Feb 2025 – False Dawn
‘Tomorrow I go to a big meeting of the local Masonic Lodge’, wrote Rudyard, early in 1888. ‘Let us hope they’ll give me some decent material’, he went on. ‘I’m in low water again.’ His anxiety was prompted by a big promotion that had made him editor of The Week’s News, a new supplement to the Allahabad Pioneer. He was also expected to provide the paper’s fiction. It was not a good time to run out of his stock of stories. But he got a grip and ‘False Dawn’ was one of the first of a flood of stories he would create in the weeks to follow.
He had to come up with the goods, it was life or death: he knew he had to get his work known outside India if he was to present himself as a successful writer in London and he’d done all he could with the opportunities India offered. Lying awake at night, as he told us, he would ponder what kind of work, what sort of story, would ‘take’ with the reading public in England.
I won’t spoil the story for you by saying too much about it. I still take pleasure in its invitation to enter a world touched with glamour by its Indian setting, even while the author also wants to rob me of any delusions concerning the British inhabitants. I turn to it for an account of extreme experience in the storm, ‘roaring whirling darkness’ and ‘lightning spurting like water from a sluice’, details that give the scale of what is going on between the lovers.
There’s one bit of background that I will add as a footnote: Rudyard had particular reason to be thinking about the psychological stakes around getting engaged. His sister Trix, to whom he was devoted, had recently broken off an engagement that her family had always thought ill-judged. Yet she remained tearful and uncertain, giving John Fleming, her tenacious ex-fiancé, hope and baffling her brother. (After many of these hesitations she went on to marry Fleming, an outcome which brought little happiness to either.)
Jan 2025 – Kaa’s Hunting
What draws me back to this particular Mowgli story? When I came on the Jungle Book as a little girl it opened a door onto a new world, one that was more alive, more radiant with feeling; though I couldn’t have named it, I think I sensed it was more truthful, too. The world I was being taught to inhabit was bleached—blame post-war austerity, the nuns at my convent school, as you will.
I loved the Jungle Book right from the opening incantation
‘Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—’
That tone of magic comes with an undernote of threat, for the herds have to be protected, ‘shut in byre and hut’ from the ‘talon and tush and claw’ of the proud and powerful creatures that stalk abroad. For me, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ creates that sense of ruthless threat, embodying it in Kaa’s terrifying hypnotic power over all other animals, even while holding it in balance. Countering that threat is the care of Baloo and Bagheera, in teaching Mowgli before putting their lives at risk to save him from the bundar-log, the lawless and dangerous monkey people.
Decades after that first reading I spent several years immersing myself in Kipling’s personal experience in order to write Kipling and Trix, my fictionalised account of his life. These days, as a reader, I find myself picking up other patterns in his writing, connections between ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ and his earlier visit to the abandoned ancient city of Chitor, described in Letter XI, of Letters of Marque (1888). Memories of that sinister ruin may lie behind the Cold Lairs of ‘Kaa’s Hunting’. In Chitor he felt a terror, a sense of ancient danger that threatened to overwhelm his very identity: he felt ‘he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or …the Gau-Mukh (river) would continue to pour water until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and crush him flat.’ I find that terror of the loss of self to be echoed in his account of the mesmerising power of the great rock-snake to overwhelm identity in others.
(Letters of Marque are well worth reading for entertainment: they were written as he was sent travelling in Rajasthan, a twenty-three year old, who had made India too hot to hold him.)
As for the bundar-log, I sense they owe a good deal to the child’s pained response to the social world little Ruddy found on arriving in Southsea. Remember ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’? When Auntie Rosa takes steps to have him humiliated among the other boys, Punch can’t contain himself: ‘If I was with my father,’ said Black Sheep, stung to the quick, ‘I shouldn’t speak to those boys. He wouldn’t let me. They live in shops. I saw them go into shops—where their fathers live and sell things.’ It’s not an attractive response, I admit, but it reflects the social stratifications that boy, Ruddy’s stand-in, had been brought up with. At home in India little Ruddy had also grown up hearing talk among adults, Indian and English, that was often intelligent and thoughtful. In later years, now a writer, he didn’t forget the impression made on him as a child when overhearing conversations between the adults who were Auntie Rosa’s friends: perhaps in the limited interests and concerns of the bundar-log, he was recalling those speakers.
Dec 2024 – Beyond The Pale
I feel a bit shy about suggesting ‘Beyond the Pale’: though it could be described as ‘a rattling good yarn’ it is undoubtedly a horror story, one which turns on an image of mutilation that’s hard to forget. Only gradually does the story reveal its depths and resonances. At first reading it appears a tale written to confirm Sahibs in their fears of the apparently uncivilised and unpredictable ways of the Native.
No doubt many subscribers to the Civil and Military Gazette, the newspaper based in Lahore, where Kipling had been employed as a journalist since his late teens, would have taken it that way. But the story, which first appeared in the first Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills, was also aimed, like the other tales in that collection, at readers outside India.
Twenty-three when it came out, in later years Kipling described how he had lain awake in those early days, puzzling how to create a product that would ‘take’ as he put it, with a wider reading public, the public at home where he hoped to make his name. No wonder if young Kipling’s Tales tended to the sensational! For Oscar Wilde, ‘as one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity’.
When he spoke of ‘reading life’ I think Wilde was recognising the truthful vision that underlay the all too apparent horror of ‘Beyond the Pale’. Alongside the tiresomely knowing or patronising tones of one authorial voice, we hear another. The voice of ‘The Love-Song of Har Dyal’ sings of passionate longing, a physical longing that is brutally suppressed. Bisesa is no helpless victim, no ‘little Bisesa’ but a sexually experienced woman whose sexual desire is savagely punished. Trejago himself went about the world in hiding, walking Lahore under a burqa, his desires concealed: the injury to ‘his groin’ he receives, from Bisesa’s avenging uncle suggests castration or impotence. It’s a barely spoken critique of the empty social interactions between women and men that are all Trejago can look forward to.
Nov 2024 – Baa Baa Blacksheep
If you haven’t come across this story or even if it’s one that’s familiar from past reading, do click on it here. But first, brace yourself. Its tale of traumatised children is written from the angry heart. It tells of the damage inflicted on little Rudyard and his still younger sister, Trix, when their parents went back to India and the children were left in the power of an ignorant and bigoted foster-mother. We know it’s no more than the truth, though some critics haven’t wanted to believe that; when she was seventy his sister, Trix, confirmed his account in her essay ‘Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’ which was published in Chambers’s Journal.
Kipling wrote Baa Baa Black Sheep when he was twenty-three and had left the home of his parents for a second time, voluntarily on this occasion. That new moment of separation may have prompted him to revisit his shock and confusion as a child. The attempt to capture it in writing disturbed him, for Edmonia Hill, his hostess in Allahabad, noted what an awful temper he developed as he worked on it. In transforming his experience into a story, he did manage to overcome some of his turmoil, not least by giving thought to his little sister Trix and exploring how those years had damaged her. To know more about Trix, I recommend Barbara Fisher’s biography, Trix: The Other Kipling.