The Maltese Cat

 I was at loose ends the other night - just finished my last book, didn't have a new one in view, and wasn't interested in the offerings of the tube - and I was pulling over the shelves beside the bed and came across my old 1898 volume of The Day's Work.

It's not the first edition, unfortunately, but the second, and was picked up in a rumpled old used bookstore along the coast, I think, had before and has since then seen a lot of wear. The spine is broken and the pages are hanging on by the threads of the sewn binding. I've cared for it gently, but it's not in great shape.

And...it's an...odd little book.

There's thirteen stories within it and they're all rather slantendicular and many are paranormal, ranging from the truly weird The Brushwood Boy (where our hero, the stock-Kipling stalwart young infantry officer, meets the woman of his dreams literally in the surrealist dreams which they share) to some Anglo-Indian romanticizing (The Bridge Builders, where a similar British hero - bridge engineer rather than subaltern - is subsumed in a conclave of the talking creatures that represent the old Indian gods his creation has disturbed) to straight-up anthropomorphism in the Jungle Book-style.

Some of them I enjoy more than others (I've never actually managed to struggle through .007 or William The Conqueror Part 1 and my tolerance for his full-throated paeans to colonialism like The Tomb of His Ancestors - as clever and touching a tale as it is, and it is clever, and parts of it are touching -is fairly limited; I've read too many Indian authors to elide the "faithful native" claptrap that comes with Kipling in paint-the-map-red mode.

Though not as impatient as George Orwell was; his takedown of the guy is pretty epic (has ever a writer or poet been dismissed as brutally and summarily as this: "He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks."? Daaaaamn...)

The Kipling I loved as a child and the least harrumph-able are his animal tales. The echoes of imperial hubris are faint in the Jungle Books (although I have my eye on Bagheera, that fusty old colonial mug...) and there's a version in The Day's Work - a story about polo.

I know absolutely nothing about the game other than it's a ballgame played on horseback and supposedly the Argentines are now the bosses of it. I know that to play at any sort of high level today you have to be filthy rich, because it's a horse thing and all horse things are rich now that horses are a luxury good and not a working tool.

Not in the 1890s, though (or more likely the 1880s, the period when the guy was working in British India); a British officer rode to work, and keeping an extra hayburner or three wasn't so much of a big deal.

Hence the story; our hero, the gray polo pony of the title, and his equine teammates are carrying the British officers of an Indian engineer outfit (they're called "pioneers", which were the 19th Century version of combat engineers - the guys who built fortifications and bridges and all that. "Sappers" were the tunnel guys, which was a separate specialty...). They're playing a fancy cavalry (meaning: rich) outfit for the Big Casino, and the story is the story of that game.

That's it, that's the bones. The real meat is in the telling, and that's where our guy Kipling gets to cut loose.

"The question was which pony should make way for the other; each rider was perfectly willing to risk a fall in a good cause. The black who had been driven nearly crazy by his blinkers trusted to his weight and his temper; but Benami knew how to apply his weight and how to keep his temper. 

They met, and there was a cloud of dust. The black was lying on his side with all the breath knocked out of his body. The Rabbit was a hundred yards up the ground with the ball, and Benami was sitting down. He had slid nearly ten yards, but he had had his revenge, and sat cracking his nostrils till the black pony rose.

‘That’s what you get for interfering. Do you want any more?’ said Benami, and he plunged into the game. 

Nothing was done because Faiz Ullah would not gallop, though Macnamara beat him whenever he could spare a second. The fall of the black pony had impressed his companions tremendously, and so the Archangels could not profit by Faiz Ullah’s bad behaviour."

A little over 7,000 words paints a vivid little picture of a place and a time and a day and the people - including the four-hooved people - in it. In that short space Kipling gives you a whole cast of characters, from Lutyens and Macnamara and Powell above the saddles to grumpy Benami and slippery Faiz Ullah and Who's Who snorting through his nose in Australian below.

So buried in this largely-forgotten volume from a now-widely dismissed author is this perfect little gem of a tale; brightly and briskly told, sharply drawn, thoroughly engaging and entertaining even to a reader who, over a century later, knows almost nothing about the subject and the setting.

Goddamn it, that's writing.

That's why it's hard to just toss Kipling into the dustbin of history as just another imperial relic. Yes, he's all the things his detractors, that Orwell, say he is. But, dammit, the man could write when the humor was on him, and he's left us with stories like this. That has to count for something.

As we discussed in the last post here; life is complicated, and sometimes we just have to accept that there is worth to be found in some dark places, and darkness in the shiniest of vistas. Sometimes you have to take in the flaws to accept the value. Or, as the Cat himself says:

"Keep yourselves to yourselves," said the Maltese Cat to his companions. "We don’t want to rub noses with all those goose-rumped halfbreeds of Upper India. When we’ve won this cup they’ll give their shoes to know us."

 

Worth a look.

Light Bedside Reading; the Zombie Apocalypse

I'm reading Max Brook's World War Z.

Let me start by saying that I'm not a "horror" genre fan by nature. I figure that between epidemic disease, war, and the collected work of Toni Tennille the world is replete with horror enough that seeking out horrible things to "entertain" myself is both redundant and insulting.

But I read a review of the film that said "don't go thinking you'll see the book on film; this isn't like the book at all..." and suggested that the book touched on much broader and deeper subjects than the living dead feasting on human brains.

And I can report that, yes, it does.

Not sure which part I've enjoyed more. The Palestinian recounting how his father dragged him to asylum in Israel where he found that the "Zionist plot" was, in fact, the true assessment of the rapacious dead rising from their graves? The former White House chief of staff sneering about misplaced idealism and political "realities" driving the failed response to the Zombie Apocalypse from his current job shoveling pig-shit at a manure farm? The old Red Chinese combat surgeon's tale of the very first "Victim Zero"?

Politics, espionage, corruption, democracy, dictatorship, free markets, hope and fear, delusion, skepticism, credulity...the book does a pretty damn decent job of describing all the ways people deal - or fail to deal- with the immensities of Fate and Nature that we try and pretend can't destroy us with a vast and utter indifference (not to mention the usual human miseries and buffooneries) at any moment.

Good stuff. If you're looking for a damn good summer read, you could do far worse than the "Oral History of the Zombie War".

Then go watch Shaun of the Dead.

Shaun: "Look, I don't care what the telly says, all right? We have to get out of here. If we don't they'll tear us to pieces, and that is really going to exacerbate things for all of us."

Love in the time of cholera

I've been reading Doris Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" off and on this spring. It's an interesting story in itself - the history of how Abraham Lincoln the politician first finessed his political foes into the Republican nomination and then coopted them into becoming members of his first Cabinet - and the telling is as worthy as the material. Goodwin has a flair for popular history and writes well, using small touches to illuminate a landscape as vanished as the Pliocene to most of us.And that's an important part of any history. Because it can be difficult, especially when the time in consideration is at some remove, to get a sense of the people of the time as...people.

The temptation is to see them either as moderns dressed in period costume, or as some sort of freakish antique, acting and thinking in ways impossible to any "real person" the reader knows.

And in understanding how they acted, and why, how they thought, how they saw the world around them, is crucial. A historian writing for the general public has to be capable, in a handful of sentences or a paragraph or two, present the past life both in itself and in its context so that the modern reader can grasp both the qualities of the person discussed and their standing with the person's times. Was she an especially bold woman, an iconoclast, or was she more typical of her contemporaries? Were his acts, or thoughts, likely to be the product of his surroundings or owe more to the inner daemon of the man?Obviously most histories are written about dramatic times and "great" events - few histories are written about the daily lives of vanished people in humdrum times. So the questions become; how did this or that person fit into the tenor of his or her time? When they acted, did they follow opinion or lead it? Did they act against the grain of their own era, or in conformance with its strictures? Did what they did tell us something useful about people, and events, and societies, that we can use in our own lives?

Goodwin's account is no different, and thus she spends some time early on establishing the characters of the central figures; Lincoln himself, obviously, his principal "rivals" (Ed Stanton, Will Seward, Sal Chase, and Ned Bates) and their various parents, wives, sons and daughters, as well as their political cronies and associates.It's a good tale, and it doesn't hurt that pretty much all of the main characters are fairly colorful. Lincoln is an ediface, a man recognized even in his time as a singularity. Stanton, Seward, and Chase are all men with immense egos and strong wills or they wouldn't have gotten where they did.

The one who's sort of the odd man out is Bates.Here he is, a Victorian patriarch and stern paterfamilias there ever was one. You can't picture even his friends calling him "Ed" or "Eddie" or "Ned". He's a "Edward" if ever I saw one.

But that's the interesting thing. He wasn't. Ed Bates was a man passionately in love with his wife, and desperately in need of his family. Goodwin keeps on about this; Bates married Julia Coulter in 1823 and spent the rest of his life falling in love with her. He kept his hand in politics because that what what a man of his class did. But he was miserable when he had to leave his home for D.C., and his letters to Julia are full of longing and his own loneliness and melancholy apart from her.

The Bates' marriage seems to have been more than just a spiritual one; Julia bore sixteen children (sixteen! My mind reels (and my pelvis sches) at the thought...) over the next thirty years. Here she is as a sturdy matron in her forties, but her husband seems to have been just as gaga over her as the day she put on - and took off - her brideclothes.

One of the most difficult parts of human life to transport over the distance of time is emotions and the way we express them. Certainly some elements, the biological ones, are fairly immutable; so a man or woman in Celtic times, or in ancient China, or in modern Peru, must certainly feel physical lust. That desire is a built-in designed to keep little humans coming along, and certainly the Roman man looking at a comely puella, or a Victorian woman glancing at a handsome lad must have felt a touch or more of the same visceral stirrings down in the libidinous regions that you or I would.

But the difference is in the detail. What sort of thing would a Roman find intriguing...as opposed to titillating, or mysterious, salacious, or challenging? We've read about how the mere glimpse of a shapely ankle could send a straitlaced Victorian man into a paroxysm of desire. But could it, really? Does having your inamorata always covered in draperies make the ankle an erogenous zone...unless it would be for you, anyway?

Because, apes that we are, we're a very visual species. We like to look, and where people are concerned, we like to look at the people we're attracted to for the things that attract us. Being not just apes but thinking apes (well, at times and of a sort...) there's more to attraction than JUST what we see. But we still place a great deal of importance in the physical aspects we consider pleasant.

Fortunately for the species, those aspects are pretty flexible. Whether Victorian or post-modern, some of us delight in the familiar, while others are drawn to the "different". Some find certain traits desirable, others the opposite, so while one woman finds a small, neat, blackavised man to her liking another gets a frisson of pleasure looking at his lanky, sun-fair friend.

But...here again, as people's manners and mores have changed through time, so have their standards of beauty. The difficulty of trying to understand someone like Ed Bates or Julia Coulter is trying to get a clue for how they thought about each other. What was "love" to them? How did they say it? Or did they? Certainly the Victorian standards of public behavior, so much more elaborate than ours today, would imply a great disparity in the intimacy a man and woman could show in public as opposed to within the privacy of the marriage-bed. But to what degree? Looking at the man, could Julia have been calling him "Mister Bates" even in their most unguarded moments?

And what of him? Could the dignity of a Victorian gentleman relent to the pure sensual enjoyment of his beloved wife; of an endless moment with his face buried in the scented darkness of her hair, every nerve-ending shirring beneath its satiny heaviness, hearing nothing but the sound of her breathing, touching his brow to the dear curvature of her head, the one he cherished because it held the vital spark, the life and thoughts, the whole essence of the one so dear to him in that fragile orb.

Well, as I read through the section about the Bates' marriage I came across something very like this. Edward was in D.C. when his first daughter Nancy was born. His letter conveys his longing and regret at putting his office before his child. And he asks Julia to tell him all the details of "how she is - what she is - what she is like...whether she has black eyes or gray - a long nose or a pug..."

And then he writes an odd little thing. "...and above all..." he implores, "..whether she has a pretty foot." for unless she has a foot as pretty as her mother's she "could never make a fine woman."

And it was this bit of parental and husbandly foolishness that caught me. Because I am a bit of a fool for a woman's hands, and her feet. I've always enjoyed holding hands, feeling the intricate textures of bone and sinew that can hold such character.

A woman's hands (or a man's, for that matter) can speak as or more eloquently than her face, her body, or even her words, of the nature and quality of her. Well-worn or pampered, slender or square, smooth or muscular...it takes a lifetime of living within her hands, of walking the roads her feet take her, to make them, and her, the woman she is. If you cherish the woman, than every line and muscle that makes her her, becomes dear in ways that are hard to express.

Or, hell, maybe people like Ned Bates and I are just queer for feet...

But whatever the reason, that little paragraph helped me see them not as stiff pictures in a book but people, people-people. I could vividly picture this long-dead couple, these vanished people preserved in silver salts and black back in the days of their happiness, perhaps lying lazily abed with her "pretty feet" in his lap as he gently rubs them after a long day. Enjoying the feeling, enjoying the moment, just enjoying each other.Silly, isn't it? And yet, it was that little detail, as one who has often admired my own wife's neat and strong feet as I worked the lotion into her sole and heel-ball and soothed out the aches and stiffnesses of a day's work, that connected these strangers to me, that made me feel like I understood him, and her, just a bit, and through them a bit more of the time and the tides of the world that had borne them up, he and his beloved, on the long swells of a dim-lit sea an ocean of time and a world of lives ago.

And if that's not how a good history works, I can't think of a better.Let me leave you with the words of the Victorian lover himself;

"Oh! How I long to press you to my bosom, if only for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision - I see you with such vivd and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye. O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine."