The Haunted Wood, page 16
If Kim and Stalky can be seen as being at the young adult end of Kipling’s range – books about teenagers and young men – he also produced, in The Just So Stories, right at the beginning of the Edwardian age, a picture book to be read aloud for very young children, and an immortal classic of fairytale or myth. If these other books dramatized a sense of his own dislocated Anglo-Indian childhood, the Just So stories tell you something about Kipling as a father.
They were written, or at least collected for publication, in grief. Kipling’s daughter Josephine, known as “Effie,” was the original audience for these fables – so called because when he told them to her as bedtime stories Effie insisted that they had to be told word for word, or “just so” – which is something every parent who has tried to skip a line or two in a picture book with a punctilious child will recognize. She died of pneumonia in 1899, aged only six. She is the “Best Beloved” to whom the stories are narrated, and in the tenderness and wit and silliness of them you can still hear the loving connection between father and daughter, given torque by the knowledge that that connection has been severed.
The stories are origin stories or creation myths, and not noticeably Christian or even Western ones. The original trio, first in the book, were “How the Whale Got His Throat,” “How the Camel Got His Hump,” and “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin.” Tonally, Kipling just had incredible fun with these – it’s the closest he gets to the territory of Hilaire Belloc or Dr. Seuss. This is absolutely a text intended to be read aloud, complete with rhetorical questions, skittish little digressions and interpolations, and the formulaic patterning characteristic of the folktale tradition.
There’s a great aural delight in Homeric epithets – “Dingo” is never just “Dingo,” but “Yellow-Dog Dingo,” and again and again (in “The Elephant’s Child”) we meet “the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees.” Episodes and epithets fall into groups of three. Dingo is “grinning like a coal-scuttle,” then he’s “grinning like a rat-trap,” then he’s “grinning like a horsecollar” as he chases Kangaroo. In “How the Leopard Got His Spots” we meet animals visible “like ripe bananas in a smokehouse,” “like a bar of soap in a coal scuttle,” “like a mustard-plaster on a sack of coals.” In “How the First Letter Was Written” Taffy is “a very wonderful child,” then “a very, very wonderful child,” then “a very, very, very wonderful child.” The patternings are those of an oral tale where half the pleasure is in anticipation: if you know what’s going to happen to the whale, you’re going to enjoy all the more the reminders that, among the possessions of the shipwrecked Mariner (“a man of infinite resource-and-sagacity”), “you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved.”
The original and many subsequent editions contained Kipling’s own very accomplished illustrations. They have a stylistic flavor of Beardsley. The pictures, and even the very lengthy picture captions, work in a dynamic way with the text. The Just So Stories is Kipling’s contribution to the picture-book tradition that was to take such a large role in publishing for pre-school children and, unlike the linguistically challenging Stalky & Co. and the fey and rococo Puck of Pook’s Hill, it has, to my ear, barely dated: it has the out-of-time quality that goes with its mythological aspect.
The pleasure in sheer language, in these stories, is undimmed by the passage of more than a century. Nobody has a meeting when they can have a “palaver and an indaba and a punchayet, and a pow-wow.” Their jokey baby-talk (the Elephant’s Child is full of “satiable curtiosity,” “inciting” is a routine mistake for “exciting,” and “berangement” for “arrangement”), is that of a child’s mispronunciations being fed back to her. What family doesn’t have a handful of private words that survive from the faltering early language of their children?
Kipling’s model of fatherhood was a doting one. Tender, teasing, and affectionate father-and-daughter relationships feature in the stories. In the creation myth “The Crab That Played with the Sea,” the first Man approaches the Eldest Magician “with his own best beloved little girl-daughter sitting upon his shoulder.” The only recurring characters are the caveman Tegumai and his daughter Taffy.* There’s nothing of the remote victorian patriarch in this caveman dad: “From that day to this (and I suppose it is all Taffy’s fault), very few little girls have ever liked learning to read or write. Most of them prefer to draw pictures and play about with their Daddies – just like Taffy.”
Perhaps the most moving line in all of Kipling comes in one of the book’s interstitial poems, where he imagines how thousands of years after the events of the story, in spirit, “comes Taffy dancing through the fern / To lead the Surrey spring again”:
In moccasins and deer-skin cloak.
Unfearing, free and fair she flits.
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.
For far – oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him.
* A Hindi term of respect, not generally racialized, but which Kipling frequently uses to refer to Europeans.
* The Wikipedia page for the first doesn’t even have the courtesy to link to a disambiguation page; though if you do find the page for the Kipling book the first thing it says, as if you might have arrived there by accident, is “For other uses, see: The Jungle Book (disambiguation).” Pff.
* i.e. fire.
* It’s an open question, and a potentially hot one, given the charge of racism against Kipling, what if anything this distinction is meant to allegorize. Are the Bandar-log representatives of savage peoples and the jungle animals of (white) civilization? Are the villagers feckless and superstitious because they are natives, or because they are humans? Kipling in later life did not discourage the idea that the Bandar-log could stand for American populist politicians, and the phrase “outcaste,” as applied to them, seems to differentiate them from native hierarchies rather than Western ones. Perhaps they are just monkeys.
* Nick Duffell, “Why boarding schools produce bad leaders,” Guardian, 9 June 2014.
* Not a cigarette or the other thing: a temporary servant.
* Their names, we’re told solemnly, mean “Man-who-does-not-put-his-footforward-in-a-hurry” and “Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-bespanked.” But we’re also told that, being Tegumai’s Best Beloved, “she was not spanked half as much as was good for her.”
Adventures on the High Seas
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON · JOHN MEADE FALKNER
Treasure Island; Kidnapped; Moonfleet
THIS WAS A PERIOD IN WHICH WHOLE GENRES WERE starting to bud. The boys’ adventure story, which had been chugging along in its stiff way with Henty and co., got a tremendous jolt of electricity in 1883 with the publication of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). It’s artfully structured, vigorously and pacily written, funny, alarming, and exciting: as fresh on the page today as when it first appeared. It had been published originally in serial form in a children’s magazine called Young Folks; a reminder of the crescent vigor of periodicals for children and the importance of serial publication of fiction in the victorian age.
Stevenson’s audience for early drafts of the manuscript were his father and his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd. Their reaction gave an indication of how it might take off. “I had counted on one boy; I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once.” Not only were boys excited by adventure stories aimed at grown men, as Stevenson himself had been reading Jules Verne, Captain Marryat and James Fenimore Cooper; grown men could and would delight in stories aimed at boys. It transformed the reputation of its still-young author. Up until that point, he recalled ruefully, “I was thirty-one; I was head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way, had never yet made two hundred pounds a year.”
Stevenson was, like Kipling, one of those fantastically energetic Victorian writers who roared around the four corners of the world and didn’t confine himself to one genre but wrote classics in several. Spry, moustachioed, enterprising, thirsty for travel, a bohemian, and an atheist, he was an adventurer as well as a writer of adventure stories. He gave us the Gothic classic The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), reams of journalism, short stories, essays, poems for adults and children (A Child’s Garden of verses (1885) is still in print), as well as travel-writing so enduring that you can still walk the Stevenson Trail in the Cevennes, where he went on his Travels With A Donkey (1879). He may even have invented the sleeping bag. He roamed the Pacific in his thirties and spent the last five years of his life in Samoa before his death from a stroke at forty-four. All this from a man who had been sickly with lung disease from a very young age.
Treasure Island didn’t invent pirate stories. There was an existing body of mythology in sensation literature, feeding on the golden age of piracy in the previous century. A 1724 bestseller called A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates had reveled in heavily embellished biographical accounts of pirate captains such as Blackbeard, William Kidd, and “Black Bart” Roberts; Stevenson even borrowed the name of one of his characters, Israel Hands, from that book.
But there’s no doubt that it was Treasure Island that established all the furniture of pirate cliché – buried treasure, X-marks-thespot, parrots squawking “pieces of eight,” the Jolly Roger, the “Black Spot” as a mark of doom, the whole peg-leg, avast-me-hearties shebang – so indelibly in the culture and, especially, in writing for children. In giving this tradition mainstream form you could see Stevenson’s as a bridging work between the scurrilous “low” ephemera of the popular press and the supposedly respectable stuff aimed at middle-class bookshelves. F.J. Harvey Darton called it the “very apotheosis of the ‘penny dreadful’”*
Treasure Island has another feature that goes consistently through children’s writing: this is a story that’s shadowed by the idea of stories. Its young protagonist Jim Hawkins – through whose eyes the story is told, except for a peculiar interlude in the middle where, when the group is separated, another character takes up the narrative for a couple of chapters – isn’t just a resourceful and courageous (and lucky) child. He’s an imaginative child. In the opening section of the book, after the alcoholic captain, staying at Jim’s mother’s pub the Admiral Benbow, warns the boy to be on the lookout for a one-legged man, Jim recalls how “that personage haunted my dreams […] I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.” When Jim is in Redruth waiting to set sail, he is “full of sea-dreams and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures.” Like Catherine in Northanger Abbey, with her head full of Gothic literature, he adventures both in the book’s reality and in his imagination.
Yet his real-life adventures in the story are just as wild as any imagination could furnish. That’s, in a way, the joke. Treasure Island is a pure thrill-ride, and it speaks to children, in Jim’s ingenuous voice, on their own level. Within just a few chapters, Jim has set out to sea with the kindly Squire Trelawnay in search of buried treasure, only to discover that half the crew, led by the treacherous Long John Silver, posing as a ship’s cook, plan to mutiny, do for its honest passengers and steal the treasure. Once the ship reaches the island pitched battles, desperate reverses and all stripes of derring-do follow in a cavalcade.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t wink, a little, at the adults too. The pirate language, like Shakespeare’s nautical gibberish in the opening scene of The Tempest, is pure color:
‘Do you call that a head on your shoulders, or a blessed dead-eye?’ cried Long John. ‘Don’t rightly know, don’t you! Perhaps you don’t happen to rightly know who you was speaking to, perhaps? Come, now, what was he jawing v’yages, cap’ns, ships? Pipe up! What was it?’ ‘We was a-talkin’ of keel-hauling,’ answered Morgan. ‘Keel-hauling, was you? And a mighty suitable thing, too, and you may lay to that. Get back to your place for a lubber, Tom.’
And dear old Ben Gunn – a man marooned three years on the titular island, having lost possession of the better half of his wits and peculiarly interested in cheese (“‘Was it cheese you said he had a fancy for?’ ‘Yes, sir, cheese,’ I answered”) – speaks the most fantastic nonsense.
The most captivating figure in Treasure Island, though, is Long John Silver – who starts off as something of a pantomime villain and turns into something no less villainous, but far more complex and interesting. In the world of Treasure Island, he has the seductive qualities of an Iago: he isn’t just a baddie, but a trickster figure, a shrewd player-of-the-odds, a master-deceiver. His loyalties are gimballed and ever-shifting, and – even though he’s terrifyingly physically able, crutch or no crutch – his greatest power is not brute force but persuasion.
There’s a wicked bit of dramatic irony, for instance, when as the expedition is in preparation the hapless Squire Trelawnay writes back from Bristol docks to report on his progress. He has acquired a ship’s cook who lost his leg in his country’s service, he says, and this cook has helped him assemble a crew.
Between Silver and myself we got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable – not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit. I declare we could fight a frigate. Long John even got rid of two out of the six or seven I had already engaged. He showed me in a moment that they were just the sort of fresh-water swabs we had to fear in an adventure of importance.
The Silver that Jim first meets – Jim having been primed by the captain to fear the worst of a one-legged man – is so charming that Jim’s suspicions immediately abate: “One look at the man before me was enough.” It’s only when, once aboard ship, Jim overhears Silver flattering a co-conspirator – “you’re young, you are, but you’re as smart as paint. I see that when I set my eyes on you” – with the very same words with which he flattered Jim himself, that the boy gets his first lesson in not trusting appearances. Arriving on the island, Jim witnesses from hiding how Silver first flatters and then murders in cold blood an honest crewman who refuses to take the pirates’ part.
Again and again on the island – as the advantage swings between the mutineers and the crew of honest adventurers against whom they have risen – Silver feints at switching sides or plays both off against the middle. His eyes are perpetually on the prize – or, rather, two prizes: the treasure, and saving his own skin. There’s an odd sort of honesty in his self-interest. Even defeated, and in quasi-captivity, Silver shrugs on a different persona and goes along to get along. As the remaining companions eat Ben Gunn’s salted goat and drink a bottle of wine around the fire,
Never, I am sure, were people gayer or happier. And there was Silver, sitting back almost out of the firelight, but eating heartily, prompt to spring forward when anything was wanted, even joining quietly in our laughter – the same bland, polite, obsequious seaman of the voyage out.
Rather than swing from a rope at the end of the story, as he well deserves, he slips away with a portable portion of the treasure – and Jim seems not to mind too much. This is a book quite uninterested in moralizing, in delivering just deserts or even a happy ending. The goodies and baddies alike are actuated by nothing higher than greed, after all, and there’s a sense hanging over it that seamen operate according to a different and more pragmatic code than their land-bound counterparts. When Silver rejoins the group – “Come back to my dooty, sir” – Captain Smollett replies, “Ah!” and passes no further comment. Silver’s amoral charm works on the reader as well as on the characters around him.
Stevenson’s other great children’s adventure, Kidnapped (1886), set among the Highlands and Islands of Scotland during the Jacobite rebellion, hits many of the same beats – even down to the overhearing of a black-hearted plot aboard ship. It follows its orphaned seventeen-year-old protagonist David through a series of improbably twisty adventures, and a footslog through the Scottish heather that anticipates the John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps. As in Treasure Island, we’re seeing the real history of the middle eighteenth century recycled in iconographic fictional form: history turning into myth.
Among the striking qualities of Kidnapped is its wry awareness of standing in a literary tradition, and the gleam of humor that surrounds it. The early sections, in which David’s villainous uncle Ebenezer tries to kill him, gips him out of his inheritance and then has a bash at selling him into slavery, are high-camp Gothic; and when (after much Treasure Island-style treachery and gunplay) David is washed up alone on an island just off the Scottish shore, he grumbles about how little his situation resembles the Robinsonades that his readership will be familiar with:
In all the books I have read of people cast away, they had either their pockets full of tools, or a chest of things would be thrown upon the beach along with them, as if on purpose. My case was very different. I had nothing in my pockets but money and Alan’s silver button; and being inland bred, I was as much short of knowledge as of means.
We meet a wicked ship’s captain who, nevertheless, never passes the village where his old mum lives without showing the ship’s colors and ordering a gun to be fired in salute. His right-hand man Riach – vicious when sober, kindly in drink – advises young David to take life as it comes:
