Auto-eroticism in Conrad, Kipling and Wharton - TheArticle

I

The three decades between 1880 and 1910 were the great age of invention. During that time the electric light, telephone, radio and cinema appeared, and the first plane took flight. Automobiles – called horseless carriages, measured in horse-power to mark the radical transition from animals to mechanical transport, and given names as if they were beloved pets – also appeared at the end of the Victorian era. Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Edith Wharton, early owners of cars, were passionate enthusiasts for speed and travel.

In Victorious Century, David Cannadine notes that the fast and fashionable new motors, driven by the wealthiest people, incited class warfare. They brought many difficulties and accidents to traditional villages, which became hostile to the invasive motors: “The invention of the internal combustion engine meant an increasing number of car owners were bringing noise, dust and danger to rural roads, among them the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, and Edward VII himself (pictured below). In 1896 the speed limit had been set at fourteen miles an hour, but the Motor Car Act of 1903 raised it to twenty miles per hour (mph). The following year there were more than 8,000 cars registered. Many of these could be driven faster than the statutory limit, and as a result, traffic offences were significantly on the rise.”

In After the Victorians, A N Wilson mentions the rapid surge of cars which, despite fatalities, were actively promoted for the upper class by the future king: “The motor car was introduced to the English public at a Crystal Palace exhibition in 1896. In 1900, 800 cars were purchased in Britain; by 1913 the figure had risen to 33,800. (Fatal accidents involving cars exceeded those involving horse-drawn vehicles for the first time in 1910.) Edward VII, who as Prince of Wales was photographed taking his first ride in one in 1898, predicted: ‘The motor-car will become a necessity for every English gentleman.’”

Despite the danger – which was, like fox hunting, half the excitement – the Times of 11 July 1907, exclaimed that the intoxicating influence of speed was an essential pleasure of motoring. Two years later, in his First Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Marinetti glorified this thrilling sensation: “The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, hurl the lance of his spirit across the earth.” But nothing much had been done to control the vertiginous vehicles. Sean O’Connell writes in The Car in British Society that the antediluvian “Locomotive Act of 1865 had introduced the so-called ‘red flag’ legislation. Road locomotives were restricted to 4 mph in the countryside and 2 mph in urban areas, with the added stipulation that vehicles be preceded, at a distance of sixty yards, by a red-flag-carrying walker.” But this quaint law, which assumed that cars would not overtake the flagman, was repealed in 1896 as cars began to go much faster.

II

Though Joseph Conrad retained a romantic attachment to sailing vessels rather than steamships, he preferred to travel on land, as fast as possible, in a mechanical automobile rather than in a horse-drawn carriage. He acquired a series of cars early in the twentieth century, and joined the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall — not for the usual social and political reasons, but solely for his ownership of cars. 

Conrad’s inappropriate costume for his motoring expeditions, in which he fancied himself an English gentleman, was the same he had worn when driving a dog-cart: grey bowler hat, monocle, Inverness coat and cape. A photo of c.1910 shows Conrad standing next to a high-sprung open Rolls Royce with huge staring headlights and adjustable windscreen. Its gleaming steel front grill supports the trademark flying angel, the sexy “Spirit of Ecstasy.” Striking a casual pose, with one booted foot on the running board and one arm on top of the door, Conrad wears a bowler hat, stiff collar and tweed suit, and stares rapturously at his attractive American houseguest and lover Jane Anderson.

In letters of 7 January, 1924 Conrad was snobbishly pleased to announce that his new acquisition had a royal pedigree: “I have been out to-day for drive in the new [Daimler] car, a roomy old-fashioned affair which I acquired from HRH the Duke of Connaught. A great stroke of business. . . . The Cadillac was getting impossible, and I could not face the idea of being shut up here without any means of getting more than a few yards outside the gate.” But Conrad’s sorties were a series of tragi-comic Charlie Chaplin disasters, and anyone in or near his car was placed in mortal danger. His teenaged son Borys, retrospectively appalled by the risks they had taken, later reported a number of thrilling accidents. On one occasion “we charged through a barbed-wire fence, ran up a steep bank and capsized the vehicle on to its side”. The second incident was even more serious. When a drunken sailor stepped directly in front of their car, the chauffeur “was unable to manipulate his levers smartly enough to avoid knocking the man down and running over his leg . . . Fists were shaken and an attempt was made to drag [the driver] from his seat.” Like most car owners, Borys did not take responsibility for the accident and blamed the sailor rather than the driver. 

Though Conrad could command a ship through a typhoon, he never learned to drive a car. Notoriously incompetent and dangerous, like Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows (1908), Conrad retained his bowler hat and monocle while adding boots and gaiters. Incorrigible, he shouted orders at Borys, his patient repairman, with nautical speech: “This damned thing took charge of me and I was quite unable to bring it to anchor. You had better have a look at it.” On another reckless occasion, “he threw up his arms and exclaimed, ‘Do you think I can’t pass a damned wagon?’ and at the same time, drove straight into the back of it. Luckily the farmer sustained no injury but merely became partially buried beneath the hay dislodged from the wagon by the impact”. Apologies all around, but they drove on.

The sculptor Jo Davidson described perilous driving with Conrad, a moving menace on the quiet Kentish roads, in the days when lessons and licenses were not required. The car “was not acting well. Conrad at the wheel was trying to be polite in conversation over his shoulder while jabbing levers of the machine that went this way and that and seemed more inclined to go astern than forward.” Mr Toad presents a similar threat to unwary motorists. As Rat tells Mole, “Another smash-up only last week, and a bad one. You see, he will insist on driving himself, and he’s hopelessly incapable.
. . . You know that coach-house of his? Well, it’s piled up – literally piled up to the roof – with fragments of motor-cars. . . He’s been in hospital three times.” 

III

When living in Torquay, Devon, in 1896, Kipling at first took daily bicycle rides on pneumatic tyres and smooth roads, with the sea on one side and the beauty of Dartmoor on the other. Though his friend HG Wells was fascinated by the future, filled with new inventions and powerful machinery, Wells preferred bicycles to cars. Cycling, though much slower, combined freedom and silence without dirt and danger. Wells’ son, Anthony West, describes the considerable advantages of this new mode of propulsion. The first cyclists “rejoiced to find themselves gliding almost silently along the uncrowded country roads, testing a new freedom . . . When it wasn’t in actual use this biddable appliance didn’t need fodder, or stabling, or any of horse coping’s endless chores – it would stay undemandingly where it was put away until it was wanted for another ride”.

By contrast to Wells, Kipling, also obsessed by machines, preferred speed to convenience and comfort. He liked to ride in London taxicabs, watch the meter and experience “the joy of seeing an impersonal machine recording one’s progress in four penny spasms”. Pleased to reduce the journey from Harrods to Charing Cross by eighteen minutes, he felt no nostalgia for hansom cabs. 

The crucial turning point came in October 1899 when Alfred Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail, visited the Kiplings in his new motor car. Charles Carrington, Kipling’s first biographer, reports: “They were instantly converted to the new form of transport which released them [like Conrad] from the restraints that were beginning to bear heavily.” After a twenty-minute spin, Kipling said, “We returned white with dust and dizzy with noise. But the poison worked from that hour.” In December he hired a motor and “engineer” at three guineas a week. In his posthumous autobiography Something of Myself he described the car in technical language. It was a “Victoria-hooded, carriage-sprung, carriage-braked, single-cylinder, belt-driven, fixed ignition embryo which, at times, could cover eight miles an hour.” 

Carrington adds that in 1900 Kipling “bought a steam-driven American car called a ‘locomobile,’ and for two years drove it from end to end of Sussex, in a world still unprovided with petrol pumps, spare tyres, or repair shops. Every motorist had to be his own mechanic (or hire one) and had to learn how to do running repairs as new problems arose”. If no facilities were available, drivers had to purchase petrol at the nearest chemist’s shop. Kipling complained, with considerable exaggeration, that “no designer, manufacturer, owner, nor chauffeur knew anything about anything”.

Kipling was well aware of the negative aspects of motoring. But, his biographer Lord Birkenhead comments, “he persevered grimly with a series of these strange monsters emitting loud explosions and cascades of oil, their tyres puncturing every other mile, jeering little boys running beside them in clouds of yellow dust.” Boys were not the only ones who jeered. As Kipling lamented: “We, and a few other desperate pioneers, took the first shock of outraged public opinion. Earls stood up in their belted barouches and cursed us. Gipsies, governess-carts, brewery wagons” joined in the abuse.

But Kipling believed the negative aspects of motoring were overshadowed by the positive advantages: the enclosed privacy combined with travel through the outside world, the joy of exploring the historical sites of England, the lawlessness and release from conventional restraints. He even described his punctures and breakdowns with humorous and uncharacteristic tolerance. On 5 July, 1901 he sent his American mother-in-law an amusing anecdote about crowds staring at his public humiliation: “You won’t know Brighton or Brighton seafront so you will never understand the joy of breaking down for lack of fuel under the eyes of 5,000 Brighton Hackmen and about 2,000,000 trippers.”

In November 1902 Kipling’s expedition with Henry James, who’d been best man at his wedding, was ruined by an unfortunate breakdown of the new Lanchester. In a letter to their mutual friend Charles Eliot Norton, sent from James’ house in Rye, Kipling wrote: “Because we swaggered and boasted about Amelia (she being a virgin) and told him how we would drive him all over Sussex in two hours, Amelia was took with cataleptic trance . . . [We wired] for an expert mechanician or obstetrician or whatever the name is and after two days Amelia came back to us. But Henry James’ monologue over her immobile carcass would have been cheap at the price of several wrecked cars.” Kipling didn’t quite know what to call the recently created mechanic, used “immobile” for the paralyzed automobile and slyly named the car Amelia, the eponymous heroine whose nose is badly damaged in a carriage accident in Henry Fielding’s novel of 1749. 

Neither Kipling nor Henry James left a written account of his fascinating monologue. But Ford Madox Ford, who lived nearby in Sussex, either heard it from James or imagined it, and described it in his autobiography Return to Yesterday (1932). James magniloquently said, “We were all indulging in – what is it? – delightful anticipations and dilating on the agreeableness of rapid – but not, for fear of the police and consideration for one’s personal safety, too rapid – speed over country roads and all, if I may use the expression, was gas and gingerbread when there is a loud knocking on the door and . . . in rushes the chauffeur. And in short the chauffeur has omitted to lubricate the wheels of the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car with the result that its axles have become one piece of molten metal.” Despite the disappointment of the aborted journey, James felt considerable pleasure in the meltdown, which forced Kipling to return home by train. He envied Kipling’s popularity, resented his boast about the expensive new car – which James, though the greater writer, could never afford – and mocked Kipling’s promise to speed them through the country in time for lunch with friends. 

Kipling’s contretemps with cars directly inspired his work. Carrington reports that Kipling “kept careful records of his journeys, with notes on mileage, the state of the roads, and the comfort of hotels, and duly reported defects to the Automobile Association. Often his motoring journals provide comments on scenery, and architecture, with word-pictures of landscapes or wayside happenings which might reappear one day in a story”.

Kipling’s speeding through pastoral villages resembled modern cars rushing through Amish horse-and-buggy country. Philip Mason, another biographer, observes that Kipling had several run-ins with crooked constables, whom he satirised in his fiction: “When Kipling became ‘a motorist,’ village policemen became almost as much a target for malice as politicians. Kipling had joined a rich but persecuted minority. There was a good deal of feeling against motor-cars; they were smelly, noisy and dangerous to horse-drawn traffic; they killed chickens and dogs and sometimes children; they must have been seen by many as a threat to the peace of the English countryside and all that Kipling admired.”

The title of Steam Tactics (1902), suggests military conflict with both automobile and villagers. Though a minor work, it includes the essential elements of Kipling’s motoring stories: defective auto parts, struggles between coachman and car, speeding violations, arguments with police, accidents and lyrical praise of his proud possession. The autobiographical narrator even has a sailor-passenger who condemns the police and speaks, like Conrad, with nautical imagery. He angrily asks: “D’you suppose that a man who earns his livin’ by runnin’ 30-knot destroyers for a parstime . . . is going to lie down before any blighted land-crabbing steam-pinnace on springs? . . . There ain’t a port in China where we wouldn’t be better treated. Yes, a Boxer ‘ud be ashamed of it.”

A common problem was leaking or evaporating water, and there wasn’t enough room in the cars to carry an extra supply. The driver, as if crossing a desert, mentions his dependence on the hostile local folk: “‘We’ll have to take in water. There isn’t more than a couple of inches of water in the tank.’ ‘Where d’you get it from?’ ‘Oh! – cottages and such like.’ ” Henry Royce, the engineer of Rolls Royce, who believed the main cause of breakdown in engines was overheating, designed space for a large water-cooling unit. 

In Steam Tactics, when the driver blows his loud air horn at a horse-drawn cart that is blocking the road, the coachman vehemently expresses his suppressed fury: “He said aloud of motor-cars, and specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of superior coachmen.” Signaled to halt by a policeman, the driver ruthlessly asks, “Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?” At the mercy of the police, who extract a lot of money, the motor-gentry are accused of being “drunk and disorderly in charge of a motor-car – to the common danger.” Losing patience, the narrator exclaims, “My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best, but I could not love this person.” Kipling – in the covert theme of the story – felt he had the right, as automobile owner and important literary personage, to disobey the law and receive special treatment.

The fictional characters have the inevitable accident, but manage to stop at a brook just in time. The driver “stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres slithered over wet grass and bracken – down and down into forest . . . Forty horse-power would never have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff had we descended.” After overcoming that obstacle, the driver continues, in a lighthearted mood, as if he were playing a musical instrument: “He improvised on the keys – the snapping levers and quivering accelerators – marvelous variations, so that our progress was sometimes fugue and sometimes a barn-dance.” A passenger, alluding to the celestial Rolls ornament and comparing the machine to exalted verse, launches into lyrical praise: “She’s the Poetry o’ Motion! She’s the Angel’s Dream.” The story ends happily—after troubles with road and car, conflicts with coachman and constable – in a safe landing at a congenial country inn.

They (1906), one of Kipling’s most subtle and elusive stories, reflects his profound bereavement after the death of his six-year-old daughter Josephine in 1899. Evoking the pleasures of motoring in the remote Sussex countryside during the early years of the new century, Kipling propels the narrator into an uncanny world and contrasts the stark reality of the automobile with the illusory denizens of the garden. He suggests that the blind woman, who has no children, compensates for her loss by imagining that dead children inhabit her home, 

The undulating opening sentence of They brings the real world of the car into the dream world of the house: “One view called me to another; one hill-top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could not answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels,” as if he were sailing on a ship. When he returns to the house, “or it may have been that my car took the road of her own volition,” he displays his bright and appealing car tools to attract the children: “I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug.” To humour and comfort the woman, he tells her the children “were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken down, and came to see the fun.” She asks, “How do cars break down?” and he replies, “In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty-first.” This echoes his poem In the Neolithic Age: “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right!” At the end of the story the car, an important element in the plot, fades away and is reflected in the metallic colors of the water: “looking down at the sea, in that instant I beheld the blue of the Channel through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter.” 

The increase of speed and rise of legal limits intensified class conflicts and hostility between motorists and police. CFG Masterman’s influential book The Condition of England (1909) criticized automobiles as “wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed along all the rural ways.” Sean O’Connell notes that the police acted aggressively against cars: “Concerns about safety and the damage to rural roads caused by motorists resulted in the introduction of speed traps to ensnare motorists travelling at more than the 20 mph. limit set down by the 1903 Motor Car Act.”

In The Tour, one of Kipling’s Muse Among the Motors poems, the driver is:

Accused of storming through that placid nook

At practically any pace you please.

The Dogberry, and the Waterbury, made

It fifty mile – five pounds. And Juan paid!

In two cunning literary allusions Kipling portrays a bad cop and innocent victim: Dogberry, the bumbling constable in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and Mr Waterbury, the father unjustly accused of a crime in Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906).

In Kipling’s satiric story The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat (1917), the drive is quite pleasant until the motorists are stopped by a policeman, ordered to give their names and addresses, and charged with exceeding the speed limit. When the driver points out that “the road ran absolutely straight for half a mile ahead without even a side lane,” the swindling policeman admits, “That’s just what we depend on.” The driver, who confesses that he was speeding and offers an extremely poor excuse, behaves like one of the “lesser breeds without the Law” that Kipling had famously condemned in Recessional.

In a more egregious incident, the narrator is “summonsed on charges ranging from the use of obscene language to endangering traffic.” The policeman, referring to the straight road, reveals “We rooked seventy pounds out of ‘em last month. No car can resist the temptation.” In court they are outrageously insulted by the magistrate who compares them to felons and exclaims: “he was sick and tired of processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking stones on the road.” Though the policeman had leaned on their horn and made the magistrate’s horse bolt, he falsely claims that they deliberately blew the horn to frighten his horse. He fines them £23.12s.6d—an astronomical amount compared to the £5 fine in The Tour and one third of the annual extraction by the police—and treats the gentlemen as criminals when he has them in his power. The story then deteriorates into a practical joke, rather like breaking a butterfly upon a wheel, to retaliate for their legal humiliation. By libeling the village and claiming that it believes the earth is flat, they show that the hopelessly backward place is blind to the realities of the modern world.

IV

Like Kipling, Edith Wharton was passionate about cars and tolerated all their difficulties. Equating mobility with money, she used the royalties from her first novel to buy her precious Panhard car. Remodeled and impressive, the Panhard had a canvas top, two tall brass-topped handbrakes outside the driver’s door, big headlights, lanterns on the hood, inside electric light, and every known accessory and comfort. Wharton’s graphic account of a friend’s near-fatal accident, which expressed her deepest sorrow for the destruction of the beautiful car, illustrates her motor mania. 

To emphasise their masculinity, chauffeurs, like Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard, wore military uniforms: high polished boots, brass-buttoned tunics, heavy gauntlets, a pilot’s leather helmet and protective goggles. Since they were also expert mechanics, chauffeurs considered themselves gifted artisans rather than common servants. Most coachmen and grooms despised the new calling, so many chauffeurs were recruited from car factories. In a deliberately sentimental poem, The Dying Chauffeur, Kipling describes the death of the driver as if it were the death of his car:

Wheel me gently to the garage, since my car and I must part –

No more for me the record and the run.

That cursèd left-hand cylinder the doctors call my heart

Is pinking past redemption – I am done!

Transported by a reliable chauffeur, Wharton no longer had to worry about tired horses and submit to inconvenient trains. In her lyrical travel book, A Motor-Flight Through France (1909), she exclaimed, “The motor-car has restored the romance of travel . . . The villages that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train – the unseen villages have been given back to us . . . If the motorist sometimes misses details by going too fast, he sometimes has them stamped into his memory by an opportune puncture or recalcitrant ‘magneto’; and if, on windy days, he has to rush through nature blindfold, on golden afternoons he can drain every drop of her precious essence.” Most punctures were certainly not opportune, and rarely occurred before a historical building or stunning landscape. Since it was difficult to start cars in cold weather and drive on icy roads, she was dependent on temperate climates. Nevertheless, Wharton was always excited by the unpredictable adventures of motoring.

Five years after his aborted expedition with Kipling, the equally wealthy Wharton took Henry James on a more ambitious three-week excursion through France. In a photograph that resembles the one of Conrad with Jane Anderson, Wharton wears a fur collar and huge white hat secured with a scarf. Her guest Henry James is muffled up in a heavy overcoat, topped by a sporty flat cap. Her husband Teddy, wearing a peaked cap and smoking a pipe, sits in the front next to the tall, capable American chauffeur, his hands firmly grasping the steering wheel. They left in her new Panhard and, as if on a royal progress, sent several servants ahead with their luggage to prepare their hotel accommodations. Suitably impressed, and more deferential to Wharton than to Kipling, James poetically named her the “pampered Princess with eagle pounce and eagle flight.” Alluding to 2 Kings 2:11, he also called her a “firebird who rode in a chariot of fire.”

In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton—like Ford—wittily satirised James’ absurd repetition of “in short,” his patronising tone while seeking assistance and his condescending address to “my good man,” while leaning down from the high vehicle, as if he were speaking to a servant or the village idiot: “ ‘In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ‘in my short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which, in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where are we now in relation to . . .’ Finally exasperated, Wharton cuts through his parenthetical circumlocutions with a direct query: “ ‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ‘do ask him where the King’s Road is.’ ” “Ah – ? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?” With the considerable advantage of knowing where he is, the aged face at the window said, “Ye’er in it.”

James loved their journey, but later complained about the expense of the luxurious hotels and the need to tip all the servants, as well as Wharton’s exhausting energy, imperious manner and unwillingness to relax her possessive hold. She not only invited the passive James, but also captured him.

V

When motor-cars began to replace bicycles and horse-drawn carriages, they propelled the privileged class into the modern world. For Kipling and Wharton the journey was more important than the arrival, and both transformed their personal experience with cars into poems and stories, travel book and memoir. Cars allowed owners to visit attractive locales, but speeding through landscapes also made them miss the quintessential qualities they wished to see. Their road dust, engine noise, petrol smell and oil stains damaged the pristine countryside they hoped to explore. The automobile revolution also led directly to the genocidal collection of rubber for tyres in the Belgian Congo, and intensified the cruelty and horrors that Conrad had described in Heart of Darkness.

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