I’m
not sure what started this train of thought.
I might have been thinking about portrayals of the Raj, or the
relationship between colonials and Empire, A
Passage to India, Shakespeare Wallah,
The Man Who Would Be King, and I
drifted into more personal reminiscence.
My dad
grew up in the wilds of Elyria,
Ohio, and was sent East to
boarding school when he was fifteen. He
was the youngest of five boys, and followed in his brothers’ footsteps. I think plainly my grandmother Ada thought they’d get a
better secondary education; it almost certainly helped them get into a good
college. My own experience with boarding
school started at the same age, but I didn’t profit from it nearly so
well. I’m bringing this up because it
has a parallel in Rudyard Kipling’s exile and return – you could definitely do
something with this as metaphor, but I mean it literally, Kipling at five years
old, uprooted from the heat and light of Bombay, packed off to the damp south
coast of England, abandoned to the rigid torments of an unyielding Evangelical orthodoxy.
I
don’t in any way mean to suggest my experience, or my dad’s, was anything like
Kipling’s. I idealize my father’s
childhood, in fact, as some sunny upland of innocence, an unshadowed place out
of Booth Tarkington or Don Marquis, gigging for frogs and going barefoot and
swimming nekkid in the turbid shallows of the Black River,
but this is utter nonsense, nobody’s
childhood is unshadowed. As for his
years at Milton,
he remembered them with enough affection to encourage me to apply there. I wound
up going somewhere else, and I wasn’t crazy about the whole prep school formula,
either, but it was a long way from Dickensian horror. Kipling wasn’t so lucky. The years in Swansea, in the care of a retired Merchant captain
and his wife, were manipulative and abusive.
Kipling’s own account, sixty years later, in Something of Myself, unflinchingly conveys his bewilderment and
terror, the House of Desolation, he calls it.
“Often afterwards, [my] beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told
anyone how I was being treated. Children
tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally
established.” The despair is absolute, a
lifetime after, the injury never forgiven.
Kipling
says a couple of very interesting things about this period. First off, remember that he was imprisoned
there for six years, aged five to eleven.
He says, Turn a boy over to the Jesuits, for that time of life, and
they’ll own him for the rest. He also says,
There were few books in that house. But
when they found this out, his parents sent him books, and they were
rescue. Lastly, he talks about his strategies
for combating abuse. “If you
cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he
wants to go to sleep), he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie
and retailed at breakfast, life isn’t easy.
Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to
tell, and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.” Well, yes.
This is a very sly admission on Kipling’s part, that the cruelty he
encountered here was an engine for his imagination. You don’t have to be a survivor of domestic
dysfunction to recognize the coping mechanics; even a pretty healthy family
dynamic can require navigation. Kipling
is saying that the habit of secrecy, of concealment, of lies, is a survival mechanism, it’s protective
coloration. Oh, and he sings for his
supper. He begins to make up
stories.
Happily,
this isn’t taking place in a complete vacuum.
He doesn’t have close relatives in England, but there are a few close
enough to see the kid’s miserable, and his mother shows up finally to effect
his escape. (He never seems to blame
them for this, by the way, Alice and John, his parents. They identify as Anglo-Indian, overseas
English, and it’s common practice to send your children home to Great Britain
so they don’t go native. The problem
being that the foster family Kipling and his sister Trix were lodged with are
opportunistic scum.) We can all too
easily imagine the twelve-year-old boy’s apprehension that he hasn’t broken free, that this is all a
cruel joke, that the House of Desolation will open its jaws to him again, but no,
this isn’t an imaginary release, they spend a careless spring and summer near
Epping Forest, and we can’t help but think this is remembered in Puck of Pook’s Hill.
(One
of Kipling’s gifts, it seems to me, is his enormous sympathy with
childhood.
He re-imagines it.
Reading his children’s stories - or having
them read aloud to you -
The Just-So
Stories,
The Jungle Book,
Puck of Pook’s Hill and
Rewards and Fairies,
Stalky & Co., you can hear how each of
them are pitched for a different ear.
The Just-So Stories are clearly aimed at
four to six,
Puck of Pook’s Hill and
Rewards and Fairies aimed at a slightly
older audience, say
seven to ten.
But he’s never condescending.)
Kipling
was twelve going on thirteen when he went to public school at Westward Ho! It was of course a curriculum that emphasized
muscular Christianity, but the boy, Beetle in the Stalky stories, got his
growth. We imagine it was tough at first
– did they even have hot bath water? – and there was caning, and
institutionalized bullying by the upperclassmen, and for all of that, he pulls
up his socks and soldiers on. This isn’t
the torment of Swansea,
it’s a discipline
he can embrace.
He
wasn’t, however, a terrific academic success.
His grades weren’t good enough to get him a scholarship to Oxford, and his parents didn’t have the means to pay his
tuition, so John lined up a job for his son back in Lahore, assistant editor of The Civil and Military Gazette.
Kipling
docks in
India
in October, 1882.
He’s just shy of
seventeen, and he’s been away for eleven years.
“I found myself at
Bombay
where I was born, moving again among sights and smells that made me deliver in
the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not.
…My English years fell away, nor ever, I
think, came back in full strength.”
These
next seven years account for Plain Tales
from the Hills, Soldiers Three, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee
Willie Winkie, along with poetry and six days a week of newspaper
content. The boy, once bereft and cast
out, is home again. His engine burns
furiously.
Kipling was always full of industry, and his energies never deserted him, even if age slowed him down a little in the last five or so years of his life, but nothing matches the fever of that time in India. Both the Gazette and its sister publication, the Pioneer in Allahabad, were dailies, and he refers to the newspaper work as Seven Years’ Hard. He clearly wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything else.
Try as he will, no man breaks wholly loose
From his first love, no matter who she
be.
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose,
That didn’t settle somewhere near the
sea?
I
admit I have a real weakness for writers like Kipling, and Sir Walter Scott, and Dickens,
or for that matter John O’Hara, who just pour
it on. Their invention, their
freshness, their sheer concentration,
is astonishing. I’m sure they have their
moments of despair and doubt. But they
lace up their God damn game shoes, and go out to play, with the score against
them.
Kipling
is one of those guys who’s anything but transparent. In disguise, he takes on other voices, he
protects himself. He’s still in a boxer’s
crouch. Restless and forlorn. The boy, abandoned, finding refuge in
stories, a larger fate, a secret destiny.
Kim. Kipling the spy. The writer as double agent, infiltrating his
own narrative, reporting back to us at great personal risk from an occupied
country, where the real enemy is trust.
Famously,
he says of Bombay:
The cities are full of pride,
Challenging each to each –
And she shall touch and remit
After the use of kings
(Orderly, ancient, fit)
My deep-sea plunderings.
This
is a man who put regret aside, but regrets color his life. He forgets nothing, and forgives less. Kipling absorbs,
and apologizes. Not even Dickens is less
himself, or more. Hidden, he rings true,
as clear as water.
