THE USE OF LITERATURE/FLAT HEROISM

Dreams. How we live in them. How they make the days of keeping appointments and spending time in the company of people who say things we've heard in just those same words a thousand times...just a little more bearable. Without them, what an utter desolation of predictability and frustration. Even for the best of us. Even for the most unstructured of us, the freest of us. Dreams. Without them, the suicide statistics would be catastrophic.

The key word here is desolation: without solace. From The Harlan Ellison Hornbook.

If England were what England seems
An' not the England of our dreams
But only putty, brass an' paint
'Ow quick we'd drop 'er. But she ain't.

Kipling, from 'The Return'.

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It's been quite something to return to reading the Hornbook after a gap of fifteen years or more. It's verbose in places and dated in many others, but much or most of it remains forceful and invigorating and encouraging and just plain entertaining.

The Kipling lines come from my mother's copy of Other Men's Flowers by Lord Wavell (still in print from Pimlico). The plate inside the cover states that it is a prize for Lower 6th English, and is signed by the headmaster, F. Spencer Chapman, a genuine WWII hero whose The Jungle is Neutral is a classic account of guerilla warfare (republished in 2006 by Birlinn).

Incredibly, what appears to be the original Time magazine review from 1949 is available online; the last paragraph reads:

The Jungle Is Neutral is packed to the boards with incredible adventure and impressive evidence of human fortitude, but it is written without a note of excitement, understated to the point of monotone. For that reason, and by the simplicity of its statement, it makes most first-person war books seem almost shrill.

Though I haven't read The Jungle is Neutral, this description tallies with my reading of Eastern Approaches, which is weirdly unaffecting despite everything which takes place in it. You know: holed up in the Sahara after a disastrous night raid, half the men lost or killed or injured, water low, ammunition low, random aerial bombardment from the Germans, who know they're out there somehere: "Our position...left much to be desired."

I mentioned this to a friend in the Army, and he more or less shrugged his shoulders and said, of course. How do you communicate the uncommunicable to those who weren't there?

FLY SEEKS WALL

At ‘the little Savile’ I remember much kindness and toleration. There was Gosse, of course, sensitive as a cat to all atmospheres, but utterly fearless when it came to questions of good workmanship; Hardy’s grave and bitter humour; Andrew Lang, as detached to all appearances as a cloud, but—one learned to know—never kinder in your behalf than when he seemed least concerned with you; Eustace Balfour, a large, lovable man, and one of the best of talkers, who died too soon; Herbert Stephen, very wise and very funny when he chose; Rider Haggard, to whom I took at once, he being of the stamp adored by children and trusted by men at sight; and he could tell tales, mainly against himself, that broke up the tables; Saintsbury, a solid rock of learning and geniality whom I revered all my days; profoundly a scholar and versed in the art of good living. There was a breakfast with him and Walter Pollock of the Saturday Review in the Albany, when he produced some specially devilish Oriental delicacy which we cooked by the light of our united ignorances. It was splendid!

From Chapter IV of Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling.

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It was indeed an immortal evening. Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats' eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation, that in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age, and my solemn Jerusalem flashing up by the flame of the fire, with Christ hanging over us like a vision, all made up a picture which will long glow upon

that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

Benjamin Robert Haydon, quoted in The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes [2nd ed.] p172.

The full excerpt is too long to quote in full, but for anyone up for a laugh, let alone having an interest in literary history, I can't recommend looking it up too highly. Note that the 2nd edition is now OP, and the 3rd edition (recently published) contains a completely different selection.

KIPLING'S MOT JUSTE

From Wressley of the Foreign Office:

One of the many curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere in the painter’s sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale them against. They do their work, and grow to think that there is nothing but their work, and nothing like their work, and that they are the real pivots on which the Administration turns. Here is an instance of this feeling. A half-caste clerk was ruling forms in a Pay Office. He said to me, ‘Do you know what would happen if I added or took away one single line on this sheet?’ Then, with the air of a conspirator, ‘It would disorganise the whole of the Treasury payments throughout the whole of the Presidency Circle! Think of that!’

If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.

This is pretty typical of Kipling's work, certainly the early Kipling: cynical, superior, funny, precise, and the mean-spirited edge softened a little by an acknowledgement of the other fellow's point of view, or of the narrator's own weakness. Edward Said, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Kim, has a fair old go at its author while still admitting that it is a great book; Orwell snipes at Kipling now and then in Orwell in Tribune, yet he still quotes from him and makes reference to him. I guess that may be a tribute to Kipling's talent, the truth and relevance of much of what he wrote, and especially his enormous popularity. Whether one agrees or no, Kipling seemed to speak for many of the English of his time, and he could speak to them, and listen as well, at all levels of society. What writer nowadays could claim to do that?

I must admit to being in awe of his technical ability. This is the start of 'On Greenhow Hill':

'Ohé, Ahmed Din! Shafiz Ullah ahoo! Bahadur Khan, where are you? Come out of the tents, as I have done, and fight against the English. Don’t kill your own kin! Come out to me!’

The deserter from a native corps was crawling round the outskirts of the camp, firing at intervals, and shouting invitations to his old comrades. Misled by the rain and the darkness, he came to the English wing of the camp, and with his yelping and rifle-practice disturbed the men. They had been making roads all day, and were tired.

Ortheris was sleeping at Learoyd’s feet. ‘Wot’s all that?’ he said thickly. Learoyd snored, and a Snider bullet ripped its way through the tent wall. The men swore. ‘It’s that bloomin’ deserter from the Aurangabadis,’ said Ortheris. ‘Git up, some one, an’ tell ’im ’e’s come to the wrong shop.’

‘Go to sleep, little man,’ said Mulvaney, who was steaming nearest the door. ‘I can’t arise an’ expaytiate with him. ’Tis rainin’ entrenchin’ tools outside.’

‘’Tain’t because you bloomin’ can’t. It’s ’cause you bloomin’ won’t, ye long, limp, lousy, lazy beggar, you. ’Ark to ’im ’owlin’!’

‘Wot’s the good of argifying? Put a bullet into the swine! ’E’s keepin’ us awake!’ said another voice.

A subaltern shouted angrily, and a dripping sentry whined from the darkness—

‘’Tain’t no good, sir. I can’t see ’im. ’E’s ’idin’ somewhere down ’ill.’

Ortheris tumbled out of his blanket. ‘Shall I try to get ’im, sir?’ said he.

‘No,’ was the answer. ‘Lie down. I won’t have the whole camp shooting all round the clock. Tell him to go and pot his friends.’

Ortheris considered for a moment. Then, putting his head under the tent wall, he called, as a ’bus conductor calls in a block, ‘’Igher up, there! ’Igher up!’

The men laughed, and the laughter was carried down wind to the deserter, who, hearing that he had made a mistake, went off to worry his own regiment half a mile away. He was received with shots; the Aurangabadis were very angry with him for disgracing their colours.

The main body of the story is pretty thick with Victorian sentiment, but the framing narrative, and especially the ending, is simply sublime. Brutal, but sublime.

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Email is back up.

KIPLING'S GUANTANAMO

From "On the City Wall", first published December 1888

Whence it is easy to see that mere men of the flesh who would create a tumult must fare badly at the hands of the Supreme Government. And they do. There is no outward sign of excitement; there is no confusion; there is no knowledge. When due and sufficient reasons have been given, weighed and approved, the machinery moves forward, and the dreamer of dreams and the seer of visions is gone from his friends and following. He enjoys the hospitality of Government; there is no restriction upon his movements within certain limits; but he must not confer any more with his brother dreamers. Once in every six months the Supreme Government assures itself that he is well and takes formal acknowledgement of his existence. No-one protests against his detention, because the few people who know about it are in deadly fear of seeming to know him; and never a single newspaper 'takes up his cause' or organises demonstrations on his behalf, because the newspapers of India have got behind that lying proverb which says the Pen is mightier than the Sword, and can walk delicately.

Now check out the fate of Ahmed Urabi, who led a revolt against the European, particularly British, domination of Egypt. The entry on the Urabi revolt itself has more on the background, although I'd personally want to confirm this from other sources. Interesting to see debt being used, then as now, as a weapon.

Incredibly, there is a street in Pontypridd named for the deciding battle of the revolt, somewhat modified as Telelkebir.

MMM....DOUGHNUTS

"If the landowner finds that one of the twain (and God knows whether he beat one or both, but this man is certainly beaten) be in the city, there will be a murder done, and then will come the Police, making inquisition into each man's house and eating the sweet-seller's stuff all day long."

From 'Gemini' by Rudyard Kipling, in The Man Who Would Be King and other stories. Date of first publication: 1888. Some things never change.

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In Louis Cornell's notes to 'The Strange Ride of Morrowby Jukes' he writes that it "reflects the dominant influence of Poe's tales of the fantastic." In the introduction to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, John Seelye writes, "Setting out with Huck in search of buried treasure, Tom clearly operates under the influence of such fictions as Poe's 'The Gold Bug'." In the essay 'My First Book' RLS writes, "No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe"; in his introduction to Treasure Island Seelye writes, "As for Stevenson's other, acknowledged borrowings, such as the parrot from Robinson Crusoe, the stockade from Marryat, and the pointing skeleton from Poe's 'The Gold Bug,' these are perhaps best regarded as tributes to authors Stevenson admired."

All of which makes me wonder if it isn't high time that I read some stories by Edgar Allen Poe. I've read about him, in Brian Aldiss's excellent Trillion Year Spree fourteen years ago, and I know that he's widely credited with having invented both the detective story and the science fiction story, but that's it.

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Seelye goes on to write, "And so it goes, that joint interweaving between texts that is not only essential to the notion of genre but suggests the larger kinship, the DNA as it were, that joins the various members of the great family of adventure fiction in one common blood-bond."