The Indian Tales by Kipling

http://www.kipling.org.uk/braz_one.htm
THE BRAZILIAN SKETCHES THE TRIP OUT

BRAZILIAN SKETCHES I THE JOURNEY OUTA Trip SouthThe Pursuit of the Beautiful
introduction notes on the text
The Friends I HAD some friends—but I dreamed that they were dead—Who used to dance with lanterns round a little boy in bed;Green and white lanterns that waved to and fro:But I haven’t seen a Firefly since ever so long ago! I had some friends—their crowns were in the sky—Who used to nod and whisper when a little boy went by,As the nuts began to tumble and the breeze began to blow:And I haven’t seen a Cocoa-palm since ever so long ago! I had a friend—he came up from Cape Horn,With a Coal-sack on his shoulder when a little boy was born.He heard me learn to talk, and he helped me thrive and grow:But I haven’t seen the Southern Cross since ever so long ago! I had a boat—I out and let her drive,Till I found my dream was foolish, for my friends were all alive.The Cocoa-palms were real, and the Southern Cross was true:And the Fireflies were dancing—so I danced too!
A Trip SouthOnce in a child's dream, I wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world, and found everything different from all previous knowledge; as only children or old folk desire it to be. Now, the dream has come true.The South American boats are a world to themselves, more intimate and specialised than any other. Inquiries begin to be answered in Portuguese or Spanish, while we lie at Southampton docks; the ship's notices stand in both tongues; and the passengers do not in the least concern themselves with anything or anybody, or any motive or policy that, till then, one had held to be important. Before our steamer began to shift the sun, all known centres of gravity had shifted, and were spinning on new bearings.Companions of the WayOne companion of the way drew, by birth and inheritance, from the Falkland Islands, and knew that very woman who sent in word to Sturdee's people that the enemy were coming down, not guessing that our ships were at hand. He used to circulate by boat among the firths and fiords of the islands, and by horse ("Saddlebags, of course. There's no way of carrying a trunk.") inland across rivers of stone, and moors where no trees grow, and men fence in the wild sea-birds at nesting time that they may better manure the pastures. This had been his father's life before him, and he loved it more than all his great possessions.Other companions inhabited beyond the limits of imagination—among the snows and fires of the Cordilleras, or in sweating forest concessions northward, where unknown rivers out of the hearts of unknown forests rise and drown unknown tribes whose bodies presently arrive, face-down, at the frontiers of civilisation. There were cattle-men owning flat and stoneless land by the hundred square league, through which railways run for ever and ever without a bend or a rise or a culvert to them. Their wives and daughters, and the families of the coffee-Princes, had, by the look of them, been in the Rue de la Paix till the last moment. There were men also, with English and Irish names, as Southern as their Argentine wives, and their electrically quick children who used three languages at once in their play and went to bed when they felt sleepy, and not before. Embarrassment of Riches.As the blessed warmth brought back all the rules of right living - the thin kit, the long drink, and the disregard of what manufactured clocks say up North, men talked. Every man felt it his duty to point out that the place one was going to was not the place one ought to see; at any rate, not at first. There were Inca cities and causeways, for instance, 15,000 feet up in the air, with copper mines (or was it gold-stuffed glacial deposits?) just beneath them. A mere picnic to reach. But, said another, not to be compared with 200 solid miles of high-grade Herefords, all going to be turned into beef-tea, and all accessible by luxurious Pullmans. Or did one desire cities as progressive as Birmingham, with Opera and Town Halls, and racecourses of limitless cost and size? Or still green worlds of coffee; or whispering, dark cocoa-nut plantations where old houses were hidden beside old, old chapels, and one could catch a breath of what life used to be in the days of the superb Brazilian Empire? Or suburban railways that corkscrewed themselves up the faces of 3,000 foot mountains; or Transcontinentals that rumbled nightly over the Andes, and fed you rather decently en route? These things, and heaps more, were to be played with; and the men of the cattle, coffee, shipping, oil, rail, and all the other interests, said, and meant it, that they would give one a good time. But time was quite good enough as it came up day after day with the ripening warmth, under escort of squadrons of flying-fish always rounding-to across our steady bows.The Portuguese and Spanish emigrants taken in at Vigo and Lisbon, lay out on the foc'sle, and lived in the open after their easy custom. The life that they were going to, men told me, would be the same as that they had left, with the difference that in the South they could become as rich as their talents justfied. They had no difficulties to overcome; an Italian could pick up working Portuguese in a fortnight. Climate, custom, and language had apportioned those countries for the Latin. There were Basques, also; and that was a stock that did well. The present ruler of one of the great Southern States was, for example, pure Basque. And emigrants were needed. Did I realise? - Here they spouted figures of square mileage and population thereto, showing how many millions could be thrown into the illimitable South before it ceased to echo. Some of my informants used "South" specifically, because they said the North means the Tropics, where men grow lazy; whereas the businesslike South is swept by Polar breezes and bucked up by frosty winters. To which the North replied in effect: "Don't you wish you were like us? What would you give to be the Paris of the North?" and so on.One got at these things easily as the days grew warmer, and more and more Spanish and Portuguese lingua franca crept into the talk, and the children's voices lifted themselves along the decks: "Eduardo! Ahora se! Do look out you—you—petit imbecile!" Or, when it was necessary to suppress Eduardo further, in Portuguese: "Oh go away and plant potatoes!"But my business was the pursuit of the Beautiful, and beyond a desire to hang architects, I had never taken interest in municipal buildings. The purple-blue seas pushed under and crowded back behind the ship; the sunrises without a shiver to them, when the day rules at once, full-born; and the instant down-dive of night over the very head of the sunset, had been forgotten too long for the soul's health. One had to catch up with these.The Clerks of "Pernam"Then, one early morn, our ship stopped, and by consequence all the little draughts and breezes that run up and down her stopped too; and heat—the genuine heat of lands that have not "weather"—beat friendlily on the back. It was Pernambuco, opening another jewelled day, with boats alongside where men sold golden and pink mangoes, and green parrakeets, every patch and flash of colour definite as enamelwork; the whole backed by the concrete of new piers, oil-tanks and warehouses. Behind these, low coast with veritable palms and bananas, quite unchanged since last seen, and hints of villas on a wooded cape that ran out into the turquoise. Overside, dim shapes of shovel-nosed sharks who are respectable harbour-scavengers and need not be fished for. And as one stared, there unrolled itself a length of well-known film—a shore-boat with a man in white kit that had been often washed. He came aboard and introduced himself to a very young man in quite new London "whites," with the creases still down the front of the trousers, who turned to his companions and bade them farewell. It was just a Pernambuco Bank taking over a new clerk. When the pair were gone—the young figure looking all ways at once—and I had finished estimating the number of shore—boats of different makes, in different ports, at that hour, with allowance for change of time, convoying just the same suit of whites—I asked a man, "What do you think he'll make of it?" "He'll like it no end, and he'll talk about his first commission at Pernam, as long as he lives. They all do. I know I did. It's a dear little place." Which must be good news to some mother, the far side of the sea. ,br> And further, this beach gave me this tale for the instruction of psychologists. Not long since, a couple of Bank clerks of Pernambuco went out (men take liberties with these waters) three miles in a Canadian canoe, which upset. After due consideration, the one who could swim best pushed off for the shore to get help. It took him hours and hours; but what he resented most, at the last despairing lap, was the sight of his lit club house on the shore, where he knew his friends were all drinking happily. However, he survived, gave the news, and a launch hurried out and rescued the other man after some sixteen hours soaking. He, the tale ended, was all right; but the swimmer went "absolutely off" gin and bitters for weeks. He said they, somehow, reminded him of the taste of salt water. Coastwise Traffic There is a fascinating and old-established life behind the green of the shores—with adventure and fun today, and unbroken tradition from Elizabeth's time, and in the background, a world almost untouched. We had entered a stream of its society—people going up and down the coast on little excursions, all apparently rich, all pleasantly at ease, all well acquainted with each other, or each other's acquaintances. It snapped whatever last link there had been with the rest of the world. These places belonged to another Power, and had risen on foundations utterly alien to ours. An old Portuguese fort beside some new harbour-works hinted as much. A Dutch cut on the sterns of the sailing barges added another hint (the Dutch and the Portuguese had it out together, here, a couple of centuries since), and the easy-moving, easy-spoken passengers filled in the rest. They were going, on their own concerns, to Bahia, 300—or Rio, a thousand—or Buenos Aires, 2,000 odd—miles down the road. That boat yonder with the banded funnels was a Brazilian Lloyd. She would run 1,200 miles north, and then up the Amazon for another thousand or two. Letters for Europe could be posted at Pernambuco, because the Dutch or the Italian or the French mail would be up to-morrow to take them on. So learning, we brushed along the green, resounding empty coasts till a vast bay opened, and we lay off Bahia, where, again, everyone coming aboard knew everyone, and the impression of age and solidity deepened in the face of ancient churches and serene old houses. One felt, without telling, that Bahia was the Mother City—the hearth of all that flaming energy when Brazil was being born. Here, too, the Church had ruled, very completely, and here had come the slaves in their thousands, unaware that their children should be citizens of a Republic where the Colour question is not. Here you find the dishes and meats of the old regime—wonderful confections that derive from "palm-oil chop" at its highest; the fruits and the fruit-juice drinks; the rampant colours, greens, reds, and yellows, as of a negress's head-dress; the glare and blaze that takes possession, but does not hurt; and the orderly alternation of the land and sea breezes. Everything that really civilised men can need; and, just because of these advantages, they prefer to talk about their docks and wharves, which, after all, come by nature and public loans to any decent seaboard town.So we went on past a certain Cape where the air and water are always chilly for a few hours, while a Brazilian told me tales of the old time explorers and Captains and the Priests who came after them, in the years when fiery Portugal was raking half the world into her lap. They had as little fear, reason, or what is called common-sense, as any of our sea-workers of the same date, otherwise they would have left the proposition alone. For, he pointed out, from Bahia south to Rio runs a ridge of mountain some two or three thousand feet high within a few miles of the coast, and to get anywhere at all they had first to deal with the tribes in the low ground, and then to work themselves up to the ledge that gives on to the real country. "You'll see it better when you are at Rio or Santos," said he. "That ledge has held us back fifty years. In the old days, one rode it on mule-back—as my father did. Everything came down in packages—coffee and all. That was why we had to have slaves. People don't keep slaves for fun. It's a question of transport. Nothing kills slavery but roads." And while he was explaining, the heat, past Cape Frio, sucked in again, the mountains lifted themselves more loftily and fantastically into hammer-heads and tusks of rock, velveted, up to any slope short of vertical, with matted, solid fighting green forest-growth, and there was a general stir and possessiveness along the decks. Most of our Southampton passengers were almost home again.
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chapter II
POEM OF THE BANANAS
HAVE you no Bananas, simple townsmen all?“Nay, but we have them certainly.“We buy them off the barrows, with the vegetable-marrows“And the cabbage of our own country,“(From the costers of our own country.)” Those are not Bananas, simple townsmen all.(Plantains from Canaryward maybe!)For the true are red and gold, and they fill no steamer’s hold,But flourish in a rare country,(That men go far to see.) Their stiff fronds point the nooning down, simple townsmen all,Or rear against the breezes off the sea;Or duck and loom again, through the curtains of the rainThat the loaded hills let free—(Bellying ’twixt the uplands and the sea.) Little birds inhabit there, simple townsmen all—Jewelled things no bigger than a bee;And the opal butterflies plane and settle, flare and rise,Through the low-arched greenery,(That is malachite and jade of the sea.) The red earth works and whispers there, simple towns men all,Day and night in rank fecundity,That the Blossom and the Snake lie open and awake, As it was by Eden Tree,(When the First Moon silvered through the Tree) . . .But you must go to business, simple townsmen all,By ’bus and train and tram and tube must flee!For your Pharpars and Abanas do not include Bananas(And Jordan is a distant stream to drink of, simple townsmen),Which leaves the more for me!
RioIn sane countries there is no hurry, not even for Port Doctors and Police. Thus, though we entered Rio harbour by early afternoon, it was not till the edge of dusk that we sidled into the wharf, and the whole city and the coasts alongside her chose that moment to light up in constellations and cloud-stars of unbridled electricity.An Evening DriveThen men came aboard, ready—as men are the world over—to show a stranger the place that they loved. In two minutes the shadowy lines of the crowded wharves vanished, and the car was sweeping down a blazing perspective, chequered strongly with double lines of tree-foliage and flanked with lit and packed clubs, shops and cafes. This world of light gave of a sudden, between the shoulders of gigantic buildings, on to even vaster spaces of single-way avenues, between trees, with the harbour on one side, fringed by electric lights that raced forward, it seemed for ever, and renewed themselves in strings of pearl flung round invisible corners; while, above everything, one saw and felt the outlines of forested mountains. All the world was with us in cars, all filled with bare-headed folk, all going at top speed, but none more swiftly than certain devils of motor-buses, whose workaday tones I later mistook for the thunder of an aeroplane outside my eighth-floor window. Somewhere to our right rose a hill up which the lavish lights climbed and broke, on half indicated twists of road. One knew enough from old novels to be aware that this must be San Theresa, the quarter where the virtuous clerk, and the lover exiled by Fate, used to live while they were making their fortunes. It is to-day, as it always has been, a place of pleasant residences. It looks out at the very jaws of the harbour mouth—two smooth crocodile teeth of stripped rock that many eyes must have watched barring the way home in the days when men died between noon and dusk. There were glimpses of pink and white houses here, with plumes of palm upspringing, or, more intimate still, friezes of quiet banana-fronds behind ivory walls. But we kept to the water-front with the multitude who were taking the air.The night was reasonably—that is to say, tropically—warm. Hats, coats, hurry, Time, and other trifles had been dropped on the far side the Line. The only trouble that remained was lest this dream-city of shell-white palaces, intensely lighted green foliage, arrogant statuary, silvered waters, and brooding mountains, would vanish if one dared look aside. But it held on, as one enormous loop of road slid into the next; still skirting the water, still lit by the insolent, all-powerful lights, but—one must pay something to the Gods—perfumed throughout by the flying cars. (Note here, the Brazilian as a driver can paralyse any Place de la Concorde taxi-man. But jealous Southerners say that an Argentine "all out" gives him points. For me he more than suffices.) The Mountain that Runs Presently, the current of traffic turned aside from the Bay, tore through a ringing tunnel where everyone tooted all the time, and broke out on a stretch of Mulzenberg beach—the rollers from the full South Atlantic aligned under the stars, and crumbling along ivory sands up to the electric footlights. Here all who were not on wheels were walking by myriads along a mosaic pavement flush with the sea. Facing the beach were costly detached dwellings whose owners had gone amok in every order, detail, trimming, devilment attribute and curio of what is called "architecture" that their minds or purses could compass. And since the buildings were like nothing on this earth, they exactly fitted the inexplicable scene beneath the high heavens regarding them."This is called Copacabana," said my companions. "It has not been developed very long. No. It is not the City. It is only one of the suburbs. The City is several miles away. There is more of this ahead, but—" They turned back at leisure so that one could get the impression of the milky-mouthed rollers coming in, the movement of the gay multitudes along the sand, the throb of the packed cars—radiator to tank—the overhang of the mountains that one could but guess at, and the goblin-like houses that posed in the glare. It was apiece with the unreality of it all that some of the cars should be filled with joyous, singing people in fancy-dress. "That is because Carnival will be here in a week. They are getting ready for it. But look!, If you watch the shape of that mountain with the light above, you will see that, at first, we leave it behind." Upon which the mountain stood still; we making thirty-five knots. "Now it will run alongside us." The obedient thing started off and did so at once. "Now it will finish by going on ahead. Then it will wait for us at the end of the next bay." This, too, came to pass, and the mountain halted in just that place, showing no signs of fatigue. Men have been burned at the stake for making much smaller magics.
The First Dawn The ride ended opposite stage-green lighted foliage, in a marble hotel that faced the serene waters where one dully lighted tramp was kicking herself out to sea. But the traffic beneath the windows went on till that glassy dead time after day-break when there is neither land nor sea-breeze, and the trees get what they can of rest. In this suspension of pulse and movement, the City swam up with the divinely-heated dawn—enormous, opulent, spotless, and, in spite of her new-sought modernity, ancient and set. The lights on a moored battleship's gangway switched off; a North American pattern ferry-boat plying to suburbs across the water laid out faint furrows on the flat blue floor; fussy Government launches put from a fortified island close by, and fled round a flat point of land which had once been a red hill, but was now turning into an esplanade; a sailing ship began to fiddle with her gear, and a last trail of mist smoked off to let the eye choose what it would of Rio Bay.

__________________________________________________________________

REFERENCE; Pinney, Thomas (Ed.) Kipling's India, Uncollected Sketches 1884 to 1888 Macmillan
1986


THE GATE OF ONE HUNDRED SORROWS
http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_hundredgate1.htm


"The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows"
(notes edited
by John McGivering)



notes on the text
[Heading] pice a small copper coin (Hind. Pais} one-quarter of an anna and one-sixty-fourth of a rupee; at the time it was worth a fraction of a farthing and unlikely to be enough for a pipe of opium. Older readers will remember that a farthing was a quarter of a penny in pre-decimal days when there were 240 pence to the pound sterling instead of only one hundred.

[Page 277, line 1] This is no work of mine ... Gabral Misquitta The author is using the device of crediting another – possibly of Portuguese extraction - with the story, to make it clear that he himself is not the narrator.

[Page 277, line 8] the Mosque of Wazir Khan this almost certainly fixes the story in Lahore where Kipling was working at the time of publication. See Something of Myself Chapter III, and Kipling’s India (ed. Pinney, following p 146 plate 6, for a picture of the city from the mosque.

[Page 277, line 14] ‘The Gully of the Black Smoke’ “Opium Alley”

[Page 277, line 16] a loaded donkey he would have panniers or bags on his back and so would be wider than usual.

[Page 278, line 3] bazaar–rum a local drink made from fermented sugar-cane.

[Page 278, line 7] pukka substantial, well-cooked, permanent, first-class. Also applied to buildings of brick or masonry. From Hindi pakka. (Hobson-Jobson).
[Page 278, line 8] chandoo-khana chandoo is an extract or preparation of opium for smoking. khana is the Persian for a house, room or receptacle etc.

[Page 278, line 15] touched by the Smoke affected by opium.

[Page 278, line 24] gone back to China the Chinese would have their bodies shipped home for burial.

[Page 278, line 28] Joss an idol or household god, from the Portuguese Deos (God) via the ‘Pidgin’ dialect of the Portuguese ports. Europeans would probably have thought this to be a Chinese word. (Hobson-Jobson)

[Page 278, line 30] sticks incense

[Page 278, line 32.] coffin ready for his death.

[Page 279, line 30] Agra on the right bank of the Jumna, once the seat of government of the Mogul emperor Akbar. Here is the magnificent Taj Mahal.

[Page 279, line 23] some people that the Smoke doesn’t touch opium can act as a painkiller but has a deleterious effect on the respiratory and other systems so that the user eventually dies of suffocation. Andrew Lycett (p. 96) reports that Kipling’s excruciating stomach-cramps were cured by his servant giving him a pipe of opium, though this left him with a hangover the next day. See Charles Allen for Kipling's accout of this episode in a ltter to Miss Edith Macdonald, and also Something of Myself pp.53-34.

[Page 280, line 20] Babus Bengali clerks

[Page 280, line 21] Anarkulli a quarter of Lahore below the city wall.

[Page 280, line 27] MacSomebody Macintosh Jellaludin - see "To be Filed for Reference" later in this volume.

[Page 280, line 31] Eurasian usually the result of union between an European father and an Indian mother. (See "His Chance in Life" earlier in this volume.)

[Page 280, line 32] Madras major industrial port in southern India, and capital of the former Madras Presidency on the Bay of Bengal

[Page 281, line 25] three hundred and fifty rupees a month and pickings his salary plus perquisites

[Page 281, line 26] Calcutta the seat of government of British India from 1773 to 1912.

[Page 282, line 13 chandoo-khanas (see the note to p. 278, line 8 above.)

[Page 283, line 16] bran possibly used to adulterate the opium, or it may be ‘the bran-like poppy-trash’ used to pack the cakes mentioned at p. 337 of “In an Opium Factory" in From Sea to Sea vol. II.

[Page 283, lines 21, 22] The coffin is gone …. Smoke the coffin, with the body of Fung–Tching, together with grave-goods for the after-life, would have been shipped to China for burial.

[Page 284, line 25] ‘first-chop’ in this context, 'best quality', indicated by the impression of a seal or brand. Of doubtful etymology, it seems to have come from the pidgin English dialect of the Chinese Treaty–ports via the Portuguese chapa "a thin plate of metal". (Hobson-Jobson)

[Page 284, line 30] a white a European

[Page 284, line 31] a mixed skin a half-caste

[Page 285, line 18] bangles rings of coloured glass worn on the wrist by women and applied to any such ornament worn on the ankle or leg. From the Hindi bangri.


[J. McG.]



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[October 29th 2003]


Publication

This story was first published in the Civil and Military Gazette on September 26th 1884, when Kipling was not yet nineteen, and collected in Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in subsequent editions of this collection. It was his first short story to be published – a tour de force that set a standard which – with a few lapses – he maintained for the rest of his life. When it was first published, the distinguished critic Andrew Lang said that the tale "defeats de Quincey on his own ground".

The story

The tale is presented as a monologue by Gabral Misquitta, a half-caste opium addict, six weeks before his death. It describes the life of the opium den, and of the opium smokers, in the Coppersmith's Gully near the mosque of Wazir Khan. In the end, all life for them revolves around the 'black smoke'. There is nothing else.

It is written entirely as reported speech, indeed the ORG suggested that it might have been taken down verbatim in shorthand, in the notebook which Kipling sometimes took with him. It may equally have been an entirely invented story, inspired by Kipling's night rambles in the dark alleys of Lahore. (See also "In an Opium-Factory" and Chapter VI of "The City of Dreadful Night" in From Sea to Sea vol. II. This should not be confused with another story based on Kipling’s nocturnal ramblings with the same title, collected in Life’s Handicap)

See also Mary Hamer's essay "Kipling and Dreams"

A possible film

This story was considered by Kipling nearly forty years later, in 1922, as a possible basis for a silent film, on which he worked with a scenario writer. It was to have included a number of characters from other tales and poems concerned with low life in India, including Fung-Tching, the Chinaman who kept the opium den in "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows", MacIntosh, an Englishman who has taken to drink and married a native wife, as in "To be Filed for Reference", 'Anne of Austria' the prostitute from "The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House" and 'Hans the Dane' from the same poem, and 'Mother Maturin', the central character from Kipling's lost novel of that name, on which he was working while in India, and which was never published. The film project came to nothing, and no script or scenario has survived, but there is a good deal of information about it in Rudyard Kipling's World by Thurston Hopkins, pages 197 to 233.



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version for printing
notes on the text





http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_brushwood1.htm
THE BRUSHWOOD BOY This story first appeared in The Century Magazine for December 1895 (with no illustrations, but with one map by Kipling) Vol. LI (N.S. XXIX). It was collected in 1898 in The Day’s Work, and subsequently in:
Scribner’s Edition, Volume XIV
Sussex Edition, Volume VI, page 379
Burwash Edition, Volume VI.
It was also published separately in 1899 (reprints in 1907 and 1925) with 12 illustrations by F.H. Townsend (1868-1920). The latter was a well-known book illustrator at this time, and a frequent contributor to Punch, of which magazine he became Art Editor in 1905, and to which he contributed the well-known cartoon in August 1914, entitled ‘No Thoroughfare’ showing a small Belgian boy, in smock and clogs, defending a gate against a large German with jackboots and a cudgel.

The Story

The story tells of the early life of an upper middle-class English Army officer, George Cottar, from his early childhood, through his schooldays, to his return from India at the end of his first tour of duty there. Interwoven into this is an account of his dreams, in which a young girl features: he has met her only once, but clearly she has penetrated his mind; and in the tale she is his constant companion and grows up as he does. The dreams have a consistent theme and imaginary countryside (which Kipling drew as a map).

On his return home, he meets this same girl; she does not realise that she has featured in his dreams for some 21 years – nor does he realise that she, too, has dreamed about him, and the same imaginary countryside, for the same period of time. He reveals himself to her; she realises that he is, indeed, her ‘Brushwood Boy’ (from the pile of brushwood which is the starting point for their dreams) – and the story ends there.

One might describe the tale as a fairy story, with an implicit “And they all lived happily ever after” ending. In reality, “The Story of the Gadsbys” could well have been the sequel.

The Text

The original version in The Century Magazine contains several passages omitted from the book version. These are mostly concerned with Georgie’s schooldays, and were obviously omitted so as not to overlap with Stalky and Co. which was beginning its serial appearance when The Day’s Work was published: most of them are quoted in Roger Lancelyn Green's article in KJ 115 on "Stalky and the Brushwood Boy". Other variations are usually noted, except in the case of a few unimportant words. And, as will be seen below, in Andrew Lycett’s comments, the Century version differed from the original manuscript version.

The Geographical Setting

The ORG Editor makes the perfectly reasonable assumption that Kipling had in mind the neighbourhood of Tisbury, in Wiltshire, as the setting for George Cottar’s home. Kipling had stayed in Tisbury with his parents for three months in 1894 and again for a month in July August 1895 when the story was being written. Two place-names bear a relationship to places near Tisbury: “Dowhead” may be Donhead, four miles south-west of Tisbury – in which case the Cottars may have lived at Wardour Castle, home of Kipling’s friends the Arundells (see Charles Carrington p. 215); “Bassett” may be taken from Combe Bissett”, although this is ten miles east of Tisbury. However, the geography is intentionally vague, and “The Wiltshire Downs south of Tisbury” is sufficient for the purposes of the story.

Date, and Cottar’s Schooldays

The ORG cited Roger Lancelyn-Green’s article in KJ 115 to imply a detailed chronology: there can be little to cavil at in his reasoning, but date and time is not really relevant to the tale. That said, Kipling himself gave a positive date to the tale, and by extension, a timetable of George Cottar’s life, by dating the map of his dreams which Cottar produces (p. 381, line 17).

Similarly, the ORG Editor suggested – again, perfectly reasonably – that Cottar must have attended the United Services College at Westward Ho! at the same time as Beetle, Stalky and M’Turk, and goes so far as to tentatively identify him with Flint or Carson (in "The Last Term"). This Editor concedes that all that his predecessor wrote may be true, but is less certain that Cottar went to U.S.C., although it is obvious that Kipling drew heavily on his time there to give a picture of an English public school of the period. This Editor’s doubts arise from the fact that the Cottars are clearly established as landed gentry (probably minor landed gentry, but clearly 'not short of a bob or two') – all their life-style as described in the tale shouts “upper middle class” (or “lower upper class” – the dividing lines in the English social class system are vague and shifting). Given that, it is less than likely that he would have been sent to U.S.C. which was established for the sons of penurious officers in the Army: the boys had to pass into the army to be assured of a career. George Cottar is not in that situation. At that time, it was quite customary for the eldest son of a house to serve in one of the armed forces until the time came for him to marry and start to learn about the running of the Estate, but he would probably have been educated at one of the older, longer-established schools.

The Dream

The ORG contained quite a long section under this heading. However, the present Editors consider that it does not add anything to the understanding or the background of the story, and so it has been omitted.

ORG Comment on the story


To many people "The Brushwood Boy" is the best of all Kipling’s short stories, being a classic love story, an English idyll, and a delightful picture of the English home and countryside. Others have said that it has too many faults to take high rank in that respect. Others again say that it wants only a little modification to make it one of the best. Georgie is too much of a prig for the modern reader, but at the time the character was conceived by its creator, the anti-hero of today [1960] had not even been thought of, and the knightly hero of fiction was a firmly established convention.

Miriam has been described as (a) not a real woman, and (b) one of the loveliest of creatures. French opinion was represented by Monsieur Fleurian, Ambassador at the Court of St. James, who said, in 1932, “Miriam is the proof that Kipling had a thorough understanding of women.”

Lord Moynihan [a distinguished surgeon who died in 1936] used to suggest that this is the finest story in the world. Others think it too sentimental for the 1960s.
The present Editor would suggest that one’s view of the tale depends on one’s age: he read it first as a late teenager, when, it may be suggested, one is more stirred by the romantic in life than later, when one’s illusions have been swept away by the harsh realities of earning a living and establishing a relationship and, if one is so blessed, in bringing up a family. (That, anyway, is a male view of the matter.) As a result of early reading, he can still believe in the romance, and the coincidence and continuance of the twin dreams, although his realist side suggests that the fiction is unlikely.

The Critics

Lord Birkenhead feels that the story disappoints:


...and, at the end of the volume [The Day’s Work], "The Brushwood Boy", which contains some of Kipling’s most glaring lapses in taste and self-criticism.

"The Brushwood Boy" is one of Kipling’s fabular stories, and deals with the fusion of dreams and reality. The dreams of the child, which always begin by a heap of brushwood near the shore, are poetical yet frightening: there is danger and terror in them, but they are also in a sense exciting and desirable, so that although the boy is puzzled and disturbed by these dream-journeys, and by the girl who is his companion in them, he is also stimulated by an experience so different from the workaday world. There is a beauty and a mystery about these occult wanderings which is completely dissipated when Kipling shows us the bewitching child developing into one of his idealized subalterns in India, and the picture of this clean-living military prig shatters in an instant the mystique of the 'Brushwood Boy'.


Cottar was cantering across to polo, and he looked a very satisfactory figure of a man as he gave easily to the first excited bucks of his pony, and slipped over a low mud wall to the practice ground. There were more than Mrs. Corporal Morrison who felt as she did. But Cottar was busy for eleven hours of the day. He did not care to have his tennis spoiled by petticoats on the court; and after one long garden-party, he explained to his major that this sort of thing was ‘futile piffle’ and the major laughed ….

‘Comin’ to the Fusiliers’ dance tonight, Galahad? asked the Adjutant.

‘No thanks. I’ve got a fight on with the major.’ The virtuous apprentice sat up until midnight in the major’s quarters with a stop watch and a pair of compasses, shifting little lead blocks about a four inch map.
The picture of this smug paragon’s return on leave, after winning glory in the field, to the stately country home and the adoring ‘pater and mater’ resembles some early Hollywood attempt to portray the English aristocracy, and is among the most embarrassing passages in all Kipling’s work; and by now we can neither believe, nor rejoice in the Brushwood Boy’s hastily contrived union with his ‘Dream Girl’.”
[This Editor, who has always liked the story, has to admit that Birkenhead has a point. Young Cottar and young Cottar’s family and family life are just a bit too good to be true. It may be suggested that, when the tale was written, Kipling had not really experienced English ‘County’ life. One can speculate that the tale might have been written differently had it been written in, say, 1908, after six years at Batemans, rather than in 1898.]

J M S Tompkins uses the story to illustrate facets of Kipling’s work, without dissecting the tale or criticising it. In her Chapter 5 ‘Hatred and Revenge’, she comments:


Sustaining and stable love is very seldom at the centre of his tales; it is at the edge or in the frame; it is the condition in which his valuable men are rooted, from which they go forth and to which they return, whether it is found in the country estate that bred and welcomes back the Brushwood Boy ….
Tompkins also turns to ‘The Brushwood Boy in a comment on The Day’s Work:


Nearly all the tales in The Day’s Work … belong to the well-lighted domain of the Gods of the Copybook Headings … The abyss plays no part here … but an aspect of it looms faintly in "The Brushwood Boy", before we close the book. … But the Brushwood Boy grows up with his dreams, though, since he is active and happy in all aspects of his young life and firmly set on his duty, he keeps this strange extension of his consciousness in healthy subservience to his immediate living. The story, like "The House Surgeon" and "The Wish House", is just not rationalised. We are given hints about the material that was fantastically metamorphosed into Georgie’s dream country, and the dreams themselves are not unparalleled; but when the briefly-met little girl is not only swept into Georgie’s dreams but infected by them, so that for years the two, unknown to each other and half a world apart, keep step in their dreaming, we have something that is outside our usual knowledge of human nature...

...The supernatural, then, remained part of Kipling’s total world, though it is very sparingly touched in his latest work. He himself specifically disclaimed in Something of Myself any disposition for the ‘psychic’. … The power of dreaming, which De Quincey calls one of the inlets of the dark sublime into our minds, was certainly his. He built only one story on dreams, ‘The Brushwood Boy’, but the evidence of his dream-life is scattered through his books in simile and reminiscence; … he himself has told us in ‘Brazilian Sketches’ that once in a child’s dream he wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world and ‘found everything different from all previous knowledge’. And the memory of that dream must have provided the groundwork for George Cottar’s wanderings into:


...a sixth quarter of the globe beyond the most remote imaginings of man, [where] he hurried desperately, and the islands slid under his feet, the straits yawned and widened, till he found himself utterly lost in the world’s fourth dimension with no hope of return. Yet only a little distance away he could see the old world with the rivers and mountain-chains marked according to the Sandhurst rules of map-making.
In her final comment on "The Brushwood Boy" Tompkins argues that there are two convictions which emerge strongly in Kipling’s work, both deep-rooted:


The first is that man is a creature that can do his best work only under pressure ... The other conviction is that the adult human being is in service. He wears some yole or harness, whether it be the obligation of a profession or a position, the demands of his genius or those made by society on the Sons of Martha. Some carry a lonely load, but most men are harnessed in a team, or interact like pieces of machinery. I do not think that this insistence on the yoke that a man, to be completely a man, must carry conflicts at all with Kipling’s insistence on independence and self-ownership. The Brushwood Boy fulfils each of his duties to his regiment and lives a wholly independent life as well; and in some way every man has to make the adjustment.
Angus Wilson too uses the tale to illustrate points about Kipling’s work, rather than making a critical appreciation of it. Referring to Kipling’s mother, he says:


Such a mother is not easily reconciled with the muzzily sentimental idea of motherhood that emerges in such stories as, for example, “A Deal in Cotton”, where Agnes Strickland leaves the sickbed of her grown-up son 'humming the Magnificat', or of the grown-up hero’s mother in “The Brushwood Boy”, who:


... sat down on the bed, and they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future in our Empire … she kissed him on the mouth, which is not always a mother’s property.'
(He was, as yet, a virgin.) Such over-lush, sentimental passages, along with the equally sentimental poetic references, “Mother O’ Mine”, and “‘Who’ll choose him for a Knight?’, ‘I’, said his mother,” are among the uncontrolled emotional passages in Kipling, things quite different from the carefully controlled appeals to the reader’s emotions in, say, the Boer War poems.
Wilson's next comment refers to part of the early setting of the tale:


And at Southsea itself he was, at least, protected while kind, friendly, Captain Holloway lived.” [this assessment is rarely commented on – the generally accepted view of his years at Lorne Lodge are of unalloyed misery] …. The visit to Oxford in 1872 when he saw the Provost of Oriel must have been with the Captain on the way to stay with the Baldwins at Bewdley. This visit is commemorated in "The Brushwood Boy" twenty years later as a happy time of enchantment.
Wilson's next comment relates to George Cottar’s school days:


In 1894 …. He went over to the College [the U.S.C., at Westward Ho!] …. This seems to have set his mind further on the school, for in "The Brushwood Boy", which he wrote on a visit next year by himself to his parents, there is a fairly detailed fictional account of Westward Ho (deleted from the final book version).
Later in his study, Wilson suggests that:


Perhaps the most clearly positive result of his four years stay in America [the reference is to the year 1895] had been his changed attitude to England. Two of his best Jungle Book stories … were written while staying there with his parents in their retirement. Here, too, he miraculously recaptured his obsessive dream of the land of the dunes in "The Brushwood Boy", although in writing the story when he returned to Vermont he incorporated an embarrassingly sentimental attitude to the mother he had left behind.
Andrew Lycett describes the tale at length, and uses it as a comparator in half a dozen instances elsewhere in his biography:


Back in his study, puffing on his briar pipe, Rudyard had already started on a ‘story of dream life’ (as Carrie put it), rather at variance from his recent output, almost as if he were defying readers’ efforts to typecast him. "The Brushwood Boy" tells of the conventional upbringing of a young army officer, George Cottar, who throughout his early life enjoys the distraction, pleasure and sometimes terror of a recurring dream sequence. This usually had two main features: he would enter and leave his dream along a beach road that ran past a pile of brushwood to a lamp-post and there was a beautiful girl in the background to whom he gave the name Annieanlouise.

Returning from India, Cottar meets a girl whom he instantly recognises. When he talks to her he learns that she has had similar dreams and is indeed the girl in his own visions. The autobiographical elements of the story are striking: banished to a nursery in the far west wing of an English country house, Cottar starts weaving his own worlds at the age of six. In his later Brazilian Sketches, Rudyard recalled how, as a child, he had once wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world where everything was ‘different from all previous knowledge’; in "The Brushwood Boy", Cottar finds himself in ‘a sixth quarter of the world, beyond the most remote imaginings of man’. But his flights of fancy are repressed during the course of a regular English public-school education that ‘does not encourage dreaming’.

In India Cottar spurns contact with older, usually married, women, preferring to keep himself for the girl, literally, of his dreams. During his fantasy voyages he has to run the gauntlet of spirits he describes as ‘They’, ‘Them’ or ‘It’, which can prove either comforting, frightening, or, in the case of a laughing duck, merely bizarre. Having completed these journeys of discovery, he returns to England to find his other half (in Jungian terms his anima). In a reprise of Rudyard’s "The Dream of Duncan Parrness" eleven years earlier, Cottar is then ready for the business of manhood, the propagation of the race with a young woman who, in an intriguing twist, is called, outside of the reverie, not Annie or Louise but by the unambiguously Jewish name Miriam.

The autograph manuscript of this story in the J.P. Morgan Library in New York shows that Rudyard cut a section in which Cottar asks the regimental doctor in India about his dreams and is told,


“Oh, that’s easy enough. You’ve got two sides to your brain, you see, and they ought to work together but they don’t always. One side gets a fraction of a second in front with a thought specially when you’re half asleep and your reason, you see, isn’t at work.”
Perhaps he thought this was too didactic: in October he admonished Sarah Orne Jewett, a New England writer he admired, for spelling things out in a story, ‘and I loathe an explanation’. He certainly did not offer much help in relation to "The Brushwood Boy". However, his clear description of the Tisbury landscape and his use of Wiltshire names such as Morrison and Bassett suggest that, as in the previous year, his time in England helped him work out pressing issues. Watching his contented father and his wife carrying his baby (was it to be the son everyone said he longed for?), he reflected deeply about his upbringing (and particularly his school years) and concluded that a complete man needs to strike a balance between his masculine achievements and feminine imaginative sides. As he would later boast, he himself had two sides to his head – something for which he thanked the Lord or, as he put it with a typical flourish, Allah.

Having completed the story on 8 September, Rudyard sent it to Century Magazine, asking $170 per thousand words. (His fees had been leaping up.) Since it was accepted for the Century’s Christmas issue, he even allowed the editor, Gilder, in deference to squeamish readers, to alter the boil on Cottar’s thumb to a cut. (Usually, he refused such petty censorship, as when Bok at Ladies’ Home Journal wanted to remove scenes referring to alcohol in "William the Conqueror".)

According to Carrie’s diaries, the original title for "The Brushwood Boy" was ‘The Infants of Bohemia’, which provides a clue to the story’s provenance ….

Lycett explains that Kipling and Conan Doyle had become acquainted, and suggests that 'it would have been just like Rudyard to nod recognition towards Doyle in his title ‘The Infants of Bohemia’ (Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ had been the first of his stories agented by A.P. Watt.)'
Lycett remarks on the publication of The Day’s Work thus:


... in October, Rudyard published The Day’s Work, his first collection of short stories for five years. Although all the material had been published before, he gave it a focus and artistic integrity, by starting the book with "The Bridge-Builders" dating back to 1893, one of his most successful explorations of the duty and commitment required by the empire-maker, and progressing to the final piece, "The Brushwood Boy", which launches into uncharted territory, where the secret world of dreams needs to be squared with objective reality. Rudyard’s precise positioning of these stories indicates that he saw the collection as his own bridge between a youthful naturalism and a later sparser, more allusive style.
Peter Havholm, in his recent (2008) study, speaks well of "The Brushwood Boy", remarking that:


...the development of Kipling’s work after his return to England in 1889 can be followed through his experiments and choices in fictions.
Havholm goes on to cite Life’s Handicap and The Light that Failed, and comments:


Whereupon he chose to turn again to the wondrous and produced some of his most popular work: stories like ‘The Maltese Cat’ and "The Brushwood Boy...
Later, he examines the tale in greater detail:


...On occasion, he gives himself completely to the pleasurable fantasy of "The Maltese Cat" or The Just-So Stories, or the Jungle Books or "The Brushwood Boy". That last, archetypal in its wild joy, metonymically unveils a fundamental characteristic of all of Kipling’s worlds. Its pure fantasy stands in relation to the worlds of Kim or "The Head of the District" or "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat", or the Stalky stories as a revelatory extension of their less obvious dreamings.

From an outside perspective, the story’s George Cottar (brilliant at school and Sandhurst, DSO and a brevet majority in his first campaign, unwittingly the passion of every woman who sees him, cheered madly by his men and worshipped by his officers’ mess) seems as impossibly perfect as are his parents’ well-staffed estate and the trout in its evening streams. But in the story whose centre is the meeting in life of a man and a woman who have been literally in one another’s dreams since childhood, these little imperfections fall into the background. The climax offers a romantic love gilded by the kind of magic represented by oak, ash and thorn in the Puck books: these souls have been meeting circumstantially.

George confronts Miriam with details of their shared dream: 'Don’t you remember the thirty-Mile-Ride – with me …?' – that confirms his identity. Realizing, she cries: 'Then you’re the Boy – my Brushwood Boy, and I’ve known you all my life!' Later, You are you!', and she remembers what he has forgotten, that, as a dream child years before, he called her Annieanlouise.

'It all joins on, you know', as George says, and then, 'What’s the shortest limit for people to get engaged?'. What could possibly be more satisfactory? And how could anyone be taken in by this sort of thing? …
There have been a number of articles down the years in the Kipling Journal: in particular, in nos. 115, 119 and 291. This last contains the text of a lecture on the tale, given by the Hon. Austin Asche, to our Australian branch, together with a short commentary by our then Kipling Journal Editor, the late George Webb. In introduction George Webb writes:


I am glad now to publish the text of a talk which he [Mr. Asche] delivered in Melbourne in March 1998 to members of our Australian Branch, at an event marking the Branch's sixtieth anniversary – noted in our June 1998 issue at page 37. His subject was that well known short story, "The Brushwood Boy" (collected in The Day's Work, 1898), aspects of which he compared with another story in the same collection, "William the Conqueror".

"The Brushwood Boy" has always provoked a mixed reaction from its readers. Some (myself included) admire it without serious reservations, and do not feel that the main character, George Cottar, though idealised, is too implausibly virtuous. Others, however, have been put off by what they regard as Cottar's priggishness – and by a certain complacency in Kipling's depiction of him. For example, "He had plenty of money of his own; his training had set the public-school mask upon his face, and had taught him how many were the 'things no fellow can do.' Such sentiments, expressed with approval and without irony, were acceptable – indeed were common form – a hundred years ago, but to a more cynical and disillusioned generation they seem painfully dated.

The same perhaps applies (if one is inclined to be captious) to Kipling's rather breathless description of the Cottar parents' idyllic home, immaculate in an unspoiled countryside:


'Nothing was changed in that orderly life, from the coachman who met [George] at the station to the white peacock that stormed at the carriage from the stone wall above the shaven lawns...' – and so on.
The story also contains an often-cited example of the kind of false note that Kipling occasionally struck. Like all rapid, copious and creative writers he sometimes slipped, and the remarkable thing is, how rare these lapses were. Still, one may slightly wince on reading how Cottar (just back on leave from India) and his mother fondly 'talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future for the Empire.'

I have tried to analyse just why this jars. The trouble, I think, arises because it is a sweeping, dogmatic and sentimental generalisation which contributes nothing to the narrative and, being both sudden and uncalled-for, is likely to surprise and even alienate many readers. I guess that here he was tempted to ventilate a favourite political theme – by forcing an analogy between the intimacies of English family life and the state of the British Empire, where much depended on the 'Mother-country' maintaining a sympathetic relationship with her self-governing colonies.

Significantly, Kipling himself seems to have realised that to shoe-horn a reference to the British Empire into this love-story would put off American readers, for he changed "our Empire" (in the English 1898 Macmillan edition of The Day's Work) to "the Empire" (in the American 1898 Doubleday & McClure edition); and it remained "the Empire" in the special illustrated edition of "The Brushwood Boy" published by Doubleday & McClure as a separate book in 1899; though in the volume containing The Day's Work in the 1941 Burwash Edition (Doubleday, Doran) – the American equivalent of the Sussex Edition – it reverted to "our Empire".

Either way, it was artistically a mistake – at least it seems so to us, unaccustomed as we have become to having didactic assertions of a political or philosophical nature made to us by the narrator in a work of fiction. Admittedly, for our Victorian forebears, such assertions were not unusual, and there was more room for them in the huge, leisurely-paced novels of the nineteenth century. For example, Dickens was a heavy and emphatic moraliser – though, be it said, more effective when letting the moral emerge by implication out of what his characters said or did than when passing judgment as narrator. The same caveat applies to any writer bold enough to be dogmatic about matters on which many readers will have views of their own. There will be a saving grace if the ex cathedra comment is amusing (like many of the outspoken opinions with which R.S. Surtees litters his novels), or relevant to the plot (like Dickens's famous introduction of A Tale of Two Cities – 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...' – which directly pertains to the story, setting the scene for all that follows). But Kipling's throw-away imperial allusion in "The Brushwood Boy" can claim no such justification.

However, if the story has minor flaws, it also has great merits. Cottar's enchanted dream-country is vividly described in evocative language:
'He would find himself sliding into dream-land by ... a road that ran along a beach near a pile of brushwood [and then] over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason.' On occasion, he found himself 'trapped in mines of vast depth hollowed out of the heart of the world, where men in torment chanted echoing songs.' And he and his companion 'rode the Thirty-Mile Ride under whip and spur along the sandy beach by the booming sea, till they came to the downs, the lamp-post, and the brushwood pile, which was safety.'
Austin Asche gives full credit to "The Brushwood Boy" for the effectiveness and power of its writing; but is less enthusiastic about its heroine, Miriam, whom he compares unfavourably with the heroine, known as 'William', in "William the Conqueror". It is a fair and thought-provoking comparison.


The Bridge Builders

The Bridge-Builders" (notes edited by John Radcliffe; these are partly new and partly based on the ORG notes edited by Reginald Harbord)
notes on the text [December 3rd 2009] Publication This story first appeared in the Illustrated London News Christmas Number, 1893. It was written in Vermont. soon after the Kiplings had moved in to Naulakha, with some assistance from Rudyard's father Lockwood. It was collected in The Day's Work, 1898, in the U.S.A. and England The Story The first part of the story is a detailed description of the construction of a great railway bridge across the Ganges. It illustrates Kipling's remarkable capacity for assimilating and portraying details of civil engineering practice which he had largely learned from the engineers themselves.
PLOT
The bridge is nearing completion when it is threatened by a major flood. After taking all possible precautions to save his bridge, the Chief Engineer, Findlayson, is swept down the river at night in a small boat, onto an island, with his Lascar foreman, who gives him opium to stave off the cold.
VISIO0N OF THE GODS OF INDIA WHILE PEOPLE DREAM THE GODS WILL STILL BE THERE
Under the influence of the drug, he has a vision of the gods of India. They do not care for change in the old order of things, and so protest against the bridging of the river. The bridge stands, despite the flood, but in the broad sweep of human history, perhaps this is not such a deep loss to the old gods, who will always be there to claim the allegiance of men and women in different ways, whatever material changes there may be. While people dream, the gods will still be tnere.
BRIDGE BUILDING AN OLD ART
Bridge-building The ORG Editors write: The art and practice of bridge-building is very old. As early as the latter part of the 12th century, a Bridgebuilding Brotherhood (Fratres Pontifices) was established in the south of France, a confraternity whose responsibility it was to build bridges, to maintain hospices at the chief fords of the larger rivers, and to look after ferries. The bridge in this story is a lattice-girder type of 28 spans of 330 feet each. It could have been either an independent span bridge, i.e., each span reaching from abutment to pier, or from pier to pier, without projecting beyond the supports; or a continuous span bridge, i.e., each span reaching over more than one opening, usually three. From the wording of the narrative it appears that an independent span bridge is being erected. The lattice-girder is a type of construction involving a series of trusses interdependent one upon the other. The limiting span for this type of bridge is about 800 feet: the Hawkesbury Bridge, New South Wales (right), is typical, with 7 spans each 416 feet long.
KIPLING AND BRIDGE BUILDING
Kipling and bridge-building The ORG Editors did much to analyse the author's supposed mistakes, and concluded that though he was guilty of various minor errors, to be expected in a layman's description of highly technical matters, most of the major mistakes of which he had been accused were found on close examination not to exist at all. The British built a number of major bridges during their time in India to support trade and better communications, and the opening of a bridge was an important event. Rudyard covered several such openings as a newspaper correspondent. Two of his reports are to be found in Kipling's India, uncollected sketches 1884-88 (Macmillan, 1986) edited by Thomas Pinney:
the Sutlej Bridge (known as the Kaiserin-i-Hind - 'Empress of India' - Bridge between Ferozepur (or Firozpur, south of Lahore) and Kazur, opened on 2 March 1887 (p. 206). [see the picture at the top of these notes and the Map of Kipling's India.] The description of the Sutlej Bridge bears a marked resemblance to Kipling's account of the 'Kashi Bridge' in the story. In "William the Conqueror", also in this collection, the train, bringing the famine relief team back to the Punjab from the South, crosses this 'mile-long' bridge. (page 225, line 24).
the Victoria Bridge at Chak Nizam over the Jhelum River, opened on 18 May 1887 (p. 215). See also Charles Carrington (p. 208).
MALVIYA BRIDGE CARRIES THE GRAND TRUNK ROAD ACROSS THE GANGES NOTE THE STORY KIM
Kipling is also thought to have stayed with Frederick Walton, the Chief Engineer of the imposing Dufferin Bridge called since 1948 the Malviya Bridge) at Benares, opened on December 16th 1887. It is notewothy that 'Kashi', the name of the bridge in the tale, is another name for that sacred city. We have not, though, so far been able to trace any reports from him about this bridge in either the CMG or Pioneer. The Malviya Bridge carries the Grand Trunk Road across the Ganges, within sight of the temples of the burning ghats where the remains of the dead are committed to the sacred river. The opening ceremony had been delayed because the bridge had been damaged by flood, another link with the story.
THE ENGINEERS ORIGINAL OF FINDLAYSON
Who were the engineers ? The ORG Editors did their best to establish the original of 'Findlayson'. He was probably partly based on James Richard Bell, a notable engineer and bridge-builder, who spent twenty years in the Public Works Department of India and died in 1912 (See the notes on page 1 line 1). He is noted in his own profession for having devised a system of 'guider' banks, known as 'Bell bunds' for containing the alluvial rivers of Northern India in narrower (and consequently deeper) channels than those provided by nature. ('There is always room for more stone on the revetments' - page 9, line 16) However, Kipling knew other civil engineers, and their bridges, whom he must also have remembered in writing this tale in his study in Vermont.
SIR A GEDDES AND ALYSON MINCHIN
Sir A. Geddes in his Founding of a Family claims that his father was the original of Findlayson. Another suggestion came from Mr. Alyson F. Minchin, of Duns, Berwickshire, who wrote in December 1962:
In a letter you observed that Findlayson was almost certainly a composite character. I have information from my school-friend, Colonel Granville Walton, C.B.E., and some more from his brother, Sir Cusack Walton, R.E., which make it conclusive that Findlayson was, as you thought, `composite'. Bell may have served as the one Kipling wanted, whilst the actual builder of the Kashi Bridge was the father of the Waltons, whose full name was Frederick Thomas Granville Walton, C.I.E., Telford Medal, etc. (1840-1925).
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORLD OF WORK
Critical responses This story has been acknowledged by the critics as one of Kipling's masterworks, expressing deeply felt convictions and speculations about the significance of the world of work, as he observed British rule in India. Angus Wilson (p. 93) remembers the contrast between ancient India and British modernity so vividly illustrated by the bridging of the Ganges:
During his Indian time the imposing Dufferin (called since 1948 the Pandit Malviya) Bridge was constructed to take the Grand Trunk Road across the Ganges within sight of the temples of the burning ghats. He reported on its building for the Civil and Military Gazette in 1887, the year that it was opened. But the ceremony had been delayed because the bridge had been damaged by flood. In my own experience, the spectacle of the ghat cremations in its juxtaposition of noisy bazaar and silent river, in its vivid colours besides the draining sunshine and heat, and its constant human movement beside the stillness of the dead, heightens the intensity of all one's sense-impressions.
PHILIP MASON TININESS AND FUTILITY OF HUMAN EFFORT
Philip Mason (pp.141-2), who worked as an administrator in British India in the best years of his working life, notes:
The bridge is the symbol of modern progress, science and technology; it has been built up at the cost of many lives, much toil and agony of spirit. But all that effort is only dirt digging in the dirt. None the less, the bridge is still standing, when we come back to the workaday world, and it joins the present to the past ... But while Kipling was always on the edge of an awareness of the infinite, there was never any true conflict in his mind about this; he was a Son of Martha, and like Findlayson concerned with stone and concrete, and the strength of good workmanlike building ..."The Bridge Builders" puts a question-mark against the whole idea of human effort, displaying its tininess and futility. Men scurrying about like ants busy themselves on things of desperate importance, but they are nothing in the face of eternity. Yet - the message goes - morning will come and the bright sun and we must again be scurrying about our important business.
TOMPKINS AND THE VISION OF KRISHNA THE DREAM OF THE DIVINITIES JUST THAT
J M S Tompkins (p. 192) notes the contrast between the impressive achievement of the nearly completed bridge, and the threat posed by the vast forces of nature:
It is at this point, at what should be the triumph of Findlayson's labours, that they are reduced to nothing by progressive changes of scale. Indra chides the impatience of Mother Gunga: `The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and tomorrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till tomorrow?' Ganesh adds: `It is but the shifting of a little dirt.... Let the dirt dig in the dirt ere it return to the dirt.' This chilling vision contracts again, from a geological to a historical scale, when Krishna, who lives with men, tells the other gods that, through the building of bridges and such works as the men from over the water do, the flame will die on their altars, and they will be as they were in the beginning, 'rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the tree, and the village-mark'. But, when they appeal to Indra, they get an answer that dissolves time and place and mass into insubstantiality. They and all things, even Heaven and Hell, are the dream of Brahm. And Jan Montefiore (pp. 62-63), in her chapter on "The Day's Work" stresses that Kipling does not, in fact, let the forces of Ancient Night win out:
The bridge survives, Findlayson forgets the whole thing ... and he and Peroo are taken off to safety in a local Rajah's up-to-date steam-launch. Moreover, when Peroo, the most intelligent person in the story, realizes that in daylight the terrible Gods mean nothing to Findlayson, he concludes that they can exist only because men dream them: 'Then it is true. When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods go' (page 44). Not only the Ganges, but the gap of belief between Englishman and Indian has been bridged by English technology: Peroo the Indian sheds his superstition to enter Findlayson's own realm of materialism and technological mastery, and we last see him taking possession of the launch's steering-wheel and, in imagination, flogging the guru whose service he has outgrown. The dream of the divinities, whose vision reduced humanity to insignificance, has revealed itself as just that - a dream that is itself reduced to insignificance by the daylight reality of skill and labour.
ZOHREH SULLIVAN
As Zohreh T Sullivan says:
... the irony is clear; the gods exist as long as Findlayson remains in his opium dream. And the colonialists exist as long as the natives remain asleep. Rationality, consciousness, enlightenment will gradually awaken the dreamers, and then the gods will die. And yet these ironies do not still the question asked by Indra, the highest of the Gods: 'Can any say that this their bridge endures till tomorrow?' The story suggests that the real reason why men must attend to their duties is to avert their minds from an unimaginable eternity in which nothing they do can matter. The final significance of work seems to be for Kipling, as for Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness, that it offers an escape from the nothingness of the night when no man can work, neither the colonial officer nor the native subaltern. See also Mary Hamer's essay "Kipling and Dreams"
REFERENCES
See also KJ 92, KJ 100, KJ 247, KJ 238. For an introduction to Hinduism and its Gods, see Hinduism, by K. M. Sen, Pelican 1962.










http://www.fullbooks.com/Indian-Tales1.html

http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/kipling-rudyard

http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_finest1.htm The Finest Story in The World"-its synopsis
BEYOND THE MAP OF IMPOSED ORDER- PARADISE REDISCOVERED
-IMAGINATIVE FRAGMENTS AND DISJOINTED FRAGMENTS
-INSPIRATION, ORGINALITY AND REINCARNATION -GRISH CHUNDER'S REMARKS ON DREAMS-NEW CHANNELS -EXPANSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS ON BECOMING A FATHER-OVERTAKEN BY DAEMON BEYOND CONSCIOUS CONTROL-RECOLLECTED FRAGMENTARILY IN THE POWER OF IMAGINATION

'The Finest Storyin the World' (notes edited by Peter Havholm)
notes on the text [November 8 2007] Publication This story was first published in the Contemporary Review of July 1891.It is collected in:
Many Inventions, page 95
Scribner’s Edition, Volume V
Sussex Edition, Volume V
Burwash Edition, Volume V
The story The narrator meets a young bank clerk, Charlie Mears, who longs to be a writer and seeks his advice. Charlie seems a commonplace and not particularly imaginative young man, but - partly written and partly in conversation - he produces strangely powerful accounts of sea voyages in the ancient world, by a Viking adventurer on a voyage to America, and by a Greek galley slave. He gives vivid details, including fragments of script which turn out to be corrupt Greek. The narrator becomes convinced that - rather than creating these stories - Charlie is remembering past lives, and that it is such recollections that feed the mysterious processes of creative 'imagination'. Another friend, a sophisticated Bengali, Grish Chunder, confirms that this must be the case, but warns that when Charlie falls in love the threads from the past will be broken.This is exactly what happens. Charlie meets a young woman, expresses his love in banal conventional verses, and loses interest in his 'tales' of the past.Background By July 1891, a year and half after his arrival in London, Kipling knew that the ‘new man’s bid’ for public favor, of which he had written to Mrs. Burton when Plain Tales from the Hills was in production three years before, had been successful. While The Light that Failed (first published in January 1891) had not been a critical success, it was not unpopular, and much else of his published work had been both. Hence, this story may be seen as part of the artistic exploration that took place during this interim period (as it became) between work at his two bases in India (Lahore where he had his apprenticeship as a writer and Allahabad where he was an experienced correspondent) and Vermont, where he was writing as an established literary star. It seems reasonable to suppose that, because the story introduces the Bengali Grish Chunder, its notion of reincarnation comes from Hindu ideas which Kipling would have encountered at least in conversation with his father in Lahore. But the story also references Wordsworth’s “Immortality” Ode ('trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home') and therefore, indirectly, sources like Plato’s "Phaedrus". So the concept is general rather than specific. Charlie remembers two previous incarnations, one on a Greek galley and one on a Viking ship that sailed to America. Grish Chunder says that he, believing in reincarnation, is afraid to be kicked but not afraid to die, 'but you are afraid to die. If you were not, by God! you English would be all over the shop in an hour, upsetting the balances of power...' But the story does not propose a complex theology. Carrington suggests that Charlie Mears’s hopeless fantasy of becoming a poet may be based on conversations Kipling had with Ambo Poynter in Embankment Chambers, who showed him his poetry and a five-act play. Kipling wrote to Mrs. Hill:
He estimates his poems not by the thing actually put down in black and white but by all the glorious inchoate fancies that flashed through his brain while his pen was in his hand... [Charles Carrington, page 188] Critical responses The story has been both popular and admired by critics, though Carrington uses it to argue how much more 'richly polyphonic' is “Wireless” later on (Traffics and Discoveries 1904). J M S Tompkins remarks on the story’s skill in giving the reader a:
...much stronger imaginative impression of the past from disjointed fragments than...a complete picture. The fragments glow with conviction because we are infected with excitement at a revelation so imminent and so completely unrealizable. (page 227). As an example of one strand of modern Kipling criticism, Zohreh Sullivan writes in the 1980s:
This is Kipling’s most “uncanny” story. Just as Freud has explained the uncanny by connecting it with the return of the repressed, with the idea of a double, with ‘regression to a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated form the external world and from other persons,’ so the structural doubling of storytellers compels the older narrator to relive his early fears and anxieties through the younger. . . . What Charlie is uncannily remembering is not merely previous incarnations but his own unconscious life: his life in the womb, his birth and latency. [“Kipling the Nightwalker” in Harold Bloom, ed. Modern Critical Views: Rudyard Kipling Chelsea House, New York 1987] See also Mary Hamer's essay "Kipling and Dreams"

http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_dreams.htm#finest
Reincaranation, dream and writing Trance and reverie, waking states in which the everyday forms of perception give place, are linked with dream in "The Finest Story in the World" (1891). Charlie Mears, a bank clerk who yearns to be a writer, is the subject of its study rather than its hero. Endowed with an immensely detailed knowledge of life as a galley slave and as a northern pirate, he doesn’t appear to question where that knowledge comes from. Nor can he write it: on the page his work is leaden. His speaking voice alone is able to carry the story. It’s when he’s sleepy, about to go to bed or gazing spellbound into the fire that he gains access to it. But when he is utterly vulnerable, asleep, that’s the moment whe when thenightmare’ in which he experiences his own death sweeps over him. Writing in the first person, Kipling inserts himself in the story, as a young man in London, a figure very close to his actual position at that time. Emphasising his own identity as a writer, Charlie’s mentor and interlocutor, allows him to raise questions about inspiration and originality, before providing an answer designed to thrill Kipling’s own readers with assertions concerning reincarnation. Those assertions may also be designed to calm Kipling himself. He had learned that as a writer he was at times taken over by a power beyond his conscious control, his ‘Daemon’ as he named it, which brought those intuitions of guilt and death he developed in writing "The Phantom Rickshaw". He needed some framework for understanding what was happening to him. It may have been a relief to arrive at the formulation of a ‘half-memory falsely called imagination.’ The power of what Charlie recounts, his fragments of narrative and of description, remain striking. Yet the story itself is so distorted by the writer’s personal need to establish an explanation for those bursts of inspired talk, that it is dragged down. A Hindu acquaintance, Grish Chunder, is unconvincingly introduced, with discussions meant to demonstrate that the East, with its faith in reincarnation, can accommodate Charlie and his tales. Chunder can explain it all and how it will end: “Charlie will remember a little and a little less and he will call it dreams” . More disturbing, to today’s readers at least, is the assertion that Charlie’s gift will evaporate once he comes to feel that he’s in love with a woman, as though something pristine in him will be killed off, and with it access to what is truly known. It’s awkward, a place where the pattern of Kipling’s own fantasies— or is it his buried memories? — come poking through. The reader senses strain, too, in the repeated assertion that some writing, some knowledge, is forbidden by ‘The Lords of Life and Death’: the narrator says he would like to write the story of Charlie’s former lives but feels that he must not do so. One reason, he claims, is that readers would say that he made it up out of other men’s books. But the intimation of veto is stronger and more diffused than that: the intuition of a past death, and the sense of a knowledge that is forbidden, weave together, closing the way.
To the end of his life Kipling remained uneasy about being so porous, so open to knowledge he could not account for, and uncomfortable with his sometimes uncanny power of intuition. In Something of Myself, which was in late draft at the time of his death, he describes two such occasions which left him baffled. In 1913, when he was lying out watching manoeuvres near Aldershot, the weather conditions put him in mind of South Africa and the Boer War. In imagination he felt the pressure of all the British dead from that war, seeing them forming and flickering before him in the heat. (Readers may see a link with his story "The Army of a Dream" (1904), but Kipling himself failed to make that connection.) His notion came to obsess him. In the end, however, he drew back from writing it up for publication because he didn’t want to attract discussion of his ‘psychical experience’. ‘And I am in no way psychic’, he stoutly if unconvincingly declared. He believed that his sister Trix’s psychical experiments had contributed to her breakdowns.That disclaimer was closely followed in his memoir with an account of an exactly prophetic dream, quite prosaic but perfectly exact in its detail, which came to him in 1922. Six weeks before the ceremony took place, the dream precisely anticipated his experience in Westminster Abbey when he was present for the dedication by the Prince of Wales of a memorial to the dead of the Great War. For Kipling, it was an unsought example of forbidden knowledge: he had 'passed beyond the bounds of ordinance ... But how, and why, had I been shown an unreleased roll of my life-film?’, he asked.Charlie’s memories—if they do belong to him—or his visions, are involuntary, like his creator’s, and appear to give a clue to the workings of the world, workings specifically not recognised under Christianity. Grish Chunder, the Hindu, is brought in to dramatise the existence of a different culture and to make its reading of the world actively present in the tale.
A vision of natural forces and pagan gods "The Bridge-Builders" (1893) takes this a step further. Findlayson, the English engineer, whose fine calculations and dedicated toil have succeeded in throwing a bridge across the mighty Ganges, is exposed under the influence of opium to a completely different vision of the powers that move the universe. The flickering dragons of "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" have given way to something infinitely more challenging. The beasts that Findlayson and his overseer, Peroo, overhear in divine conference as they lie in an opium dream, and the figure of Krishna that comes to stand among those beasts, are deities of the Hindu pantheon.These may be a bolder indication of the scale of the dreams Kipling himself had experienced as a young man in the years before he left India. But by the time he wrote "The Bridge-Builders" he was the father of a young family, living in Brattleboro. Why this vision now, and why one based on the traditions of Hinduism, when he always claimed to get on better with Muslims? It appears that the inner reconfiguration, the expansion which followed on becoming a father, opened a new channel for his imagination, releasing some of his own earliest experience.
As a child in Bombay he once lived in a vivid world of ‘threshold magic [and] wayside spells’ where elephants and camels, water buffalo and cows moved along the streets, not to mention the vultures that wheeled above the nearby Towers of Silence: animals lived close alongside humans, as even today, they do to some extent in urban India. Animals also made the heroes and villains in the stories he heard from his ayah and the other servants. Bearing this in mind, it’s no surprise that the creative burst prompted by the birth of his first child Josephine, in 1892, took the form of the animal stories which would make up The Jungle Book.Kipling revelled in the flexibility of outlook his early identification with India gave him. He called it having ‘two sides to his head’. In ‘The Bridge-Builders’ it is as though he allows himself as a writer to succumb to the power of the pagan, pre-Christian, vision and to present it side by side with the workaday view of the practical white man. The world of the Indian labourers, ‘the humming village of five thousand workmen’, is absolutely present in the tale, along with the anxieties and calculations of the engineers, in the face of an oncoming flood, a pairing that is thrown into relief when Findlayson and Peroo are isolated together under the stress of the storm.Does the writer believe literally in the story of Hindu apparitions that he’s telling? Has he believed in earlier ones? Psychologically, if not rationally, yes. Otherwise none of them could command the power they do. One way of putting it is to say that just as animals and humans remain close in India, the conscious and the unconscious are not so firmly separated there as they are in Europe. For his western-educated readers, then and now, this story offers a charge of something primal that’s been lacking in their diet, alongside the satisfyingly minute description of labour, and the fight to save a bridge in a time of flood.

"The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" offered no challenge to conventional wisdom, but this later opium dream constitutes both a statement and a challenge, or at the very least a ‘what if?’. What if there are other powers in the universe that may take different forms, which Krishna and his story bring into focus? Kipling was seeking to find a language for his maturing independent vision, one that would frame that vision, and accommodate it within a story concerning human experience and human response to the living world. The dreams experienced in "The Brushwood Boy", however, present readers with a different kind of juxtaposition, one that challenges them to use their intelligence. In the daytime world, the hero, Georgie Cottar, achieves apparent perfection as a public school boy and later as an officer in the Indian army. He is single and perfect: literally, a virgin. Yet we have been shown him from the age of three subjected to dreams which indicate a buried life of conflict and confusion. As a tiny child he wakes screaming in fear of the figure of a policeman, the symbol, we come to suspect, of the law which rules the daytime life he must take up as a man. Though he appears to have conformed completely to this law, the chaotic adventures of his dreams indicate a life that is bubbling beneath, unexpressed and unresolved in daylight. He confronts extremities of danger in these, indicating a threat to his inner life that has to be confronted over and over, rather like the demands which are shaping his life on the outside. One dream takes him into ‘a sixth quarter of the globe’. For all its dangers, this appears to be the very landscape of desire. Kipling’s only recorded childhood dream seems to refer to a sighting of some such world beyond the map of imposed order, his lost paradise rediscovered, perhaps. His travel letter "The Journey Out" (Brazilian Sketches, 1927) suggests such a link with the past when it remarks:
...Once in a child's dream, I wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world, and found everything different from all previous knowledge; as only children or old folk desire it to be.’ (italics mine) Yet Georgie Cottar survives amidst these dangers, a survival closely linked to the image of a little girl, a young woman whose presence— or memory—keeps him safe. (Recalling how a young woman spelled the death of insight to Charlie Mears in "The Finest Story in the World", we can see how far Kipling has travelled here.)





Georgie’s family home in England is described in idealising terms, in tune with those used of his career as man and boy. Readers have taken this as evidence of Kipling’s naiveté—as the very notes to the story on this website complain— but I would argue that all this idealisation is a conscious move, made in mockery, meaning to contrast it with the truth to be found in the risk and struggle of the instinctual world of dream. It was only after I came to see this that I could make sense of ‘Ha ha, said the duck laughing’, a dream phrase that is repeated in the story. Like the song Kipling incorporates within the tale, lamenting the return from the City of Sleep under orders from Policeman Day, it snags on the reader’s awareness, and calls out considered response from greater depth. It is when the grown-up Georgie and Miriam, a real-life young woman, meet in the world of daylight and are collecting a real-life duck that his mother has ordered for dinner, that they confront the fact that she is familiar with the landscape of his dreams and has shared in his struggles there, matching detail for detail, impulse for impulse with him.The reader can take it that their lives of instinct and fantasy have all along been intimately shared, for the distasteful presence of a Sick Thing haunts Georgie’s dreams, while Miriam’s waking life has been up till now tied to an invalid mother—by inference one who doesn’t support or enjoy a vitality like her daughter’s. As an artist Kipling has arrived at the point where he can use dream to mount a critique of the secular sacred, the ideal of masculinity and the mothers who perpetuate that tradition. His first readers could scarcely be expected to accept such a move made openly. By taking them into the world of dreams, he quietens everyday patterns of thought, speaking in images whose force is picked up at a deep level. Sixteen years would pass before he wrote another profound dream story. In the interval Kipling suffered an extended dream himself, in 1899 when he was delirious with pneumonia. On his recovery, in line with his interest in the mind and its workings, the play between memory and imagination, instinct and image, he dictated an account of this dream to a stenographer. For today’s reader that document makes painful reading, laying bare his agonised feelings of exposure and of being falsely accused, his fear of separation from his wife, Carrie.




Remembering the scandal of May 1896, when Kipling took his brother-in-law Beatty Balestier to court after Beatty threatened to kill him, we can make sense of these anxieties. In spite of all his fame and distinction as a writer, Kipling was publicly humiliated when he broke down under cross-examination, a collapse that was widely reported in the press. At the end of his life what Kipling chose to remark, reviewing the dream in Something of Myself, was the way delirium brought to the surface factual information that he supposed had been long forgotten. In Lahore, as a young reporter on the Civil and Military Gazette, he’d been obliged to translate the war diaries of a Russian general from French. In New York, fifteen years later, the names of every camp noted in those diaries loomed up written just above the horizon of his dream.Dream politicised A year or two on, circumstances moved him to exploit dream as a device in a way that he hadn’t done for years. Kipling’s eldest child, his daughter Josephine, was ill at the same time as her father: he recovered only to find she was dead. Kipling proceeded to take out some of his grief and rage in an inordinate commitment to the Boer War, which broke out in October, that same year. It’s a background which may account for the very strange piece, ‘"The Army of a Dream" ’, (Morning Post June 15, 16, 17 and 18, 1904). Under a thin veil of fiction, this presents an argument that boys should be subjected to military training from childhood, a notion that may have more in common with renewed feelings of helplessness in the writer, awoken by this fresh experience of loss, than it does with a realistic plan for England in 1904.



It’s also a regression in terms of its form: like "The Dream of Duncan Parrenness" and "The Last of the Stories", it is told by a first person narrator who then wakes to find it was all a dream. A savage sting, however, closes "The Army of a Dream". The narrator recalls that the men with whom he has apparently been in conversation all died in the Boer War: the wounds and disease which killed them are individually described. For his benefit the dream characters had been describing a new system of national defence. Under this, from the age of eight little boys are involved in training for military service, a programme that will continue through their maturity. All members of society are incorporated in this effort. The right to vote and to social acceptance are dependent on agreeing to take part. This wilful attempt to pass off political argument under the guise of fiction bears testimony to the temporary disturbance of his judgment. Realising the story wasn’t working, he put it aside and came back to it later. Begun in 1900, on the way out to South Africa, within months of his daughter’s death, it wasn’t published until 1904. By 1905 he was admitting it was a failure with readers: ‘I got a good deal of gali (bad language) for it’, he wrote to a correspondent. Why did he persevere with it? It appears he was flooded by conflicting feelings in the aftermath of this new and unbearable loss. It brought back, as does all later bereavement, the earliest and most acute experience of loss. With that came the helplessness he had known as a child removed from the world of India and from those he loved, while as a grown man, he knew the rage and shame of a father who had failed to protect his child. These could all be channelled, now he was the most influential and famous writer in the English language, into a demand for organised protection. This took the form of a demand for a capable army. The fact that his plan involved children—boys were to be trained up in military service from the age of six, about the age he’d been approaching when he was taken from India—might have given him pause. Readers did not take to the idea. But at this time of bereavement he could not be expected to observe himself or to be open to the promptings of intuition and insight. He was overwhelmed.
Dreams of healing What is nervous prostration, as the doctors used to call it? When the imagination becomes disordered, is memory implicated somehow? Kipling would bring these different questions together as he went on. In "The Finest Story in the World" Kipling had linked imagination with a special form of memory. "In the Same Boat" (1911) tells a not always convincing story of the friendship between two suffering ‘nerve-patients’ who find healing through mutual support. Conroy, the gentleman, and the Lancashire heiress Miss Henschil are each subject to terrifying repeated nightmares, and both have become addicted to the drug they started taking in order to sleep without dreams. Her cynical doctor believes the dreams are made-up, an excuse for her drug habit. Conroy’s physician however, who is his colleague, more imaginative and humane, suggests bringing the parties together. Each receives advance warning of the advent of their special nightmare, so it can be arranged that they will share an overnight train journey on an appropriate date and may be able to help each other.

It’s immediately clear from this summary how much manoeuvring Kipling had to do in order to construct a scenario in which a young man and a young woman could plausibly be brought together at a pre-arranged moment in order to spend a night in each other’s company without scandal and without his tale dwindling into a love-story. A striking feature of the narrative, in fact, is the insistence on both sides that they have no sexual feeling for each other at all: Kipling wants to show them as comrades, rather as Georgie and the girl in "The Brushwood Boy" had been in their life of dream. He probably knew that the romantic ending of that story was less than compelling, even if the market demanded it.So it is almost as brother and sister that Conroy and Miss Henschil are shown. As brother and sister too they become close, and supported by that intimacy are able keep each other from the drug, and from the isolating horror of their individual nightmares. Conroy feels:
‘His one hope, he knew, was not to lose the eyes that clung to his because there was an Evil abroad which would possess him if he looked aside by a hair-breadth,’ The material, with its accounts of drug-dependency and paralysing dread, its hints of other-worldly horror, allows him scope for a tense account of spiritual torment, offering thrills that might hold on to readers who were by now beginning to drop away. But behind or underneath this surface is a more sober intention, to trace the source of the individual nightmares to the mothers that bore the two sufferers. Something close to the cross-generational haunting that psychologists speak of today is depicted here. Miss Henschil’s travelling companion and nurse comes up with the explanation, in a somewhat awkward move into which the writer is forced in order to make his point: the mildewed faces that Miss Henschil sees are an image or imprint of the leprous faces that frightened her mother when she was pregnant. Because there then turns out to be a comparable explanation for the images in Conroy’s nightmare, in the shock experienced by his pregnant mother, the story suggests that the transmission of terror from mother to child is not an aberration. It may be more common than we know.
Unclaimed knowledge, that generates nightmares, paralysis and the need to escape, links the topic of "In the Same Boat" with "At the End of the Passage". In the former, however, once the images in the dreams have been identified and named, located moreover as fears passed on from mother to child, both patients find themselves cured and finally released. As Freud was the first to admit, artists were representing the workings of the inner life, including the return of the repressed, long before he himself got round to naming them.Dream manipulated I’ve argued that an agenda rather than artistic concerns drove the composition of "The Army of a Dream" (1904), when Kipling’s personal anxieties were channelled into a strident appeal for boys to be trained up in a programme of defence. Not surprisingly, the tale fails to convince as fiction: the fact that he is making a political argument rather than telling a story stands out. There is also a transparently political element in '"Swept and Garnished" (The Century Magazine, January 1915). It has been described as an act of reprisal for the atrocities committed by German forces that invaded Belgium in August 1914. Their policy of ‘Schrecklichkeit’ or ‘frightfulness’ seems to have something in common with the policy of ‘shock and awe’ devised by President Bush in our own day.Published in the early months of the First World War, the story tells of the dreams or hallucinations which visit Frau Ebermann, a well-to-do elderly German woman, suffering from influenza. Her comfortable apartment, in its scrupulous order, appears to be invaded by a troop of young children: a brilliant image of the incursion of unwelcome knowledge. In spite of all her smug defences she is finally compelled to recognise the suffering caused to children by the actions of German troops. She is left unhinged, herself a figure of dread.
The artistry of this story is even more striking when we observe that a personal element of reprisal is involved, and how skilfully it is contained. The image of the pious Christian woman who is indifferent to children’s sufferings and at least to some extent responsible for them, is one that takes us back to the world of Southsea, and Mrs Holloway’s sadistic teachings on the subject of Hell. This story leaves her representative figure babbling, mentally destroyed. In "The Army of a Dream" there was an embarrassing mismatch between the projection of Kipling’s private feeling, and the public arena of the Boer War he attempted to map it onto. There is none of that incongruity here. International atrocity in the world of the present offered Kipling an image that could absorb his ancient rage and at the same time allow it to be given developed form in a work of art. ‘Think of your own worst experience and find a metaphor for it’ would-be film-makers are advised if they want to reach an audience at depth. "Swept and Garnished" is recognised for its power, unlike the shambling "Army of a Dream". I’d suggest that in writing this story, Kipling found a metaphor that could carry the charge generated by his own experience as a child. The elements of violent conflict, mutilation and madness, which are dispersed between the background of war and among different characters in the narrative, reflect what he once endured in his own person. It’s a measure of his art that, rather than inveighing against the mental cruelty he was subjected to, instead he makes the story turn on the smug denial of atrocity against children.Play as healing: putting an end to dreams "The Tender Achilles" (1929) presents a group of senior doctors and the cabal a number of them had formed years before. They manipulate the systems of their profession outrageously, in the process of restoring the mental equilibrium of a colleague. This man, C. R. Wilkett, to whom they refer familiarly as ‘Wilkie’, had been attacked by overwhelming feelings of guilt following his experience in the Great War. He accused himself of ‘murdering’ all the patients he had failed to save when he was working as a military surgeon at the Front.Wilkett’s characteristic ‘imagination’, as his colleagues name it, rendered him vulnerable, yet it also made him invaluable as a research bacteriologist, and he was wanted back at the hospital when the war was over. After Wilkett was found cowering at home with his mother, subject to dreams and hallucinations, his colleagues devisea scheme to get him fit again and back to work. This plan involvesmaking a deliberate misdiagnosis followed by an unnecessary operation.Telling Wilkett that a wound in his heel has become tubercular rouses him to resume his professional confidence in disputing this view. When his colleagues ‘discover’, following the operation they insisted on, that there had been ‘a mistake in the samples’ that is a mix-up with the slides, Wilkett feels that his superior judgment is confirmed. Senior doctors proceed to manipulate his fury at what Wilkett perceives as the incompetence of others, finally suggesting that if he’d still been at his post in the lab’ the mix-up couldn’t have occurred. With that he apologises, is relieved of his symptoms and returns to work.


IMAGINATIVE TEMPERAMENT DANGEROUS IMAGINATION


Several earlier stories feature v doctors treating patients whose symptoms included nightmares; with "In The Same Boat" a slightly maverick doctor arrives at a way in which such haunted patients could help each other. In this latest and most highly crafted of his dream stories, "The Tender Achilles", Kipling takes this insight further. He also finds a new technique for emphasising the context of experience which has given rise to his protagonist’s dreams. In this story the authoritative voice of doctors carry the story and direct our perceptions. With their diagnosis for a guide, we read back through the dream to the earlier damage which it represents. Getting readers to follow the logic of that diagnosis, and to accept it with its powerfully subversive implication, is in large measure the purpose of the story.Kipling lays his ground carefully, using memories voiced by the other doctors, to equip readers, so that they appreciate why Wilkett’s hallucinations take the form of ‘perspectives of heads—gunshot wounds—seen from above and a little behind, as they’d lie on the tables’ and why at night Wilkett had ‘orderlies whispering to him to wake up and give some poor beggar a chance to live.’ They match precisely with what he had seen and been through.His colleagues are quite clear about the preconditions for Wilkett’s’s breakdown, his dreams and hallucinations. They are in no doubt that he was more use in the laboratory. The sights that met him in the Clearing Station, the demand for split-second decisions rather than considered professional judgments, and the need to accept that those decisions were sometimes wrong, were too much for his ‘research temperament’, under further stress from lack of sleep. Other doctors were able to find ways of coping. Unlike Wilkett, they were realists, ‘able to recognise the facts of life and [their] own limitations.’Kipling doesn’t, however, allow readers to take Wilkett’s ‘research temperament’, his dangerous imagination, as a given. According to his friends, Wilkett insisted on going to the Front because his head was already inhabited by unrealistic ideals, and he mistakenly considered it his duty— ‘all part of the imaginative equipment’ as they wryly point out. Keede was disturbed by Wilkett’s inappropriate sense of guilt when they met soon after the war. His pocketbook was crammed with notes ‘to prove’ that in falling short as a surgeon and in dedication he had effectively murdered many men.Keede’s impatience with the language of religion in which this guilt was expressed—“he was eternally damned’ of course’—invites readers to share his sceptical perspective. Describing how Wilkett applied the words of the New Testament to himself: “To whom much has been given, from the same much shall be required”, Keede exclaims: “That annoyed me”, and goes on to ask: “Who was he to know how much had been given to the other fellow?”.Later Keede seeks Wilkett out at home. His report offers a clue to the influences that shaped Wilkett’s peculiar temperament and disposition. They equip Wilkett to work as a research scientist, where absolute accuracy is required, but they also render him unable to tolerate any falling short in himself or others. In Wilkett’s mother, Keede meets a frightened woman who ‘kidnapped’ her sick son in order to hide him away from public view. Even with Keede, a doctor, she heads off all discussion of her son’s breakdown. Wilkett is obliged to play up to her, not for the first time, it is clear:

Thetis, the divine mother of Achilles attempted to make him immortal like herself, when he was a baby, by dipping him in the river Styx. But the heel by which she held him remained vulnerable. The folly of her attempt to make him more than human was brought home when he was killed by a wound in that heel. It looks as though Kipling, who loved to layer his mature stories with meaning, is drawing a parallel between Achilles and Wilkett when he gives Wilkett a wound near his heel. Wilkett also suffers, like Achillles, from a mother’s attempt to make him more than human. His religious upbringing, which is demonstrated in his use of New Testament language to express his pathological sense of guilt, has left him unable to accept his own ordinary human weakness, just as his mother can’t allow herself to acknowledge her son’s distress. Those shouts of ‘Murder’ that he hears accuse her too.Yet for all the gravity of Wilkett’s symptoms, those voices, the nightmares of being woken up and called on to operate, the campaign to save ‘Wilkie’ is presented almost as a jape carried out by schoolfellows. Writing in Something of Myself of his visits as a boy to his Aunt Georgie, Kipling described the sound of ‘deep-voiced men laughing together over dinner’ as ‘the loveliest sound in the world'. It may have offered a counterpoint to his experience of domination by an ill-tempered woman, an assurance that a different kind of power existed. As an artist he chooses to present "The Tender Achilles"—which recounts a conversation following a reunion dinner—by means of such laughing voices, reminiscences exchanged in relaxed conversation. A confident masculinity at play, decently mindful of its own limitations, is presented both as the main actor in the story and as the agent of healing.It’s undeniable that for many of us it makes uncomfortable reading, the way that in these dream stories Kipling repeatedly links mothers and the attitudes—including religious teaching—that they inculcate, with mental disturbance in their children. Yet at the same time he raises questions about the wholesome part in a man’s mental life that an erotic relationship with a woman might play. There is a tiny hint of such a relationship, in "The Tender Achilles", when Keede is helped in his quest for Wilkett by finding “a woman who had kept her eye on Wilkett’s whereabouts—mother or no mother” . The story ends with a glance towards this woman, who remains nameless: an independent spirit like the male doctors, she was prepared to join them in setting aside the laws of her profession: she was the one who faked the slides. Wilkett however, remains unaware of her devotion. The story closes with his colleagues lamenting this blindness. I’m not the first to argue that Kipling’s power as an imaginative writer was directly linked with the suffering of his early years. As in the case of Homer’s wounded hero Philoctetes, whose cries of pain prompted the Greeks’ vain attempt to abandon him while at the same time making off with his tremendous bow, the psychological wound sustained by Kipling as a child is inseparable from those insights concerning inner damage which give critical force to his mature work on dreams.
Kipling himself was impatient of ‘Freudistic’ interpretations because they ignore the active intelligence of the artist, his stance as an adult in the world of his day. He insisted that the writer’s achievement as an artist should be the focus of critical effort, rather than making readings of his life. Remembering this, we might apply to Kipling, writer of dream stories, the praise that he once offered Mark Twain. When he was a child, Kipling’s aunt saw him strike out in self-defence: let us agree that as a grown man and an artist, Rudyard Kipling:
... fought his age and surroundings (where he didn’t like ’em) up to the limit of his weapons which were many and sharp
THE GATE OF ONE HUNDRED SORROWS
http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_hundredgate1.htm

"The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" (notes edited by John McGivering)
notes on the text [October 29th 2003] Publication This story was first published in the Civil and Military Gazette on September 26th 1884, when Kipling was not yet nineteen, and collected in Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in subsequent editions of this collection. It was his first short story to be published – a tour de force that set a standard which – with a few lapses – he maintained for the rest of his life. When it was first published, the distinguished critic Andrew Lang said that the tale "defeats de Quincey on his own ground". The story The tale is presented as a monologue by Gabral Misquitta, a half-caste opium addict, six weeks before his death. It describes the life of the opium den, and of the opium smokers, in the Coppersmith's Gully near the mosque of Wazir Khan. In the end, all life for them revolves around the 'black smoke'. There is nothing else. It is written entirely as reported speech, indeed the ORG suggested that it might have been taken down verbatim in shorthand, in the notebook which Kipling sometimes took with him. It may equally have been an entirely invented story, inspired by Kipling's night rambles in the dark alleys of Lahore. (See also "In an Opium-Factory" and Chapter VI of "The City of Dreadful Night" in From Sea to Sea vol. II. This should not be confused with another story based on Kipling’s nocturnal ramblings with the same title, collected in Life’s Handicap)See also Mary Hamer's essay "Kipling and Dreams" A possible film This story was considered by Kipling nearly forty years later, in 1922, as a possible basis for a silent film, on which he worked with a scenario writer. It was to have included a number of characters from other tales and poems concerned with low life in India, including Fung-Tching, the Chinaman who kept the opium den in "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows", MacIntosh, an Englishman who has taken to drink and married a native wife, as in "To be Filed for Reference", 'Anne of Austria' the prostitute from "The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House" and 'Hans the Dane' from the same poem, and 'Mother Maturin', the central character from Kipling's lost novel of that name, on which he was working while in India, and which was never published. The film project came to nothing, and no script or scenario has survived, but there is a good deal of information about it in Rudyard Kipling's World by Thurston Hopkins, pages 197 to 233.
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