A Reading Diary (5 page)

Wells attempted, in later life, to give a less fanciful, more serious shape to his ideas. For me, however, his attempt didn’t pay off; it’s the young scribbler I remember, the author of the “scientific romances” of whom Jules Verne said indignantly, “But this man makes things up!” I remember, together with the awful god Moreau, the Time Traveller who brings from the future an impossible flower, the poor Invisible Man whose eyelids won’t shut off the light and whose naked skin won’t protect him from the cold, the traitor on the coveted moon. I remember all these necessary inventions that Wells wrote before he was thirty-five. In the next half-century or so he discussed common sense and history, social reform and the theories of education, in earnest books such as
A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli, The Outline of History, The Science of Life
. He was still brave and intelligent in difficult times, and honest and sometimes mistaken, and yet by then the gift for myth
making had left him almost completely. One or two stories still made their way to the surface—“The Country of the Blind,”
The Croquet Player
—but by and large the dream source had apparently dried up. It is almost as if the older man, no longer able to imagine, had set out to make books from solid facts, in an effort to recapture what the younger man, inexperienced and untrained, had effortlessly conjured up in intuitions and adventurous visions.

Much as this older reader now tries to recall, though he knows it’s impossible, something of the rookie thrill of first reading
The Island of Dr. Moreau
.

My
Kim
belongs to a twenty-five-volume collection, the 1914 Bombay Edition of the works of Kipling (five more volumes were published later) that C. found for me in a second-hand Paris bookstore several years ago. It was the time of the general strike in Paris, which lasted several weeks, and if we needed to do anything downtown we had to walk from the twentieth
arrondissement
to the centre, down streets deserted by buses, past the closed Métro stations, among throngs of curiously amiable and talkative pedestrians. C. had saved up just enough to pay for the collection but hadn’t left himself anything for a taxi home. He realized he’d have to traipse several kilometres with the twenty-five volumes on his back, so he reluctantly asked the bookseller whether he could have fifty francs back for the fare. The grumpy old man (may he be denied the coin to pay Charon!) refused, and offered C. instead a large postal bag. With the weight of twenty-five books on his shoulder, C. set off across Paris. He hadn’t walked long when a car pulled up and a woman asked him in what direction he was headed. As it happened, she herself was
only going a short distance, but when she heard C.’s story she insisted on driving him all the way home.

In the Universal Library, the woman’s generosity balances out the bookseller’s meanness.

The paper of my
Kim
is a light cream colour, the letters deep black and slightly raised, the initials Prussian blue. Inside each volume is an extra label with the title and volume number, to be used when the book is properly bound (the edition was produced in board bindings, so that each reader might bind it to suit his taste). Rudyard Kipling’s signature, on the title page of the first volume, is minuscule, reluctant, perfectly legible.

Kim
is one of the few books that constantly delights me; it grows friendlier with each reading. I want to apply to it a word used in Quebec to denote a particular state of happiness:
heureuseté
. I love the tone of the telling, the vividness of every minor character, the moving friendship between the Lama in search of a river and the boy in search of himself. I never want their pilgrimage to end.

The yellow stones of my house reflect the August sun. In the garden, the aspen trees are in bloom, incredibly white. According to De Quincey, “the aspen-tree shivers in
sympathy with the horror of the mother tree in Palestine that was compelled to furnish materials for the cross.”

The heat of the day here in my village suits the weather in the novel. I watch a pair of turtle doves swoop down onto the grass outside my window, strut around for a moment and then fly back up onto the roof of the pigeon tower at the end of my library. They do this (apparently) for the fun of repetition. Partly, that is why I enjoy rereading.

In
Kim
, everything is given from the very beginning: the inquisitive nature of Kim, the mystery of his past and future, the Lama’s quest, the fairy-tale atmosphere evoked by the mention of Harun-al-Rachid and the
Arabian Nights
. There is no confusion or reluctance in the telling of the adventures, except when it becomes deliberately hesitant, to encourage the reader to complete on his own a scene or a dialogue. Otherwise, Kipling knows his story and trusts even its obviousness.

Some time ago, I asked Rohinton Mistry, who, like Kipling, was born in Bombay, to read
Kim
. He had not read it before and was delighted. Like Kipling, Rohinton sees no need, in his own novels, to explain the use of certain words in the Indian vernacular; their meaning
shines through in the context and makes the characters’ language come alive.

I hate glossaries.

Rohinton told me that he finds Kipling’s dialogue, and the descriptions of the vast troupe of Indian characters, absolutely true to life. We wondered whether Kipling made up the proverbs and insults and catchphrases he used in the novel. “Those who beg in silence starve in silence.” “Thou hast as much grace as the holy bull of Shiv.” “The jackal that lives in the wilds of Mazanderan can only be caught by the hounds of Mazanderan.” And so on. …

Among all the host of minor characters, none is as memorable as the old Indian lady whom Kim and his Lama meet on the Great Trunk Road, who loves good food and gossip, and the thrill of new faces, and who chuckles “like a contented parrot above the sugar lump.” She feels
necessary
in the story, as do almost all of the native characters. However, I believe that there is something artificial about the behaviour of the European characters, something impersonal, aloof. But perhaps Kipling was catching a certain false note in the Anglo-Indian mentality. The military historian John Morris noted, “The psychology of the Raj was really based on a lie.
The majority of the British in India were acting a part. They weren’t really the people they were supposed to be.”

When Kipling was a small boy in Bombay, he would be sent by his ayah into the dining room after he was dressed, with the caution “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.” I remember my governess (with whom I spoke English and German) sending me in with a similar recommendation to “speak Spanish” to my parents—a language of which I had only a few halting words.

There is a huge, marvellous complexity in Kipling’s India that, according to Rohinton, reflects the real thing (I’ve never been there). Somewhere, Kipling says that there are places in the world where, if we wait long enough, everyone will eventually pass. One is King’s Cross Station in London; the other the train station in Bombay. The Great Trunk Road in the novel feels just like such a place. Eliot’s “I had not thought death had undone so many” echoes for me the Lama saying, “This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.”

Kipling loves lists: carefully chosen names of people, food, objects, gems, clothing are listed, page after page, with a poet’s relish. Coleridge: “Poetry = the
best
words in the best order.”

That is how Kipling describes the Wonder House: through slow, detailed lists of the sculptures and friezes at the Lahore Museum, stone after stone and image after image, given through the eyes of the Lama, who goes through the collection “with the reverence of a devotee and the appreciative instinct of a craftsman.” This is a good description of Kipling’s own literary virtues.

This morning we took our friend Katherine Ashenburg (who is visiting us and researching a piece on Romanesque architecture) to see the sculpted white stone portal of the Church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers. Many of the images I found puzzling. Who is the man holding two branches of a tree trunk sprouting from his head? (I found out afterwards that this is the Tree of Jesse.)
Who
is the monster holding his splayed legs, a serpent’s head on each foot? Who are the couple embracing or wrestling? Who is the woman carrying an open book? In the small crowd of tourists, I wonder how many of us today see these things with both (or even one) of the Lama’s qualities. To be able, like the Lama, to read “incident by incident in the beautiful story … on the blurred stone.” We have lost most of our vocabularies.

I’ve given Katherine an
ex voto
embroidered with the hair of a nun (according to the
brocanteur)
to add to her collection
of kitschy religious bric-à-brac which she keeps in her bathroom in Toronto. Curiously, for a Catholic, she is able to dissociate herself completely from the supposedly numinous quality of religious objects. Perhaps the contrary impulse to that of the Graham Greene character, the once-famous French Catholic writer Morin, who, having lost his faith, continues to go to midnight mass because, he says, “I don’t want to give scandal.”

Someone suggested that if we were able to explain thoroughly the mysteries of religion, there’d be no room for faith. Julien Green says, “There is no faith without struggle.” That does not seem to be the case with the Lama. The Lama makes no visible effort, attempts no explanations; he tells stories and follows his way, hoping that in the end he will be “free of the Wheel.”

Kim’s fat, pedantic companion, Hurree Babu: “How am I to fear the absolutely non-existent?”

A very hot morning. My daughter Alice rescues a hedgehog from the pool. It had fallen in and was desperately swimming in circles. She carried it to a corner of the garden and allowed it to scuttle away, shivering.

A question of endings: I skip to the last pages of
Kim
for sheer pleasure. The end is an exuberant epiphany: Kim is made well and the Lama finds his river. His last gesture is to cross his hands and smile “as a man may who has won Salvation for himself and his beloved.”

We read what we want to read, not what the author wrote. In
Don Quixote
, I’m not particularly interested in the world of chivalry but in the ethics of the hero, and in the curious friendship with Sancho. In
The Wind in the Willows
, I care far less about Mr. Toad than about Rat, Mole and Badger. In
Kim
I am not in the least interested in the Great Game, all that infantile spy-story stuff, but I’m enthralled by Kim and the Lama’s respective quests and the brilliance of the depiction of a world I don’t know.

Note: Literary travel is either a monologue or a dialogue, either the unravelling of one traveller’s route (Ulysses, Pilgrim, Justine, Candide, the Wandering Jew) or two characters in mutual progression (Don Quixote and Sancho, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Brother and Sister in search of the Blue Bird, Kim and his Lama).

A second pair of turtle doves has taken up residence on the roof of the pigeon tower. They shimmer in the heat.

Summer in the garden carries implicit all the year’s changes: the winter branches before they sprouted spring leaves, the place where the fruit fell in the fall, the sequence of flowers. The regular coming and going of the seasons, the aging and death of friends, the crumbling of the walls of our house and the gnawing loss of my memory are a given, but they are also the confirmation (and the proof) of a constancy in things. Time is circular, these events say: after someone dies, I talk to someone else who remembers him, or wants to know something about him; we build up the garden wall with the stones that fell from the barn; what I no longer recall is there, somewhere, on one of the carefully numbered pages of one of my books. And I, of course, will disappear; the new wall too will fall away, the books will be scattered. But that of which we all form part, a part however small, will stay on, fixed under the stars. And, as in the eye of a sculptor chiselling away at a stone, the whole will be all the more beautiful for our absence.

Kipling tells how his mother discovered one day a child’s hand from the Towers of Silence dropped by a vulture in their garden in Bombay. Rohinton told me that such a thing isn’t possible, because the vultures never stray that far from the towers.

A friend sends me a clipping from an English paper, with the heading “Housewife kills 100 magpies ‘to save songbirds.’ ” To protect the birds she liked, the woman would trap magpies and then smash their heads against her garden wall.

Kim’s definition of love, when Father Victor asks him if he is fond of the Lama: “Of course I am fond of him. He was fond of me.”

The Lama tells Kim stories “tracing with a finger in the dust.” Like Christ, who “stooped down, and with his finger wrote in the ground, as if he heard them not.”