This fascination with how and why stories are made might be described as perhaps one of the guiding purposes of this blog. It's all tied up with this unshakable curiosity I have. The best way to describe it might be to form it in the shape of a series of questions. Why do stories exist? What makes them work so well when the writing is good? Also, what makes it all fail in various ways? In other words, I seem to be fascinated just as much with the craft and imaginative inspiration that fuels the art of writing every bit as I am with reading a good example of the finished literary product. To cut it all short, I seem to be a by now incurable bookworm. The kind of guy who takes the full ramifications of that title seriously and without a trace of irony. I suppose that in itself is ironic, yet it's just the way everything has turned out for me. And so here is this blog, and the fascination still remains. How do good stories get told? It's one of the considerations that powers the engine of this meager little site, and I'll probably still be asking it long after this article is no longer in my rearview mirror. Sometimes a reader like me gets lucky, and runs across an actual literary artist whose mind is caught up in the with the same fascination of where do the stories come from? One famous name who shares this enthusiasm was an author by the name of Rudyard Kipling, of The Jungle Book fame.
The Story.
"His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was
a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day
to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations. I
met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his given
name, and he called the marker "Bulls-eyes." Charley explained, a little
nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on
at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that
Charlie should go back to his mother.
"That was our first step toward better acquaintance. He would call on me
sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his fellow clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must, he told me
of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make himself an
undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above sending stories
of love and death to the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to
sit still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky
fragments of plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his
unreserved confidence, and the self-revelations and troubles of a young man
are almost as holy as those of a maiden. Charlie had never fallen in love, but
was anxious to do so on the first opportunity; he believed in all things good
and all things honorable, but, at the same time, was curiously careful to let
me see that he knew his way about the world as befitted a bank clerk on
twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed "dove" with "love" and "moon"
with "June," and devoutly believed that they had never so been rhymed
before. The long lame gaps in his plays he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on, seeing all that he intended to do so
clearly that he esteemed it already done, and turned to me for applause"
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This is one of those character sketches with too much of the ring of truth in it to be called an entire and complete fiction. One gets the sense that the writer isn't so much inventing or (better yet) discovering a character, like a fossil hidden in the Earth. Instead, the sense of verisimilitude that hangs about the main lead gives one that sense that Charlie Mears is someone Kipling might have known or run across in real life. This is a surmise born out by the findings of the Society. They note that one of Kipling's biographers, Charles Carrington "suggests that Charlie Mears’s hopeless fantasy of becoming a poet may be based on conversations Kipling had with Ambo Poynter in Embankment Chambers, who showed him his poetry and a five-act play. Kipling wrote to Mrs. Hill: He estimates his poems not by the thing actually put down in black and white but by all the glorious inchoate fancies that flashed through his brain while his pen was in his hand (ibid)".d Are you starting to see what I mean when I describe the protagonist of Kipling's short story a walking cliche? Everything about this guy conforms to a particular type of person you're bound to meet in real life. It's like a mandate of some kind.
They may be able to note how certain motifs or gestures keep recurring successfully from one artwork to another, and yet never grasp the overall narrative context that allows such tropes as the cliff-hanger or the slaying of the dragon to come alive off the page. Instead, their lack of talent leads to the dreaded inevitable conclusion of reducing the power of archetypes to the level of mere lifeless cliches. Charlie Mears is the sort of fellow who could come away from watching films like The Godfather or Goodfellas, and fail to realize what makes each story work so well as they do. He'll come away thinking the key to that kind of story is rests in a bunch of stereotypes about the mob in particular, and (what's worse) Italians in general. He succeeds in failing to notice all the qualities of the writing which allows figures like Vito and Michael Corleone, or Henry Hill to leave an almost visceral impact on our imaginations, or how this in turn allows them all to live on in our memory. And you can forget about things like moral nuance when it comes to Charlie Mears. He might be able to tell you that the main cast of both films are villains. He just won't be able to tell what it is that makes this aspect of their characterization so fascinating to watch unfold. He can't tell you why these narratives have been able to captivate audiences across generations. I'm also pretty sure that he has no real sense of pathos. The very concepts of either Classical and/or Shakespearean dramatic Tragedy is lost on the likes of him.
In short, the guy can neither write nor understand the first thing about stories. In other words, old Charlie has sort of created his own tragic predicament, and the punchline is he probably doesn't know it. Still, there's no real cause for sorrow. The trick with people like Mears is if you give them enough time, they'll come around and see reason. Sooner or later they'll begin ask themselves why they ever put up with all this make-believe tosh to begin with, and then settle down into what might be the greatest prize of all: a normal life. It sure would be interesting to know what that is like (if anything).
It all stops being normal when Charlie calls on the narrator out of the blue on night. His reasons for the intrusion are almost a litany for this type of "writer". "I've a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that
was ever written. Do let me write it out here. It's such a notion!" Since its one of those pointless battles the narrator concedes to the poor deluded sap's wishes. "There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked
me, but plunged into the work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched
without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching
grew slower, there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest story in
the world would not come forth.
"Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had
so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked at him,
and wondering whether it were possible, that he did not know the originality,
the power of the notion that had come in his way? It was distinctly a Notion
among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by notions not a tithe as
excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the
current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to
use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his idea to remain
in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be
done indeed; but, oh so much"! From there, the tale grew in the telling, you might say. There's nothing odd about that in the strictest sense (I think?). What was strange was that one brief moment when the writer almost appeared to step out (as it were) and the story just seemed to, for lack of a better word, take over. Now even this can be claimed as nothing else except standard operating procedure for how stories are told. Whenever a writer is able to reach that special taproot well which we call the Imagination, I suppose it makes sense to claim that the story has found its proper "voice" and is firing on all cylinders.
The thing about this incident is just how much it differed from that of the normal results of good writing. Even when we're dealing with merely halfway competent writers, the sort that can claim to be "decent enough", the results leave you with a finished product where the author's voice is recognizable in the words. Each book or short piece contains a diction, and this style is very much like a blueprint of the speaker's voice, at least as it exists on the page. Most scribblers never talk the way they write, and yet what they leave on the page can be taken as a legitimate specimen of at least one aspect of their own voice, even if it seems like they can only harness it through the literary, as opposed to vocal medium. For instance, you can tell what kind of person Tolkien, Mark Twain, or Stephen King is just by paying attention to the style of their writings. The latter two both have this homespun folksy quality to their words, while the former can never seem to help displaying the breadth of his education by the unavoidable habit he's got for tapping into the ancient Epic Bard style of telling tales. The key thing that unites them all is that you can recognize their voices while reading their stories. The narrative itself may be thought of as something that exists outside of the author, yet their ability to tell it well means that the fictional account is forever associated with how they contributed their voices to it.
In the case of Charlies Mears, something else or other seems to have happened. When the hopeless fool put aside his pen and allowed himself to talk about the work instead of writing it, things got sort of "eerie". For a minute there, it wasn't as if he'd switched voices. It was as if you were in the presence of a complete and other stranger. It wasn't just that the voice was different. For a second there, you'd swear the same applied to the mannerisms, the gestures, even the usual friendly yet vacant look that Charles always had about was replaced by something else. If you didn't know who you were dealing with, you'd perhaps say that the person who you'd just met was the sort of fellow who had "seen or been through a lot". There was the kind of hard-edged look of steel and resolve in this man's eyes. The kind of stoicism that has learned how to hide or masque many secrets, a lot of them bad, yet perhaps some of them were good. This other fellow spoke in a surer voice, one with a great deal of experience in it. Such a voice belongs to someone who could be either slave or freeman, warrior, or citizen. You may think we're dealing with a man who has seen a great deal of combat in his life. Such a person is bound to have a lot of stories worth telling. The trouble is that's ridiculous, because it's Charlie Mears.
The closest this fool has ever come to combat are during those crucial years of having to survive the school yard playground rules of Prep School. Charlie was a natural victim of hazing from bullies as a lad, and has little to show from it other than a general inclination to avoid conflict as much as possible. This isn't a man, in other words, who knows anything about what life was like for the slaves of the Roman Empire to toil away within one of Caesar's galley ships. Nor what it was like to win back your freedom in such a way as to justify the phrase "hard won". To be fair, everything about this sounds like it would make for a great adventure yarn. The sort of that might have fired the mind of Tolkien as a young boy reading about the tales of Camelot and the Old Norse Sagas. There are just two problems. The author is clueless about this sort of thing, and most important of all, the voice doesn't match the artist. I know how strange this must sound, however, the moment he stops trying to write the story and instead just allows himself to tell it, it really does seem as if Charlie Mears becomes this whole other person. The most unnerving thing about the whole affair is that the more opportunities the narrator gives Charlies to tell this tale, the clearer it becomes that this story might not be totally made up.
Conclusion: An Imaginative Musing on the Source of Storytelling.
There are a handful of examples from this iteration of the sub-species that fit neatly into the naturalistic form of creative expression. One good specimen of this type would have to be the by now somewhat obscure and anachronistic Tim Robbins 1992 dramady vehicle known as The Player. That one is a film all about the writing of movie script, and it's subtitle could almost be How People Used to Think They Could Make it in Showbiz Back During the 90s. Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation is very much a spiritual successor to the Robbins film, inasmuch as its a fictionalization of the actual author's real life failed attempts to adapt a novel for the big screen. What's interesting about Kaufmann's spin on the Story about Stories idea is that he allows himself to cast off the shackles of a strict literary naturalism, and slowly begins to let the script go in a more surrealist, fantasy oriented direction. In doing so, Kaufman begins to lead us out of the confines of the normal versions of Metafictional writing, and into the sub-genre's more widely used format. This is where the basic idea of stories about the nature of writing remain the same, it's just that now it's explored through the all the possible tropes of the Fantastic genres. Here is where I think the metafiction story does its best by more or less coming into its own.
There's this innate kind of freedom in the Fantastic that allows the writer to explore the nature of his trade in a way that can appeal to a mass audience. If you can manage to make the final results into even a halfway decent plot, then you'll not only be able to achieve the rare feat of giving your audience maybe one or two genuine insights into the art of creativity without ever once leaving them bored. There are plenty of examples of this type of meta-narrative to be found both on page and screen here. The best examples I can point to would have to be Tom Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, and Stephen King's Dark Tower series, along with novels or novellas such as The Dark Half and "Secret Window, Secret Garden". In King's case, the latter two efforts prove to be more successful at exploring the subject of the power of stories than the former, though that's a subject for another time. The point right now is that Kipling's short story falls very much into the category of the Fantastic. The tale of Charlie Mears and his peculiar moments of literary inspiration meet all the criterion of being what's sometimes referred to as a weird tale. The difference is that the author of The Jungle Books has a much more sunny disposition than a certain controversial gentleman from Providence, Rhode Island. This story is a lot more fun, in many ways.
That's probably the clearest sign any writer should look for to know that something's off either with the story itself or their ability to tell it. If you want to be a professional writer, that's not exactly the kind of situation you want to find yourself in. These elements all seem to be reflected in the story of the mediumistic Charlie Mears. While the main character himself seems to have been based off of someone that author met in person, the overall implications of the story are that its a catalogue of all the issues, hurdles, and triumphs that Kipling himself had to put up with as a Name in the world of letters. The whole thing functions as a kind of allegory, one that begins on a humorous, even satirical note, before making a sure yet subtle transition into a more uncanny yet somehow epic style. It's all accomplished through the fictional conceit of having a hapless modern day Victorian era bank clerk become a medium for the spirit of a departed citizen of Ancient Greece who was first taken captive as a Roman galley slave. The spirit then relates (through the operation of Charlie, like a living puppet) of how he fought his way to freedom, and of the adventures he had as a freed man on an Ancient Viking ship. Charlie's mediumistic skills takes the narrative as far as a journey to early American shores.
This is what I'd have to call a near masterclass exercise in the classic Epic mode of expression. The grammar and mode of the words are heightened. Gone is the urban flippancy of the opening paragraphs. We're now in the hands of a narrator with no time for frivolities. This is someone who, even if he lacks our modern outlook is still capable of seeing farther into the nature of things than any of us can. For him, the Sun isn't just a celestial time piece to help mark out the day, but something akin to a god on a continuous, grand journey whose destination he can only begin to fathom. This guy's world is tinged with both savagery and compassion mixed into one another all at once. His world is one peopled with ghosts and yet for that very reason there is a greater sense of the wonder and mystery of life. In terms of dramatic technique, what Kipling has done here amounts to a neat and effective form of stylistic slight-of-hand. He has uncovered a story fossil that operates in two narratives. These are the modern satirical comic, and the straightforward Epic, which is meant to exist without a trace of irony. The entire crux of the story amounts to the ancient past finding what can only described as a supernatural creative expression for itself in the present. What Kipling has uncovered here amounts to a ghost story in which the story itself is the ghost. It signals its presence by this change of diction.
Beyond all these considerations, "The Finest Story in the World" acts as a meditation on Kipling's own dilemma as a writer. I can't tell if this was something unique to him or not. All I know is that for whatever reason, the novel was a format that Kipling struggled with all of his life. A quick look at his bibliography gives us a revealing look at the pattern of this guy's creative process. Out of a whole lifetime's worth of literary effort's, the majority of them are devoted to shorter format works. 41 of them are short stories, while over 500 of them come out as poems and the kind incidental limericks that Kipling referred to as Departmental Ditties. Out of all this vast corpus of miniature work, there appear to be just five instances when it looks like the author dared to try his hand at the novel length format. That number might even have to be cut down to four, depending on whether you're willing to regard the immortal Jungles Books as a novel or not. As it turns out, I have a few thoughts on that matter which will have to wait for another time. The point is the pattern of Kipling's creativity, as revealed in his published works reveals an author who always struggled with anything longer than a short story or novella. I think it's telling, for instance, that his first actual novel, a now forgotten effort known as The Light that Failed, had to be co-written in partnership with another writer. That appears to be a good gauge of just how much trouble the modern novel format was giving Kipling all the time.
I'll have to admit even if this doesn't sound like that much of a peculiar state of affairs for an author to find himself in, it is noteworthy enough to make the case of Rudyard Kipling's creative talents and their limitations perplexing from a literary standpoint. At least it's noteworthy from a bookworm's perspective. His haphazard labors with any story which wants to be a complete book are what make him standout so much from his contemporaries. Where fellow Victorian fantasists like E. Nesbit or Arthur Conan Doyle displayed an admirable ability to shift from the short to long storytelling format with seamless ease, Kipling's long slogs to make anything like that come about for him hints at a peculiarity of the author's talent that sort of begs for both comment and figuring out. My own two cents on the matter boils down to this. I think that what happened is Kipling's Imagination was always outsized, like Tolkien's. The trick with any gift such as this, however, is that you've got to hone your craft in order for that kind of visionary creative scope to have as much room to grow as it needs. This is something Tolkien seems to have understood on an instinctive level. If you go back and look at his first initial jottings for what would later become Middle Earth, you'll see that even the co-creator of the One Ring was still forced to start out small. Like Kipling, Tolkien began with a few verses and poems.
How all this applies to Kipling is simple. I think he had the skills and talent necessary to be a good writer. I'm also willing to go with the idea that under other circumstances, if he'd just allowed himself the space and time necessary to hone his craft, the way Tolkien did, then perhaps Kipling might have gone on to be the kind of novelist that rivaled his more famous Victorian contemporaries in the Fantasy trade. As things stand, I think the biggest mistake he might have made wasn't getting a job so much as shackling himself to the kind of employment that would only allow him to writer on a schedule and under a deadline. Unlike Tolkien or Conan Doyle, who spent his days in a doctor's practice, and then spent the rest of the evening with all the time he needed to bring Sherlock Holmes to life, Kipling decided on journalism as a career. To his credit, he was good at it, the money was gainful, and it's just that the real shame was how he accustomed his conscious mind, if not his unconscious creative faculties to the kind rote drudgery that comes from having to put out a full column at the end of every week.
In other words, I think the mistake Kipling made was in successfully shackling his creative output to the scheduled demands of being a reporter. It seems to have stunted his storytelling abilities to an extent that might have caught him off guard later when he realized how much of a struggle it was to break out of the short story format. Unlike Conan Doyle, who was able to work out a schedule that allowed him to stretch his imaginative capabilities into novels like The Hound of the Baskervilles, Kipling is perhaps best described as a victim of his own willingness to become a slave to the deadline. It gave him a space to write, yet it turned to be one which never allowed him much room to grow. The result was that the desire to write longer novels was maybe always there. It's just that the ability to achieve such a goal was always lacking after a certain point; not through any conscious design in that direction, but more as an accidental byproduct of a willingness to let others dictate the nature of his time and efforts. In fact, the more I think about it, the greater the curiosity over whether it was this willingness to let the opinions of others to dictate his own life that accounts for the schizoid quality of even the author's best writings. The sense of liberal humanism mixed with colonialist nonsense.
This is the predicament that Rudyard Kipling found himself confronted with for all of his life as a professional writer. He was a man who knew he had the talent, yet was just self-aware enough to realize the the full measure of the storytelling he ought to be capable of would always remain elusive. This is the entire framing context for the story of Charlie Mears and his peculiar literary visions, and it makes for a very interesting and enlightening read. The good news is that it's also a very entertaining read. It's an example of the modern metafictional tale, yet the writer always remembers that he's a storyteller first of all. As a result, the audience is allowed to relax and enjoy the conceit of artistic inspiration as a ghost in and of itself. There's a sense in which the narrative is being allowed enjoy its own conceit, if that makes any sense. It all starts out on a note of amiable satire as Kipling pokes fun of the writing profession in general, and of the false pretenses gets attached to it a lot of the time. This is done with the help of the figure of Charlie Mears, who starts out as a very straight-forward comic figure, a literary anticipation of Bertie Wooster. When Mears begins to tell his story instead of writing it, Kipling is able to slowly segue from the type of narrative voice familiar to the British Comedy of Manners, and then little by bit is able to transport his readers into the realm of Epic myth.
This transfiguration of the narrative from comic to mythic (all of it conveyed through the author's careful attention to the language of his tale) is as good a representation of the meaning at the heart of Kipling's unorthodox ghost story. While he might be able to have a good laugh at himself, Kipling turns out to be just too much of a genuine writer to ever make fun of the Imagination. Instead, he treats it as something worthy of respect both in its own right, as well as all of the truth it can help reveal inside a pack of lies. This is an outlook that makes its way into the final product, and the result is a story about stories that is able to both transfix and amuse us. It is nothing less than one man's entertaining meditation on where the stories come from, and what they might possibly mean to him as an artist. In terms of what this story tells us about Kipling's own views on the matter, it seems pretty obvious that he's very much the Romantic on the subject. His thinking doesn't seem to be out of place with that of either Coleridge or Jung. Like both of the earlier and later thinkers, Kipling considers any actual story (one with a more than decent chance at a genuine shelf life) as something that makes itself, and that can tell a great deal about the ultimate nature of reality. That's a strong claim to make for the content of just a simple short story. All I can do is state the obvious, which is that he believed it.
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