Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International)

by Julian Barnes

  The Tharauds were born at Saint-Junien in the Haute-Vienne (Jérôme in 1874, Jean three years later) and brought up in Angoulême, then Paris. Jérôme was a fellow student of Péguy at the École Normale Supérieure; Jean became secretary to the novelist and mystico-nationalist Maurice Barrès. The brothers – no doubt following the example of the Goncourts – first set up as co-authors in 1898 with a novel called Le Coltineur débile, and continued their creative association for the next half-century. The younger would write the first draft, then the elder would correct, adjust and fine-tune. Exoticists after the fashion of Pierre Loti (they wrote of Palestine, Persia, Romania, and were in Morocco at the same time as Edith Wharton), they were also ‘shrewd and solid Limousins’, as my 1920s literary Larousse informs me. ‘They are by nature optimists and the pity they feel in the presence of misfortune springs less from their suffering hearts than from their capacity to understand everything. They have the melancholy of the widely read who in all circumstances remain clear-sighted witnesses.’ Yes, the French always have written about literature in a different way.

  The Tharauds began writing at a time when the French and British empires were at a high point of rivalry, and French responses to Kipling were a microcosm of broader geopolitical attitudes. Like their most famous novelist, the British were more active, more vulgar, more can-do. Their empire was bigger and brasher than that of the French; and the Fashoda Incident had recently brought the two powers to the edge of intercolonial war. To the British, Fashoda was and remains just a strange place name at or beyond the margins of memory; to the French, an event hugely magnified by propaganda and lost pride. In July 1898, eight French and 120 Senegalese soldiers arrived at a ruined fort on the Sudanese Upper Nile, having spent two years crossing the continent to get there (Frenchly, they set off equipped with 1,300 litres of claret, 50 bottles of Pernod and a mechanical piano). They raised the tricolore and planted a garden. Their main purpose was to annoy the British, and they did, a little: Kitchener turned up with a sizeable force and advised them to leave. He also gave them copies of French newspapers, in which they read of the Dreyfus case and wept. The two sides fraternised, the matter was handed over to the politicians, and six months later a British band played the Marseillaise as the French withdrew. No one was hurt, let alone killed. How could this not have been just a tiny comic sideshow? But that is a British response (also, one from the side that forced the withdrawal). To the French, it was a key moment of national humiliation and dishonour. It also made a profound impact on a certain six-year-old French boy, who in later years remembered it as ‘a childhood tragedy’. How was Kitchener to know, as he was drinking warm champagne with eight Frenchmen at that distant fort, that this encounter would play out, four decades later, in de Gaulle’s obstreperous, anglophobe behaviour in wartime London exile, and six decades later in his triple refusal to allow Britain to join the Common Market?

  Though the name Dingley has only a chiming resemblance to Kipling, any pretence of artistic or legal disguise vanishes from the opening lines of the Tharauds’ novel: ‘Everywhere that English was spoken, the name of Dingley, the famous writer, was known. Even children were familiar with it: they learned to read from his books. In truth, he was a man with an incomparable freshness of imagination. He seemed to have been born at the very dawn of the world, at a time when the senses of our distant ancestors were still as keen as those of the beasts.’ This Dingley has quartered the globe in both his life and his work, combining within himself ‘the active instincts of the English race with the dreaminess and questing soul of the Hindu’; he has ‘become familiar with glory at an age when a man is still able to enjoy it’; and he has written a tale which translates back into English as ‘The Finest Story in the World’. He is now in his forties, ‘a small man with dry, angular features, the upper lip defended by a bristly moustache, and grey eyes lying in wait behind steel-rimmed spectacles’.

  So: Kipling, with one or two minor variations or ignorances (like giving the writer an Oxford education). But as the reference to his incomparable imagination suggests, this is a subtler portrait than Carrington implies. Dingley’s genius, his energy, his ceaseless curiosity are all acknowledged; what is questioned is the use to which the famous imagination and the public fame are put. There is also the charge – equally made against Kipling in England – that the writer’s aesthetic has become compromised by his temperament. Perhaps the novel’s key line is: ‘His passion for the picturesque had stifled his sense of human sympathy.’ A parallel complaint to that made by Flaubert’s mother about her son: ‘Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.’

  Dingley opens during the first weeks of the South African war (in which the French sided with the Boers). The streets of London are full of martial cries; also of recruiting sergeants and the spindly, underfed cockneys whom they target. Dingley observes a scene of entrapment in a tavern, and conceives the idea for a novel in which one such London street-sweeping will be taken up and morally transformed – made a man of – by the experience of military discipline and war. How, though, can Dingley write such a story without first examining the picturesque setting against which his tale will unfold? And so he decides to set off for South Africa, just as Kipling had done – and, for that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle. Kipling went as an observer and propagandist, Doyle as a doctor (though he came back a propagandist); they overlapped for several weeks in the spring of 1900, but appear not to have run into one another.

  It’s clear that the Tharauds knew a certain amount about Kipling’s private life. Thus, they marry their Dingley to an American wife with French blood (Kipling’s Caroline Balestier was of Huguenot stock). But whereas Carrie Kipling supported her husband in every word and deed – to the extent that her expressions of military zeal and gloating revenge during the Great War still cast a chill – Mrs Dingley’s French blood turns her into the voice of rational dissent and wifely contradictingness. So when Dingley describes the theme of his planned book to her, she proves a robust literary critic: in her opinion, street-sweepings very rarely become heroes. Why, indeed, should a man be morally improved by massacring farmers in a distant land? Surely the experience would make him more, rather than less, of a brute? The novelist dismisses these thoughts as ‘the argument of a clergyman – or a Frenchman’. She, in reply, warns him against becoming ‘the apostle of a harsh and selfish imperialism’.

  The Tharauds find happy mileage in such Anglo-French conflict. They set Dingley up as an exemplar of British imperialism, but also allow into his mouth subtler criticisms of France, and of the failings of the French imperial project. On the voyage out to the Cape (accompanied by his critical wife and their young boy Archie), Dingley falls in with a French journalist whose ‘Gascon excitability’ provokes the Englishman to the traditional defence of Empire: civilisation not conquest, railways and telegraph not greed and gold. But then he elaborates: ‘Are we doing anything more than continuing the project which you French started a couple of hundred years ago and then lost your taste for? It’s quite understandable, of course. You prefer to stay at home, and why not? Who would deliberately quit la belle France? Whereas we British are the Auvergnats of the world.’ (The Auvergnats were by tradition the wandering workers of France, obliged by poverty and poor soil to leave their native province.) The British may be plodders, but what they build lasts; the French specialise only in dash and dazzle. Passing St Helena, Dingley is moved to muse on the career of Napoleon: for all his world-shakingness, the Corsican’s ambitions, when set beside the achievements of Disraeli or Cecil Rhodes, had merely been those of an Italian condottiere.

  As the Dingleys disembark at Cape Town (staying at the Mount Nelson Hotel, just as Kipling had done) the novel becomes both more adventuresome and more serious. Dingley’s previous certainties come under threat. For a start, the war is going badly: if the British Army can be outflanked and undermined by a handful of determined Boer farmers, what will become of the Empire? And what will become of Dingley himself? In th
e presence of real soldiers and real action, he feels himself less than adequate as a man – he is a mere writer, one whose commanding officer, the Muse, is ‘an obscure authority, a cowardly and female power’. This is a strikingly accurate prediction of how Kipling was to feel in 1915, when he went to the Western Front as a war correspondent. Though entitled to wear uniform, he declined on the ground that, unlike the troops, he had not earned khaki. Describing his tour of inspection in France at War, he specifically invoked the sense of being an inadequate civilian – worse, a writer – in the presence of troops likely to die: ‘The soldiers stared, with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who scuttled through their life for a few emotional moments in order to make words out of their blood.’

  A trip across the veld to the front line in the company of a photographer, Melton Prior, deepens Dingley’s artistic unease. Prior’s images of landscape and battlefield are so dismayingly swift and accurate. What will become of Dingley’s art if photography deprives him of his key strength, the rendering of the picturesque? Like the rest of his colleagues, he will be reduced to churning out ‘psychological novels, French adulteries and Slav moralities’. It is during this upcountry foray that Dingley is recalled to the Cape by news that young Archie has gone down with a fever. Improbably setting off by himself at night-time, he stumbles into an encampment of Boers led by one Lucas du Toit, who turns out to be an old friend and fellow Oxonian (French novelists often seem to believe that everyone in England has been educated at Oxford). Du Toit, on hearing the purpose of Dingley’s journey, sends him on his way. This compassionate act points up one of the novel’s main themes: pity, its operation and its lack. What matters it that you build an empire if in the process you lose your soul?

  Dingley makes it back to the bedside of his son. Young Archie is now pitifully weak, and asks to be diverted with stories. Yet all the stories at Dingley’s command cannot save the lad; as he expires, his last delirious words are both an echo and a mockery of his father’s militarism: ‘Victories,’ he wheezes, ‘I want victories!’ When Archie is buried on a bare hillside near Dossieclipp, ‘Dingley felt that with his son he had also buried his finest secret – that of happiness.’ Did the Tharauds know when they wrote this line that Kipling had himself lost a child not long before – his daughter Josephine, who succumbed to pneumonia in 1899? Perhaps. But they could not have known that Kipling had reacted in exactly the same way: according to his cousin, the writer Angela Thirkell, much of Rudyard died with his daughter, ‘And I have never seen him as a real person since that year.’ Still less could the Tharauds have known that in describing the death of a boy made militaristic by his father, they were looking forward to the fate of Kipling’s only son John – the moment at which the last remnants of the father’s happiness were also extinguished.

  Dingley is plunged into crisis by his son’s death: just as the Empire can be suddenly derailed by a handful of Boer farmers, so a man’s hard-built self-belief can be fractured by the death of a child. The writer’s art now appears vain to him, and also lacking: for all its descriptive power and harsh intelligence, there is little in it to refresh the soul. This is a necessary fictional crisis, and perhaps a rather French one, too: while the real Kipling grieved terribly for his two children, he never doubted or despaired of his art – indeed, its austere demands were what kept him functioning. However, it is at this point that readers might begin congratulating themselves on guessing where Dingley, l’illustre écrivain is heading. Grief will open its protagonist to pity, and his work will be made richer and truer by this new compassion for humanity. Who knows, perhaps his suffering will lead him to doubt the brassy tootings and hypocritical glories of the Empire?

  But the Tharauds were better writers than this. They understood the world – and British imperialism with it. For at this precise moment pity is given a chance to enter Dingley’s soul, and it is refused admittance. Lucas du Toit has been taken prisoner and Dingley is asked to intercede. He weighs the demands of friendship and gratitude against the loftier demands of Empire and the pitiless requirements of war. While Mrs Dingley writes pleadingly to the authorities, her husband does nothing except promise a memorial poem; the Boer is shot. Dingley returns to England, and the Tharauds cleverly swerve the plot first one way, then the other. The prideful Dingley writes a newspaper article criticising the war effort in South Africa, calling for conscription (as Kipling did repeatedly) and a Continental army. The newspaper publisher tries to dissuade him, arguing that the nation is not yet ready for such criticism, but Dingley arrogantly insists. Rebuke is immediate and unanimous: readers and critics desert him. In two thousand words he seems to have undone the work of all his twenty previous books. Rejection makes him feel like a ‘dispossessed potentate’, or a painter going blind (an evident reference to Kipling’s novel The Light That Failed).

  So is this to be the moral of the story? A tale of pride rebuked? Again, the Tharauds surprise us. In a London music hall Dingley watches a cinematic newsreel of the South African war. There are many familiar scenes – including the filmed execution of Lucas du Toit. And he apprehends from the audience’s enthusiastic response that when he had withheld pity and assistance from the Boer prisoner, he was in fact deeply in tune with the mood of the British public. So he emerges knowing what he must do – write that novel on the banal yet loyal theme of a miserable cockney transformed by war into a real man. Published as peace is declared – and the women of the East End are doing ‘jigs of patriotic indecency’ – it proves a ‘colossal success’. Nowhere else, in all of his previous books, had ‘the Famous Writer expressed with greater pride the egotism of the mother country’.

  The novel is thus both a critique of British imperialism – of its coarsening effects, its brutalities and self-deceptions – and a warning against literary populism. But it is also a proper novel about human failure, about the price paid (and the public benefits reaped) when part of the human heart is suppressed. It seems impossible that Kipling could not have heard of Dingley; also unlikely he would have read it (not least because of the death of Archie). He seems to have made no recorded reference, public or private, to the novel; fictionalising him, I would imagine silent contempt being his reaction to such Gallic impertinence.

  Dingley, l’illustre écrivain was the Tharaud brothers’ first and probably greatest success, and they continued their fraternal collaboration on an industrial scale for half a century – their list of titles runs to more than seventy. Jérôme was received into the Académie Française in 1938 after some lengthy debate on the nicely French question of whether half an author could properly occupy a whole seat. The situation was resolved – or, perhaps, doubly complicated – when Jean joined him under the Dôme in 1946. They were, on the basis of Dingley, swift and efficient storytellers who, apart from anything else, showed that Kipling, or a version of him, or a part of him, could indeed be given fictional animation. André Gide returned to the subject of the Tharauds in his Journal for 12 July 1921, where he suggested that joint authorship was both their strength and their weakness: ‘Everything I have read by the Tharaud brothers has seemed to me of the best quality; the only reproach I think can be made against their books is that they are never dictated by any inner necessity; they do not have those deep and necessary relations with the author in which destiny is pledged.’

  Jean died in 1952, Jérôme the following year. Jérôme’s seat at the Académie – number 31 – was taken by the ultra-fashionable Jean Cocteau, who ignored the traditional courtesies by saying ‘as little as possible’ about his predecessor, preferring instead to pay ‘ingratiating tribute’ to the Académie. It was left to André Maurois, Cocteau’s official welcomer, to supply ‘the homage to Tharaud which Cocteau had bypassed’. Another half-century later, Cocteau’s own dragonfly fame has lost much of its sheen. If the Tharauds are unlikely to enjoy a renaissance, their Dingley will survive as more than just a curiosity – as a novel of both seriousness and verve – for some at least of the ‘li
ttle, little span’ that Kipling is borne in mind.

  THE WISDOM OF CHAMFORT

  CAMUS THOUGHT HIM the most instructive of moralists, and far greater than La Rochefoucauld; Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill revered him; Pushkin read him and allowed Eugene Onegin to do the same; he is an admired presence in the diaries of Stendhal and the Goncourts; Cyril Connolly, another melancholy epicurean with a taste for aphorism, quoted him at length in The Unquiet Grave. Yet Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1741–94) remains virtually unknown in this country.

  This is partly our insular fault for not translating enough: the last British edition seems to have been that from the Golden Cockerell Press (550 copies) back in 1926. But perhaps it’s also the fault of the genre in which he wrote his only enduring work: the Maximes et pensées, Caractères et anecdotes, et petits Dialogues philosophiques. We don’t much go for little books of wisdom on these islands. We don’t mind table talk, or profound remarks extracted from Boswell’s Johnson, or, better still, from novels (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’). But the idea of taking a social or moral observation, polishing it into literary form, and laying it out by itself on a white page as a jeweller lays a sparkler on black velvet – this seems a bit suspicious to us. In some hands, it can seem lordly, snobbish; in others, merely flash.