jewels – Kate Macdonald

The Rudyard Kipling novel no-one ever remembers: The Naulahka

This week in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, I plunge into Rudyard Kipling’s least read novel, The Naulahka. It was an absolute joy to read, because it was a rare treat: a novel by one of my favourite authors that I hadn’t already read, despite having been reading Kipling for about 40 years. I simply don’t understand how I’d never read this novel before. It’s not as if it’s a new discovery, or an obscure short story no-one’s reprinted yet. Kipling has been studied intensively in the last 30 years, and there are many editions of his stories and novels available. I’ve even read his The Light That Failed, a thoroughly depressing and gloomy novel that can’t have many fans. But somehow The Naulahka had not crossed my book radar until recently.

It is one of those novels that needs to be read, if not at a sitting, then with a lot of concentration. When I finished it I was still immersed in a part of India I had never read Kipling writing about before, and among characters I had never read him describing. So why all these differences, and obscurities, compared to Kim, and all the Kipling stories I know practically by heart? Because this was a co-written novel, a joint project between Kipling and the man who would have become his brother-in-law if he hadn’t died before the wedding. The involvement of Wolcott Balestier in the novel’s planning and creation has brought out the snobbery in Kipling critics who snoot at his role in The Naulahka’s invention. I picked up a sense that critics excuse Kipling for being saddled with this unfinished novel by his dear friend Wolcott that he obviously never wanted to co-write in the first place.

From the evidence in the early, American section of the novel, Balestier seems to have been developing a writing style and subject in parallel with Willa Cather, one that she would go on to make her own, and which Owen Wister was already exploring. Balestier writes of the American West and frontier life with clear, passionate description, and a practical awareness of the expectations from life of the women who kept the frontier houses clean and fed. But the novel is not about sod houses and shoot-outs, but the civilised life of first-generation frontier towns that already have the furnished houses, the water supply, and the town newspaper, and now want the railroad and mining investment too.

Most importantly for The Naulahka, Balestier’s impetus got Kipling to write a novel about a woman; in fact about three women, and their effect on the American hero, Nick Tarvin. He will chase halfway across the world to steal a fabulous necklace from one woman, to give to another, so that he could marry the third. Kipling didn’t normally write about women very much – Mrs Hauksbee is the only memorable and reused female character in his fiction – and he hardly wrote about contemporary Americans, except an unintelligible arms dealer in two of his South African stories. So I found that The Naulahka, to my great pleasure, has a lot of new territory for Kipling: novel-length female protagonists, an American hero who doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘no’, and the drive and business sense of the American West applied to British India and Rajput cunning. The Naulahka itself is a necklace that is the soul of the state of Gokral Seetarun, consisting of a monstrously-sized emerald, ruby, sapphire, diamond and a black diamond. The traps and mishaps that threaten Nick’s life, by the malice of his enemy the gypsy queen, are excellent reading. The corruption of the Maharajah’s court and the indifferent impotence of the British Resident are fascinating: this is British India written, for once, from a non-British perspective, and it is not complimentary.

There are flaws and annoyances, of course. The central premise of the plot is that the heroine’s desire to dedicate her life to serving the poor women of India as a nurse is a waste of time, because Indian women will not respect her since she has not yet had children. Kate’s true destiny is to be a good wife to the hero: I gritted my teeth through Nick’s self-satisfied assumptions that Kate would eventually come to her senses about this destiny. I shared her outrage on finding that he had travelled to India before she got there on her nursing mission, and that he will not go away and let her do her work. I was increasingly infuriated that Nick lies and deceives to try to steal the Naulahka, and expects Kate to share his triumph in having carried off a spectacular scam. I was horrified that the culmination of his brilliant plotting was that Kate’s life is in danger simply because Nick has tangled with the gypsy queen. Nick is a great creation, but his moral sense is distinctly shabby. One of the great satisfactions at the end of the novel is his realisation that he cannot have everything, no matter how cleverly he has planned things.

One of the strengths of the novel, according to the critics, is the portrait of the very young prince, the Maharaj Kunwar. I’m not sure I agree. Kipling has depicted young Indian boys far better – the small boys in Lucknow in his greatest novel, Kim, are more convincing – and since much of the speech of the Maharaj is in Indianised English, he isn’t his own person, he is a creature of the British Raj. The situations that the Maharaj leads Nick and Kate into, on the other hand, are definitely interesting: power and plotting follow him everywhere, and when he isn’t a protection to them, he’s a danger. Kipling worked out a fiendishly clever plotline to do with the transfer of the necklace, the safety of the prince, and how far the gypsy queen will go to get her revenge. The really refreshing thing about Nick is that he is written in Kipling’s instantly identifiable style, but he isn’t English, and my word, what a difference that makes.

Kipling’s English heroes are all steeped in an awareness of honour – their own, or other people’s – and Nick’s sense of honour is, compared to Kipling’s average British army subaltern, definitely skewed. The two other key women in the novel – the wife of the railway magnate, and the gypsy queen – are also excellent creations, making this novel the most interesting exposure of how Kipling wrote women characters. The railway magnate’s wife has tremendous power, or so we are led to believe, but doesn’t seem to realise the way of the world. If she had actually accepted a necklace of colossal value from Nick, and then tried to persuade her husband to take the railway through Nick’s town instead of through the slightly more suitable rival town, I think we’d all be justified in wondering what else she had offered Nick in exchange for such a magnificent jewel that she has not the wit to appreciate. There’s something wrong with Kipling’s understanding of human nature there, even if the railway magnate’s wife is not interested in Nick.

The only woman to try seducing Nick does it with murder in mind: the gypsy queen is a marvellous creation, and deserves her ascendancy in the corrupt zenana schemings. Kate herself is an unfinished creation. Kipling can’t convey the truth of religious fervour to convince us that her vocation comes from a revivalist meeting, but he is completely persuasive when writing about her grim months of nursing training, and her capacity for hard work in the hospital. I also believe her completely when she continues to urge Nick to just go away and let her get on with her job. It’s maddening that Nick doesn’t listen, and refuses to take her desires seriously when they don’t coincide with his own, but it’s also very modern. While a lot about this novel is great Victorian fiction, there are some highly suggestive elements which make this a thoroughly modern novel of feminist aspiration.

This is a complex novel, a very enjoyable read, and is totally gripping in its last three chapters where Nick and the gypsy queen try to outmanoeuvre each other with hostages and hidden gunmen. It’s vastly underrated, and undeservedly forgotten.

Gender performativity at its best: Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders

Swordfights and petticoats from Georgette Heyer, the grande dame / mother superior of all things swashbuckling, in this week’s podcast scripts catch-up from Really Like This Book, with The Masqueraders, from 1928.

Georgette Heyer wrote a very large number of novels. To those who haven’t read them, and simply judge them by their covers, from all their reprint phases, it might seem as if they are undifferentiated romantic slush in fancy dress. Not so! Her novels can be grouped into four kinds. There are her contemporary, realist novels published under a pseudonym: I’m not concerned with those. There are her detective novels published under her own name: again, not needed here. There are a couple of Norman and Tudor historical novels, again not relevant here. And then there are the historical novels set in the mid 1700s to early 1800s, which can be separated into subsets of those set pre- and post-French Revolution. In the former the heroes wear wigs, make-up, jewels and high heels, and in the latter, they didn’t.

The Masqueraders is one of the former, in which gentlemen of the upper classes spend as much time fussing over their appearance as women do, and spend their leisure time frivolling, playing cards, gossiping and laying bets. Where, you might ask, is the drama and excitement in that? For Heyer’s novels are undoubtedly exciting, and full of drama. These fine gentlemen also spent a great deal of time falling in love, getting into entanglements and fighting duels. The women in the novels are no less active, because the heroines of a Heyer novel are more often the leading protagonists than the men. Heyer heroines are always spirited, brave, adventurous, daring and unconventional, just the kind of girl to attract a modern readership. Heyer also makes sure that the men in high heels and wigs are also masculine enough to attract her original readers of the 1920s and 1930s. In The Masqueraders she takes this to an extreme.

In the first few pages of the novel we are introduced to a brother and sister on their way to London to meet their father. Unusually, the sister is the one in a smart coat, sword and breeches, riding the horse beside the coach in the rain, and the brother is the one in a pale blue silk gown and blonde ringlets, sitting inside the coach and waving his fan about. But this is no ordinary historical tale of cross-dressing: these siblings have very good reasons for being disguised. Robin (in the blue dress) is a former Jacobite supporter on the run, and his sister Prudence (riding in knee-breeches) has habitually dressed as a boy from childhood to preserve her virtue, living as she did in the trail of her rackety father when he was running a gaming hell, or a duelling studio, or who knows what else. To be the daughter of an adventurer also means that she has learned some interesting social skills. She is tall, and can pass as a young man easily, taking snuff with perfect style, and playing cards so cleverly as to beat the card-sharping gentleman who had hoped to fleece so young a gentleman. We also see that she can fight off three thugs with her sword, and tip wine down her coat sleeve rather than get drunk, or be detected. Prudence is cautious, and has a very cool head.

Prudence would never look this dreary, surely?

Robin, on the other hand, is a daredevil actor. He makes an undetectable girl, because he is slight and beautiful, and very, very good at managing his petticoats, flirting with his fan, arranging himself on sofas at parties for chats, and tripping across a room in the most feminine way possible. But in case we might worry that he is almost too feminine for a young man in a 1920s romantic novel (please don’t throw gender theory at me, I’m doing my best here), Heyer heroes are always heterosexual, no matter how much rouge is deployed in their performative gendered self-presentation (see?). Robin is very willing to get into breeches and top boots to act a very masculine role by rescuing the girl he is in love from a blackmailing kidnapper, and also to duel with him to the death. Prudence does not seek a duel, but when one is forced on her, she calmly accepts it, and is prepared to act the gentleman to her probable death, but another gentleman hijacks her duel by forcing one of his own on the nasty assailant instead. Reading a whole novel of this kind of thing is absolutely delightful, because Heyer was a genius at it. Once Alice and Egerton Castle and Baroness Orczy had proved that there was a market for this kind of novel, Heyer reinvented the subgenre of the historical romance for modern times. Her plots are seamless and have perfect construction. She creates unique, memorable and fascinating characters. Her historical research is legendary. She has a gift for dialogue that cries out to be performed on stage. And she is very reliable, almost predictable, in creating scenes of chaos and mayhem that are resolved by the masterful and decisive action of the hero. For Georgette Heyer is above all an upholder of the romantic tradition that decrees that men sweep women off their feet, and women must be ultimately submissive. She doesn’t make all her heroines like this, of course, but they all come to this end, no matter how sparky and active they are.

In The Masqueraders, there are two heroines; Prudence, and Letitia, whom Robin and Prudence rescue, and with whom Robin falls in love. While Prudence is brave, cautious, and daring, Letitia is a bit of a caricature, uber-feminine, with lots of sighs, whispers and dainty behaviour. She has a very vague understanding of the world, which is rather maddening, but for some reason Robin the romantic actor finds this attractive. Prudence, on the other hand, is spotted immediately for what she is by Sir Anthony, a quintessential Heyer hero, the large slow-voiced man who is also very astute, a brilliant swordsman, and quick to react effectively and masterfully to emergencies. Naturally, since Prudence is dressed as a man, and Robin as a girl, a lot of the pleasure in this novel comes from the dialogue in scenes where Sir Anthony is dancing with Robin-as-girl, or playing cards at White’s with Prudence-as-man. We aren’t quite sure that he knows what they are, or whether they suspect that he knows, but there are subtle clues in the writing to indicate that perhaps he does, making these cross-dressing episodes an exciting reading of gendered behaviour for those in the know. Heyer was, of course, fiercely conservative, in the political and social sense, and enjoyed writing fops and effeminate male characters when her hero or heroine needed a safe and amusing confidant, or, once, a nasty villain. But she would never have thought it possible to have a powerfully masculine gay or bisexual hero. I don’t think she wrote The Masqueraders like that at all, but, nowadays, you can work out some spectacular double readings of its cross-dressing scenes, even if, at the end, we are ushered firmly into traditional hetero-normative engagements.

The plot of The Masqueraders also relies on some Heyer stalwarts: the formidable and ingenious older man (in this novel Robin and Prudence’s father); the delightful, reliable and comfortable French matron married into the English aristocracy; the group of affable young men without a thought in their heads further off than the next race, card game or duel; and the walk-on parts by senior historical figures who give authority to the leading characters’ existence. The local highwaymen are very active (Letitia does seem to have a higher average than most for getting held up and robbed). The servants are mostly unnamed, apart from Robin and Prudence’s man John, who followed their father into exile as factotum. But all other servants are perceived from the aristocratic perspective, that is, they exist only to serve, they have no names, and they only achieve individuality when they do not fit that pattern. This is typical for Heyer: servants are not whom she wrote about, because their lives had no scope for dashing escapades or swashbuckling dramas. The Masqueraders is a classic Heyer for swords, wigs, brilliant plotting and charming characters.

Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods

The copy I found in the fabulous chain of second-hand book shops in Brussels, Pêle Mêle. It has nothing to do with Brussels, but I bet that's why the previous owner bought it, and then resold it. — The copy I found in the fabulous chain of second-hand book shops in Brussels, Pêle Mêle. It has nothing to do with Brussels, but I bet that’s why the previous owner bought it, and then resold it.

Last week I got grumpy about failures in historical writing, where we are asked to accept cringe-making historical howlers or listen to medieval characters speaking in awkward modern slang. Sybille Bedford’s novel A Favourite of the Gods from 1963, in contrast, was a total joy. It retrieved my faith that fiction set in the past can be written impeccably to the highest style, crossing historical periods without distracting the reader with annoying niggles about word use and periodicity. Bedford’s technique is to focus on the characters and their relationships, in a similar way to how G B Stern wrote her tremendous sagas about Anglo-Jewish matriarchies, so that the reader becomes enthralled with the characters and what they say, and does not care what king is on the throne.

A Favourite of the Gods begins in a railway carriage about to cross the border from Italy to France, and there is a delay. The travellers are Constanza and her daughter Flavia, on their way to Brussels to meet Lewis, whom Constanza is to marry. The delay causes them to miss the Calais train, and they find rooms for the night in an uncomfortable hotel in the south of France. In the morning, the cause of the delay is not resolved, and Constanza casually decides to wait. They are mistaken for a lady and her daughter who have made an appointment to view a house for rent, and, amused, and not displeased with the house, Constanza decides to take it. She puts Lewis off with a series of vague telegrams, and Flavia decides that she will remain with her mother and not, after all, take up her plan of studying in England. They stay in France for eleven years.

a very tricksy cover; encouraging long staring to work out what is going on, and on which part of the body

Now, after that beginning, who would not want to read on and find out why, what, and how things turn out? It is not clear what era we are in, though since the ladies are travelling independently and this is considered normal, it is probably in the twentieth century. Constanza clearly has plenty of money, and she has an imperious mother called Anna, referred to as the principessa, who hurtles from Florence to their French hotel to investigate why their delay – the loss of a ruby ring – has not been resolved.

The lives of these three women form the story: from Anna’s upbringing in New England, her marriage to a Roman nobleman, her blissful life in his family palazzo embraced by his mother and sisters, and her attempts to stave off boredom and find purpose in her life through travel and good works. Her judgement is faulty, and her instincts betray her. There is a terrible rupture in the marriage, and Anna sweeps off to London with the sixteen year-old Constanza, leaving her sulky son Giorgio – a spoiled and uninteresting little boy – with his father. It is the Edwardian era, a great age of salons and modern intellectual conversation.

After being taken away from her father and unwilling to probe too deeply into the reasons why, Constanza directs her own life in England, becoming as fashionable and desirable as her mother. Her marriage to the devastatingly witty dilettante Simon during the First World War, produces Flavia, and her subsequent divorce, arranged so that Simon can marry his mistress, introduces her to Lewis. The family money continues to supply Anna and Constanza with a decent and correct lifestyle that has no problem living in hotels and supplying Mena, Anna’s devoted Italian maid, with wine at every meal.

The most recent reprint, bu Daunt Books — The most recent reprint, by Daunt Books

The story swoops back and forth between the lives of the three women, revealing the connections between things they did and said in the past, with how they affect their futures. Anna’s main interest is living correctly, upholding her position in life, and following decencies she was vaguely brought up to admire. On her return from India – a journey she was encouraged to take by her husband before she caused any more trouble by trying to reform Roman society – she brings him an inset ruby, a gift from a rajah who asked Anna to offer it to her husband since she would not accept it for herself. When Constanza meets Simon for the first time, he is amusing some people at a ball with the story of her mother’s rapid departure from Rome, since he has met her father and has heard all about it, far more than Constanza knew herself. He also brings her a present from her father: the ruby set in a ring. When Flavia and Constanza are waiting in the railway carriage for the Italian police to release the train across the border, Constanza’s brother Giorgio appears to pay a farewell visit, and it is at this point that the ring unaccountably goes missing. The secrets of these three generations of women, and of their plaintively uncomprehending Roman relations are the heart of this marvellous, absorbing novel. It has a sequel, A Compass Error (1968), now on my Must Find And Read list.

Tag: jewels

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