A-Z 2021 K - Plain Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling, 1884-1888)

We may as well start today with addressing the elephant in the room.  Rudyard Kipling was absolutely a believer that British colonialism was fundamentally a good thing.  He doesn't write of it as a uniform good, but in many ways this is because he sees that humans are flawed.  He isn't supporting colonialism out of a nationalistic notion of Empire, but rather, he sees it as an almost sacred duty of good European folks (though especially the English-speaking ones) to bring civilization and Christianity to other parts of the world, whether they already had perfectly good civilizations and religions or not.

We will not, however, be addressing any elephants in today's book, as despite their appearance on the cover of my copy, there are no elephants as significant parts of the narrative in any of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.  Sorry, Hathi, I didn't read the book you're in quite yet.

Plain Tales was Kipling's first widely-published work, so what we see here is a very young writer (these stories are from when the author was between 19-23 years old), working as a journalist in British India, turning his pen to (generally comic) fiction in order to fill a few columns in the newspaper he worked for.  This, then, indicates the initial audience as well; he was writing for English folks in and around Lahore.

Perhaps due to that audience, Kipling has a particular focus on English characters; few stories have "native" protagonists, and many have only white characters at all.  There are recurring characters at times, references to earlier stories abound, and it's very clear that the readership were following along from episode to episode.

The subject matter varies widely.  There are a number of short romantic comedies and tragedies alike, tales of pranks gone horribly wrong or spectacularly right, several stories told in a remarkable vernacular about the goings-on of a military regiment...  In short, a cross-section of what life in and around Simla during the mid-1880s was like, at least if you were an Englishman.  The mental imagery created in some of these tales is amazing, particularly in the case of the military regiment's offerings, one of which includes a ghost horse with a skeleton and a pair of timpanis on its back galloping toward a whole battalion.  It makes sense in context.

Kipling's narrator is a sort of self-insertion, usually standing to one side of the stories and simply observing what happens through his journalist's eye; while several times he is drawn into the narrative, this is rarely done in a way that gives him any great agency within the story.  Rather, this device is used to allow him to act as a sort of straight man for the other characters' foolishness (in one case, having to race on a horse in a dust storm to try and stop an unfortunate aftermath to a friend's proposal to the wrong sister; the obvious mistake having been to propose to someone you can't clearly see in a dust storm).

It's hard at times to tell if some of the things Kipling says about India and its people are actually his views or if they are intended as satire.  He clearly feels strongly for the country and its culture, but at the same time, he has an outsider's view, and especially feels that Western culture has some degree of primacy that should be brought in to sort of... improve on what's already there.

It's worth noting that the text that Penguin has used, at least in the edition I have (which is not identical to the one currently in print), is from the third compiled printing of these stories, which was partially adjusted by Kipling due to its nature as a book intended for the "Home" market, back in the British Isles.  This has required some adjusting of text here and there, largely to make things that would have been obvious to his readers in Lahore more clear for readers in London.  The endnotes provided do a good job of making it clear where this has happened, however, and much of the content that one looks at slightly askance now was there all along.  It's not a surprise that this is coming from the same author who would, ten years later, write "The White Man's Burden".

One last thing that I really have to wonder about, and do want to bring up, is the way of referring to race here.  For some reason, the Indian peoples are referred to as "blacks" if their race is mentioned at all, as if they're the same as Africans.  I really don't know for sure what to make of that; in a couple of places it's been described as looking similar to a "Spanish complexion", perhaps indicating that any darker complexion would be considered 'black' in this case.  This would line up with one of the knights in the Arthurian legends, Morien, a half-Moorish knight described as "black of face and limb", despite by all indications being someone who would have something akin to a middle-eastern or, indeed, Indian complexion.  This is one of those places where being American may be to my detriment in this case, as my specific cultural background gives a likewise-specific idea of what 'black' means that may not line up with literature that comes from a British background, particularly that from other centuries.

It's ultimately impossible to separate Kipling from the colonial views and mindset, in any case.  He's a product of his time and culture, and his writings show that.  While the racism on display isn't as hateful as, say, that of H.P. Lovecraft, it's still a clear through-line of sorts in the stories where Indian people appear.  This isn't to say that the English get away without some solid jabs, but the overall form of Kipling's work still celebrates imperialism.  It's simply impossible to escape from that in many of his works, and this early fiction puts it front and center.

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1916) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 2/2)

Coming back around after wrapping the local library's challenge so that I don't leave any books unfinished, so I'm back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman once more, reading the back half of this particular volume that I started last week.

After Herland, the remainder of this book is a selection of short stories and poetry from along the length of Gilman's writing career.  The short fiction section sort of comes in two sections, early stories and stories from The Forerunner.  There's a 17-year gap between the two groups, and a very clear change in what Gilman's focus is.

The first six stories in this collection all date to the 1890s, including perhaps Gilman's most famous piece, "The Yellow Wall-Paper".  There is a clear leaning toward feminist thought on display here; of the five early stories chosen, only one doesn't seem to fit in with the others.  "The Unexpected" is a story in four chapters, in which an artist marries a young lady, becomes convinced that she's immediately engaging in an illicit affair, attempts to catch her in the act, and finds that her secret is far more wonderful than he expected.  "The Giant Wisteria" begins as a story about Puritans dealing with a daughter who had a child out of wedlock, then jumps a century forward to people staying in the same house, experiencing a haunting, and discovering the fate of the daughter from the start.  The outlier, "The Rocking-Chair", features two men taking rooms in a boarding-house after seeing a young girl in the window, and having their friendship crumble as both think the other is hiding having gotten to meet the girl, apparently the daughter of the landlady.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a very clear indictment of Silas Weir Mitchell's methods of treating psychological illnesses, a semi-autobiographical account of the slow decline of a woman's sanity when she is forced to remain in a room with nothing to do but look out the window or study the wallpaper; Gilman had been a patient of Mitchell's and sent him a copy of the story in an attempt to convince him that this was a treatment that did more harm than good.  She later wrote in The Forerunner that she had learned the story had the intended effect, and Mitchell stopped using the "rest cure".  The other two stories, "The Extinct Angel" and "Through This", are shorter pieces that are more directed, more obviously focused on feminist ideas, dealing with how the traditional female roles in society completely subsume the personality, the purity, and eventually the sanity of women.  Gilman is decidedly outspoken even in these early pieces, and you can see the beginnings of her focus on feminist social justice that would eventually culminate in Herland.

The remainder of the stories come from later, and are largely devoted to showing how Gilman's views on a perfect society would potentially work in practice.  The women are resourceful, willing to think outside the box when necessary, and more than willing to do what's best for everyone, rather than just themselves.  Additionally, there is the continuing theme, as seen in Herland, of motherhood being a sort of sacred duty, and that those who cannot perform that duty well should be willing to pass it to others who are better-suited.  Everything seems to just be these perfect little settings where all the ills of the world could be quite nicely sorted out if the women were just allowed to have some say in things instead of being buried under all the stresses of their place in a male-dominated society and...

Yeah, they're very didactic, and very much of a kind with the other material from The Forerunner.  While they are well-written and are fun reads, they do begin to feel somewhat the same after a time.  The general formula is: female protagonist is wronged somehow, female protagonist either learns of her own ability to effect change or works out the best way to do so, that change is effected, female protagonist ends the story in a much better position.  The whole theme is women's empowerment, and the various ways that it is illustrated are enjoyable, but in retrospect, the stories really do kind of start to blend together.

The poetry section is somewhat similar in formatting; early poetry holds more varying topics but a general feminist leaning, while later poetry starts to become more obviously political.  While there are a few poems from the period between the early fiction and Gilman's self-publishing, it's a very slim selection, and it's harder to see the development of ideas when they're confined to slim pieces of verse.

This raises perhaps the most important issue I have with the volume I've read here.  There's a 17-year gap with very little of Gilman's material on display here, and importantly, much of her writing during that gap was a mix of nonfiction essays and several nonfiction books, showing the development of her ideas into what would eventually become the topics of The Forerunner in general and Herland in specific.  And yet, for some reason, the "Selected Writings" on display here have completely missed that arguably-important part of her oeuvre.  Not even the piece she wrote on the topic of why she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" made it in, and that story is the first part of the collection's title!  It feels like an unusual omission, especially in a collection edited by a scholar with multiple Gilman-themed works to her name.

All this is to say that I certainly see why Gilman belongs on a classics shelf, and while the shape of her ideas is clearly on display in the stories and novel included here, I do wish that the collection hadn't had such a large piece of time left obscured.  There is value in seeing the development of ideas, and I would be very interested to have been able to see the evolution from what is on display in "The Yellow Wall-Paper", "The Extinct Angel", and "Through This" to become what was spelled out in Herland and The Forerunner.

The Stonewall Reader (ed. New York Public Library, 2019)

I'm not really sure why, but one of the common traits that seem to exist among the friends I've made in my adult life is that a majority seem to exist somewhere on the queer spectrum.  Sure, part of that might be because I identify as asexual, which is the eighth letter in the common alphabet soup of inclusive lettering and is frustratingly-often understood as meaning 'ally' or something similarly missing-the-point, but I wasn't even aware of that as a term before 2017 or so.

I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough.  It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really.  And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.

Darn neurodiverse brain.

Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand.  I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such.  I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.

Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities.  You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights.  Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was.  Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.

The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me.  It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history.  The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.

There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices.  This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals...  And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police?  Amazing.

What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath.  It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole.  Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights.  It's honestly infuriating to me.

I'm glad I took the time to read this.  It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught.  Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.

The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories (H.G. Wells, 1894-1915)

A man spontaneously has his visual perception relocated to a site on the opposite side of the planet, but none of his other senses are affected. 

There are four books that are sort of considered the 'core' H.G. Wells works: the novels The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, and the novella The Time Machine.  This collection, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, includes precisely zero of those, but I think it might be more interesting exactly because of that.

An object from deep space crashes into Neptune, ignites into a small star, and plunges through the inner solar system on its way to the Sun, causing global disasters and devastation.

What's on display here is a sort of a cross-section of the range of fiction writing that Wells produced, showing just how far beyond his well-known science fiction works he actually went.  The stories aren't designed to have a lengthy or high-stakes plot, for the most part; the general construction of most seems to be that Wells came up with an idea that seemed impossible, then went through the thought of how to make that seem reasonable, and explores it and the ramifications.

A successful politician is haunted by a magical door that he passed through once as a young boy, then passes by every time he encountered it again, despite a desire to return to the mysterious garden beyond the portal.

The most stunning thing about this collection may be the specific variety selected.  We get examples of what seems to be almost pre-figuring many later sub-genres within science fiction, showing just how much the genre as a whole owes to him.  While space travel and the parts of sci-fi that are associated with that are quite outside of what's on display here (the two stories featuring Martians in any context leave them quite contentedly on Mars), we get stories that work with hard science, stories that attempt to prefigure future technology, stories that imagine a culture and investigate how it might interact with others.

A man under the influence of anaesthesia for a surgical procedure, convinced he is going to die while under the knife, experiences Cosmic Zoom.

It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well.  Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s  biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was.  The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.

A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.

None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends.  In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.

A trip up the Amazon River leads to the verified discovery of a species of oversized, intensely venomous ants with abnormally high intelligence, which are engaging in an actively genocidal invasion of human settlements within the rainforest, and seem to be on the verge of successfully figuring out boats.

This collection honestly has a bit of everything in it.  There are several stories that seem to prefigure themes that H.P. Lovecraft would eventually deal with, alongside rather chilling, entirely-mundane-in-setting crime fiction.  There are visions of the future on display, but the longest story is about a particularly clever Neanderthal in the stone age.  For the most part, Wells always writes with a certain academic voice to his writing, which establishes The story that concludes the book is a rather humorous little tale of an author crossing paths with a devil who was cast out of Hell for abandoning his post at the wrong time, and has no science-fiction content to it at all, but all the same, it's a delightful yarn.  And that's really what one has to look for in a collection like this; a wide range of topics and genres, ending on a somewhat silly note, seems just the way to allow readers to discover how much more than 'just' a science-fiction writer H.G. Wells actually was.

Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.