True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  Take what happens what you stop reading. When you begin a book, your adaptation to its world is usually gradual. You have to learn its rhythm, you have to feel your way in. It would be a rare book in rare sync with a reader that absorbed you instantaneously at the first words. I always feel that a book has a kind of inner seal that has to be broken, like the drum-tight circle of waxed paper inside the lid of a jar of instant coffee. For the first ten, or twenty, or thirty pages, I’m still reading tentatively, like someone tapping on the paper seal; only then does the novel truly come open. But at the end of a book, however well prepared you have been for the ending by the down-shifting cadence of the narrative, the text simply runs out, and you find yourself for a minute still in the emotional state the book has aroused, without the book to sustain it. It’s then that the difference between the two states of reading and living becomes palpable as a sudden contrast. Sometimes it can feel like running off a cliff in a cartoon: your feet keep pedalling until you notice there’s no ground beneath them. Sometimes the scrim of the book – which has been between you and the input of your senses – thins and fades patchily, a tapestry becoming a veil in places, then scrubbing away altogether while other parts still linger, so that you see the real face of someone in the room with you appear through the persisting green and gold of a heraldic forest. Sometimes, though the scenery of the story is quite gone, its mood or tone persists and alters how you see your exterior surroundings; and the people in them. Although you do not see a lover, parent, child, friend, acquaintance, associate or stranger the same way that you see a character, from the moment of ceasing to read until the unpredictable moment when the book fades sufficiently from your imagination, the frame of your mind as a reader is going to alter your literal vision, telling you (among other things) how the you that responds to characters differs from the you that responds to people: what you do in the different arenas of living and reading, what you are capable of doing in them.

  Not many records have been made of these moments of transition. Trying to describe the life books have in your mind when you’re not actually reading them is a rare project, on the edge of conventional criticism or perhaps over it. One such rare description was given by the critic Sven Birkerts in his recent The Gutenberg Elegies. Here, a Patrick McGrath novel, Dr Haggard’s Disease, is on his knee:

  In the course of a fifteen-minute subway ride I drop into Haggard’s world as into a well. I heed the outside signals only enough to insure I don’t travel on past my stop. Not until I feel the train decelerating do I close the book and look up. For an instant everything swims in a milky sort of haze; then the eyes readjust and the sensations of reading begin to ebb. I look around at the other passengers – the student, the mother fiddling with the strap on her child’s knapsack – and I feel irradiated with a benign detachment. The inner and outer are, briefly, in balance. Haggard is as present to me as these people. And that specious equivalence brings me closer to them, though I’m not sure why. Their boundaries seem porous; I have the illusion that I could enter and understand their lives. The feeling passes. The life of the book dims out as I get to my feet and jostle through the doors.28

  Birkerts is very sure that the result when his reading ends is a gain in perception, just as he is sure that while he is reading, ‘reconnoitering between inner and outer focus . . . enriches my overall responsiveness’. He says ‘illusion’, he says ‘specious’, but he is very tender towards his subway epiphany. This is a triumphant affirmation of literature’s power to help us perceive, by encouraging us to adopt the equivalent in real life of a reader’s ‘benign detachment’ while reading. Notice, though, that Birkerts is not saying that his taste of reader-like understanding for the people opposite has given him any ambition to get to know them in fact as opposed to theory. He is attending to his sensation of knowledge as a sensation, one which has continued the sensory properties of reading into a batch of seconds in the life of a car of the A-train, bound for Brooklyn. The student, the mother, the child seem for a moment to be open to the switch of viewpoints which would let him look back out of their eyes at the guy opposite holding the Patrick McGrath novel. Yet all the while, since he has no means of knowing them as all real humans have to know other humans, from the outside in, they remain total strangers. A cynic might say that with no foundation in accurate this-worldly insight, Birkert’s benign detachment is not very different, functionally, from a beery glow. It’s a very sophisticated glow, but then literature makes a very classy drug.

  And Birkerts’ sensation represents only one end of a spectrum of possible sensations generated by the return from the labelled world of text. Different drugs in different consumers produce different after-effects, umpteen temporary alterations of the eye. Birkerts in effect describes a brief illusion that the world is mimicking the book. The passengers in the subway car exhibited an openness to being known as characters, and specifically as Patrick McGrath characters. I imagine they looked incipiently gothic, prone to pitiably violent passions. If he had that moment closed the text of an Oscar Wilde play, they might have seemed less provincially solid, more posed in a set of attitudes. I live in Coney Island: that is my tragedy. Yet the dominant perception at the end of a book can also be that the world contradicts it, or exceeds it. A very cerebral, abstract fiction, far from imposing a tracery of pure idea on your vision in its aftermath, can make all that you see and hear seem intensely particular and vivid. Or, if you are rebounding from some story whose characters have had to obey a demanding set of manners, if it has been hard to imagine controlling your elbows and your language in a text’s genteel ballroom, then what’s real can proclaim a kind of cheerful heaviness, the lumpy Rabelaisian assertiveness belonging to all those things that just are whether anyone likes it or not. Elbows also rest on tabletops, you remember: whoopee cushions are bought, dogs attempt to have sex with the legs of respectable strangers.

  But the most common aftermath for me has been a feeling that the world simply contains less than the book. I get a hangover, not a glow. Instead of Birkerts’ elated confusion of real people with characters, I get a disappointment that real people are not characters. That their behaviour is not plotted. That you cannot have the quick flush of unnegotiated knowledge of them. That no selecting intelligence is pruning their qualities to produce a consistent effect.

  When in December 2001 I read the obituary of the historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett, I remembered the morning after a night I spent ten years earlier with one of her books. The light was grey in the room. Dawn had come on at the same rate as the traffic noise increased from the South Circular Road beside the house, as if someone were pushing up a slider switch controlling several of the urban elements together. On the floor by the ruptured sofa my ashtray was full. I had the taste in my mouth and the brittle energy in my brain of the twenty cigarettes I’d rolled since midnight; rolled steadily, smoked steadily, as I moved through the long book at steady high speed, my eye pole-vaulting across each opened duo of pages, from a jump-point on the left to a landing on the right, the text between taken in whole. Dunnett’s world absorbed me, but she wasn’t a descriptive writer, as such. She never created a past that took hold as a persuasive environment. Rather than any moment-filling shimmer of silk or thump of believable Flemish floorboards underfoot in the year 1460, she offered the labyrinthine behaviour of Machiavellian heroes: two of them, Lymond and Niccolo, each with a cycle of novels to his name. She constructed these Renaissance demons of subterfuge to a patented plan of her own, by breaking – habitually, continually – the rule of narrative which states that in circumstances of mystery the reader should be supplied with all relevant information, so you can at least have a try at working out what’s going on. Dunnett deliberately withheld basic plot details, putting the reader into the same position of thwarted dependence as her heroes’ entourages, or the women who loved them. Heroes and author alike never explained, never apologised. Like all descendants of the gothic incorporating relishable bad behaviour into
romance, these fictions exploited the illusion that to be horrible to someone shows strong feeling about them; is a sign of intense involvement with them. And the reader was brought within the circle of intensity. The endlessly drawn-out, opaque situations secreted for the reader too a powerful set of emotions in the key of frustration. Loyalty, jealousy, curiosity, rebellion, indignation: a fibrous mat of feeling that constituted Dunnett’s characteristic world.

  And it stops. I stopped. I levered myself off the sofa, with the sensation that my mind had been used to plant, grow and harvest a crop of passion, and then been burnt off, to a dead level of stubble. Now it felt scorched, like my palate from the smoke. I fancied something sweet to eat, suddenly, to fill that space, and to set me along the route to a physical comfort, a sugary bodily security. They sold doughnuts at the newsagent’s. I drifted out of the house and up the street on unstrung legs. People were going to work, the side streets carrying little tributaries of commuters towards the bus stops. My drift took me across the line of the main, deep current flowing down Brixton Hill into central London. But I didn’t feel it; it didn’t pluck at me. The grey of the light extended to the humans. They looked hollow, artificial, incomparably less alive than the inhabitants of a fiction. I could tell from the sample I saw that nowhere in the whole waking, moving city would there be anybody walking whose face conveyed the organisation of a plot. Nobody would give me the story’s tug on my glands. Logic said that these faces all fronted experience more complicated than narrative, but that seemed like a statement of chaos to me: and not a loud overwhelming chaos either (William James’s ‘booming, buzzing confusion’) but a chaos of vanishingly faint signals, dimming towards entropy. Luckily there was an apple doughnut in the chill cabinet, my favourite. Twenty minutes later I was asleep, curled around a bolus of carbohydrate.

  (2004)

  KIPLING’S JUNGLE

  Rudyard Kipling began The Jungle Book in the spring of 1893, in Bliss Cottage, a little house near Brattleboro, Vermont, leased from his wife Caroline Balestier’s mother. They had only been married for a year. He was twenty-seven: soon he would be a father, and paternity was much on his mind, along with the revolution which every generation turns a child into a parent. The Just So Stories, later, would be for his own children to hear: these present ones, his first stories for a child audience, celebrated the change in his life, and meditated on pedagogy, for though Mowgli’s biological father plays a tiny and ignoble role in one episode alone of The Second Jungle Book, in another sense the wolf-boy has a plethora of fathers. Baloo, Bagheera, Kaa, Akela: all fathers in all but name, alive in a magical space both like and unlike a late-Victorian nursery. Moreover he drew for his jungle creatures on his own father Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India, finding anecdotal sketches there of the mongoose, the python and the jackal. Thus he loyally incorporated his own tutelage by Lockwood into the book even as the times revolved and he moved, for Josephine Kipling (b. March 1893), into the place Lockwood had occupied for him.

  Kipling wrote books, but not novels – with the exceptions of his single best work, Kim, and his single worst one, The Light That Failed. It was not simply that he was a ‘short-breathed’ writer, attuned to the needs of a short story with its relatively swift closure and peremptory insights into people via single, dazzling details; as opposed to the ‘long-breathed’ writer of novels, with their extended arc and their patient attention to the processes of growth and development. He wrote short stories, but he conceived them by the bookful. As a young man in India, and a brilliant apprentice to literature, he had worked in brief because that form best suited his pell-mell exploration of his powers. (And, of course, because it allowed him to conceal, beneath a quickly sketched worldly wisdom, those many things he did not yet know.) At this stage he expected to progress to writing novels, following the conventional writer’s path. But by the time he came to write the two Jungle Books in the 1890s, with the disgruntling experience of The Light That Failed behind him, the volume of linked narratives had become his consciously chosen form – his metier, the particular field for his talents. Here, large design and short effect co-existed; and he was able to attain a loose, suggestive richness. Loose, because it was not his way to accumulate episodes amounting to one continuous narrative. The Mowgli stories are the core of the Jungle Books, but they are not printed in chronological order, and they are actually outnumbered by the other pieces. ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, ‘The White Seal’, ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ and ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ make up more than sidelights. Though recurrent themes connect them to Mowgli’s Jungle, these are not connections of a rigorous order. Kipling made two books’-full, and was content to let the stories settle into place in the reader’s imagination. By design the stories tell upon one another. The individual precisions of the telling enlace. Kipling was acutely aware of the shape he hoped would coalesce after reading: the didactic intentions are plain and obvious. Equally, he was unwilling to pre-empt the imaginative response, or to offer lore and symbolism that could only resolve in one way. Some of the imaginative afterlives of The Jungle Book have been very public. We can imagine Kipling hating Disney’s singing version, which prettifies all the cruelty of the Jungle, and turns his lessons on growing up into a glib romp. We can know for certain that he approved Baden-Powell’s borrowing of key elements for the official mythology of the scouting movement. But we aren’t obliged to follow him in either position, and the purposely loose weave of the stories – their quilted arrangement – actually helps to free us of that obligation.

  Why are the most sympathetic inhabitants of Kipling’s Jungle its predators? The wolves who succour Mowgli are pack-hunters, and Akela holds his position as their grizzled chief only while his jaws are still capable of the death grip. They can be corrupted by the insidious words of the tiger Shere Khan, but at their best they prove their status as ‘the Free People’ by an untameable tenacity. Mother Wolf, Mowgli’s foster-parent, ‘was not called The Demon for compliment’s sake’ in the days when she ran with the pack. Bagheera the panther is a lithe, magnificent slayer, ‘and nobody cared to cross his path’. His physical beauty, his black-on-black markings that show up ‘in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk’, cannot be separated from the threat he exudes. His voice ‘as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree’ is after all a hunter’s tool. Kaa the python – whose coldness and menace we are never allowed to forget, while we admire his wisdom and subtlety – has the Jungle’s deepest gullet, its most capacious swallow. Of course, there is also ‘old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases, because he eats only nuts and roots and honey’. In his company Mowgli does learn ‘that honey and nuts were just as pleasant to eat as raw meat’; but the vegetarian example Baloo sets weighs lightly beside the education the bear imparts as tutor to the wolf-cubs, and judge of the Jungle Law. That Law is concerned with survival, with the proprieties to be observed when eating and being eaten. Baloo has a boxer’s strength when occasion requires it. Biffing Mowgli black and blue in the boy’s own interests, he counts as a proud observer of the hunt rather than a dissenter from it. ‘“Well said”, growled Baloo’, when Mowgli offers Kaa a grand massacre of goats by way of return for the python’s part in rescuing him.

  The period in which Kipling wrote the two Jungle Books saw a growing appreciation of predators in general and wolves in particular: a sort of imaginative rehabilitation of creatures that had formerly served as symbols of chaotic appetite and destructiveness. In part the cultural backwash of Darwinism was involved. Evolutionary ideas had enabled mid-Victorians to discover pattern in animal behaviour that had seemed chaotic before. An efficient, instinctual killer no longer looked quite like an agent of mayhem, but took a role in something like a natural economy, where eating and being eaten supported each other. As Kipling’s parents’ generation gave way to his, other, more crudely ‘Darwinian’ ideas also came into circulation. These drew parallels between natural selection in biology and the struggle for survival in human soci
ety, making it appear that predatory humans had the force of nature behind them. Kipling never assented to this debased (and extremely unscientific) vision, but he did believe in the necessity for toughness, of which the turn-of-the-century vogue for animal stories was partly a symptom. It was an old truth, of course, that the imagination is attracted to strength, to the stealthy step of a hunting cat. The essayist William Hazlitt wrote in 1817, ‘A lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses is a more poetical object than they; and we even take part with the lordly beast, because our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to place ourselves in the situation of the strongest party.’29 But the animal fictions of the 1890s and early 1900s actually set out to place the reader ‘in the situation’ of their animal heroes. Some made their animals speak, some did not; almost all tried to look out on the world through the eyes of wolf or eagle or bear. From being fearful objects, powerful animals became sympathetic subjects. For a child reader, of course, living a life governed by adult decisions, it was always specially attractive to slip into the skin of a lion, wild and self-sufficient. Kipling’s own genius as a writer for children sprang in part from his sensitivity to this attraction.