Collected Essays (20 page)

It makes rather repellent reading, this long record of slights, grievances, verbal brutalities. Is it a true portrait? We are dealing with a mind curiously naïve (on one occasion she refers to Edward Thomas in uniform, wearing his khaki ‘without ostentation, but correct in every detail’), unable to realize imaginatively her husband’s devotion to his art, a mind peculiarly retentive of injuries. The triviality of her attacks on Ford Madox Ford, for example, is astonishing. For how many years has the grievance over a laundry bill fermented in this not very generous brain? After a quarter of a century the fact that Henry James served Mrs Hueffer first at tea has not been forgotten.

She writes of Ford that he has reviled Conrad ‘when he is beyond the power of defending himself’. The truth is that no one did more than Ford to preserve Conrad’s fame, and no one has done more than Mrs Conrad to injure it in this portrait she has drawn of a man monstrously selfish, who grudged the money he gave his children, who avoided responsibilities by taking to his bed, who was unfaithful to her in his old age. Of this last story we should have known nothing if it were not for Mrs Conrad’s dark hints and evasions here. ‘I made no comment’: this is the phrase with which the story of his slights so often ends. But I do not think she is conscious of its complacency any more than she is conscious that the phrase with which she describes herself at the end of her book, one who has ‘the privilege and the immense satisfaction of being regarded as the guardian of his memory’, must seem to her readers either heartless or hypocritical.

It would be easy to cast doubt upon these ungrammatical revelations (on one occasion her memory fails her completely in the course of a paragraph). But there is obviously no conscious dishonesty in the one-sided record; the writer does not realize how damaging it is. ‘The dear form’, ‘the dear fellow’, ‘the beloved face’, one need not believe that these are meaningless endearments; it is simply that her mind is of a kind which harbours slights more easily than acts of kindness. She suffered – you cannot help believing that – suffered bitterly in this marriage, but it has never occurred to her that Conrad suffered too:

From the sound next door (we have three rooms) I know that the pain has aroused Borys from his feverish doze. I won’t go to him. It’s no use. Presently I shall give him his salicylate, take his temperature, and then go and elaborate a little more of the conversation of Mr Verloc with his wife. It is very important that the conversation of Mr Verloc and his wife should be elaborated – made more effective – more
true
to the character and the situation of these people.

By Jove! I’ve got to hold myself with both hands not to burst into a laugh which would scare wife, baby, and the other invalid – let alone the lady whose room is on the other side of the corridor. Today completes the round dozen years since I finished
Almayer’s Folly.

‘His own picturesque language’ is Mrs Conrad’s phrase for this tortured irony.

1935

THE PUBLIC LIFE

T
HIS
record
*11
of amazing energy, of dinners and cruises and casinos and Blue Trains, of a life crammed with public appearances and yet a life which found time in the small hours before the first engagement for a literary production of enormous quantity, is curiously reminiscent of James’s fantasy of
The Private Life.
James, it will be remembered, was fascinated by his vision of Robert Browning, the diner-out, with his ‘loud, sound, normal, hearty presence, all bristling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views’, and his other personality ‘who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wote admirably deep and brave and intricate things’. And for comparison there was another figure in the London of his time:

that most accomplished of artists and most dazzling of men of the world whose effect on the mind repeatedly invited to appraise him was to beget in it an image of representation and figuration so exclusive of any possible inner self that, so far from there being here a question of an
alter ego
, a double personality, there seemed scarce a question of a real and single one, scarce foothold or margin for any private and domestic
ego
at all.

One must not press the comparison with Browning or Wilde too far, for Bennett was obviously a man of as much greater honesty and human kindliness than the one as he was a much smaller writer than the other. His engaging vanity about his clothes (the shoes which cost five guineas a pair) and the hotels he stayed in, his sometimes rather absurd self-assurance (‘I may say that I disagree with Einstein’s theory of curved space’), were only aspects of his honesty. He may have led as public a life as Wilde’s, but he was not concerned, except in his superficial vanities, with the appearance he made; he spoke of what he thought whether it might damage him in the eyes of the unsympathetic or not.

And unlike Browning’s his public life had become his work: the huge hotels, the yachts, the
wagons-lits
, the company of millionaires and Cabinet Ministers: these were his material. No writer has been more shaped by success: genuinely shaped, for the literary conscience which was nurtured on Flaubert never allowed him in his serious work to write for the sake of popularity. Popularity simply overtook him. For the public life was not his first material – at the time of
The Old Wives’ Tale
– and he made one mysterious, because so unexpectedly successful, return, away from Lord Raingo, to the people for whom his sympathy had been deeper, who moved his creative brain, perhaps because they belonged to his earlier years, in a far more poetic manner, in
Riceyman Steps.

In these letters, kindly, sympathetic, occasionally harsh when he felt his nephew’s conduct needed improving
socially
, we read between the accounts of dinner parties and theatre parties of a few early morning visits to Clerkenwell: to ‘get’ the scene of
Riceyman Steps
took much less time than his exploration of the Savoy for
Imperial Palace
, perhaps because it connected, as that excellent piece of documentary reporting did not, directly with his imaginative experience.

Usually the documentary eye served him only too well. Vivid descriptive informative writing came to him easily. Again and again the character of places springs admirably alive in Bennett’s letters but very seldom the character of people. The documentary eye was always vivid: at rehearsals – ‘The theatre is very large, very fine, and very cold. A sort of Arctic hell’; driving home after the restrained riot of the Olympia Circus – ‘we came home with the brougham full of hydrogen balloons, which occasionally swept out on their strings through the window into the infinite ether’; noting the quality of the lemonade at a dance hall; recording that Lord Rothermere’s house had seventeen bathrooms. He had an unfailing interest for the scene, and the scene in these letters is crammed with properties, but one has a curious sense that this kindly, honest, lovable man was its only living inhabitant, as if popularity had robbed him of the only kind of people he really, deeply, knew. In 1930 he recorded with his usual innocent and candid pleasure that the publication of his
Journal
in the
Daily Mail
was making a ‘great stir’, but one cannot help wondering where that stir was to be noticed among the plane crashes and the unemployed suicides, a year’s births and deaths, except perhaps at Lord Raingo’s.

1936

GOATS AND INCENSE

M
Y
generation lived so long with the old Kipling that it is hard for us to capture the first excitement of his contemporaries, that feeling for the amazing boy who came from India and set the literary world aflame. It is one of the virtues of Mr Carrington’s admirable biography that through the care and the sobriety of his narrative we catch the pulse of the legend.
*12
After two hundred pages of close writing Kipling has not yet in this biography reached the age of thirty. By thirty he had written
Plain Tales From the Hills, Soldiers Three, Wee Willie Winkie, The Light That Failed, Barrack Room Ballards, Many Inventions, The Jungle Books
: he had been accepted as an equal by Stevenson and James – no wonder that at sixty-one he seemed to Hugh Walpole already an old man on the brink of second childhood: ‘A wonderful morning with old Kipling in the Athenaeum. He was sitting surrounded by the reviews of his new book, beaming like a baby.’ He had been a ‘leading writer’ for more than the span of most men’s literary lives.

There is no sensational surprise in Mr Carrington’s Life. A full account of Kipling’s extraordinary quarrel with Balestier, his American brother-in-law, and a fantastic story of how a homicidal lunatic pursued him from England to the Cape and back and finally ran Kipling to earth on the steps of the Athenaeum – these are the unexpected high lights. Those who anticipated intimate revelations, perhaps of the Anglo-Indian order, had mistaken Kipling’s reporting talent for direct personal experience. His prose, unlike his poetry, has not lasted well and the tricks of the reporter are apparent even in the few stories that still have the power to excite or move –
The Man Who Would be King. Without Benefit of Clergy.

Our memories are so much more satisfactory than the reality. Even
The Finest Story in the World
no longer seems quite true. One had remembered the description of a leaking ship in a still sea given by the man who had gone down in her, how the water-level paused for an instant ‘ere’ it fell on the deck. But now one notices how Kipling spoilt his effect with typical bravado. ‘He had paid everything except the bare life for this little valueless piece of knowledge, and I had travelled ten thousand weary miles to meet him and take his knowledge at second-hand.’

Even
The Man Who Would Be King
seems marred today, after its magnificent opening, by the description of Freemasonry (that King Charles’s head) in an Afghan tribe.

There is almost an inability to experience truly: observation is ruined time and again by the pretence of personal emotion.

The horror, the confusion, and the separation of the murderer from his comrades were all over before I came. There remained only on the barrack square the blood of a man calling from the ground. The hot sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater’s-skin film, cracked lozenge-wise by the heat; and as the wind rose each lozenge, rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.

It is one of the most famous openings in Kipling, and how shoddy it is today, apart from the one brilliantly realized scrap of description. ‘The blood of a man calling from the ground’ apparently with ‘a dumb tongue’ – always in his prose he protests too much. He is determined to ‘make his story stand up’, like any
Express
reporter; he calls on emotions which are not really there.

Then who should come to tuck him up for the night but the mother? And she sat down on the bed, and they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future for our empire. With a simple woman’s deep guile she asked questions and suggested answers that should have waked some sign in the face on the pillow, but there was neither quiver of eyelid nor quickening of breath, neither evasion nor delay in reply. So she blessed him and kissed him on the mouth, which is not always a mother’s property . . .

Surely Tinker Bell danced when Kipling was born. Of greatly gifted writers perhaps the two who have written with most falsity of human relations are Barrie and Kipling. We know more of Barrie’s private failure: we only get a hint of Kipling’s in that long drawn feud with his brother-in-law Balestier, the inability to realize another man’s feelings. False poeticisms, the exaggerated use of technical phrases which make some of his later stories incomprehensible to the reader who has not picked the brains of a ship’s designer or an engine-room hand, scraps of Biblical English, the overpowering shyness of the schoolboy intellectual who doesn’t want to admit to the hearties of the prefect’s room that he really takes literature seriously – as the years pass we see how the young man never grew up and how patchily in prose his promise was realized.

To me there is only one story,
The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
, in which Kipling does control his enormous capacity for play, play with images, phrases, the sound of vowels. The bravado, the knowingness, the caste-prejudices, the qualities which so often made him intrude a second-rate phrase to express a second-rate mood, are absent. In this story of an Indian hermit, once the Prime Minister of his State, there is a dignity of subject which compels him to write with the simple verbal music of the master he should always have been:

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing floors.

Oddly it was in poetry – and often in occasional poetry at that – that Kipling reached maturity. Even at his most popular, in such poems as ‘The Song of the Banjo’, we realize the extent of his mastery when we read his imitators. Here he has enlarged the scope of English poetry to include the outer, the un-English world. In so much of Canadian and Australian poetry of his time the exotic tree, the bird with the italicized name, the mugwump – if such exists – stuck out of the verse, less absorbed by the imagination than Carroll’s slithy toves. In Kipling’s poetry the exotic is naturalized: we only notice the stranger a long while after he has gone.

But perhaps Kipling never wrote better than when he wrote out of hate, and poetry is a better medium for hatred than prose. In his prose – in such a crude story for example as
The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat
– his victims are unworthy of his obsession. For hatred is an obsession, hatred confines, hatred is monotonous – Dryden and Pope drove it as far and sometimes a little farther than it will go. Kipling was their worthy successor. Who cares now for the subject of ‘MacFlecknoe’? We read it for the accurate statement of Dryden’s own mood. So too we are no longer interested in the fact that a British Government some time in the first decade of our century contemplated a joint naval demonstration with Germany against Venezuela, but Kipling’s poem is the picture of a mind in hate and we can read it still. The Marconi Scandal, because of the distinction of the accused, may still have an interest, but what was that Declaration of London on June 29, 1911, apparently just after the Coronation, which so roused Kipling’s bitterness against Government and Parliament? It doesn’t matter: the stupid bullish victim is secondary to the sword and the cape of the slayer.