The Wish House and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling Read Free Book Online

translate object-letters’. (An object-letter being a collection of objects by which the illiterate communicate with each other since they cannot write.) On the other hand, there is no indication that Kipling dissociates himself from the repeated notion that callow young men are like colts who need violent use of the bit. Indeed, his last work,
Something of Myself
, reiterates the advice
in propria persona.
    But Kipling’s own voice, over-confidently confident, is always less plausible than the alien voices he chose to assume. The latter make a long list. ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ is a faultless pastiche of Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding.
‘On Greenhow Hill’ is narrated in Learoyd’s Yorkshire accent, ‘“Love-o’-Women”’ in Mulvaney’s Irish, ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’ in Indian-English, ‘The Wish House’ and ‘Friendly Brook’ in broad Sussex. The prose of ‘The Bull that Thought’ is delicately tinged with French idiom and ‘The Judgment of Dungara’ and ‘Reingelder and the German Flag’ exploit the German accent and word-order, perhaps a trifle crudely, but comedy is always Kipling’s least successful mode: ‘“We will him our converts in all their by their own hands constructed new clothes exhibit”.’ As Kipling reaches maturity, his mastery of dialect comes to depend less on orthography. Fenwick, the lighthouse-keeper who narrates ‘The Disturber of Traffic’, is given a circling delivery that is naturally conversational. His prose isn’t good in the conventional sense, but it is dramatically appropriate: ‘those streaks, they preyed upon his intellecks, he said; and he made up his mind, every timethat the Dutch gunboat that attends to the Lights in those parts come along, that he’d ask to be took off.’ Kipling’s ear at this stage was perfect. And later, like Joyce’s ‘Clay’ and ‘Counterparts’, Kipling in ‘The Gardener’ deploys disguised interior monologue for a story which appears to be impersonally narrated. Just as Joyce’s leaden, ponderous style in ‘Counterparts’ mirrors the mental process of its alcoholic protagonist, so the Home Counties accent of Helen Turrell informs ‘The Gardener’: ‘She learnt that Hagenzeele Third could be comfortably reached by an afternoon train which fitted in with the morning boat, and that there was a comfortable little hotel not three kilometres from Hagenzeele itself, where one could spend quite a comfortable night and see one’s grave next morning.’ Those three ‘comfortable’s’ in the same sentence, like the three ‘that’s’ in Fenwick’s, are artfully calculated to convey to ‘one’ the stifling propriety of Helen Turrell’s protective carapace. They are designed to make ‘one’ feel ‘uncomfortable’ about her version of events – and to show that her lie has infected her very thought-processes. She doesn’t just act a lie – that her illegitimate son is her nephew – she
thinks
a lie even to herself. And Kipling conveys this without external, explicit comment.
    ‘“The Finest Story in the World’” explains why Kipling chose to use such a bewildering number of different narrative voices. In it the clerk, Charlie Mears, like Jonson’s Dapper, has literary aspirations: ‘He rhymed “dove” with “love” and “moon” with “June”, and devoutly believed that they had never so been rhymed before.’ His confidant, the narrator, is necessarily sceptical until Charlie tells him the fragment of a story about being a galley-slave. The details are extraordinary and vivid: “‘When that storm comes…I think that all the oars in the ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their chests smashed in by the oar-heads bucking”’; ‘“he’s on the lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatchways and through the oar-holes. Can’t you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through between the handle and the hole and wobbling about