“I will show you where your son lies”: Relocating Kipling’s “The Gardener” in 1920s Print Culture

If an old-fashioned liberal humanist excuse were needed for revisiting Kipling’s “The Gardener” it could be found through combining Phillip Mallett’s contention that “Kipling is the greatest English writer of the short story” with Edmund Wilson’s roundabout confession that he is “not sure that [The Gardener] is not really the best story that Kipling ever wrote.”[1] Greatness and hierarchies aside, the cultural materialist might find reasons enough for promoting a re-evaluation of the story in the wake of the centenary of the end of the First World War and renewed historical interest in Kipling’s work for the Imperial War Graves Commission. This was following the Commission’s unexpected announcement in 1992 that the grave of Kipling’s son John, missing in action since the Battle of Loos in 1915, had been found. The subsequent querying and then reaffirmation of this claim has further served to raise the status of the representation of the dynamics of wartime bereavement and the commemoration of the dead in “The Gardener” that can now more clearly be seen to underwrite the story.[2] The motive for the present return to the text is, indeed, partly historicist, but it is also concerned with the theoretical and methodological implications of reading “The Gardener” in the three print formats in which it made its first appearance: namely in the short story collection Debits and Credits (September 1926), where it was deliberately placed by Kipling as the final story; in the columns of The Strand Magazine (May 1926), and, earliest of all, in McCall’s Magazine (April 1926). On each occasion a more or less identical text of “The Gardener” is accompanied by complementary material in another medium or genre: in the volume edition, by Kipling’s own lyric poem “The Burden,” and, in the case of the magazines, by multiple illustrations by established artists and various kinds of editorial sign-posting. This paratextual material—which has hitherto remained buried under the critical history of the story—is significant in ways that call for a re-evaluation of how the story should be approached, received, or presented.[3] Taken together, these early publishing instances of “The Gardener” constitute, in editorial terms, what Jerome J. McGann calls “the social text” and show the work being socialized at the point in its history when it reached its largest synchronous Anglophone readership.[4] There is also the problematic relationship between what is commonly construed as the “high art” aesthetic of the Modernist short story (or, more accurately perhaps, the aesthetic of canonical short stories composed during the high Modernist era) and the reality of their frequent first appearance in mass-circulation magazines and cheap, illustrated miscellanies. Observing their textual transition from multi-authored periodical into monograph form involves a radical accommodation of differing print cultures no less than of critical approaches, which the article seeks to articulate.

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In the second half of the last century “The Gardener” has enjoyed a reputation as an enigmatic text, masterfully understated, and broadly indicative of modernist interests in its conduct and fable. Prominent among these might be its presentation of a decentered female subjectivity (Helen Turrell’s inner thoughts are carefully concealed from us throughout); its daring deployment, from the opening sentence onwards, of the free indirect style; its ironic ambiguities; and, above all, the uncertain epiphany with which it closes. While Kipling’s credentials as a modernist scarcely need rehearsing now, what is less clearly established is the way in which the dissemination of his “high art” in the 1920s sheds light on complex transatlantic cultural conversations between writers, publishing media and the modes or genres of which they were constituted.[5] This will involve  considering the interaction between the linguistic quiddity of the Modernist text and its material appearance and fragmentation among disparate forms of visual and textual communication, ranging across editorial matter, non-fiction, and even the supposedly anathematic practices of display advertising.

Questions of literary agency are also at stake, both specific—at the level of how British modernists placed their work in US mass-circulation journals, via the services of third-party negotiators not fundamentally dissimilar to advertising agents—and abstract, in the historicist sense of how even the work of as individualistic and experimental a storyteller as Kipling can be viewed as serving the deeper or antecedent movements of capital in the marketplace. In this respect, the tripartite case study of Kipling's “The Gardener” to be offered here can be seen to demonstrate how “middlebrow mass magazines were often selling different, sometimes antagonistic, genres at the same time that they reassured readers that “high culture" was a stable, acquirable category.”[6] As Daniel Tracy observes, there is a palpable “resurgence in modernist studies that has raised questions about the supposed ‘great divide’ between modernism and the market, the presumed arena of popular culture”: at one and the same time, some of those artists who eschewed the market often turn out to be highly invested in it, revealing their writing loci as “disguised outposts of mass culture,” and some of the artefacts of mass culture can be legitimately reclassified via a rubric of well-established modernist genre tropes.[7] The original printing of Kipling’s work is, I contend, a case in point, and can be re-read from both perspectives.   

Before relocating “The Gardener” within its historical nexus in print culture, it is worth briefly considering some examples of how this so-called “great divide” is breached and reconfigured as a continuum in such a way as to become the overt substance of some iconic work of the period. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) Ezra Pound’s archly-staged riposte to the demands of a debased age in which “The tea-rose tea-gown, etc. / Supplants the mousseline of Cos,” the poet/speaker presents, in tersely syncopated quatrains, a microcosm of the tensions besetting an aesthete surrounded by personifications of the surrender to the market.[8] The literary adviser-cum-literary agent looms large in the figure of “Mr. Nixon,” a latter-day Blougram, who advocates shameless name-dropping—and the pursuit of prose:

“I never mentioned a man but with the view

Of selling my own works.

The tip’s a good one, as for literature

It gives no man a sinecure.

 

And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.

And give up verse, my boy,

There’s nothing in it.”[9]

While Pound’s fastidious stylist revolts at the idea of supplying a “prose kinema” or a “mould in plaster” to satisfy the era’s demand for mass-produced artefacts, whether the “mendacities” of wartime propaganda, or of advertising, others of the avant-garde embraced the language of billboards and classifieds with a ready and quasi-erotic gusto. In the found poetry of the so-called “first American Dada,” Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a neglected “agent provocateur within New York’s modernist revolution,” readers may find in the juxtaposition of ad-men’s catchphrases the remains of the immigrant’s first proto-ironic exhilaration at immersion in a sea of commercials.[10] The poem “Subjoyride” (1920–22), introduced as “READY-TO-WEAR — / AMERICAN SOUL POETRY. / (THE RIGHT KIND),” opens thus:

It’s popular — spitting Maillard’s

Safety controller handle —

You like it!

They actually kill Paris

Garters dromedary fragrance

Of C. N. in a big Yuban!

Ah — madam —

That is a secret Pep-O-Mint —

Will you try it —

To the last drop? (Body Sweats, 99)

Such examples are ample reminder that even from within the perspective of a single artistic consciousness, “[a]ll culture is mass culture under capitalism,” the latter impossible to wholly renounce, and that many of the sophisticated narratological strategies celebrated in modernist writers can be observed in the rapidly-developing semiotic coding of advertisers: coding that operates in areas highly relevant to Kipling’s trademark “narrative manner of implication, abstention and obliquity.”[11] According to Richard Ohmann, magazine advertisers succeeded in establishing “an inherently mystifying discourse about products,” pursuing agendas that simultaneously built trust and concealed corporate America’s hidden motives and over time—by the turn of the century—had perfected ways of creating implicit meaning by indirection if not misdirection of the viewers’ sightlines. In trade cards and magazine ads a strategic disconnect demanded readers’ involvement in complex interpretive acts, in terms of “relations between image and text, and in particular [focusing] on gaps in meaning  . . . readers had learned [by 1900] how to supply connections, fill gaps, participate in the construction of meaning.”[12]  Ellipsis, in other words, was not the sole preserve of a Mansfield or a Kipling narrator.

It is through this wide-angle lens on the dynamic and contested middlebrow print culture of the 1920s, and through pursuing the forgotten or unattended journeys of short stories from the cluttered columns of high-circulation monthlies to the chaste pages of authors’ legacy editions, and from there to later selections, collections and anthologies, that Kipling’s “The Gardener” may now be refocused as a more than one-dimensional “modernist classic.” Indeed there is such consensus in late twentieth century responses to “The Gardener,” that it starts to beg a number of questions about the format in which it and many other of his later stories were being read by the critics concerned. In a number of cases, rather alarmingly, no specific edition of the story is cited in interpretations of their meaning which stress their enigmatic, elliptical and reticent properties.[13] Often, “The Gardener” is rightly contextualized as a story appearing in Debits and Credits, but where it is not, there is room to speculate whether critics have encountered it in later anthologies which have shorn it of its two-verse poetic epigraph and/or of “The Burden,” the poem which follows it in Kipling’s painstaking arrangement of his 1926 collection.[14] As subsequent analysis of the story in its original volume publication indicates, encountering the story without its poetic frame might well increase the reader’s sense of mystery and surprise at its unprosaic conclusion and sudden, final turn to scripture. Or, put another way, reading the story within the strong poetic frame provided in Debits and Credits renders the story, potentially, much less elliptical, reticent, and characterized by silence. Instead, it could read as freighted with a symbolism and a fullness of meaning that returns the critic to the text of the story proper with renewed attention, conscious of a new uncertainty that may obtain as to its textual boundaries and the specific printed iteration of the story on which its canonicity has been established.

“The Gardener” in Debits and Credits (October 1926)

A number of commentators, most notably Harry Ricketts and Lisa F. Lewis, have urged the point that a full critical appreciation of Kipling’s later stories needs to be alert to interconnections between all the elements in his short story collections. Following a hint in Tompkins, both critics pursue the idea of through-design in Debits and Credits and argue that the opening and closing tales illuminate each other and the stories in between like the “pillars of an archway,” defining the particular vista and combination of themes that Kipling has chosen to work with in the volume (Tompkins, Art of Rudyard Kipling, 158–59). This results in some valuable insights, principally in terms of the symbolic, verbal, and thematic inter-relationships between prose tales, but Ricketts concedes that “a more extended reading of Debits and Credits” than he has space to offer “would pay considerable attention to the relationships between the poems and the stories.”[15] Lewis, in a review of a work featuring three other Kipling critics, bemoans the fact that none of them “discuss in any details the verse epigraphs and poems and their effect on the tales.”[16] Her argument that “[o]ften a poem is essential to the plot” is immediately supported by reference to “The Gardener,” which,

as history of an unwed mother is only one possible reading without “The Burden,” in which Helen reveals the inner suffering beneath her “respectable” front: “To lie from morn to e’en / To know my lies are vain– / Ah, Mary Magdalene, / Where can be greater pain?” (523). 

This seems to argue that with the poem alongside, the number of possible readings is foreclosed to a single one, which is the story of the suffering Helen Turrell endures to conceal that Michael is her illegitimate son. It is worth going further.

In Debits and Credits[17] the title of the story is immediately followed by two quatrains, the second of which is given in italics:

One grave to me was given,

And God looked down from Heaven

And rolled the stone away.

 

One day In all the years,

One hour in that day,

His Angel saw my tears,

And rolled the stone away! (339)

These are then followed by the familiar opening line, with its Austen-like cadence, “EVERY one in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all her world, and by none more honorably than by her only brother’s unfortunate child.” The story runs uninterrupted to its conclusion, on a verso, after which there is blank space running through to the recto, which begins with the title of the poem THE BURDEN, followed by three eight-line stanzas on the same page, then overleaf a final stanza which readers will recognize as similar though not identical to the two quatrains with which the story began. They appear thus:

One grave to me was given——

To guard till Judgment Day——

But God looked down from Heaven

And rolled the stone away!

One day of all my years——

One hour of that one day——

His Angel saw my tears

And rolled the Stone away! (354)

Though slight, there are in fact over a dozen distinct differences in the presentation, which can be summarized by saying that the voicing is deliberately different, though it takes up what is by now a known refrain. This must be set alongside the reader’s interpretation of the three preceding stanzas, and their title:[18]  

      THE BURDEN

One grief on me is laid

Each day of every year,

Wherein no soul can aid,

Whereof no soul can hear:

Whereto no end is seen

Except to grieve again——

Ah, Mary Magdalene,

Where is there greater pain?

 

To watch my steadfast fear

Attend my every way

Each day of every year——

Each hour of every day:

To burn, and chill between——

To quake and rage again——

Ah, Mary Magdalene,

Where shall be greater pain? (353)

Far from narrowing “The Gardener” to the “history of an unwed mother” the juxtaposition of epigraph, story and poem broadens the play of meanings it embraces, not least because the differences of voicing naturally introduce the possibility that different sufferers—a community or chorus of speakers, with similar but not identical experiences of covering up the devastation of bereavement—are being constructed around the particular grief and sense of unspeakable shame in the story.

This interpretation is not intended to lend support to the controversial account of “The Gardener” given by William Dillingham, but it must be allowed that Dillingham does actually do what Ricketts and Lewis complain has been left undone, which is to read epigraph, story and poem in tandem and in detail. Dillingham argues, against common sense and the weight of critical consensus, that Helen Turrell had no son, and that Michael really is her nephew. Nevertheless, numerous phases of his discussion are telling, as he notes that the speaker of “The Burden” is characterized not by Helen’s honorable if tortured reticence, but by the volubility and high-expressed emotion of Mrs Scarsworth, the married woman who is taking photographs of graves on commission for friends in England while secretly visiting the grave of her dead lover, and who breaks down in front of Helen, confessing that she is “so tired of lying [ . . . ] always lying—year in and year out”: “[I]f her outburst is compared to the words of the woman in ‘The Burden’ the two speakers appear to be the same person.”[19]  Accordingly, for Dillingham, it has been the poem not the contents proper of the story that has put it into the heads of hasty readers over several generations that Helen also has been an adulterer and is therefore Michael’s mother. Dillingham reads the biblical resonances planted at the end of the story, in allusion to the moment when the weeping Mary Magdalene speaks to the risen Christ “supposing him to be the gardener,” as placed there by Kipling “for the purpose of creating a terrible irony” when Helen realizes that “death is final” and that “religion is of no help in time of grief” (AV, John 20:15). While Dillingham is right to point out a striking dissonance between the passage in the Gospel of St. John that Kipling explicitly recalls here and the narrative presentation of Helen’s conversation with the gardener in the graveyard, his contention that Kipling’s allusion to such a potent Biblical account of the resurrection is simply to engineer a “more poignant irony” seems unconvincing and blind to the spectrum of belief and respect for a range of forms of religious devotion that characterize Kipling as a writer of hymns and creator of places of remembrance (Dillingham, Hell and Heroism, 153, 154.).

With this in mind, the presentation of “The Burden” as after-poem and as epigraph can, and perhaps should, be read as quasi- and tangentially liturgical, complementing and expanding on the oblique reference to scripture that the story leads up to, as a homily expounds the significance of the reading, or as a hymn draws on and universalizes the themes of a sermon. The repetition of the epigraph in italics (as the final stanza of the “hymn” which follows this text) is presented like a refrain that the reading congregation are invited to voice together; the appeal to Mary Magdalene, as an epitome of grief, is one that all are encouraged to make. In stressing how the character of Helen as a pious “old maid” in the prose narrative differs strikingly from the speaker of “The Burden,” as an example of paradoxes that undermine traditional readings of Helen Turrell as an unmarried mother, Dillingham in turn insists on an overly narrow reading of Mary Magdalene as religious icon. For him, she is “traditionally a woman of loose morals,” an adulterous woman “with a shady past,” “who became devoted to Jesus and who was the first to see him resurrected,” thus akin to Mrs. Scarsworth in Kipling’s story and wholly unlike the “[o]pen and frank, noble and honorable” Helen (Hell and Heroism, 150, 151, 149). However, as far as the speaker(s) of “The Burden” are concerned, Mary is primarily invoked as someone who has undergone great pain and sorrow: the guilt and shame are not hers, but the speakers’, though clearly the assumption is that she will understand if not absolve them. In this respect, she is called upon in her iconic role as “weeper” as much if not more than in that of  “fallen woman,” and, like John Donne, Kipling knew enough about the varied roles and functions of the figure of Mary in European religious and cultural history to “think these Magdalens were two or three.”[20] In other words, critics of “The Gardener” as it is presented in Debits and Credits should perhaps be stressing the plurality of experience of loss and sorrow that the story and its paratextual accompaniments appeal to, not seeking an interpretation that relies on singular constructions of lines of meaning. Just as readers returning to rebuild their understanding of Helen’s relationship with Michael after the shock of the denouement, can newly detect the censorious voices of the village establishment in the famous opening sentence, rather than that of a neutral narrator, so critics of the relationship between the story and its after-poem, need to attune themselves to a subtle kind of polyphony.

Of course, had Kipling chosen to use the first-person plural in the epigraph and poem (“One grief on us is laid”; “To bring no honest face / To aught we do or say,” etc.), this reading would become obvious. His decision not to reinforces the central thrust of the story, however: that each bereaved person suffers in their own private hell of isolation while on earth, and opportunities for human consolation and shared sympathy are missed or misinterpreted. Dillingham is again both literally right and broadly wrong in stressing that, in spite of the powerful critical consensus otherwise, “there is no indication that Helen emerges from the cemetery a burden-free, happy woman” (Hell and Heroism, 52). As so often with Kipling, the rhetorical and temporal framing of the situation is much more complicated than it looks. Helen’s experience as a bereaved relative, both in the cemetery, and before, is presented as transitional, if not epiphanal: she is one of the many survivors who must take “her place in the dreary procession that was impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions,” and Kipling charts the inexorable steps of those emotions like the Stations of the Cross.[21] The first of these is the stage where “‘Missing always means dead’” but friends insist on telling “perfectly truthful tales” about “other women, to whom, after months and months of silence, their missing had been miraculously restored” (384). This passive, limbo stage, when “all the organisations” that could possible help “sincerely regretted their inability to trace, etc.,” is followed by an important transition, which is the discovery and identification of a body, and communication by officials of the co-ordinates of a grave: she now joins “a world full” of relatives “strong in the certainty that there was an altar upon earth where they might lay their love” (384, 385). Kipling has already vouchsafed to Helen at this point in her progress more information about her lost son than he and his wife were to obtain during their lifetimes concerning the resting place of the remains of John Kipling. But it is also important to note that, although the progress of Helen and the legion of other bereaved to whom the story gestures, who now endure “the agony of being waked up to some sort of second life,” is recounted using the language of traditional religious consolation (“miraculously,” “infallible,” “blessed,” “altar”), and now is firmly focused on the dark pilgrimage to find “one’s grave,” this journey is already beginning to deviate in a number of important respects from the journey recounted in the Gospels of the disciples and followers of Jesus to his tomb after the crucifixion (386).

A key difference is that the graveyard itself, “Hagenzeele Third,” is a “place [ . . . ] still in the making” which offers different versions of the kind of “altar” on which the bereaved can “lay their love.”[22] On the one hand, with its “merciless sea of black crosses” with “stamped tin at all angles across their faces” it presents to Helen, with shades of both Hamlet’s and T. S. Eliot’s despair, “a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead” with neither order nor design in its more than twenty thousand graves (389). On the other hand, “a great distance away,” she detects as a “line of whiteness” an area where the cemetery has a more hopeful look: “a block of some two or three hundred graves whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted, and whose new-sown grass showed green” (389). Again, Kipling wrongfoots expectation both for readers who do and those who do not know of his extensive personal involvement with the Imperial War Graves Commission, because rather than have Helen directed towards this haven of order and comfort, as he easily might have done in an act of almost propaganda  for such work, its clear signage means that “referring to her slip” Helen “realize[s] that it was not here she must look.”[23] This is, strictly, the absolute limit of realization Helen is shown to undergo at the close of the story.

With its contrasting spaces of dark and light, torture and tranquility, Hagenzeele Third is thus a more ambivalent resting place than the one described in the gospel of St. John, where “there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid” (AV, John 19:41). The tomb Helen seeks, and the one to which she is eventually directed, is not in a garden, though one is nearby, but in a wilderness. The man from whom she asks directions, working among the new graves and “evidently a gardener,” “look[s] at her with infinite compassion” and “turn[s] away from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses,” and leads the way to the tomb of the man he instinctively knows to be her son, not her nephew (Kipling, “The Gardener,” 389). Helen here is a more ambivalent figure too, than the Magdalene of the Gospel narrative, weeping because the grave is empty: she is suddenly revealed not only as a grieving mother, akin therefore to Mary of Nazareth, but also as fallen woman, whose story since the birth of her illegitimate son the reader must rapidly reconfigure, and as a consummate hider of the truth. Yet this moment of revelation is the reader’s not Helen’s, who is afforded no epiphany when the man of infinite compassion speaks to her. Or at least, none is recorded. A double line space before the final two sentences of the story conveys the passage of time, during which we are to presume Helen finally stands before Michael’s grave. We are given no clue as to her emotions: the way the narrative suppresses them seems an analogue for her own suppression and denial of the truth. She turns for a “last look,” sees the man tending his plants in the distance, then goes away, still “supposing him to be the gardener.” In the context of the tale, this is of course a perfectly correct identification, but attentive readers familiar with the passage from St. John where Mary, as soon as she hears the word “Rabboni” recognizes the mastery of the risen Christ, naturally gain the sense that Helen has missed a vital moment of connection: an opportunity to surrender the façade she has worn for over twenty years and confess her fallen humanity to a sympathetic stranger (AV, John 20:16). Thus, when Helen leaves, she leaves in the state of Mary before her enlightenment: that of a grieving mortal, unable to construe the mysterious knowledge of the gardener and the symbolism of the two cemeteries into a potent message of salvation despite their appeal to her senses. There is here a deliberate converging of opposed religious and secular interpretation, bleakness and despair, in congruence with images of hope and a transcendently peaceful afterlife; something, too, of the speaker’s envy in Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush,” though more obliquely and delicately presented. To read “The Gardener” in Debits and Credits is to appreciate, then, more clearly than is possible in many subsequent reprintings, the patient balancing of books that the collection—as it alternates between prosaic and poetic utterance and methodologies—enjoins on its readers.[24]

“The Gardener” in The Strand Magazine, May 1926

The process by which Kipling’s short stories were placed in magazines after his move to England in 1889 has been partially illuminated by Thomas Pinney in a brief overview of Kipling’s relationship with his literary agent A. P. Watt (1838–1914), and after Watt’s death, with his son A. S. Watts, an overview based on “some 319 letters from Kipling to the Watts, father and son” now held in the Beinecke Library, Yale.[25] Pinney notes that after Kipling’s illness in 1899 the character of the correspondence changes radically, and thenceforth, with the introduction as intermediaries in the correspondence first of Kipling’s wife and then of a private secretary, “the extant letters [ . . . ] are only rarely about business or about Kipling’s literary plans but more and more about other things” (“A. P. Watt,” xx). Nevertheless, such evidence as there is suggests that from an early stage in the relationship Kipling’s agents were given a free hand to select publishing outlets for work and that the author was not always actively involved.[26] This sometimes led to mis-matches, as on the occasion when Watt placed “The Bridge Builders” (1893) “in a disreputable magazine called Town Topics” leading to a sharp letter in which Kipling complains that “I am already getting talked to about it and told that if I take trouble I may even write to the dignity of the Police Gazette” (xxi). Nevertheless, the Watts found an impressive range of periodicals ready to take Kipling’s work, and thus magazine editors and—almost more importantly—illustrators began to shape the process of interpretation for large numbers of readers of the “social text,” alongside, but not necessarily in collaboration with, the executive author; indeed, their involvement is poised between an authorial and a critical role.[27] This intervention produces complex results that literary theory has seldom cared to contemplate.

When Kipling first contributed to The Strand Magazine (1891–1950) in 1892 it was only in its second year of publication, still firmly billing itself as An Illustrated Monthly; its success and influence in the decades spanning the birth and heyday of cinema were due in no small measure to the intelligent interaction between text and image and the modernity of its typesetting and interests.[28] Its cover design showed a strictly contemporary street-view, complete with shopfronts and advertising, eastwards to the spire of St. Mary le Strand, with the magazine’s title suspended from telegraph wires crossing between the buildings. Its longstanding “Literary Editor” Herbert Greenhough Smith (1855–1935) is credited with first seeing “the potential for circulation figures for the Strand in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories[, e]ach story form[ing] a discreet unit yet [] linked through characterization with the one previous”—“a departure from the traditional Victorian serialization of the novel, though it performed the same functions.”[29] Its owner and General Editor, George Newnes, however, knew from the outset he was imitating a model already successful in America, where Scribner’s, Harper’s and Lippincott’s all adopted a similar format. According to a later editor, Reginald Pound, who became the magazine’s first historian,

the middle-classes of England never cast a clearer image of themselves in print than they did in The Strand Magazine. Confirming their preference for mental as well as physical comfort, for more than half a century it faithfully mirrored their tastes, prejudices, and intellectual limitations.[30]

A roster of leading authors and illustrators publishing new work in the magazine kept it in the vanguard of print culture: besides Conan Doyle and Kipling, Max Beerbohm, E. Nesbit, H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse, and Kipling’s close friend and confidante H. Rider Haggard, all had their work trailed and then prominently displayed in its pages. In January 1926 a strapline on the cover had announced a “New Story of Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling,” above a large oval portrait of the writer; this was “The Propagation of Knowledge.” In March 1926, Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist; or, The Quest of Edward Malone completed its nine month serialization in the magazine: this was a further “Professor Challenger” adventure, largely dealing with Challenger’s friend Malone’s growing interest in Spiritualism, thinly masking Conan Doyle’s own conviction of its efficacy, in the aftermath of the deaths of his son, brother, and two nephews in World War I. A studiedly neutral interview with Conan Doyle in March 1919 on the subject of “Life after Death” had begun by informing readers that in his book on Spiritualism, The New Revelation (1918), Conan Doyle had stated that “he then knew of thirteen mothers of dead soldier boys who were in communication with their sons” by means of psychic phenomena, but that now “the number of such mothers of whom he has personal knowledge has grown to thirty [. . .a]nd in most cases, he declares the result has been ‘tidings of great joy.’” Kipling already had his own phrasing, both as a father and writer, for the representation of the harking after such “tidings.”[31]

This cluster of facts concerning the magazine in which “The Gardener” first reached British readers, and its position with respect to Spiritualism, obviously says nothing directly about Kipling’s artistic intentions but has considerable importance in providing a set of contextual frames for its interpretation by those readers. At the risk of some oversimplification we might say that, in a magazine well-known for combining narratives of strenuous intellectual and physical pursuits with various kinds of comforting resolution, emanating from the cosmopolitan heart of the modern city, readers of “The Gardener” were presented with a story that, when read closely, could be seen to deny both traditional Christian and Spiritualist forms of consolation to its main protagonist, while visibly courting both. As the bereaved parent of a child lost to the Great War, not merely unable to establish psychic contact across the grave, but unable even to identify the grave itself, Kipling might well have had some personal motivation to counter Spiritualism’s “tidings of great joy” with another kind of graveyard encounter, where the resolution is not quite so joyful. Strand readers, used to mysteries being solved or restated as credos, were therefore being presented with something distinctly bleaker, and it is easy to imagine Kipling approving the choice of outlet on this occasion, whether consulted by his agent beforehand, or not.

After trailing this “New Story by Rudyard Kipling” on its cover, the magazine—presumably at Greenhough Smith’s direction—placed “The Gardener” first in its list of contents, following a Frontispiece with the caption given below:

At first sight, this may seem an unexpected selection for a prefatory illustration, focusing not on the reactions of Helen Turrell after her bereavement but on a transient moment in her relationship with Michael, aged six, after she has told him that “she was only his auntie” but that he “might call her ‘Mummy’ at bedtime, for a pet-name between themselves” (“The Gardener,” 382). This secret she breaks when she tells “her friends” in the village the same thing, and Michael, outraged, refuses thenceforth to use the pet-name which the events of the story eventually suggest is the true representation of their relationship. His angry promise “And when I’m dead I’ll hurt you worse” is, however, on a second reading of the story, bitterly prophetic, vindicating the editorial selection (382). For when Helen tells her friends of Michael’s wish to call her “Mummy,” she tells the truth framed as if a lie, which becomes a pivot for the kind of reversal of understanding that the story at large demands. Indeed, Helen’s famed openness doubles as an almost pathological reticence, to the extent that her complex character becomes an analogue for how information is released over the course of the narrative and its paratexts.

The verso of the Contents page, with its advertisement for silky Luvisca pyjamas (“luxury wear for men—yet economical”), is given over in full to J. Dewar Mills’s framed tableau illustration of this unhappy bedtime scene.[32] Helen, with downcast eyes, places her hand on the boy’s pyjama-clad shoulder as he looks sorrowfully away, with the caption repeated underneath. The “Turrell forehead, broad, low and well-shaped” and the well “cut” mouth, as described in the text, are clearly reproduced in both subjects by Dewar Mills, and with the same ambiguity as to inheritance. A Glaswegian, J[ohn] Dewar Mills (1883–1966) had moved to London in 1914, and after picking up work for various periodicals, become a regular illustrator of school stories for girls, for the publishing houses of Ward, Lock & Tyler, and Blackie & Sons, featuring in twenty-two of their titles by the end of 1925. As a sympathetic and perceptive depicter of the female form, both young and old, he was well suited to the task of depicting Helen at different stages in her trajectory from young mother to bereaved elderly woman, as well as Michael’s growth from toddler to young officer.

On the title-page of “The Gardener” a further editorial intervention is made, with the addition in a side-box of the appetite-whetting comment: “Few stories ever roused so much discussion and divergence of opinion as that by Mr. Kipling entitled ‘They.’ The following story will be likely to excite as wide a controversy.” This acts as both preface and alternative epigraph to the two stanzas from “The Burden” which follow below and assumes that readers will recall the impact of a story published over twenty-one years before.[33] The controversy over “They” concerned the extent to which its climax presented the narrator’s experience of the “little brushing kiss” of an unseen child in a mysterious house as a genuine contact with his own dead child, and as something it would be proper for a bereaved parent to indulge or seek. The narrator is ultimately equivocal, telling his blind hostess, a childless medium, of her desire to attract such spirits “[f]or you it is right. . . . For me it would be wrong.”[34] Those readers of The Strand who knew this might naturally approach “The Gardener” with expectations of a similar doubtful epiphany, set within the context of the post-war debate over the truth of Spiritualism that its pages were powerfully helping to articulate. But the anticipated divergence of opinion is wide, wide enough therefore to embrace other controversial topics handled in “The Gardener,” such as the social taboos surrounding illegitimacy and adultery that readers could also identify in their immediate responses to the revelation of the final paragraphs. The editorial guidance here, though rather clumsily distracting from Kipling’s verse epigraph, points open-endedly to both spiritual and social controversy, and primes readers to look for it.

The Strand’s next intervention in interpretation of “The Gardener” consists of a large vignette illustration of the moment when Michael, just eighteen and already in his battalion uniform, worried that the war might be over too soon, reminds Helen of how “I should have got into the show earlier if I’d enlisted.” This forms the caption of the picture, which cleverly runs across the gutter of the spread of the magazine, neatly separating and distancing the casually-lounging young man from his anxious-looking relative, who, with her hands clasped and gaze averted, already looks as though she has lost her boy.[35] Dewar Mills’s least successful attempt to highlight and accentuate the story’s network of ironies forms the penultimate illustration, showing Helen’s meeting in the office of the nameless Central Authority with “a large Lancashire woman” who has no idea of the row, or number, or indeed the cemetery, which holds her son’s  grave, and who “fell forward on Helen’s breast” before being carried out in a swoon. The officer and the two women in the vignette form a rather lumpish group, too heavily shaded to show much facial expression or offer a visual or symbolic equivalence for aspects of Kipling’s narrative. The most one could say of the image is that it shows Helen firmly holding her reserve, as she does not just through this encounter, but through the following one with the voluble Mrs. Scarsworth, who finds Helen’s response to her passionate confession (holding her hands and “murmuring ‘Oh, my dear! My dear!’”) so humiliating (Kipling, “The Gardener,” 386, 388).

Helen’s reserve is ambiguous of course, and it masks her own twenty-year lie to hide the secret of Michael’s birth; readers remain unsure even on a second or third reading whether her battle to suppress her grief is a sign of nobility, or a self-serving attempt to protect her reputation. Dewar Mills is able to capture this well in the final framed illustration to the story, which ostensibly depicts Helen’s first arrival at Hagenzeele Third with her slip of paper, climbing the “wooden-faced earthen steps” for the first time, to be confronted with the breath-taking spectacle of twenty-one thousand dead: “All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses.” That is the caption to the image, which, given the lines of perspective, which run from below the line of the top of the steps, necessarily debars the viewer from seeing much of what Helen sees: the “line of crosses” is tiny, kept flat to the horizon, and Helen is staring into emptiness. The lack of a focal point or object has the effect of stressing the story’s lack of conventional closure and fulfilment in something of the manner of a Modernist or surreal artwork—and is certainly in keeping with interpretations of the story that offer ironic or pessimistic versions of Helen’s delayed or denied epiphany. The picture and caption occupy the whole of the recto on page 425; the verso on page 426 concludes the story, and readers can be forgiven for associating the image not just with Helen’s arrival at the cemetery, but also with her final departure: as she leaves “she turned for a last look.” The positioning of the feet on the steps means the figure is ambiguous in posture: it could equally be arriving or turning back as it leaves. The final sentence—“In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener”—thus applies to Helen’s gaze into apparently thin air.[36] The figure of the gardener is nowhere to be seen and the closing promise of the Gospel echo seems, in this visual interpretation, to be wholly lost to both viewer and protagonist.

John Dewar Mills had served in the war himself, joining the Royal Navy in 1917 and transferring to the RAF Reserve before discharge in April 1920, and his manner of illustrating “The Gardener” corresponds with the hypothesis that its publication in The Strand helped shape a counter-narrative to Spiritualist stories of miraculous communications across the grave with those lost in the conflict.[37] It redirects our attention to such snatches of dialogue as the following between Mrs. Scarsworth and Helen, as they share confidences in a railway compartment on their way to the hotel nearest Hagenzeele Three:

“Oh, I forgot to ask you. What's yours?”

“My nephew,” said Helen. “But I was very fond of him.”

“Ah, yes! I sometimes wonder whether they know after death? What do you think?”

“Oh, I don't—haven't dared to think much about that sort of thing.” said Helen, almost lifting her hands to keep her off.

“Perhaps that's better,” the woman answered. “The sense of loss must be enough, I expect. Well, I won't worry you any more.” (“The Gardener,” 387)

It may be too much to suggest that the italicization of “they” shows Kipling himself harking back deliberately to his earlier story of that title, but there is no doubt that the figure who carries the burden of his own and Carrie’s grief throughout “The Gardener” is shown here, like the narrator of the earlier story, to shun the possibilities of Spiritualist contact, not even “dar[ing] to think [. . .] about that sort of thing.” The poem “En-Dor” (1919) and Kipling’s firm eschewal in Something of Myself of “psychic” powers and the “evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor” that claims to clairvoyance can bring, are clear indicators of his somewhat tortured renunciation of Spiritualism.[38]  What has not hitherto been so clear is the way in which “The Gardener,” as originally published in The Strand Magazine, carried and amplified the same argument.

Indeed, the editorial additions, illustrations, and the magazine’s own policy of trailing Kipling’s work and that of Conan Doyle alternately on its cover through 1926 all push to the fore the story’s stark presentation of a moment of failed telepathic communion, as part of a broader cultural debate and series of disagreements about the religious, ethical and scientific value of clairvoyants’ attempts to communicate with the spirits of the departed. Donna R. White has ingeniously read an earlier Kipling story, “The House Surgeon” (Harper’s Magazine, September–October 1909), as, among other things, an artfully coded signal to Conan Doyle that, just as the titular house of the story, “Holmescroft,” is cured of its psychic haunting, so he might look forward to being cured of his long depression following his first wife’s death in July 1906: “the story is meant to have special significance for one specific reader: Kipling’s bereaved, depressed, and guilt-stricken friend, Arthur Conan Doyle.”[39] White notes that although Conan Doyle had not yet fully “converted” to Spiritualism “as a religion” at the time of this story’s publication, he had been since the 1880s a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, and, while their views were far from identical, Kipling intended him to be intrigued by a story in which the narrator is called in to solve the mystery of a property haunted by the grief of its previous owners: “He and Kipling shared an intellectual curiosity about paranormal activity, but Kipling remained leery of Spiritualism his entire life, and was not sympathetic to Conan Doyle’s later views on the subject.”[40]

From this perspective, The Strand’s printing of “The Gardener” effectively dramatizes this lack of sympathy and divergence of views, while performing and to an extent maintaining a dialogue between the two writers on a topic which, in the view of Bishnupriya Ghosh, goes back to the imperial adventure stories of the 1880s and 90s in which both writers had introduced and placed in complex narrative frames heterodox beliefs about psychic communication. “For Kipling and Conan Doyle,” Ghosh argues, “telepathy entailed an epistemological project, as it mandated the interpenetration of colonial epistemic paradigms (legal, medical, political or religious) by native doxa, semi-legitimate or subjugated knowledge (philosophies, sciences, religions, beliefs)” and where such doxa are not ultimately triumphant, when their “radical potentials are blocked by an emphatic return to colonial rationality, we might characterize the text as spectral rather than telepathic” in mode.[41] While Ghosh is specifically interested in  colonial settings of what she calls this sub-genre of “telepathic occult fiction,” this distinction usefully allows us to see how stories like “They,” “The Greatest Story in the World,” “Wireless” and “The Gardner” too, all revolve around the narration of the possibility/impossibility of telepathic or spectral transfer, within the tensions of domestic, national, pre- and post-war, frames of analysis.[42] Nevertheless, in claiming that “Kipling and Conan Doyle were purveyors of tele-technologies, and both—Conan Doyle to a larger measure than Kipling—stage, test, and speculate on theories of psychical transfer in their fiction,” Ghosh’s argument rather flattens the developing rift between them on the moral justification for spiritualist enquiry, which publication of  “The Gardener” in The Strand can now be seen to assert (Ghosh, “The Colonial Posctard,” 344). Furthermore, readers of The Strand were being asked to accommodate at the end of the story not so much the interpenetration and contesting of colonial rationality by alien, pagan doxa, but of native English pragmatism with the miracle of Christian revelation. Uncomfortably for orthodox believers, this requires a reading of the denouement as representing what Ghosh would consider a “spectral” rather than a “telepathic” mode of communication—and Helen Turrell evidently does not believe in ghosts.  

“The Gardener” in McCall’s Magazine, April 1926

The story’s first appearance in print a month earlier presents a contrast remarkable in character and degree, and not simply because the monthly which carried it had, as its core readership, American women rather than British men. Still publishing in 1926 from an address in Dayton, Ohio, McCall’s dated from 1873 when an émigré Scots tailor, James McCall, had started publishing a four-page sheet promoting sewing-patterns, which had, under successive editors, grown into one of America’s highest-circulation women’s magazines, a hundred-plus pages per issue. It still carried fashion items but also news, fiction, non-fiction focused on the family and domestic space, and high-end advertising tailored to its rapidly growing army of readers and subscribers. Its editor from 1921 to 1928 was Harry Payne Burton (1886–1952), who increased advertising and spent lavishly to promote a roster of household names in fiction. “In the 1920s,” one press historian notes, “McCall’s envisioned its readers as ordinary, middle-class citizens, whom it referred to as living on ‘McCall Street’”—a popular thoroughfare rather less cosmopolitan than the Strand.[43]

One of the first things to strike any reader of the April number of McCall’s, which carried the beginning of Kipling’s story under its masthead on the page five recto, is that it is what might be called an “Easter number.” Its contents page carries a short devotional piece on the meaning of “Easter-Tide in the Heart” by self-help author and “New Thought” philosopher Ralph Waldo Trine; its cover, adorned with a painting of the young Jane Welsh Carlyle in a hooded cape, blushing demurely, trails Basil King’s evangelical interpretation of scripture “Be not Afraid!”

Given this immediate context, and given that Jane Carlyle is here being showcased as one of the “heroines of the great love-stories of the world,” Kipling purists may begin to suspect that “The Gardener”—later to become known as that bleak, enigmatic, ambivalent, elliptical quasi-modernist work—will cut an odd figure. This suspicion will not, perhaps, fully prepare them for Payne’s editorial introduction, which presents the story thus:

The inspiration for this reverent and beautiful story, so fitting for Eastertide, has doubtlessly sprung from that magnificent passage in the twentieth chapter of St. John wherein Mary Magdalene, when it was yet dark, came to the sepulchre, not recognizing Jesus. “She turned herself back,” the gospel reads, “and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom sleekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, sir if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him.”  * * With this as his motive, Mr. Kipling has written in “The Gardener” not only a short-story that is truly a masterpiece but has incorporated in it a profound interpretation of the fullness of the Divine mercy.

Even before readers familiar with the story’s painstaking repression of its secrets, both narratological and spiritual, will have had time to register any objections to this egregious plot spoiler and editorial stealing of artistic thunder, their eye will doubtless have been arrested by Arthur Becher’s half-page tableaux illustration beneath the masthead.[44] This shows a stony-faced Helen Turrell, Quaker-like in a broad-brimmed hat and dark cape, rooted amidst a sea of wooden crosses staring at—not a gardener at all, but the figure of Christ, phosphorescent in a long white gown, standing, or seemingly floating, in front of her, a shining trowel in his hand. A caption, drawn from the final paragraphs, is appended: “He, without prelude or salutation asked, ‘Who are you looking for?’ ‘Lieutenant Michael Turrell—my nephew,’ said Helen.”

The columns of type are so narrow on this opening page of the story that, together with the large drop-cap “O” in the first line of the two-verse epigraph drawn from “The Burden,” they force the quatrain onto five lines, so it does not immediately have the appearance of poetry. The verso of the opening spread on pages four to five is devoted to a full-page advertisement for Procter and Gamble laundry soap, proclaiming in a larger font than any used for “The Gardener” “The pink one, please, mother!” / “This romper suit is still Dorothy’s pride and joy after more than 50 trips to the tub.”[45] After very little of the story proper, the reader is unceremoniously instructed to “Turn to page 77,” more than seventy pages distant, in order to find two further columns of “The Gardener” sharing the space with two columns of image-rich advertisements; two more follow on page seventy-eight, with a final column squashed between three columns of advertisements on page seventy-nine, two of which are given over to the benefits of Johnson and Johnson talcum powder, and an idyllic image of a mother cradling her child. 

While it might be tempting to represent this setting of “The Gardener” as something of a travesty and to draw attention to the numerous ways in which it can be seen to ignore or ride roughshod over the very subtleties for which the story has later become celebrated, it is worth considering the implications of the fact that this is how well over two million readers encountered Kipling’s masterpiece on its first publication in any form.[46] It is not as though the story’s publication in McCall’s was an aberration; rather, it was wholly typical of the way in which short stories by British authors reached audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, largely as a result of the involvement of literary agents like the Watts. If the fourteen tales comprising Debits and Credits are taken as an example: “The Gardener” was merely one of four to appear in McCall’s during 1926, following January’s “Propagation of Knowledge,” and preceding June’s “On the Gate” and September’s “The Eye of Allah.” All of the other ten items that make up the collection had been previously syndicated in a combination of British and North American illustrated consumer magazines, including Good Housekeeping, MacLean’s Magazine, Hearst’s International Magazine and its later incarnation, Cosmopolitan. Although few appear to have been subjected to major textual changes in their passage from magazine to monograph, all were subject to the same kinds of editorial intervention and artistic interpretation, which, as we have already seen with The Strand, stress, select, and give emphasis to, aspects latent in the story which are congruent with the larger cultural work of the periodical that forms its immediate publishing context.[47]

In the case of McCall’s, one might suggest therefore that its framing of “The Gardener” in April 1926 represents a perfectly sincere act of assimilation and endorsement of its readers’ desire for comfort and a transcendent rather than an ironic symbolism “at the Eastertide,” on the part of the magazine’s editor and appointed illustrator. Its apparent misrepresentation of the denouement identifies something crucial about the telling of the story: that Kipling puts the possibility of intertextual recognition with a well-known Gospel story into the grasp of multiple readers, not into Helen’s. Such readers are therefore expected, if only momentarily, to revision the gardener in the role of the risen Christ, and to see him in that connection to Helen, and this is what the prefatory illustration and editorial commentary are designed to underscore. Given that, for the reader of McCall’s, the moment of potential epiphany for Helen is still some seventy pages hence, with dozens of advertisements and multiple storylines to come—the world, with all its mundane distractions, intervening—it is perhaps not so insensitive a precaution as it might appear at first sight. Readers turning back to scrutinize the image may note at this point that the two figures are not represented as establishing eye contact, or as looking anything other than somber and downcast. This is not, in the end, or rather, from the beginning, a moment of Truth. Indeed, a tiny discrepancy between the text of the final paragraph in the McCall’s printing and that of The Strand, Debits and Credits and all later reprintings, promotes an indeterminacy as to the identity of the last person Helen sees as she leaves Hagenzeele Third, which loosens the certainty of the revelation promoted by the Becher illustration. Whereas subsequent editions state that “in the distance” Helen “saw the man bending over his young plants,” McCall’s readers are merely told that she saw “a man.”[48] The indefinite article tempers here and almost calls into question the earlier definitiveness of the illustrator’s vision.

These factors make it possible to suggest that the story’s presentation in McCall’s responds not unintelligently to important forces in the dynamics of the story as well as to the pressures of the magazine’s own publishing norms. In “The Gardener” Helen Turrell is impelled by social mores of stifling power, first to hide Michael’s illegitimate birth from “[e]very one in the village” and then to hide the anguish of his loss from the authorities and other bereaved relatives (Kipling, “The Gardener”, 381). The story pits the ideal of respectable wedlock against the stigma of bastardy; pits orthodox Christian faith in the ritual of burial and idea of resurrection against the emptiness of unbelief. McCall’s itself broadly reproduces the dominant bourgeois positions in each these binary pairings, reinforcing them with consumer marketing and editorial spin, and so there is an obvious danger that readers might fail to detect the deconstructive potential in a story like “The Gardener”—a risk that the act of reading it against the grain not only of the tendencies of Helen’s village and the establishment, but of “McCall Street” and its advertisers (all keen to promote the comfortable world of “happy housewife heroines,” purchasers of romper suits and talcum powder) will prove too arduous. Hence the editor’s decision to herald the equivocal epiphany with which the story ends, at its outset, argues a canny recognition of the power of social and cultural pressure to overwhelm and efface the individual’s capacity for spiritual reckoning: a threat faced equally by Helen and the reader of McCall’s. While the magazine’s efforts to mitigate this may still strike one as an act of over-compensation, it is not necessarily indicative of a misreading. Indeed, appreciation of this may further help refine critical understanding of “The Gardener,” just as scrutiny of its alternative settings in The Strand and in Debits and Credits can be seen to do.

*

As it is presented in Debits and Credits, accompanied by the quasi-liturgical strains of “The Burden,” the story stresses the plurality of experience of loss and sorrow and the concomitant, agonizing self-denial of personal sorrow that each sufferer on earth must make. The opening and closing exclamations “His Angel saw my tears / And rolled the Stone away!” suggest the underlying consolation or yearning for consolation of an orthodox Christian community, which the specifics of the presentation of Helen’s impassivity in the graveyard, and the reader’s own experience of loss, bely in a manner more or less discordant and ironic. As it is framed in The Strand, without the repetition of consoling poetic harmonies at its close, “The Gardener” is a bleak story handling controversial themes—illegitimacy, the inefficacy of faith—which helped shape a counter-narrative to Spiritualist claims of miraculous encounters across the grave with those lost in the Great War. As first presented in McCall’s, “The Gardener” also serves duty as an Easter story, in which any residual sense of emptiness reveals the potential for “profound interpretation of the fullness of the Divine mercy” (McCall’s, April 1926, 1). The opening illustration, which may at first sight seem to indicate a failure to understand Kipling’s reticence, reveals on closer scrutiny a reasonably defensible response to the story’s closing gesture towards transcendence and “infinite compassion,” which is raised high against the undertow of rational disbelief in the protagonist and the distractions and worldly pressure of magazine publication itself. These materials serve to further underscore the subtle dialectic of absence versus presence which Kipling is exploring in this tale and reveal more clearly its pivots and reversals, which build a conceptual chiasmus deep into the workings of the story as it is first revealed to its readers and its main protagonist: we know precisely when and how Michael was killed, and what his first tomb was made of (“the foundation of a barn wall”) but not that he is Helen’s son; only Helen knows this, but not where he lies (“The Gardener”, 384).[49]

If these readings are held to establish an accurate bandwidth for the reception of “The Gardener” by readers in 1926, they may also act as a corrective to later readings that distort the signal the story emits. Donald Davie’s crushing indictment of Kipling as a religious thinker (“some sort of undogmatic theist”), for example, toys with the idea that “what looks like duplicity” in poems intended to display both faith (“Recessional”) and blasphemy (“Gethsemane”) can be excused  as “muddle and ignorance about the nature of the English ‘puritan’ tradition,” only to dismiss such a “compassionate if contemptuous verdict on Kipling’s works as a whole” as in many ways too good for him:

[T]he Kipling who thought this, and perverted his poetic vocation to serve this kind of [cynical and muddled] thinking, is indeed in many ways the diabolical figure that many of us supposed him to be, before Eliot and George Orwell some forty years ago began to rehabilitate him.[50]

There is an element of hypocrisy here in that Davie proceeds to interpret the ending of the “The Gardener” with just the kind of muddle and inattentiveness to tradition of which he accuses Kipling, when he writes that “the war cemetery’s gardener is revealed to the Mary Magdalene figure as Christ himself” (“A Puritan’s Empire,” 46). To say so is a genuine misreading of the text that goes beyond what is only implied in Arthur Becher’s illustration for McCall’s, an interpretation which in comparison can be seen to maintain its own kind of non-verbal reticence. Davie compounds the error by adding that “this has the surely unintended implication that no merely human compassion could have embraced her,” as further proof that the “use of the scriptural text is both tasteless and redundant” in the story (46). A return to the paratexts of 1926 helps clarify that Kipling’s, and his editors’ presentation of the human and the divine and their interpenetration was anything but.

This line of investigation also has wider ramifications concerning the relationship between the “high art” reputation of modernist short stories and the reality of their frequent first appearance in “middle-brow” consumer magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Twentieth-century critical practice and the formalization of a canon have tended to isolate “great” short stories from the latter, and often also from other materials which their authors and editors designed to accompany them on first publication in book and magazine form. Analysis of other well-known stories from Debits and Credits in terms of their inter-relationships with both their verse entr’actes and magazine paratexts (illustrations and editorial interventions) would doubtless yield similarly corrective results. Observing the stories’ transition and transmutation from multi-authored miscellanies into monograph form requires a radical accommodation of differing attitudes to print culture. In the process, the generic purism of intentionalist critics no less than intentionalist editors, challenged by the juxtapositions and fusions of Kipling’s work, finds itself countered by socio-historical attention to the material forms of its production, revealing aspects latent in the stories which reinforce or query the larger cultural work of the periodicals that formed their immediate publishing context. Read in either direction, the transition is an illuminating process. This is not to argue for some full-dress collation of magazine with manuscript and printed texts, though digitization and the internet make this much more conceivable a project than it would have been twenty years since, but rather to assert that such an approach is both worthwhile and theoretically grounded. Stephen Donovan’s print and online work on Conrad, serialization and popular culture offers a model for what might be achieved.[51] Just as the “story of modernism in magazines” can in general “best be understood not as a single narrative of complicity or collusion, but as an amalgamation of shifting, overlapping, and competing narratives about what it means to be modern,” so Kipling’s “The Gardener” in 1926 offered readers on both sides of the Atlantic a trinity of overlapping but competing and differently-voiced narratives about what it means to lose a child to war and the singular paradox of universal grief: e pluribus unum.[52] Relocating it in the vibrant print culture of the mid-1920s opens out a series of broader conversations about the social and psychic repercussions of the Great War, the interpenetration of artistic and advertising strategies in the anglophone marketplace, and about the self-denials and renunciations entailed by secular no less than spiritual ideals of conduct.