itEVIEW OF BOOKS
Philip Mason on Amis, Kipling and the modern mind
Long ago I read something by J. B. Priestley about Evelyn Waugh. Immense admiration for the style and structure of his work was balanced — said Priestley, as I remember him — by a thorough disagreement with everything he wrote and stood for. That is not quite the expectation with which I pick up a book by Kingsley Amis. Elegance of style, a craftsman's achievement of his purpose, yes, I am confident of that — but it is with a good deal less than half of what he says that I expect to disagree.
This volume* is part of a Thames and Hudson series; it is pleasantly produced and interspersed with pictures and marginal decorations. Compared with John Gross's compilation on Kipling, published by Weidenfeld three years ago at the same price, it is inevitably slimmer and there is no colour; illustrations that appear in both are smaller in this but there is a good deal that is new. The total effect is very attractive, but Kingsley Amis must have found it inhibiting to be allowed so limited a space. On the whole it is what he does not say that surprises me more than what he does. But let us look first at points of positive disagreement and, to begin with, at the unhappy five years in Kipling's childhood when his parents left him with strangers while they were in India.
Any assessment of what this meant to him depends on the extent to which you regard the story `Baa Baa Black Sheep' as founded on fact. Of course it was fiction; of course the effects were heightened. But Kipling came back to the theme twice and by the end of his life he had persuaded himself that what he had been through himself was much what had happened to the little boy in.the story. I am not sure that he was actually sent through the streets with a placard reading LIAR on his back, as the boy in the story was, but I am quite sure that he was made miserable by the sense of desertion, and the feeling that he was no longer loved, which he endured from his sixth to his eleventh year. Kingsley Amis plays down this unhappiness and its effect on his life and writings. He says: "all children . . . need opposition . . . before puberty" and goes on that: "Rudyard got what he needed." This is part of the 'No nonsense, let's be simple' line which he sometimes likes to adopt.
Compare this with his attitude to another episode. Kipling had imagined himself in love when he went to India — not quite seventeen — and had nourished the sentiment in "a tender twilight way"; he met the girl again when he came back to London at the age of twenty-four. This time he took it much harder; he pursued her and was repulsed. Kingsley Amis writes of this episode: "Did he go to bed with her? Nobody knows, or is going to tell, or (I imagine) cares much either way." But this is to look at 1890 in the mood of 1975. In 1890 people did care about such things, and I am convinced that Kipling was deeply hurt by a rejection that was complete. The Light That Failed would have been quite a different book if he had gone to bed with her. It is stiff with the uncomprehending anger of the rejected. Mr Amis concludes a little later: "Nothing contradicts the view that (Kipling) was an ordinary monogamous man." I agree that he was monogamous (and probably monogymous) but it is a strange phrase. Surely to a novelist no men are ordinary and few monogamous.
In short, it is Kingsley Amis's view that Kipling's work was much less influenced by his life than I think it was. He does not of course question the unevenness of the work, but he does not allow legitimacy to the extraordinarily wide range of opinion that is held about the value of different stories. Shortly before reading his book, I received a letter from a widely read and usually critical friend who wrote: "You will hardly deny that The Man Who Would be King is one of the best short stories in the English language." Well, I
would deny it; I agree with Kingsley Amis that the setting is much too long, but I would not go so far as he does when he calls it "grossly overrated" and "intolerably garrulous". Again he dismisses the whole collection called 'The Day's Work' as containing "not a single first-rate story"; he does not mention 'The Bridge Builders', with which it opens, nor 'The Brushwood Boy' with which it ends. But the first of these has been highly acclaimed by recent critics of repute, and by any reckoning it throws a light on Kipling's attitude to British rule in India which completely upsets the usually accepted legend. 'The Brushwood BOY is, in my view, a sentimental fantasy but it attracted at one time almost a cult of admirers: Later there is no mention of 'The Gardener which several recent critics have regarded as his best story.
I regret that Mr Amis has not addressed himself more seriously to the question that most puzzles me — the passion with which people have identified themselves with Kipling, in particular with such a story as 'The Brushwood Boy', and the equally passionate dislike he has aroused. I have heard of n° annual meetings of the Conrad Society; there is no quarterly paper devoted to the works of Shaw or Barrie; admirers of Wells and HardY do not refer to themselves as 'the faithful' — but all these marks of respect are paid t° Kipling. I believe myself that he was secretly convinced he was an underdog, but spent a good deal of time pretending to be a top dog; since a large part of the human race also fall into this category they feel a sympathy with what he is saying. And since he was a genius with words and had moments of brilliant vision, he can say it very effectively. But that is by no means the whole story.
It is easier to understand the dislike Kipling arouses. In the first place he missed few chances of abusing 'intellectuals', who after all include the people who assess a writer and the esteem in which he is held. And Kipling also has real faults. I am grateful to Mr Amis for the phrase "paraded wisdom", which exactlY expresses an element I find distasteful in manY Kipling stories — though I mind it much less in The Jungle Books than in many others; although it is there that Mr Amis finds it There is the hysterical laughter at physical misfortune. There is the fascination at crueltY which runs side by side with compassion. Of course Mr Amis discusses all these points, and is often illuminating, but I wish that he had had the space and the freedom from editorial direction to direct his sceptical and empirical mind in more depth to these questions. A book that is part of an illustrated series obviously imposes limitations, and these have often forced him to make an ex cathedra pronouncement without much discussion. Again and again one would like to hear more and since opinions about Kipling vary so widely, an unqualified pronouncement sometimes sounds rather grumpy.
It need hardly be said that there is a great deal in this book to applaud. Mr Amis is a writer of distinction and he has convinced Me that Kipling "regarded his craft too much as 3 craft, something too exclusively and self absorbedly concerned with the craftsman and the finished product. He knew the full story in each case so he would cut out the bits that bored him even if they contained necessary information . . . " And I am glad we agree on the excellence of the opening of `Love-o'' Women,' with which his essay ends. But there are far too many questions on which I feel that the discussion has only just begun.
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