Read Online The Wish House and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rudyard Kipling
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extended histories – which it should not attempt to tell, as well as those it must retail with the maximum efficiency. In the course of a long writing career, from 1890 to 1936, Kipling both abides by this principle and subtly violates it. The
oeuvre
of any good writer exhibits two opposite, but perfectly consistent tendencies: certain features will persist throughout (‘in my beginning is my end’) and there will also be a trajectory of change and development. So far, we have considered Kipling from the first point of view – that of consistency. His arc of change more or less follows the development of the short story itself. This can be roughly summarized by thedifference between, say, Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’, with its notorious trick ending, and, say, Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’. Admirers of Maupassant claim that ‘The Necklace’ is untypical of him, but actually even his best work is essentially anecdotal: ‘Boule de Suif, despite its length, has little particular characterization and is designed merely to expose the hypocrisy of the French upper and middle class; ‘The Trouble with André’, ‘The Piece of String’ and ‘My Uncle Jules’, to take a broad sample, are all anecdotes. ‘The Piece of String’ is the story of a peasant who is unjustly accused of theft, exonerated by the facts, yet sent into a rather implausible decline by the refusal of the community to believe him. He has parsimoniously picked up a piece of string, not the wallet he is accused by an enemy of taking. Maupassant’s talent is to dress up this amusing but thin tale with a vivid opening that describes the Normandy peasants going to market. ‘Boule de Suif shows a prostitute sharing her food with her fellow passengers, whose hunger conquers their moral repugnance. Yet when, to oblige them, she has slept with an occupying Prussian officer who is holding up the coach till she complies, they refuse to share their food with her. The irony is typically pat and not unlike that of ‘The Necklace’, in which the lost diamond necklace, replaced after years of scrimping, turns out, after all, to have been paste. Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’, on the other hand, avoids this fearful symmetry by abjuring plot: Nick Adams goes angling, but does not feel able yet to fish in the swamp. In terms of plot, a meal is a big event. The story’s power resides in its brooding implications which, though never made clear, involve the attempt to regain the simple life after the trauma of war, symbolized by a fire which has razed the whole area about the river. In other words, the short story moves away from anecdote, the neat tale, to a plotless genre of implication. This, of course, is a generalization and Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’ shows that the anecdote, if brilliantly enough handled, will always continue to have a life. There the Irish boxer has to lose a fight because he has bet on his opponent. However, in a double-cross, his opponent has bet on him. The upshot is that, in order to lose, Jack Brennan is forced to call on enormous reserves of courage by going on after he has been hit low. The narrator, his trainer, puts this down to Brennan’s meanness in money matters, which he overemphasizes throughout: Hemingway, though, is more interested in the paradox by which Brennan’s cynical decision to throw the fight has to be sustained by brute heroism. The ‘cowardly’ route proves to be its opposite.
‘Fifty Grand’ is an exception. More typical of the short story in this century is ‘The Killers’, in which two gangsters take over a café in order to murder a customer, who doesn’t in fact appear. The dialogue we hear is full of menace, but we never discover why the men are after Andreson. The modernity of the story can be gauged when you consider how like Pinter’s
The Birthday Party
this dramatic vignette is. (Some day, incidentally, the influence of Hemingway on Pinter will be properly
oeuvre
of any good writer exhibits two opposite, but perfectly consistent tendencies: certain features will persist throughout (‘in my beginning is my end’) and there will also be a trajectory of change and development. So far, we have considered Kipling from the first point of view – that of consistency. His arc of change more or less follows the development of the short story itself. This can be roughly summarized by thedifference between, say, Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’, with its notorious trick ending, and, say, Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’. Admirers of Maupassant claim that ‘The Necklace’ is untypical of him, but actually even his best work is essentially anecdotal: ‘Boule de Suif, despite its length, has little particular characterization and is designed merely to expose the hypocrisy of the French upper and middle class; ‘The Trouble with André’, ‘The Piece of String’ and ‘My Uncle Jules’, to take a broad sample, are all anecdotes. ‘The Piece of String’ is the story of a peasant who is unjustly accused of theft, exonerated by the facts, yet sent into a rather implausible decline by the refusal of the community to believe him. He has parsimoniously picked up a piece of string, not the wallet he is accused by an enemy of taking. Maupassant’s talent is to dress up this amusing but thin tale with a vivid opening that describes the Normandy peasants going to market. ‘Boule de Suif shows a prostitute sharing her food with her fellow passengers, whose hunger conquers their moral repugnance. Yet when, to oblige them, she has slept with an occupying Prussian officer who is holding up the coach till she complies, they refuse to share their food with her. The irony is typically pat and not unlike that of ‘The Necklace’, in which the lost diamond necklace, replaced after years of scrimping, turns out, after all, to have been paste. Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’, on the other hand, avoids this fearful symmetry by abjuring plot: Nick Adams goes angling, but does not feel able yet to fish in the swamp. In terms of plot, a meal is a big event. The story’s power resides in its brooding implications which, though never made clear, involve the attempt to regain the simple life after the trauma of war, symbolized by a fire which has razed the whole area about the river. In other words, the short story moves away from anecdote, the neat tale, to a plotless genre of implication. This, of course, is a generalization and Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’ shows that the anecdote, if brilliantly enough handled, will always continue to have a life. There the Irish boxer has to lose a fight because he has bet on his opponent. However, in a double-cross, his opponent has bet on him. The upshot is that, in order to lose, Jack Brennan is forced to call on enormous reserves of courage by going on after he has been hit low. The narrator, his trainer, puts this down to Brennan’s meanness in money matters, which he overemphasizes throughout: Hemingway, though, is more interested in the paradox by which Brennan’s cynical decision to throw the fight has to be sustained by brute heroism. The ‘cowardly’ route proves to be its opposite.
‘Fifty Grand’ is an exception. More typical of the short story in this century is ‘The Killers’, in which two gangsters take over a café in order to murder a customer, who doesn’t in fact appear. The dialogue we hear is full of menace, but we never discover why the men are after Andreson. The modernity of the story can be gauged when you consider how like Pinter’s
The Birthday Party
this dramatic vignette is. (Some day, incidentally, the influence of Hemingway on Pinter will be properly
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