Buckle Up
Chapter 24 — Mowgli Leaves the Jungle Forever
The English superheroes are Dr Who, Hermione Granger, King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Danger Mouse, Robin Hood, Emma Peel and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Only King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes once struggled with inner demons, but both have come out of rehab as nicer people. Now all of them apart from an occasional James Bond are suitable for children. The mission that unites them is to teach miscreants and foreigners how to behave, especially foreigners.
The Promised Land that awaits them on the other side of the Jordan isn’t the green hill far away where the dear Lord was crucified, but a green hill in Cumberland where a gingham cloth is spread under an ancient oak tree on a late summer’s afternoon and mum and the kids tuck into the Fortnum & Mason pâté while dad reads them the carefully selected poems of Wordsworth in the reassuring tones of Wellington. Later they will pay homage to the prophet of Rydal Mount and drive home through country lanes to Downton Abbey.
Now their most notable superpowers are a sharp wit, a boarding school education and good breeding. Emma Peel’s tragic flaw, her hamartia in the scheme of Aristotle’s Poetics, is her secret love of watercolours.
The question is how the English imagination that produced Prospero, Ariel and Caliban ended up producing such a tepid pantheon of idols; how King Lear ended up as Gandolph the Grey; how Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle’s “god-born devil-dung”, ended up as Rubeus Hagrid; and how the radical visions of William Blake ended up as a paean to the perfect cover drive.
There may not be a single answer; but the clues that might add up to a credible explanation are to be found in the circumstances that led to the suffocation and eventual asphyxiation of the English literary daemon in the last decades of the 19th century. If it had a headstone to mark its demise it would read something like this: “Here lie the last remains of English genius, the free and wild spirit that set the dim imagination of the Western world on fire — tamed, house-broken and fully domesticated by the time of its passing on the 25th day of May, in the Year of Our Lord 1895.”
I tried to like Lord of the Rings in the early seventies when it had the totemic power of The Pill, Timothy Leary, Khalil Gibran and Hair. I didn’t get it then, and I didn’t get The Hobbit when I read it to my son when he was eight or nine. I thought he was enjoying it. He thought I was enjoying reading it. Maybe he thought it was obligatory, the way Karine had made it obligatory for the girls to listen to James Taylor and the Mamas & the Papas. I think we must both have sighed at the same time because one night he looked at me and I looked at him and we both shook our heads. We never got to wherever the hobbits were going, and neither of us was left wondering.
I didn’t know why it felt so trivial and so empty until I saw the first of the universally fêted films. For all its lavish production and its splendid CGI there was nothing and no one to care about. It was a multi-million dollar tiff between nice people and people who were apparently not so nice; the Ben Hur version of handbags at dawn.
But it wasn’t until I came across Epic Pooh, the controversial essay by sci-fi author Michael Moorcock, that I understood my initial aversion had been less aesthetic than political:
“The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire, are ‘safe’, but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are ‘dangerous’. Experience of life itself is dangerous.The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable substitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.”
The characters and stories of the Allahakbarries, of J.M. Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, A.A. Milne and the rest of them, but also of Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame and Lewis Carroll, had all contributed to the English rural idyll that so entranced me as a child, that located my imagination in Merrie Olde England, and that made everything outside of its borders feel distastefully foreign. So when I got called up to serve my country in 1971, I learned the words of Kipling’s If to stiffen my backbone, and packed a match-book sized edition of FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam just in case.
Rodney and Bruce had come back from their respective one year call-ups to the South African naval base at Saldanha Bay apparently unscathed. Despite my parents’ best efforts to get me assigned to the Navy to follow in their footsteps, I was assigned to join the Services School base at Voortrekkerhoogte, now Centurion, where they taught cooks how to cook, mechanics how to be mechanics, and clerks how to be clerks. I had in mind a cushy desk-job typing letters for a kindly colonel with a moustache like Dad’s.
One late night in the first week of January my parents took me down to Rosetta station where I was to catch the train of conscripts on their way to Pretoria. My father said, “Cheer up, my boy” and my mother said, “Put your best foot forward.”
It was two months after my seventeenth birthday: old enough, surely, not to have imagined myself in a Just So story — not to have been thinking of myself as the Elephant’s Child who “took a hundred pounds of bananas (the little short red kind), and a hundred pounds of sugar-cane (the long purple kind), and seventeen melons (the greeny-crackly kind), and said to all his dear families, ‘Goodbye. I am going to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, to find out what the Crocodile has for dinner.’ And they all spanked him once more for luck, though he asked them most politely to stop.”
I like to believe it was a simple twist of fate took me to spend eight months on the banks of the actual Limpopo — and not some twisted unconscious urge to play out in real life Kipling’s fantasy about how the elephant got its trunk. It turned out to be grey, green, and greasy, and all set about with fever trees, just as he’d described it. And I found out soon enough what the Crocodile had for dinner.
Leopard-crawling at night with Limpopo dirt in my mouth and the shocking loudness of R1 rifles firing over our heads and into the banks of Botswana on the other side to make us “fiks vir stryd”, I silently repeated the verse in the Rubaiyat that took me back to the rural idyll I’d left behind:
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness —
O, wilderness were paradise enow!
And it was this mad incantation, this crazily distorted fixation on the exquisite opposite of the testosterone hell of Greefswald, associated forever with Omar Khayyam’s mysteriously feminine and magnificently elusive “thou”, that found its crazily obsessive voice in Kill Yourself & Count to 10. Because I had seen her in the flesh, whoever it was, whom I imagined her as a student from Tukkies in her early twenties, lifting her chin and shaking her chestnut hair back into a ponytail, her raised elbows pale in the distance where we knew they were digging around that koppie for proof of Mapungupwe’s existence, that other South Africa, officially denied because it gave prior claim by Africans to the land that the Voortrekkers liked to believe was a dispensation from their version of heaven; the wild and native South Africa which I set in opposition to my white naiveté; the wild goddess, I would understand later, who led me to find in all that hurt and confusion what Robert Johnson describes as “the inner gold”.
But what I took from it then was that I could no longer trust Pooh Bear or Mowgli to see me through. And I found nothing in Tolkien that suggested that the paradise I’d lost could be regained by following a hobbit. The reverse seemed more likely: that Frodo would only lead me back to the very idyll that had set me up for such an agonising crisis of faith in its moral worth.
I became suspicious of everyone’s motives after that, but especially of the voices of authority — institutional, governmental, parental — it didn’t matter; of the controlling, moralising, life-denying mendacity with which vested interests veiled the selfishness of their nationalism, their racism and their existential fear of change. I was angry at everything and nothing. My default view of the world around me became cynical to the point of irrationality; became a prevailing bitterness that expected the worst and usually got it.
For all of that acrimony, or possibly because of the self-doubt that came with it, I could never let go completely of the English romantic spirit that had come during my university years to signify a secular alternative to South Africa’s religion of hate. Like Emerson in his teens, I wanted to imagine a world legislated by the temper of the Lyrical Ballads, a nature-worshipping wilderness in which Coleridge’s very hippie pleasure dome was decorated by Wordsworth’s daffodils, where the moon was always in the Seventh House and love would always steer the stars.
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Skipping forward through a life dedicated to romancing Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Ford Sierras I find myself watching the girls play cricket on a village green in Surrey. The jug of wine, the loaf of bread and Karine are present beneath the bough. The pleasures of the pleasure dome may have turned out to be milder than I’d hoped for, but the Groot Krokodil is dead, and our gingham cloth is set about with ox-eye daisies.
But that was then, and this is now. And the voices of England’s vested interests veil the selfishness of their nationalism, their bigotry and their existential fear of change beneath a controlling, moralising, life-denying mendacity that’s uncomfortably familiar.
Those were wonderful years, nevertheless, when I came home to the self I thought the crocodile had eaten for dinner, and found myself comfortable in its skin, and lived and breathed the English dream. I’m grateful for that, even if it was brief and fanciful. If I could never again give credence to the J.K Rowling or the Tolkienesque version of it, I can at least now imagine its warmth and English kindliness as a living and credible alternative to the pernicious idyll I’d left on the banks of the Limpopo.
And living in England in an English skin had also given me the knowledge and experience to interpret Englishness from the inside: to trace this river of virulence back to its source in a specific period of English thought, not with the accuracy of an historian, but with the privilege of atavism.
Tono-Bungay led me to Linda Dryden’s Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siècle Literary Scene, and Linda Dryden led me to the 25th May 1895, the day Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for “gross indecency”; and the day, both symbolically and effectively, when all of the repressed anger of Victorian hypocrisy vented its outrage on the creature of its most dangerous dreams. Mr Justice Wills described Oscar Wilde’s sentence of two years of hard labour, the maximum allowed by law, as “totally inadequate for a case such as this” and “the worst case I have ever tried.”
But Mr Wills’ indignation reflected the wider anxiety of a class of English society faced in 1895 with unprecedented challenges to both their Victorian sensibilities and their assumed entitlements. Very much in their minds were the warnings of Max Nordau, the French Zionist and social critic, who diagnosed “a serious intellectual epidemic, some kind of Black Death of degeneration and hysteria” sweeping from Moscow to London and threatening to infect and bring down the pillars of European civilisation. He saw its symptoms in the “degenerate” art and literature of the symbolists, mystics and Pre-Raphaelites, and in the philosophies of Wagnerism, Aestheticism and “Decadentism”, and recommended, in his bookDegeneration, a strict regime of censorship and repression by politicians, judges and teachers to prevent further contagion.
So Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, its first chapter appearing in serialised form in December 1894, met with this reaction from Margaret Oliphant, Queen Victoria’s second favourite novelist:
There may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in those dark comers where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not, we repeat, from any Master’s hand.
Algernon Swinburne, one of that class of fops who longed for a return to a medieval England unpolluted by modern industry, begged Hardy to distance himself from Jude’s unrelenting dissection of poverty and sexual desire so that he, Swinburne, might be allowed “another admission into an English paradise ‘under the greenwood tree’”.
H.G. Wells was one of the very few critics who sprang to his defence:
“Had Mr Hardy never written another book, this would still place him at the head of the English novelists. To turn from him or from Mr Meredith to our Wardour Street romancers and whimpering Scottish humourists is like walking from a library into a schoolroom.”
Victoria’s favourite novelist, for the sake of completeness, was Marie Corelli, who sold more books between 1886 and 1918 than Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling combined. Corelli might have been better known today for her trailblazing lesbian fiction if she hadn’t been convicted of food hoarding during the First World War.
But then it was Victoria the literary critic who called King Lear, “A strange horrible business, but I suppose good enough for Shakespeare’s day.”
There is a bigger point to be made about the taste in literature that she shared with the increasingly literate English middle classes: the slow but steady mechanisation of the spirit that went hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution, described here by Colin Manlove in his brilliant essay Kingsley, Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction.
“In the eighteenth-century novel the protagonist often finds out what he or she is, while in the nineteenth-century novel the process is one of learning what one may become. But that ‘becoming’ is circumscribed by the factory of Christian teaching, and bound down as to a bench by Victorian evangelical principles. The optimism behind many Victorian novels, in which there is a tendency to turn our perfect moral products after they have been shaped in the furnace of experience or turned on the lathe of self-knowledge, makes them into spiritual manufactories in which each item of apparently contingent vicissitude is part of a production line designed to generate admiration in man and acceptability to God.”
It was the efficiency of this production line, the sheer weight of sentimental cant produced and consumed in the late Victorian era, which made it possible for the English reading public to substitute sentimentality for humanity, and to fix the legitimacy of this exchange as an incontrovertible premise of English political discourse to this day; which makes charity an acceptable alternative to the responsibility of the state; which dresses poverty in the sweet and charming rags of Oliver Twist, Lizzie Hexam or Jenny Wren; which allows us to make sentimental heroes of the victims of Grenfell Tower while exculpating the authorities responsible by figuring them as Gradgrinds or Bounderbys.
So the Victorian evangelists and English conservatives who were to conspire to send Oscar Wilde to prison for his sexual orientation were the same Victorian evangelists and English conservatives who filled the St James Theatre in the West End to applaud and cheer and titter at the first stage production of The Importance of Being Earnest in February 1895. Later that year the national hypocrisy began to manifest itself as a split in English consciousness, a schizophrenia of sensibilities diagnosable in the concurrent publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s rip-roaring adventure The Heart of the World, Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Lewis Carroll’sSylvie and Bruno, Florence Kate Upton’s The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and, perhaps most prophetically, Rudyard Kipling’sMowgli Leaves the Jungle Forever.
Elsewhere 1895 also saw the publication of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Jules Verne’s Propeller Island, Alfred Jarry’s Caesar Antichrist and Friedrich Nietzsche’sDer Antichrist.
In December, Joseph Conrad began work on Heart of Darkness.
That a schism occurred in the English literary psyche between 1895 and the end of the First World War is not in question. While the Allahakbarries and their privileged upper class followers were regurgitating the tropes of Merrie Old England, James Joyce, an Irishman, was writing Ulysses, and D.H. Lawrence, an autodidact like Thomas Hardy, would soon be writing Sons and Lovers.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, aka Baroness Snow, CBE, FRSL, an author who between 1935 and 1981 produced several dozen novels of the kind Queen Victoria would have admired for their moral lessons, mourned the loss of English sentimentality thus:
“The followers of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce began to lead the novel into sterility. And nobody saw anything wrong in that inexorable process. Why not? Because life was growing too hard for writers to face, and quiet lay in impotency alone.”
The irony of this is as breath-taking as the hypocrisy that inspires it. What she is really mourning, of course, is the loss of Empire and the decline of British virility. And her choice of words, in “sterility” and the “impotency”, gives away the secret of her fear: that the diminishing power of England’s cultural hegemony, along with Britain’s diminishing global hegemony, threatens to diminish the privileges of a class of English society that derives its privileges from breeding, and breeding alone.
English superheroes are made of this impotence, the progeny of the “watery spunk” of D.H. Lawrence’s rage against the machine that wouldn’t publish Sons and Lovers in 1912:
“Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, palsied, pulseless lot that make up England. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frogspawn the gibberers. Why, why, why, was I born an Englishman!”
