The False Structure

18 THE FALSE STRUCTURE By John Bayley (SL Catherine's College, Oxford University) Kipling's remarks on his art are few, but not reassuring. They mostly come in Something of Myself. There is the daemon of course, on whose attendance he waits, and whose status is such that Kipling the man can accept no honours for the work done. There is the joy of creating, and the awareness that what is created may turn out pretentious or false, on which "Hal o'the Draft" is eloquent, learning the ironic lesson that for strictly non-artistic reasons bad work may be more richly rewarded than good. There are the metaphors of a three-decker masterpiece, matured like a ship's timbers, sumptuously gilded and carved. There are the overlapping tints and textures, whose import is graduated to the age and discernment of the reader. Art displays its ingenuity in its modes and levels of instruction. Yet none of this sounds quite real. Partly because it has nothing to do with the impact the writing actually makes, its absolute and unique appeal; and the paradox, often noted, on which that appeal is based: that here is an immensely popular author whose prose has nonetheless the air of being written for an ingroup , for a few connoisseurs of craftsmanship and style. More pungent, perhaps more meaningful, is what is implied in two of the stories~"A Matter of Fact" and "The Finest Story in the World." The message of these, pushed to the edge of self-parody, is that the best narrator is the one who, as the sailor Pyecroft was later to say, can relate "solely what transpired," or, as the poem puts it, the "unvarnished accident" as it "actually occurred." Having been a slave at the oars of the galley that was sunk, or having seen the sea-monster from the steamer's deck, he alone can give the entirely authentic account which constitutes true art. The absolute authority of the young man who can recall episodes from his past lives is cunningly transmitted to us by Kipling the narrator. The principle is the mirror image. Absolute truth gives absolute art: therefore absolute art is absolute truth. The artist who has actually seen a sea-monster rising out of the depths nonetheless decides to write the experience as fiction, for truth is a naked lady, and, if she appears, right-minded men avert their eyes and swear they did not see. The facetious image tells us that people will accept the truth if properly clothed. They will accept what Kipling wants to tell them— his version of the truth—if it is concealed as art. This paradox may explain the strange air of unreality which grows more and more marked in Kipling's stories, becoming their point and justification, virtually the sign of their success. The more "authentic ' the narrator, the more marked the unreality. There is of course a simple nemesis which waits for all highly imaginative writers whose imaginations are deeply involved in politics. Their Eolitical and social pictures tend to become wholly fictive. In Bowen's Court, er biography of an Irish house, Elizabeth Bowen remarks on the fact that when the IRA occupied it during the troubles their young men were fascinated by a Collected Works of Kipling, and pored over nis tales with absorption. Kipling's vision or his ideal army ana empire does indeed have something of that potent fictive unreality, however much less legendary, more detailed and 19 more clear-cut, which attended the growth of Irish nationalism. The two visions were roughly contemporary; and though the British Empire itself had a vast, solid, and objective existence, it was inevitably a dream to Kipling's daemon, to his creating mind. He could be quite aware of this. In his earlier writings he can even be amused by it. "His Private Honour" shows Kipling having a dream about the ideal British army in India, lying on the mud wall of a fort, from which he wakes to find the actual British army getting into small personal difficulties on the Earade ground below him. (Even here we might notice, Ortheris's private onour, how it is...