I'm busy doing stuff at the moment, none of which is particularly blog-worthy, but is all quite time-consuming and energy-sapping. So, just to keep things ticking over, I may continue to re-post some of my older efforts (with the customary edit and polish), which most current readers will probably either never have read at the time or forgotten all about by now.
As with columnists, reviewers, or any other provider of literate amusement, even your best efforts quickly go the way of yesterday's papers. Very quickly, actually: I realise now that I read something in the TLS earlier this week that made me hoot with laughter, but cannot remember exactly what it was, and can't be bothered to find out; that issue is already in the recycling bin. I used to keep a notebook to transcribe such things and my own occasional aperçus but lost the habit, probably around the time I realised I was never going to become a "serious" writer.
But most weeks I'm surprised to see that some old post that I, too, had forgotten all about is briefly having a moment in the blog stats for some reason and, although I say it myself, I am often agreeably surprised by its quality. This one, for example, which was originally published in 2013; a year which seems quite recent, subjectively, but ... isn't. Where does it go?
Just So
Many years ago, as a thoughtless young man I upset my mother by telling her – intended but not taken ironically – that I had had a deprived childhood because I had not been read, or been given to read, children's classics like Alice in Wonderland. This was perfectly true, though, and hardly surprising, as both my parents had left school at 14 in the 1930s, and were never big readers. They had no idea that there was a children's canon that, as I discovered when I got to university, formed the bed-time bedrock of middle-class literacy. Wind in the Willows? Never heard of it. Treasure Island? Arrh, Jim lad! All about pirates, and parrots with wooden legs, isn't it? Never actually read it, though. Swallows and Amazons? That was on TV, wasn't it? Seemed a bit girly. And so on. You name it, I hadn't read it.
As a consequence, I find myself belatedly picking up these best-beloved books to read. The latest in this line of never-too-late classics has been Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Like Treasure Island, these stories are already over-familiar to everyone who has never actually read them. So much so, I could barely bring myself to read "How the Elephant Got His Trunk" (or, as I now know to call it, "The Elephant's Child"). What would be the point? Yeah, yeah, the crocodile bites his nose and pulls it. Very droll.Well, you might as well ask, "Why bother to see Hamlet yet again?" What I discovered is that these are genuinely, startlingly original pieces of writing. They are spellbinding, begging to be read at bedtime, again and again, ideally by a talented reader capable of bringing to life and inhabiting the different voices and registers that Kipling weaves so inventively, and so intimately. Where else will you find something as delightful as "he smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times"? As vivid as "Off ran Dingo – Yellow-Dog Dingo – always hungry, grinning like a coal-scuttle"? Or as memorable as "One, two, three! And where's your breakfast?"
True, there are moments when cloying cuteness threatens to break out. Victorian and Edwardian gents were 'sclusively sentimental about characterful little girls: see Edward Lear, see Lewis Carroll, among others. But when you learn that Kipling was still mourning the death of his own eldest daughter, Josephine, the sentiment seems less toe-curling. Little Taffy in "How the First Letter Was Written" is clearly the great-grandmother of many feisty little heroines who neglect and reject their household duties in favour of more inciting adventures.
Also true, there are some dodgy undertones that bubble up ("'Oh, plain black's best for a nigger,' said the Ethiopian"). But I think Kipling both honours and teases the language, traditions and manners of India and Africa, just as he does those of the common British soldier in Barrack-Room Ballads. Nobody loves slightly bent English as much as Kipling.
With hindsight, this could be condemned as colonial "orientalism" or simple condescension, but his attitude could never be described as malevolent. Kipling is an imperialist, no doubt, but very far from racist. That unfortunate swastika on the rock in the illustration to "The Crab That Played With the Sea" is a Hindu symbol for "auspiciousness", which is why it also appeared on the bindings of Kipling's collected works. Kipling himself ordered the symbol to be removed as "defiled beyond redemption" after the Nazis had usurped it in the 1930s.
The tone of the Just So Stories is one of controlled but intense playfulness. It's a story-telling voice, rather than a story-writing voice. It is the relaxed, unbuttoned, domestic voice of upper-middle-class imperial Britain in 1902, as heard in a nursery within a large house, buffered from boring routine by servants, nannies, and cooks, and secure behind the impenetrable firewall of the greatest army and navy the world had yet seen.
Then there are Kipling's own illustrations. They are bold, Beardsley-esque, and – let's be honest – really not very good. Often described as "woodcuts", I'm pretty sure they are actually ink drawings imitative of the woodcut style. "The Cat That Walked By Himself" is an exception, and rightly popular, although few people seem to realise it was drawn by Kipling himself. Most of these illustrations, though, are crowded, mannered, uncertain of line, and have neither the delicate clarity of a Beardsley, nor the compensating vigour of bold shapes and composition (see Edward Wadsworth, for example). Above all, it's hard to make out what they're meant to be – never a good thing in an illustration – and it's no wonder Kipling felt the need to write a commentary on each. Some of these commentaries are so whimsically strange you have to wonder what Kipling used to put in his pipe.
But I am much taken with these stories, Best Beloved, and if I am ever blessed with grandchildren I shall scare them something hijjus at bedtime with my gritted-teeth rendering of the crocodile in "The Elephant's Child".
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