinning so much of Kipling’s prose is an irrepressibly exuberant, boyish enthusiasm, even when he’s at his most crabbed and mannered in style, and unpleasant in attitude. It’s the strange combination of all these qualities, the good and the bad, which make the later stories, particularly the ones in Credits and Debits, so powerful and unsettling.

Elusive, crabby, deliberately neglecting huge subjects, dwelling on trivia, you can accuse Something of Myself of various sins – but it was his life and he had a perfect right to write about it as he pleased. And on the plus side, it is full of absolutely vital, irreplaceable biographical information – Charles Carrington confesses that his (definitive) biography would have been incomparably poorer without the hundred telling details which Something of Myself includes.

It’s a relatively short book and required reading for anyone who wants to understand or get a fuller flavour of this strange, unpleasant, jovial, weirdly imaginative and hugely important writer.

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