The Woman in his Life

“Dinah in Heaven?and followed by “Four Feet?.

There are three black-and-while illustrations in the London Magazineby Norah Scheyit, an artist we have not traced, and others by Paul Bransom (1885-1979) in McCall’s.

The Story

John Marden, who had served on the Western Front as a Royal Engineer during the Great War, starts an engineering business with some fellow-comrades when they are demobilised. It is a great success, but through overwork Marden has a breakdown in which he is haunted by the war-time terrors of mining under the Messines Ridge in constant peril of his life. (His experience of being assailed by buried fears is similar to the ordeal of Miss Henschil and Conroy in “In the Same Boat? in A Diversity of Creatures.) He is obliged to rest, but turns to drink to ward off the 'horrors', which include a vision of a phantom dog in his sitting-room; they simply get worse.

Shingle, a devoted old comrade, now his valet, sees the problem and gets John a real dog, an adorable Aberdeen Terrier puppy named Dinah (the name of a dog Kipling owned in India), which so diverts him that he begins to recover. Dinah catches distemper and has to be nursed round the clock. John returns to work but has a relapse; Shingle suggests a holiday in the country. This is a success until one night Dinah is reported missing.

John searches for her in the dark with the aid of Jock, the farm dog, and a torch. He hears her whining, deep in a disused badger hole. To find her he has to crawl along a narrow tunnel, in constant fear of being buried alive, which takes him back to his worst experiences on the Western Front. He overcomes his fears, gets her out, and brings her home. After twelve hours sleep he wakes to find himself fully recovered and ready for work again.

See Dr. Gillian Sheehan’s “Kipling’s Medicine?. A similar phantom dog figures in “The Dog Hervey"in A Diversity of Creatures, where Shend, an alcoholic, also has the 'horrors'.

Background

When his surviving daughter Elsie married and left home, Kipling acquired a succession of Aberdeen terriers. 'Wop', acquired in 1926, was called after the character in the novel A Daughter of Hethby William Black, who had provided the nicknames ‘Wop of Asia’ and ‘Wop of Europe,’ which Kipling had used of himself and his cousin Margaret (Burne-Jones) in early Indian letters. (See Harry Ricketts, page 369) See also Thy Servant a Dog and other Dog Stories.

See aso Kipling’s speech “Values in Life? (A Book of Words, page 20):

There is a certain darkness into which the soul of the young man sometimes descends - a horror of desolation, abandonment, and realised worthlessness … I know of what I speak.
[McGill College, October 17 1907]

Some critical comments

T S Eliot does not include the verses associated with this story in his A Choice of Kipling's Verse, but in the introductory essay (page 20) writes:

There are deeper and darker caverns which he penetrated, whether through experience or through imagination does not matter: there are hints in “The End of the Passage" and later in “The Woman in His Life? and “In the Same Boat?: oddly enough, these stories are foreshadowed by an early poem which I have not included,

“La Nuit Blanche?, which reappears in “The End of the Passage?. Kipling knew something of the things which are underneath, and of the things which are beyond the frontier. There is also an interesting footnote on the same page where Eliot discusses “The Brushwood Boy? (The Day’s Work), “The Finest Story in the World" (Many Inventions)and others.

Dr Tompkinsconsiders this story in her Chapter 6, 'Healing', calling it 'a happy tale', and commenting (page 177):

The narrative here is forthright and in the third person, and we need no more comment than we get from his knowledgeable ex-batman who steers him back to sanity by means of the jet-black dwarf Aberdeen bitch Dinah …This, too, is a healing through love.

Martin Seymour-Smith(page 357) obviously misunderstanding the story, or perhaps unable to resist a play upon words, writes:

Limits and Renewals is the book of a tired and sick man, and it is weaker as a whole. There are stories in it with wonderful touches, none more wonderful perhaps than the detail of the dog John Marden believes he sees in “The Woman in His Life?…The tale deals with his redemption through a dog – through his saving of and love for a dog ... (it) fails because it is too engineered…the manservant Shingle … is the one who does does the engineering; he effects the cure.

[It is of course “engineered? – it is a work of fiction, and the characters move as the author pulls their strings; the resourceful Shingle, evidently from a genuine affection for his employer, based on their experiences in the war, or perhaps also his affection for a soft job, or both, sees the problem and deals with it; Ed.]

Angus Wilson(page 313) writes:

Of the many tales of the healing of war’s mental wounds, most of them diffuse and over-elaborate, the most simply satisfactory is probably “The Woman in His Life?. In this story, a typical Kipling hero, a young veteran of the battle of Messines who, through engineering, builds up a thriving post-war industry, collapses from overwork and singleness of satisfaction. The wily Cockney valet (once his batman) of his Jeeves-Wooster West End luxury flat existence, saves his master from complete breakdown by persuading him to keep an Aberdeen terrier bitch. At this point all who are allergic to dog worship will leave. I like dogs well enough, but I am not a devotee: however I love cats enough to understand what Kipling is saying. He goes on to deplore the sentimentalitywith which Kipling covers his real egoistic conviction, which is that the magnificence of dogs lies in their complete subservience to their masters...

It is hard to take as a whole; but it is an interesting example of how Kipling’s skill can reconcile an open-minded reader to the most unpromising themes.

[Jeeves and Wooster are a resourceful valet and a wealthy idle young man who figure in a series of very successful humorous novels set in the 1920s and 1930s by P G Wodehouse (1881-1975) whom Kipling met at his club; Ed.]

See also John Coates, The Day’s Work, Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice, (Associated University Presses 1997, page 90) where he discusses this story, “The Miracle of St. Jubanus? and “The Tender Achilles? (later in this volume) in his Chapter 5, 'The Redemption Theme in Limits and Renewals'.

[J H McG]

©John McGivering 2008 All rights reserved

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version for printing

notes on the text

"The Woman
in his Life"

(notes edited
by John McGivering)

[July 4th 2008]

Publication

First published in McCall’s Magazine for September, 1928 and the London Magazine Christmas Number the same year. Collected in Limits and Renewals (1932) it is preceded by