What a find in the neighborhood book box! Kipling’s Best, a selection of short stories, chosen by W. Somerset Maugham. For the prospect of reading his introduction, and hoping for something comparable to Eliot’s well-known essay about his verse, I snapped it up instantly. I’ve never read Kipling’s stories (and Maugham’s closing evaluation may shock you as it did me) but reading one great writer on another is often interesting. I would apprise Maugham as English’s greatest short story writer, so I’m always keen to have his insight.
Maugham’s “rough generalization” regarding the stages of the “creative” (or writing) process seems to me on point, corroborated in my experience, but other paragraphs (or segments thereof) struck me on par with anything in the Eliot essay. I’ve extracted some quotes below for those interested; the entire book is archived online and easily found by search engine.
**
“Plain Tales from the Hills is not only concerned with Anglo-Indian society. The volume contains stories of Indian life and stories of the soldiery. When you consider that they were written when their author was still in his teens or only just out of them they show an astonishing competence. Kipling said that the best of them were provided for him by his father. I think we may ascribe this statement to filial piety. I believe it to be very seldom that an author can make use of a story given to him ready made, as seldom indeed as a person in real life can be transferred to fiction just as he is and maintain an air of verisimilitude. Of course the author gets his ideas from somewhere, they don’t spring out of his head like Pallas-Athene from the head of her sire in perfect panoply, ready to be written down. But it is curious how small a hint, how vague a suggestion, will be enough to give the author’s invention the material to work upon and enable him in due course to construct a properly disposed story.”
**
“Plain Tales from the Hills is very uneven, as indeed Kipling’s work always was. That I believe to be inevitable in a writer of short stories. It is a ticklish thing to write a short story and whether it is good or bad depends on more than the author’s conception, power of expression, skill in construction, invention and imagination: it depends also on luck. So the clever Japanese, taking from his little pile of seed pearls, all to his eyes indistinguishable from one another, the first that comes to hand and inserting it into the oyster, cannot tell whether it will turn into a perfect, rounded pearl or a misshapen object neither of beauty nor of value. Nor is the author a good judge of his own work.”
**
“In the essay Mr. T. S. Eliot wrote to preface his selection of Kipling’s verse he seems to suggest that variety is not a laudable quality in a poet. I would not venture to dispute any opinion of Mr. Eliot’s on a question in which poetry is concerned, but though variety may not be a merit in a poet, it surely is in a writer of fiction. The good writer of fiction has the peculiarity, shared to a degree by all men, but in him more abundant, that he has not only one self, but is a queer mixture of several, or, if that seems an extravagant way of putting it, that there are several, often discordant aspects of his personality.”
**
“During those four years he wrote a number of stories many of which were of a quality which only he could reach. It was then that he wrote ‘In the Rukh’ in which Mowgli makes his first appearance. It was a propitious inspiration, for from it sprang the two Jungle Books in which, to my mind, his great and varied gifts found their most brilliant, expression. They show his wonderful talent for telling a story, they have a delicate humour and they are romantic and plausible. The device of making animals talk is as old as Aesop’s fables, and for all I know much older, and La Fontaine, as we know, employed it with charm and wit, but I think no one has performed the difficult feat of persuading the reader that it is as natural for animals to speak as for human beings more triumphantly than Kipling has done in The Jungle Books. He had used the same device in the story called ‘A Walking Delegate’ in which horses indulge in political discussion, but there is in the story an obviously didactic element which prevents it from being successful.”
**
“As a rough generalization I would suggest that an author reaches the height of his powers when he is between thirty-five and forty. It takes him till then to learn what Kipling made a point of calling his trade. Till then his work is immature, tentative and experimental. By profiting by past mistakes, by the mere process of living, which brings him experience and a knowledge of human nature, by discovering his own limitations and learning what subjects he is competent to deal with and how best to deal with them, he acquires command over his medium. He is in possession of such talent as he has. He will produce the best work he is capable of for perhaps fifteen years, for twenty if he is lucky, and then his powers gradually dwindle. He loses the vigour of imagination which he had in his prime. He has given all he had to give. He will go on writing, for writing is a habit easy to contract, but hard to break, but what he writes will be only an increasingly pale reminder of what he wrote at his prime.
“It was different with Kipling.”
**
“It must seem strange at first that Kipling after leaving Allahabad never went back to India except for a short visit to his parents at Lahore. After all it was his Indian stories that had brought him his immense fame. He himself called it notoriety, but it was fame. I can only suppose, that he felt India had given him all the subjects he could deal with. Once, after he had spent a period in the West Indies he sent me a message to say that I should do well to go there, for there were plenty of stories to be written about the people of the islands, but they were not the sort of stories he could write. He must have felt that there were plenty of stories in India besides those he had written, but that they too were not the sort of stories he could write. For him the vein was worked out.”
**
“Whether you find drunkenness amusing depends, I suppose, on your personal idiosyncrasies. It has been my ill-fortune to live much among drunkards, and for my part I have found them boring at their best and disgusting at their worst. But it is evident that this feeling of mine is rare. That stories dealing with drunkards have a strong allure is shown by the popularity of Brugglesmith, a crapulous ruffian, and of Pyecroft, a sottish petty officer, who amused Kipling so much that he wrote several tales about him. Practical joking, till the very recent past, seems to have had an appeal that was universal. Spanish literature of the Golden Age is full of it and everyone remembers the cruel practical jokes that were played on Don Quixote. In the Victorian Age it was still thought funny and from a recently published book we may learn that it was practised with delight in the highest circles. Here again it depends on your temperament whether it amuses you or whether it doesn’t. I must confess that I read Kipling’s stories which deal with this subject with discomfort. And the hilarity which overcomes the perpetrators of the exploit grates upon me; they are not content with laughing at the humiliation of their victim; they lean against one another helpless with laughter, they roll off their chairs, they collapse shrieking, they claw the carpet; and in one story the narrator takes a room at an inn so that he may have his laugh out. There is only one of these tales that I have found frankly amusing and since I thought it only right to give the reader at least one example of this kind of story I have printed it in this volume. It is called ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’. Here the comedy is rich, the victim deserves his punishment, and his punishment is severe without being brutal.”
**
“I have in this essay only referred casually to Kipling’s success. It was enormous. Nothing like it had been seen since Dickens took the reading world by storm with The Pickwick Papers. Nor did he have to wait for it. Already in 1890 Henry James was writing to Stevenson that Kipling, ‘the star of the hour’, was Stevenson’s nearest rival and Stevenson was writing to Henry James that Kipling was ‘too clever to live’. It looks as though they were both a trifle taken aback by the appearance of this ‘infant monster’ as James called him. They acknowledged his brilliant parts, but with reservations. ‘He amazes me by his precocity and various endowment,’ wrote Stevenson. ‘But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. ... I was never capable of — and surely never guilty of — such a debauch of production ... I look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. … Certainly Kipling has gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening: what will he do with them?’
“But copiousness is not a defect in a writer; it is a merit. All the greatest authors have had it. Of course all their production is not of value; only the mediocre can sustain a constant level. It is because the great authors wrote a great deal that now and then they produced great works. Kipling was no exception. I don’t believe any writer is a good judge of the writing of his contemporaries, for he naturally likes best the sort of thing he does himself. It is difficult for him to appreciate merits that he does not possess. Stevenson and James were not ungenerous men and they recognized Kipling’s great abilities, but from what we know of them we can guess how disconcerted they were by the boisterous exuberance and the sentimentality of some of his tales and the brutality and grimness of others.”
**
“Kipling was widely accused of vulgarity: so were Balzac and Dickens; I think only because they dealt with aspects of life that offended persons of refinement. We are tougher now: when we call someone refined we do not think we are paying him a compliment. But one of the most absurd charges brought against him was that his stories were anecdotes, which the critics who made it thought was to condemn him (as they sometimes still do); but if they had troubled to consult the Oxford Dictionary they would have seen that a meaning it gives to the word is : ‘The narration of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking.’ That is a perfect definition of a short story.”
**
“Another fault found with him was that he had little power of characterization. I don’t think the critics who did this quite understood the place of characterization in a short story. Of course you can write a story with the intention of displaying a character. Flaubert did it in ‘Un Coeur Simple’ and Chekhov in ‘The Darling,’ which Tolstoi thought so well of; though a purist might object that they are not short stories, but potted novels. Kipling was concerned with incident. In a tale so concerned you need only tell enough about the persons who take part in it to bring them to life; you show them at the moment you are occupied with; they are inevitably static. To show the development of character an author needs the passage of time and the elbow-room of a novel. Perhaps the most remarkable character in fiction is Julien Sorel, but how could Stendhal have shown the development of his complicated character in a short story? Now, I suggest that Kipling drew his characters quite firmly enough for his purpose.”
**
“A distinguished author not long ago told me that he disliked Kipling’s style so much that he could not read him. The critics of his own day seem to have found it abrupt, jerky and mannered. One of them said that ‘it must be insisted that slang is not strength, nor does the abuse of the full stop ensure crispness.’ True. An author uses slang to reproduce conversation accurately and in the course of his narrative to give his prose a conversational air. The chief objection to it is that its vogue is transitory and in a few years it is dated and may even be incomprehensible. Sometimes of course it passes into the language and then gains a literary validity so that not even a purist can object to its use. Kipling wrote in shorter sentences than were at that time usual. That can no longer surprise us, and since the lexicographers tell us that a sentence is a series of words, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought, there seems no reason why, when an author has done just this, he should not point the fact with a full stop. He is indeed right to do so. George Moore, no lenient critic of his contemporaries, admired Kipling’s style for its sonority and its rhythm. ‘Others have written more beautifully, but no one that I can call to mind has written so copiously. . . . He writes with the whole language, with the language of the Bible, and with the language of the streets.’ Kipling’s vocabulary was rich. He chose his words, often very unexpected words, for their colour, their precision, their cadence. He knew what he wanted to say and said it incisively. His prose, with which alone I am concerned, had pace and vigour. Like every other author he had his mannerisms. Some, like his unseemly addiction to biblical phrases, he quickly discarded; others he retained. He continued throughout his life to begin a sentence with a relative. Which was a pity. He continued to make deplorable use of the poetic ere when it would have been more natural to say before. Once at least he wrote e’en for even. These are minor points. Kipling has so made his style his own that I don’t suppose anyone to-day would care to write like him, even if he could, but I don’t see how one can deny that the instrument he constructed was admirably suited to the purpose to which he put it. He seldom indulged in long descriptions, but with his seeing eye and quick perception he was able by means of this instrument to put before the reader with extreme vividness the crowded Indian scene in all its fantastic variety.
“If in this essay I have not hesitated to point out what seemed to me Kipling’s defects, I hope I have made it plain how great I think were his merits. The short story is not a form of fiction in which the English have on the whole excelled. The English, as their novels show, are inclined to diffuseness. They have never been much interested in form. Succinctness goes against their grain. But the short story demands form. It demands succinctness. Diffuseness kills it. It depends on construction. It does not admit of loose ends. It must be complete in itself. All these qualities you will find in Kipling’s stories when he was at his magnificent best, and this, happily for us, he was in story after story. Rudyard Kipling is the only writer of short stories our country has produced who can stand comparison with Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov. He is our greatest story writer. I can’t believe he will ever be equalled. I am sure he can never be excelled.”
RSS Feed