Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (14 page)

In old age, despite having his cars ‘put down’, Kipling continued to visit France. He wintered in Monte Carlo and Cannes, while noting, as early as 1926, that ‘the motor car has made the Riviera an hell – and a noisy, smelly one’. The last two decades of his life were lived with acute and recurrent abdominal pain, heroically resisted (once, in Paris, doubled up in agony, he clutched a cushion to himself and said, ‘I think this time I’m going to have twins’). He constantly feared cancer; over a seventeen-year period nine different British doctors offered eight different diagnoses; in 1921 all his teeth were extracted, to no beneficial effect.

In 1933 he fell seriously ill in Paris, and a French doctor correctly deduced that he had been suffering from duodenal ulcers. It was by now too late to operate, and Kipling died
– in London, on his way to Cannes – three years later. But if it was ‘through the eyes of France that I began to see’, it was fitting that France also spoke to him one final, diagnostic truth.

W
HEN TALKING ABOUT
my novel
Arthur & George
I am sometimes asked – by a deerstalkered profile in the shadows of the bookshop – how my fascination with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began. My answer often comes as a disappointment: I was drawn to the story, I explain, by its other eponym, George. Arthur came inevitably attached to him. I would have been just as happy – indeed perhaps happier – if my novelist-as-man-of-action had been someone else: Kipling, for instance. I choose the name deliberately, because the two writers were virtual coevals; further, they were friends, fellow imperialists, men of loud public opinions, and golf companions who once played a round together in the snows of Vermont with the balls painted red.

While a slight air of let-down may be sensed in my questioner, I also find – as is often the case when answering questions in public – a contradicting surtitle running through my head. Would I have been just as happy? Happier? True, Kipling was by far the greater writer, recognised as a genius even by those (such as Henry James and Max Beerbohm) who were at the distant end of the aesthetic spectrum; but would this make him an easier, or more fulfilling, subject than a fine professional storyteller who happened to have created a literary archetype? What if Kipling had come attached to my story and I had found him impossible to recreate imaginatively? He was prickly and private (though this could have been an advantage); he regarded any form of biographical venture as the ‘Higher Cannibalism’; he even left us a famous
admonitory ‘Appeal’ – ‘And for the little, little span / The dead are borne in mind / Seek not to question other than / The books I left behind.’ Was it, in fact, possible to put Kipling into a novel at all?

Jérôme and Jean Tharaud clearly thought so: their roman à clef,
Dingley, l’illustre écrivain
, was first published in 1902 under the editorial direction of Charles Péguy, then rewritten and republished in 1906. It was a popular success, won the Prix Goncourt, and was translated within the year into Spanish and German – though never into English. Kipling’s biographer Charles Carrington stoutly dismissed it as ‘plainly a hostile criticism of Rudyard Kipling presented in the form of a romance’, but others detected more literary virtue. André Gide wrote in his Journal for 9 January 1907: ‘I greatly admire the work of the Tharaud brothers on their
Dingley
, of which I am reading the excellent revision. But how this sort of reworking several years after the event amazes me and remains foreign to me!’ Gide’s praise is, admittedly, offered in the context of greater self-praise (‘I cannot, I have never been able to, rewrite a sentence later; all the work that I put on it must be when it is still in a molten state; and each sentence strikes me as perfect only when retouching has become impossible’), but even so. Gide rarely read anything that was less than serious.

The Tharauds were born at Saint-Junien in the Haute-Vienne (Jérôme in 1874, Jean three years later) and brought up in Angoulême, then Paris. Jérôme was a fellow student of Péguy at the École Normale Supérieure; Jean became secretary to the novelist and mystico-nationalist Maurice Barrès. The brothers – no doubt following the example of the Goncourts – first set up as co-authors in 1898 with a novel called
Le Coltineur débile
, and continued their creative association for the next half-century. The younger would write the first draft, then the elder would correct, adjust and fine-tune. Exoticists after the fashion of Pierre Loti (they wrote of Palestine, Persia,
Romania, and were in Morocco at the same time as Edith Wharton), they were also ‘shrewd and solid Limousins’, as my 1920s literary
Larousse
informs me. ‘They are by nature optimists and the pity they feel in the presence of misfortune springs less from their suffering hearts than from their capacity to understand everything. They have the melancholy of the widely read who in all circumstances remain clear-sighted witnesses.’ Yes, the French always have written about literature in a different way.

The Tharauds began writing at a time when the French and British empires were at a high point of rivalry, and French responses to Kipling were a microcosm of broader geopolitical attitudes. Like their most famous novelist, the British were more active, more vulgar, more can-do. Their empire was bigger and brasher than that of the French; and the Fashoda Incident had recently brought the two powers to the edge of intercolonial war. To the British, Fashoda was and remains just a strange place name at or beyond the margins of memory; to the French, an event hugely magnified by propaganda and lost pride. In July 1898, eight French and 120 Senegalese soldiers arrived at a ruined fort on the Sudanese Upper Nile, having spent two years crossing the continent to get there (Frenchly, they set off equipped with 1,300 litres of claret, 50 bottles of Pernod and a mechanical piano). They raised the
tricolore
and planted a garden. Their main purpose was to annoy the British, and they did, a little: Kitchener turned up with a sizeable force and advised them to leave. He also gave them copies of French newspapers, in which they read of the Dreyfus case and wept. The two sides fraternised, the matter was handed over to the politicians, and six months later a British band played the Marseillaise as the French withdrew. No one was hurt, let alone killed. How could this not have been just a tiny comic sideshow? But that is a British response (also, one from the side that forced the withdrawal). To the French, it was a key moment of national humiliation and dishonour. It
also made a profound impact on a certain six-year-old French boy, who in later years remembered it as ‘a childhood tragedy’. How was Kitchener to know, as he was drinking warm champagne with eight Frenchmen at that distant fort, that this encounter would play out, four decades later, in de Gaulle’s obstreperous, anglophobe behaviour in wartime London exile, and six decades later in his triple refusal to allow Britain to join the Common Market?

Though the name Dingley has only a chiming resemblance to Kipling, any pretence of artistic or legal disguise vanishes from the opening lines of the Tharauds’ novel: ‘Everywhere that English was spoken, the name of Dingley, the famous writer, was known. Even children were familiar with it: they learned to read from his books. In truth, he was a man with an incomparable freshness of imagination. He seemed to have been born at the very dawn of the world, at a time when the senses of our distant ancestors were still as keen as those of the beasts.’ This Dingley has quartered the globe in both his life and his work, combining within himself ‘the active instincts of the English race with the dreaminess and questing soul of the Hindu’; he has ‘become familiar with glory at an age when a man is still able to enjoy it’; and he has written a tale which translates back into English as ‘The Finest Story in the World’. He is now in his forties, ‘a small man with dry, angular features, the upper lip defended by a bristly moustache, and grey eyes lying in wait behind steel-rimmed spectacles’.

So: Kipling, with one or two minor variations or ignorances (like giving the writer an Oxford education). But as the reference to his incomparable imagination suggests, this is a subtler portrait than Carrington implies. Dingley’s genius, his energy, his ceaseless curiosity are all acknowledged; what is questioned is the use to which the famous imagination and the public fame are put. There is also the charge – equally made against Kipling in England – that the writer’s aesthetic has become compromised by his temperament. Perhaps the
novel’s key line is: ‘His passion for the picturesque had stifled his sense of human sympathy.’ A parallel complaint to that made by Flaubert’s mother about her son: ‘Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.’

Dingley
opens during the first weeks of the South African war (in which the French sided with the Boers). The streets of London are full of martial cries; also of recruiting sergeants and the spindly, underfed cockneys whom they target. Dingley observes a scene of entrapment in a tavern, and conceives the idea for a novel in which one such London street-sweeping will be taken up and morally transformed – made a man of – by the experience of military discipline and war. How, though, can Dingley write such a story without first examining the picturesque setting against which his tale will unfold? And so he decides to set off for South Africa, just as Kipling had done – and, for that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle. Kipling went as an observer and propagandist, Doyle as a doctor (though he came back a propagandist); they overlapped for several weeks in the spring of 1900, but appear not to have run into one another.

It’s clear that the Tharauds knew a certain amount about Kipling’s private life. Thus, they marry their Dingley to an American wife with French blood (Kipling’s Caroline Balestier was of Huguenot stock). But whereas Carrie Kipling supported her husband in every word and deed – to the extent that her expressions of military zeal and gloating revenge during the Great War still cast a chill – Mrs Dingley’s French blood turns her into the voice of rational dissent and wifely contradictingness. So when Dingley describes the theme of his planned book to her, she proves a robust literary critic: in her opinion, street-sweepings very rarely become heroes. Why, indeed, should a man be morally improved by massacring farmers in a distant land? Surely the experience would make him more, rather than less, of a brute? The novelist dismisses these thoughts as ‘the argument of a clergyman – or a Frenchman’. She, in
reply, warns him against becoming ‘the apostle of a harsh and selfish imperialism’.

The Tharauds find happy mileage in such Anglo-French conflict. They set Dingley up as an exemplar of British imperialism, but also allow into his mouth subtler criticisms of France, and of the failings of the French imperial project. On the voyage out to the Cape (accompanied by his critical wife and their young boy Archie), Dingley falls in with a French journalist whose ‘Gascon excitability’ provokes the Englishman to the traditional defence of Empire: civilisation not conquest, railways and telegraph not greed and gold. But then he elaborates: ‘Are we doing anything more than continuing the project which you French started a couple of hundred years ago and then lost your taste for? It’s quite understandable, of course. You prefer to stay at home, and why not? Who would deliberately quit
la belle France
? Whereas we British are the Auvergnats of the world.’ (The Auvergnats were by tradition the wandering workers of France, obliged by poverty and poor soil to leave their native province.) The British may be plodders, but what they build lasts; the French specialise only in dash and dazzle. Passing St Helena, Dingley is moved to muse on the career of Napoleon: for all his world-shakingness, the Corsican’s ambitions, when set beside the achievements of Disraeli or Cecil Rhodes, had merely been those of an Italian
condottiere
.

As the Dingleys disembark at Cape Town (staying at the Mount Nelson Hotel, just as Kipling had done) the novel becomes both more adventuresome and more serious. Dingley’s previous certainties come under threat. For a start, the war is going badly: if the British Army can be outflanked and undermined by a handful of determined Boer farmers, what will become of the Empire? And what will become of Dingley himself? In the presence of real soldiers and real action, he feels himself less than adequate as a man – he is a mere writer, one whose commanding officer, the Muse, is ‘an obscure
authority, a cowardly and female power’. This is a strikingly accurate prediction of how Kipling was to feel in 1915, when he went to the Western Front as a war correspondent. Though entitled to wear uniform, he declined on the ground that, unlike the troops, he had not earned khaki. Describing his tour of inspection in
France at War
, he specifically invoked the sense of being an inadequate civilian – worse, a writer – in the presence of troops likely to die: ‘The soldiers stared, with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who scuttled through their life for a few emotional moments in order to make words out of their blood.’

A trip across the veld to the front line in the company of a photographer, Melton Prior, deepens Dingley’s artistic unease. Prior’s images of landscape and battlefield are so dismayingly swift and accurate. What will become of Dingley’s art if photography deprives him of his key strength, the rendering of the picturesque? Like the rest of his colleagues, he will be reduced to churning out ‘psychological novels, French adulteries and Slav moralities’. It is during this upcountry foray that Dingley is recalled to the Cape by news that young Archie has gone down with a fever. Improbably setting off by himself at night-time, he stumbles into an encampment of Boers led by one Lucas du Toit, who turns out to be an old friend and fellow Oxonian (French novelists often seem to believe that everyone in England has been educated at Oxford). Du Toit, on hearing the purpose of Dingley’s journey, sends him on his way. This compassionate act points up one of the novel’s main themes: pity, its operation and its lack. What matters it that you build an empire if in the process you lose your soul?