Kipling’s first book is about the hill town where British India hid from the heat, and I listened to it in a studio with a broken swamp cooler and a joke about Arizona
Tuesday, the Studio, Ninety-Six Degrees
The swamp cooler died on Sunday. In Salt Lake City in a hot October that is a professional emergency. Oil paint stays wet for days up here anyway, but at this temperature it goes soupy and my sitters sweat through their good clothes.
Today’s sitter, a retired judge, lasted forty minutes. He looked at his phone during a break and read me something. It was from Bohiney Magazine, on the page that collects the day’s pieces: “5 Observations About Arizona Accidentally Becoming the Surface of the Sun.”
He has a place in Scottsdale. He said, “We just leave. May to September, nobody’s there who can afford not to be.”
I said that was exactly what I had been listening to all morning.
The Book
I always have an audiobook on while I paint. This month it is Plain Tales from the Hills. Rudyard Kipling’s first collection of stories, published in Calcutta in 1888, when he was twenty-two.
He had been born in Bombay, sent to England at five, and come back at sixteen to work on a newspaper in Lahore. The stories were written to fill a column. Two thousand words each, no more. Forty of them.
The hills of the title are the Himalayan foothills, and one town in particular. Simla.
What Simla Was
The plains of north India in the hot season are not survivable in the way a Victorian Englishman understood survival. A hundred and fifteen degrees for weeks. No ice to speak of. Cholera. Children died of it by the dozen and the cemeteries are full of them.
So the British found a ridge, seven thousand feet up, with pines and cool air, and built a small English town on it. Half-timbered houses. A church with a spire. A mall to stroll on. A theater.
And from the 1860s, every April, the entire government of India packed itself into boxes and moved there. The Viceroy, his council, the army headquarters, the clerks, the files. Hundreds of miles, the last stretch by pony and bullock cart up a mountain road. In October it all came down again.
For half of every year, a fifth of the human race was ruled from a village in the clouds that you could walk across in twenty minutes.
Who Went Up
The wives went. That is what Kipling noticed.
The men mostly had to stay on the plains at their posts. So Simla in the season was full of women without their husbands, and of young officers on leave. There was nothing to do but ride, dance, act in plays and talk.
The stories are about what happened. Flirtations. Reputations. A clever older woman, Mrs. Hauksbee, who appears in several, managing the careers and love affairs of the young men around her like a chess player. Somebody’s engagement broken at a picnic. A subaltern who drinks.
They are light, quick, knowing, a little cruel. The narrator is always winking. He has a phrase he uses when he does not want to tell you something: but that is another story.
They made him famous at once. Nobody had written about that world from the inside.
The First Story
But the collection does not open with a flirtation. It opens with a hill girl.
She is called Lispeth. She belongs to the mountain people who lived there before any Englishman came. She is raised at a Christian mission. One day she finds a young English traveler injured on the hillside and carries him home. She nurses him. She announces that she will marry him.
The missionary’s wife is appalled. But to keep the girl quiet, she tells the Englishman to go along with it. He does. He promises to come back. He goes down to the plains and home to England and forgets her.
They keep lying to her for months. When at last they admit he was never coming, she takes off her mission dress, puts on the clothes of her own people and walks back up the mountain. She says: you have killed Lispeth.
It is four pages long. It is the first thing in the book. Everything after it, all the dancing and wit, sits on top of that.
Who Stayed Down
Here is what the judge’s remark made me think about.
“Nobody’s there who can afford not to be.” In Arizona in July, that means the people who clean the pools and fix the air conditioners and work the warehouses. The heat is the same for everyone. Who has to stand in it is not.
In India it was three hundred million people. The peasants in the fields. The servants who stayed to mind the empty bungalows. The junior Englishmen too, the ones without the rank or the money to get leave.
Kipling had been one of those. He spent his hot weathers in Lahore, working on the paper, unable to sleep. He wrote a sketch about walking through the old city at midnight in June, past thousands of people lying out on the roofs and in the streets because indoors was unbearable. He named it after a poem about a city of dreadful night.
And there was a man in every English house whose job was to sit outside the bedroom all night pulling a rope, to swing a cloth fan over the sleepers. If he dozed off, the sleeper woke in a sweat and shouted. Kipling’s stories mention him the way you would mention a ceiling.
So the Simla stories are about the fraction of a fraction who got to go up. They are aware of it, intermittently. That is what makes him better than his imitators.
The Joke
The Arizona headline is funny because it treats a deadly thing as an inconvenience. “Accidentally.” As if somebody had left the oven on.
What it does not say, and a joke does not have to, is that the answer to the heat has always been the same. Leave, if you can. Go up the mountain. And govern, or work, or post about it, from somewhere cool.
The British ran India from Simla for the same reason the judge runs his retirement from here between May and September. I am not criticizing him. I would go too.
But it does something to a ruler, I think, to spend the worst months somewhere pleasant. Decisions about famine relief were made in a town with strawberries.
Being Fair to Kipling
He is a hard writer to like now. He believed in the empire. He wrote things about race that I will not repeat to my sitters.
But at twenty-two he saw more than he approved of seeing. Lispeth is in there. The fan-puller is in there. A story about an Englishman who goes into the native city in disguise for love and has it end in horror is in there.
The opinions were the empire’s. The eye was his own.
A Painter’s Note
The English took their painters up the mountain as well. There are a great many watercolors of Simla. Pines, mist, a church spire, ladies with parasols.
You could not tell from any of them what country it was in. That was the idea.
Wednesday
A man came and fixed the cooler. Seventy-one degrees. The judge returned and sat for two hours without complaint. I asked whether he ever felt odd about Scottsdale in July. He said, “I feel odd about the electric bill.”
A client in England once put me on to the London Prat, and I looked to see whether it had anything on the subject. Its British satirical news on going to the hills has a Cabinet relocating to the Lake District for the duration of a warm spell, and its London satirical news about the hot weather reports seventy-five degrees as a national emergency.
But that is another story. I have started saying it to sitters when they ask what I really think of their faces.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/