Kipling and the Kuch-nays

MOM

By ANTHONY BURGESS IN Singapore, a few years ago, there was a slogan competition, run by the 'Tiger' beer company. One of the winning entries was : If all Malaya's rivers Could run with 'Tiger' brew, How grand to be an ikan, For think what ikon do.

Ikan is the Malay for a fish. This kind of bilingual punning was very common in British colonies and protectorates. The interaction be- tween English and a non-cognate native language could produce, at its highest, quasi-literary pleasure; at its lowest, it was the facetiously macaronic dialect of a tribe. When an English- man was repatriated from the colonies, he had not so much to relearn a mode of communica- tion as to cauterise a whole communicative area of his brain. Coming home meant the abandon- ment, except in memory, of a whole area of experience and the language to go with it. When Malay calls a curry hot, it distinguishes between panas (temperature, as of tea) and pedas (spiciness), just as rice in the field is padi, in the store bergs, on the table nasi. Of what use is this linguistic knowledge in England? A writer who learned his trade in a colony was bound to feel deprived when he came home to practise it. This was my experience; how much more must it have been Kipling's.

This point about language is not made in Dr Cornell's book,* but it seems to me as relevant as any other factor in the analysis of Kipling's highly idiosyncratic contribution to British literature. Kipling used more of the English lexis than any writer except Joyce and Shakespeare, and it was because of his bilingual upbringing in India. The literary dialect as he found it had, when it could no longer be enriched by India herself, to be referred back to its earlier historical phases ('I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed') or peppered with the colloquial and the technical. The Kipling additives are a substitute for lost Hindi.

Dr Cornell concentrates on other matters, and perhaps we ought to start by summarising the facts of Kipling's early life. He was born in Bombay and spent his first six years there. His sensuous development was in terms of heat, gold and purple fruits, Hindu gods, the vultures from the Parsee Tower of Silence dropping the hand of a dead child into the garden, tree-frogs, the night-wind in the banana-leaves.

It was not all idyllic. One of Kipling's 'Nursery Rhymes for Little Anglo-Indians' ends : 'When the hot weather comes/Baby will die—/ With a fine pucca tomb/in the ce-me-te-ry.' Kipling's moral development was not helped—nor was that of any Anglo-Indian child—by the feudal defer- ence of ayah, jhampani, ,nehter, dhobi and sais.

* KIPLING IN INDIA. By Louis L Cornell. (Mac- millan, 30s.) t RGDYARD KIPLING. By J. I. M. Stewart. (Gollancz, 28s.) Sent home with his sister Trix to lodge with strangers—the Holloways in Southsea—he found himself rudely thrust out of his snaky Eden. The story `Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' describes the horror of the change—the murky Victorian Christianity he'd never met before, full of threats of hell; the demotion from infant despot to very ordinary middle-class boy; the white ayah ('Aunty Rosa') who doesn't call him sahib but beats him. It was the first and perhaps the most lacerating of the Kipling traumata: it confirmed him in Anglo- Indian attitudes which he never lost. One can always sniff either snobbery or inverted snob- bery. He could identify with the raj and the Sweeper, the colonel and the Tommy, but never with the English middle class.

J. I. M. Stewart, in his fine general study of Kipling,t goes so far as to suggest that a fear and dislike of women was a more fundamental consequence of the Southsea days. Mrs Hollo- way is often just 'the Woman,' and Mr Stewart sees 'something savage about the capital "W."' Taking time off from Dr Cornell's specific ex- amination of Indian Kipling, and looking ahead with Mr Stewart at Vermont Kipling, P and 0 Kipling, and Burwash Kipling, one can see how 'the House of Desolation went further than the inculcation of class-feeling and intermittent misogyny. Blake said that a tear is an intellec- tual thing. 'Aunty Rosa' made hate an intellectual thing: she was herself a Blakian emanation, symbol of the darkness in a child's cosmogony. Kipling's later hates can be frightful, even un- clean. And we can accept with Mr Stewart that his view of life was 'as sombre, in essence, as was the vision of his great elder contemporary among English writers, the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy.' It is not pure fancy to find the roots in Lorne Lodge, Southsea.

But he was thrust by Mrs. Holloway into the protective life of the imagination, enclosed by a fence and ruled by magic; he was to become what Auden called 'the poet of the encircle- ment.' He was predisposed to literature by his pre-Raphaelite parents and Burne-Jones relatives and, despite 'Prooshian' Bates in Stalky & Co., found another Morris-Burne-Jones enthusiast in Price, the real headmaster of the United Ser- vices College at Westward Ho! in Devon. If he kept his verses to himself at school, it was because they were private, not because he might be ragged for being a poet. Back home in India (for it really was home), the infra-literature of colonial journalism presented the only possible career for a word-troped young man unfitted for business (unthinkable), army (kad sight) or the ICS (too competitive). And so the years of sub- editing for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore.

We are familiar with the newspaper galley- slave who dreams of literary fame with the verses and novels he writes off-duty, keeping his art and his sub-craft separate. The remarkable thing about Kipling is that he moved to art through his journalism and, to the very end, kept some- thing of the journalistic in his art. Had not his parents shown Victorian prudence, he might halm stayed in London, writing moony poetry on the Bohemian fringe. In Lahore one con- formed. After all, one needed an audience, and that audience was in the club.

Kipling's early achievement was to raise the level of taste in his local Anglo-Indian readership by contriving a verbal intensity that could avoid the mawkishness of the imitation Rossetti and Swinburne that flourished back in London. He used parody on various levels. 'Sing a Song of Sixpence/Purchased by our lives—/Decent Eng- lish gentlemen/Roasting with their wives' was on the lowest. Much more subtle, foreshadowing the really mature Kipling, was:

Mother India, wan and thin, Here is forage come your way; Take the young Civilian in, Kill him swiftly as you may. . . .

That is from 'A Vision of India,' which parodies Tennyson's 'Vision of Sin.' As Dr Cornell says, the parodic element 'has become a rhetorical device to heighten our sense of the speaker's lack of "poetic sentiment" about life and death.' The Anglo-Indian's stoic approach to the horrors which qualified the glory of the raj is finding a voice.

Kipling's first published story, 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,' found its way into the Civil and Military, despite the editor, Stephen Wheeler's, discouragement of 'literary' journal- ism. But what Kipling, who had abandoned all efforts at what he thought of as 'serious' poetry, regarded as prose literature was little more than sub-Poe fantasy. It was the sub-editorial eye, the need , to notate the actual and give it hard unrhetorical compression that turned Kipling into the master of a unique short-story form. 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows' has its smoky, opium-tainted, Poe-like elements, but it is much more the prototype of the Conrad study (imitated but debased by Maugham) of the white man going to pieces on Black Smoke. In other words, it is a new kind of naturalism, and it could only come from a writer working in the East.

Dr Cornell reminds us that, though Zola and Maupassant were still not much read in England, it was not too hard to get hold of them in India. And, even when they were not translated, Kipling had enough French. But Kipling, unlike the home-based writer, did not need to get his realism and irony from foreign models. He had developed the ironic approach through verse- parody and straight-faced reportage; the subject- matter—not available to sweet stay-at-homes— was in the province of a journalist. The thing we have to remember about the first really mature story collection—Plain Tales from the Hills—is the primary Anglo-Indian audience. Kipling was not exploiting the exotic for the titillation of readers back in England; he was presenting a mirror to the people who took a regular Simla holiday and knew Mrs Hauksbee well. That Kipling was able to communicate with an audi- ence bigger than Lahore may be ascribed to the great artist's insight, which sees the universal in the local; he wrote for Anglo-Indians as Shakespeare wrote for Elizabethans.

Kipling's vision of the India that made him a writer was—as we know from all his Indian writings—far from liberal. He did not like the English middle class and he did not like the Indian middle class either. He preferred the pre- Mutiny India, with high and low fixed immutably in a. formal frieze. It was perhaps his unwilling- ness to see how a new India was already emerging

from an articulate middle class that prevented his doing more than composing merely frag- mentary pictures of India, and not some epic prose or verse work that should be animated by a sweeping historical insight.

There remains something of the Lahore journa- list about all his work—the magazine stories, the `occasional' verses. And, in all the repatriate years, whether in New England or East Sussex, the urge to find a place and a mythology in which to feel at home—as he had felt at home in Bom- bay and the Punjab—strikes with great pathos. He was the product of a system which could accept the unequivocal terms of feudal loyalty, the language of parable and prophecy; he wrote for a minor autocracy. But a member of that autocracy, back home in England, is nothing more than a kuch-nay—a middle-class nonentity. By a terrible irony, the kuch-nays of England, praying for 10 per cent, made him their own poet.