Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (13 page)

This RAC inspector of toilets and letter boxes, we shouldn’t forget, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature only four years previously. But this didn’t temper his relentless and quotidian curiosity. 24 March 1914: ‘Grand Hôtel de Grenoble is not too good, and they also charged 5fr to wash car which I must report to AA.’ Five days later, in Chartres: ‘As usual, bathroom
Hot
was cold. Had some talk with a man in a 1905 Wolseley.’ 4 May 1921: ‘arr. Newhaven 4.25, but not away (in heavy shower) til 5.20. All quite smooth but slow. Must write AA.’ Despite the chauffeur-driven Rolls, despite the fact that he walked with captains and kings, the Kipling who emerges from these notes is an archetypal motorist, occasionally joyful but mostly fretful and frustrated. ‘Cabourg to Caen: road crowded. 76 cars in 31 miles!’ ‘Lost way between Dreux and Nonancourt – never trust nice strangers.’ ‘First time I used Michelin map which I found very convenient.’ ‘Lunched in wet pines by roadside with a tin of unopenable foie gras.’

Why did Kipling love France? Like many other Francophiles, he responded to its ‘immense and amazing beauty’. He liked its food – preferably solid rather than grand, and at a reasonable price. ‘They understand belly-service in Alsace,’ he noted; while his daughter recalled ‘a long detour in a day’s motoring to sample the pigs’ trotters in a town noted for this delicacy, and which a French general had said should not be missed’. In his poem ‘France’ (1913), he described the country
as ‘Furious in luxury, merciless in toil’. Kipling was not much interested in French luxury, and whereas others, having begun by admiring the landscape and the food, might continue gourmandising on the culture, the sense of style, the social or intellectual milieux and the
douceur de vivre
, he preferred to admire what many overlooked: the merciless toil.

It was a country that worked, and worked hard and efficiently. In India, Kipling had met forestry officials expertly trained by the French at Nancy. After the Great War he witnessed the extraordinary resilience and fortitude with which the French cleared up the wreckage and started again. On his motor tours he discovered pastoral and agricultural virtue, admiring villages and farmsteads where women, children and even dogs worked to full capacity. In 1933 he published
Souvenirs of France
, sixty pages (out of print ever since) of memory, praise, nostalgia and gratitude. There he recalls visiting an agricultural fair in the provinces and inspecting various appliances. ‘I asked an agent how long a certain manure-pump would last –
marche
being the word I used. The answer was illuminating. “If you leave it lying out in winters, as you English do, it will not
marche
more than two years. Give it shelter and it will
marche
for 10.” ’

In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in 1922, Kipling claimed that for the English, the French were ‘the only other people in the world that mattered’ (probably untrue then, certainly now). In ‘France’ he calls the two countries ‘Each the other’s mystery, terror, need and love’. Perhaps what he most admired in France was what he thought his own country could do with more of. Work ethic, thrift, simplicity; ‘the acceptance of hard living which fortifies the moral interior as small pebbles assist the digestion of fowls’. Self-discipline; but also external discipline. One aspect of social life that distinguished France and much of Continental Europe from Britain before the Great War was conscription. Kipling believed that a period of enforced military service promoted not only
civic virtue but also a fundamental seriousness of mind which he felt his compatriots lacked. A Frenchman once said to him: ‘How can you English understand our minds if you do not realise those years of service – those years of service for us all? When we come to talk to you about life it is like talking about death to children.’

If Kipling took France to his heart, the attachment became mutual. He seems to us such an English writer, such a British imperialist, such a pungent purveyor of the lore and language of his tribe, that it comes as a surprise to find how well known and widely read he was in France. On 26 March 1913 his motor-notes show him sheltering from the rain in Bourges Cathedral, ‘where met highly intelligent young French priest who knew all about the
Jungle Book
. Gratifying to notice the spread of civilisation in Gaul.’ General Nivelle gave him a tour of the front line in 1915, and with a gesture to the French troops under his command, remarked, ‘All these men know your books.’ Kipling smiled at the presumed civility, but Nivelle then took him to another sector where ‘Sentries with rifles told me the same thing. Weird non-coms in dugouts echoed it till I nearly thought it was a put up job of the general. But ’twasn’t. ’Twas true.’

Nor were his fans just among the poilus. ‘I only dreamed of the jungle,’ Jules Renard confided to his journal, ‘Kipling has been there.’ A few months before his death in 1893, the critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine had
The Light That Failed
read to him by his nephew André Chevrillon. ‘
C’est un homme de génie
,’ commented Taine; and Chevrillon attested that his uncle had never previously applied the G-word to any living writer. The novel – Kipling’s only attempt at the longer form – was generally more admired in France than England. Sarah Bernhardt offered to produce a stage version; and Kipling concluded in his autobiography, ‘I always fancied that it walked [sic] better in translation than in the original.’

One consequence of this French fame was that anonymity on the motor tours was hard to preserve. Kipling’s family used to say that three days was the maximum they could stay in one place without his identity being discovered. A soldier would accost him in the street and bear him off to the nearest officers’ mess; a priest would make an occasion of his visit to a church; by the third day, the mayor would be threatening a civic reception and they would all have to flee.

Kipling’s French, according to his biographer Charles Carrington, ‘was fluent, though inaccurate, and powerfully helped out by gestures’. At school, he had been taught the language with the help of a clever trick:

Verne and Dumas led to Balzac, Rabelais and Maupassant; he found Scarron ‘dreary’ and Anatole France ‘a fraud’. He also read Colette, whose animal stories he judged ‘so much better than mine’. In a letter of 1919 to André Chevrillon, he mentions his early reading, adds a life of Dumas that made his head ‘spin with excitement and inchoate ideas’, but concludes: ‘Otherwise the French influences (except a few days in Paris in ’78) seem to have been few.’ Two years later, receiving an honorary doctorate at the Sorbonne and doubtless playing a little to the occasion, he made the debt sound greater: ‘I will not confess (what must be evident to my literary confrères here) how much in my art I have learned and applied
both consciously and unconsciously from the masters of that art in your country.’

The truth lies somewhere in between. Direct literary influence is small. Kipling called
The Light That Failed
‘a sort of inverted, metagrobolised phantasmagoria’ on Prévost’s
Manon Lescaut
. He also used French settings in three of his late stories – ‘The Miracle of Saint Jubanas’, ‘The Bull That Thought’ and ‘Teem’; strangely, in the last two of these he used French animals (a Camargue bull and a Périgourdin truffle hound) as running metaphors for the artist and his travails. But overall, French influence on Kipling is of a more diffuse kind. Put Rabelais, Balzac and Maupassant together and – against the background of late-nineteenth-century English Literature – they make an argument against gentility and for specificity. Kipling was much accused of ‘vulgarity’ and ‘cruelty’ – in other words, of being democratic in personnel and truthful in theme and detail. An early exposure to French literature would have endorsed this aesthetic.

Angus Wilson was rather snooty about Kipling’s Francophilia. ‘Perhaps the love is a little self-conscious, a little the stereotype of France made by many Englishmen, especially of the upper-middle classes, in the 1920s, when many of them decided to settle there.’ But Kipling’s attachment to France was much more than that of a motor tourist who found the climate an improvement and the peasantry picturesque. It was a bond made lifelong – and sealed with blood – by the Great War. The sealing was both general and personal. Addressing a university banquet at Strasbourg in 1921, he expressed British losses with a comparison pitched directly for his audience. From Calais to Reims, he told them, ‘We English have left there, a larger army than Napoleon left in Russia – 400,000 of the bodies of our own sons, beside a multitude of whom no trace remains.’ He went on: ‘They died with your sons. Have we forgotten where they died? Ask any man or woman
in any English street or field. They will give you at once the name of some little demolished French village of which, perhaps, even you have never heard. They will tell you the very turn of road to it, the very hedge beside the orchard where their man fell.’

Some of his audience would have known that among the ‘multitude of whom no trace remains’ was Kipling’s only son, John; and that the father could indeed give his last known address – near Red House, on the edge of Chalk-Pit Wood, among some slag heaps and miners’ cottages. John Kipling volunteered at the outbreak of war, a few days before his seventeenth birthday; rather humiliatingly, he was refused on grounds of poor sight. His (equally short-sighted) father used his influence to wangle the boy a commission in the Irish Guards; he was shipped out to France in August 1915, and by the end of September was among the 20,000 British dead at the Battle of Loos. Kipling’s response was grief, pride, silence and, after the war, ceaseless, detailed work for the War Graves Commission. It was he who proposed the inscription on the Stone of Sacrifice in the military cemeteries: ‘Their name liveth for evermore’. He drafted texts for memorials to the British dead in French cathedrals; was responsible for the nightly ceremony of the Last Post at the Menin Gate; and was one of the originators of the plan to bury an Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.

What his motor-tour diaries reveal is that he was just as assiduous an inspector of graveyards as ever he was of French hotels. In one three-day period in 1924 he visited twenty-four cemeteries. Now, shadowed by the death of his son, Kipling’s dry, methodical notes take on a terrible poignancy. ‘Dury. No headstones. Stones stacked for a year.’ ‘Ferme Buterne: bad right of way – inaccessibility.’ ‘Cemetery register top and sides need painting – book inside all damp and register inside will go to pieces if not kept dry.’ ‘4.50. St Mary’s A. D. S. Spoilt by gardener’s shed.’ ‘Arras Road. (No book), a tiny (Canadian)
cemetery beautifully flowered, alone in a ploughed field, and the farmer pinching with his plough into the right of way. To report this.’ ‘NOTE. Nothing but the smallest plants should be set in front of the headstones as they hide the relatives’ texts.’

On 13 May 1922, at Meerut: ‘Cemetery austere and dignified – in spite of bake-house crematorium on corner where Hindus had been burned. All sorts burned here inside stone wall, spaced with what should be dignified evergreens (like cypresses) in years to come … Went round graves, spoke to gardeners, etc etc. I saw grave of Gunga Din, dooly-bearer.’ Kipling worked as a War Graves Commissioner for the last eighteen years of his life, from 1918 to 1936. He gave intense support to this vast, unprecedented act of national remembering. Every fallen soldier was to be reburied in a marked grave, each with his own headstone; and there was a particular, unassuageable pain in the fact that Kipling could bow his head before the grave of Gunga Din and 400,000 others, but not before that of his son John, whose body was not identified until the 1990s.

As part of his work as a commissioner, Kipling visited the military cemetery in Rouen. ‘Mar. 13 1925,’ his motor-diary records, ‘Got into Rouen (de la Poste) @ 10.30. Put small things into our rooms and went off at once to Cemetery (3,400 headstones up out of 11,000) where saw the gardener and contractor. All the place has been levelled and looks sloppy and dirty.’ Of course, Kipling had by this time inspected scores of cemeteries and met numerous gardeners, and there is no sign from the rest of the day’s notes that this was any different. He went to the marketplace in Rouen ‘to do penance where Joan was burned’ (he was a great devotee of the Maid and seriously apologetic over her immolation), then ‘a bad dinner but decent champagne and so to bed’.

But the next day his motor diary makes unprecedented reference to work in progress. ‘Have begun a few lines on
the story of Helen Turrell and her “nephew” and the gardener in the great 20,000 cemetery.’ On and off for the next ten days he records progress on ‘The Gardener’, one of his greatest short stories, a tale – like his own post-war life – of rigidly suppressed grief. As Kipling’s quote marks suggest, Michael Turrell is not Helen’s nephew but her illegitimate son, and her social shame compounds her suffering as she endures the cycle of pain Kipling had known ten years previously: from the ‘inevitable series of unprofitable emotions’ when Michael is posted missing, to the ‘physical loathing of the living and returned young’, whose presence emphasises her loss. Helen Turrell’s epiphany comes at the Hagenzeele Third Cemetery in Belgium. Lost among the countless, counted dead, she asks a gardener where she can find her ‘nephew’, and with ‘infinite compassion’ he replies, Christlike, ‘Come with me and I will show you where your son lies.’ Since the story ends with this shimmer of the transcendental, it’s worth noting that Kipling and his Roller passed through Lourdes the day before he finished it; although, typically, he observed to his diary that the town was ‘quite empty and no miracles going on’.