Barbara Everett’s books include Young Hamlet and Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin.
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Kipling, Rudyard, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1909, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1910-1919, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1920-1929, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1930-1939, Literature and literary criticism, Fiction, Short stories
Vol. 13 No. 1 · 10 January 1991
pages 12-15 | 9043 words
Kipling’s Lightning-Flash
Barbara Everett
Few discussions of literary obscurity fail to come to a climax with a story written by Kipling in the early 1900s, ‘Mrs Bathurst’. Conversely, most general critical treatments of the writer sooner or later brace themselves to try to explain what is going on in it. Excellent work has emerged from the process – Kipling can bring the best out of the good critic, and possibly the worst out of the bad. I don’t, however, want to tackle the question of obscurity precisely in this interpretative way. I should like to suggest rather that the particular difficulties and originalities of this dark tale can (paradoxically) throw light on to what was happening to fiction in England in the 1890s and after: they can even tell us something about why and how the short story emerges from the slow dissolution of the Victorian novel.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 2 · 24 January 1991
From Peter Campbell
Barbara Everett quotes several passages from Kipling’s Something of Myself in her discussion of ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (LRB, 10 January), but not the sentences in which Kipling describes the genesis of that story: ‘All I carried away from the magic town of Auckland was the face and voice of a woman who sold me beer at a little hotel there. They stayed at the back of my head until ten years later when, in a local train of the Cape Town suburbs, I heard a petty officer from Simon’s Town telling a companion about a woman in New Zealand who “never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a scorpion”. Then – precisely as the removal of a key-log in a timber-jam starts the whole pile – those words gave me the key to the face and voice at Auckland, and a tale called “Mrs Bathurst” slid into my mind, smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank-high river,’
This suggests a mechanical modernity to add to others which Everett identifies. A cinema show drives the plot in ‘Mrs Bathurst’; Kipling’s telling of the story, and telling of how the story was made, are montages. He was famous for cutting his stories like a copy editor, but he also cut them like a film editor. He loved machines, and modernity was, in some degree, an appreciation (or at least a prefiguration) of the effects of picture-taking technology on the way tales are told and understood.
Everett refers to Kipling’s lightning-flash. D.W. Griffith said something to the effect that the cinema was history written with lightning. Kipling often forces readers to make connections and accept ambiguities which are commonplace in the movies.
Peter Campbell
London WC1
