The Lonely Voice by Frank O'Connor

Author:Frank O'Connor [O’Connor, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-017-4
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

That sense of the group makes it almost impossible for Kipling or his readers to believe in individual loneliness, and when it does appear it is always in some monstrous disguise, such as the pit of the living dead in “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” or the horror that kills Hummil in “At the End of the Passage.” When Kipling should be moving in the direction of Chekhov he always moves in the direction of Poe. When an officer is unjustly accused of having sexual relations with the wife of a brute called Bronckhurst, the whole machinery of a secret society is put into operation to prevent the Indian servants from perjuring themselves, and when an unpleasant young man from the Lower Classes who has been sent as assistant to a bank where, in his arrogance, he makes a mess of everything, falls ill, his tough superior not only covers up for him but forges testimonials from the bank which has long ago dismissed the wretched boy, and even pays his salary out of his own pocket. Kipling is not only President of the Society for Persuading Unmarried Mothers To Tell, he is also Secretary of a thousand other groups from the Freemasons and Janeites to the Deceased Syphilitics Friendly Burial Fund and the Society for Defending Innocent Co-Respondents. Everyone is covering up, everyone is rushing to the rescue, and all the time one seems to hear the thud of the hoofs of the Eleventh Hussars (“The Slashers”) coming to save the hero from a fate worse than death. As a weak man I like to believe that not only is God watching over me but the Eleventh Hussars are keeping an eye on me as well. As a mature one I know that Kipling is a damned liar.

Perhaps this was inevitable in a colonial society such as that of India in the nineteenth century, but it involves a contradiction which at once distinguishes Kipling from every other great writer of stories. He cannot write about the one subject a storyteller must write about—human loneliness. He has never said with Pascal, “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.”

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