Frederick
Andrew Lerner, D.L.S. |
Library
and Information Science |
|
The Tragedy of Rudyard Kipling
by Fred Lerner
“Seek not to question other than the books I leave behind.” That was
the burden of “The Appeal”, the short poem that concludes the
Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s collected verse. Kipling would
have hated Thomas Pinney’s six-volume edition of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling,
published between 1990 and 2004 by the University of Iowa Press. And
were I properly obedient to my favorite writer’s last wish, I would
have refrained from reading the 1,888 letters that Professor Pinney has
selected and annotated. But I did not refrain, eagerly invading the
privacy of that most private of men, the better to understand the
experiences and opinions that helped to shape the extraordinarily
diverse body of prose and verse that Rudyard Kipling left behind.
How can I so flagrantly disregard the desire of a writer whose work has
so enriched my life? How can I justify this intrusion into his private
correspondence? And, more importantly, did what I learned from reading
his letters repay the time I spent with them and the trespass I
committed?
Had Kipling written merely to entertain his readers, his private life
would be none of their business. Had he written to instruct as well as
to entertain, while remaining within the confines of the printed page,
he would still be entitled to his privacy. But the artist who seeks
political power, whether overtly or covertly, assumes the role of the
public man, and any medium in which he advances his quest becomes fair
game for the historian.
As a schoolboy poet Rudyard Kipling extolled the theory and practice of
empire, and until his dying day he maintained that enthusiasm in his
published writing and in his private correspondence. In the last two
decades of his life he drew upon the influence that his immense
popularity with the reading public had given him, and worked both in
public and in private to shape the editorial policies of newspapers and
the pronouncements of Tory politicians. The very man who spoke of
“power without responsibility” as “the prerogative of the harlot
throughout the ages” himself worked steadfastly to achieve that power.
In the course of that pursuit, Rudyard Kipling came to discard the
liberal sentiments that informed his youthful vision of empire. He
became a reactionary and a racist and a vicious antisemite; only the
French (“the most marvelous nation on the planet”) and a few of his
fellow Englishmen found favor in his sight. And yet, to the end of his
life, he continued to write some of the finest prose and verse ever
produced in English. Many biographers have tried to explain his life
and work, but it is from his own letters that one must discover the
origins and the denouement of the tragedy of Rudyard Kipling.
*
When Rudyard Kipling returned to India in 1882, he was ready to
appreciate its diversity of peoples and cultures. He had been born
there sixteen years before, and as a child spoke the Bombay vernacular
in preference to English. At the United Services College in the
Devonshire resort of Westward Ho!, headmaster Cormell Price had
introduced him to a wide range of literary influences: Hakluyt’s Voyages, Russian novels, The Rubaiyat (“a poem not yet come to its own”), and a panorama of English verse. As a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette
Kipling was exposed to aspects of Indian life that lay beyond the orbit
of most of his fellow Anglo-Indians — and he reveled in it. In the
stories later collected in Plain Tales from the Hills and In Black and White, he cast a satirical eye on his countrymen while writing lovingly about the peoples native to the land.
“I am deeply interested in the queer ways and works of the people of
the land”, he told a fellow-journalist in 1886. But he was under no
illusions of utopia. “When you write ‘native’ who do you mean?” he
asked a cousin in England: “The Mahommedan who hates the Hindu; the
Hindu who hates the Mahommedan; the Sikh who loathes both; or the
semi-anglicized product of our Indian colleges who is hated and
despised by Sikh, Hindu, and Mahommedan.”
His feeling for the land and people of India outlasted Kipling’s time
in that country. Even after moving to London in pursuit of a literary
career, travelling around the world, living in America for several
years, and returning to settle for good in England, he retained an
powerful connection to the land of his birth. Nowhere is this more
evident than in Kim, which he completed in 1900 while living in the seaside village of Rottingdean.
Kim is many things: a spy
story, a quest novel, a bildungsroman; but above all, it is a love
letter to India, a celebration of the sounds and smells and colors of
the subcontinent. Kimball O’Hara, the Little Friend of All the World,
is Irish by ancestry and Indian by adoption. A master of disguise, he
can pass for a Hindu or a Muslim, and he adapts with perfect ease to
the life of a Buddhist lama’s chela. “I am now that holy man’s
disciple; and we go a pilgrimage together — to Benares he says. He is
quite mad, and I am tired of Lahore city. I wish new air and water.”
And off they go along the Grand Trunk Road.
As Kim enters upon the Great Game as a spy for the British raj, he is
inducted into a fellowship that embraces all of India’s races and
creeds and vocations. A Pathan horse-trader invokes “God’s curse on all
unbelievers” — and is willing to risk his life for a Bengali Hindu.
Colonel Creighton, who supervises the exploits of this varied crew,
respects his subordinates and their cultural traditions. And their
universalism is shared by Kipling the narrator, who condemns the
Anglican chaplain who “looked at [the lama] with the triple-ringed
uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the
title of ‘heathen’”.
Soon after his arrival in India, Kipling joined a Masonic lodge, and
was an ardent Freemason for the rest of his life. He celebrated in
verse the diversity of his lodge in Lahore:
We’d Bola Nath, Accountant
An’ Saul the Aden Jew,
An’ Din Mohammed, draughtsman
Of the Survey Office too;
There was Babu Chuckerbutty,
An’ Amir Singh the Sikh,
An’ Castro from the fittin’-sheds
The Roman Catholick!
India proved too small a canvas for Kipling’s art. His tales and verses
were immensely popular in Britain, and throughout the English-speaking
world. Upon his arrival in London he was received into the highest
literary circles, and through his literary connections he met and
impulsively married an American woman, Caroline Balestier. They built a
house in her native Vermont, where the Kiplings planned to reside
permanently; but life in Brattleboro became untenable after a run-in
with Carrie’s scapegrace brother produced lawsuits and publicity. This,
together with the death of their six-year-old daughter, soured Kipling
on America. The Kiplings removed to England, eventually settling in an
ancient house in a Sussex valley where they spent the rest of their
lives between extensive travels.
Was it his disastrous experience in America that changed Kipling into
an intolerant chauvinist, or was it his wife’s snobbery, as some
biographers have alleged? Was Kipling unprepared for the public
adulation that preceded him to London and to America — and for the way
that adulation became transmuted into demands on his privacy?
Even as he found admittance into the highest literary circles in
England, Kipling maintained that interest in the world’s work and
sympathy for those who performed it that set him apart from most of his
contemporaries. But over the years his sympathies shifted from those
who actually did the work to those who planned and supervised and got
rich from their endeavors. And as Kipling increasingly absorbed the
values of the English establishment, as he became accustomed to the
prerogatives of fame, he lost much of his appreciation for the
Diversity of Creatures that populated God’s Creation.
*
If anything can be blamed for Kipling’s disavowal of his early
universalism, it must be World War I. He saw it coming long before the
Guns of August were heard, and stridently lamented England’s
unpreparedness for the looming conflict. Once the war began he saw it
as an unambiguous battle for the preservation of civilisation:
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war,
The Hun is at the gate!
Anyone who failed to share this view was to Kipling’s mind part of the
problem. The Americans, who did not understand the relevance of this
European conflict to their own security; the Irish, who felt no reason
to prefer British imperialism to the German variety; and the Jews,
whose German and Austrian compatriots had been better treated by their
governments than their pogrom-ridden coreligionists in the Russian
Empire — all these were shirkers, or worse.
He blamed “the German and German-Semitic elements of the population”
for the reluctance of America to enter the war. A decade later he had
not forgiven “the unhumourous race that told us what we ought to have
done in Gehenna, while they looked over the rim of it.”
There is no way to ignore Kipling’s disdain for Jews. “Israel is a race
to leave alone,” he intoned in his valedictory memoir, Something of
Myself. “It abets disorder.” One example of this was “one Einstein,
nominally a Swiss, certainly a Hebrew, who (the thing is so inevitable
that it makes one laugh) comes forward, scientifically to show that,
under certain conditions Space itself is warped and the instruments
that measure it are warped also.…” When Lord Montagu, the Secretary of
State for India, advocated in his Report on Indian Constitutional
Reform the transfer of limited powers from the Governor-General to
provincial governments, Kipling refused to believe “that this
particular Yid wants to save the British Empire. Racially, he does not
care for it any more than Caiphas cared for Pilate: and psychologically
he can’t comprehend it.”
I had often wondered what Kipling was about in his comic masterpiece
“The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat”. In that story a London
music-hall proprietor, caught in a rural speed trap, is gratuitously
insulted by an antisemitic magistrate (“‘He told me’ he said suddenly,
‘that my home address was Jerusalem. You heard that?’”), and extracts a
vindictive revenge on him and his village. A letter to his sometime
collaborator, the Oxford historian C.R.L. Fletcher, makes it clear that
the story was not meant to show disapproval for the victim’s bigotry,
but rather to prove that “You can’t defeat the Jew — or the pimp.”
And yet Kipling’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism was not entirely
negative. At the beginning of the war he wrote to a journalistic
colleague, “The strain on you must be awful but there is the ancient
text of the Rabbi (I think t’was Hillel or Ben Meir) to console one
with. It says, substantially, that the worst that men and women meet in
this world is just men and women and their actions. The old boy was a
bit of a free thinker like so many of the old Rabbis were at heart.”
And, writing to a Jewish historian who asked about his description of
Jewish life in mediæval England, he had noted that “They, after all,
ran the fabric of such civilization as existed at the time…”
The derogatory comments about “Hebrews” and “Yids” in Kipling’s letters
are too numerous to mention. He was no fonder of “Micks” and “Dagos”,
and Dutchmen and Welshmen and Greeks came in for the occasional barb.
And in one letter, after observing that “the last disabilities on
Dissenters were removed in 1867 or there abouts,” he complained that
“those disabilities are now transferred to England and 42 years…have
seen the justification of our ancestors’ prudence.” Strange words from
a man descended on both sides from Methodist ministers.
“As you are perfectly aware,” he told Theodore Roosevelt in April 1918,
“civilization’s great enemy is the Papacy. Not the R.C. religion of
course but the secular political head, unaltered in essence since the
beginning. In Canada, in Australia, and above all in Ireland, every
place where there is allegiance paid to the Papacy, there is steady,
unflinching and unscrupulous opposition to all that may help to win the
war.”
But his true hatred was directed toward the Germans. The wartime
Kipling spoke of them in terms that we are accustomed to associating
with Nazi language about Jews: “…the one thing we must get into our
thick heads is that wherever the German — man or woman — gets a
suitable culture to thrive in, he or she means death and loss to
civilized people, precisely as germs of any disease suffered to
multiply mean death or loss to mankind”. To another correspondent he
wrote, “The Hun is outside any humanity we have had any experience of.
Our concern with him is precisely the same as our concern with the
germs of any malignant disease.”
He urged his American publisher, Frank Doubleday, and the editors of
British newspapers to deny the very humanity of Germans, suggesting
that “the word hun be set up lower case always — never capitalized: and
in referring to the animal it be spoken of and written as neuter — not
‘he’ ‘his’ ‘whom’ etc. but it, its and which”. He forgot himself a
month later, when he described with approval the “small riot” that
ensued when “a party of Huns — dog and three dry bitches — occupied a
boarding house” at Newquay. (Two weeks later, quite without irony,
Kipling asked Sir Herbert Baker whether an anecdote the latter proposed
to include in his biography of Cecil Rhodes “is a sound thing to
release in a world still populated by little people who hate?” But by
that point it would not have occurred to Kipling that Germans fell
under the category of “people”.)
Whether in Ireland or in India, “a certain amount of the Home Rule
Movement must be part of Hun-propaganda”. But Kipling’s opposition to
Irish and Indian self-government predated the war. In 1912 he sided
with the Ulster Covenanters, who threatened armed revolt should Ireland
be granted Home Rule:
We know the wars prepared
On every peaceful home,
We know the hells declared
For such as serve not Rome —
Home rule in India, he warned, “will mean more oppression and a firmer
riveting of caste privilege on the necks of the people” — and besides,
“Russia and Ireland are helping actively in the fomentation of
‘disorder’.” This was in 1933, when someone other than the Huns had to
be held responsible for the empire’s troubles. (But Kipling’s hatred
had not abated. “Personally, I am delighted with Herr Hitler. It
confirms my theory that if we only trust and believe the Boche when he
thinks aloud, he will save us.” Alas, too few of his contemporaries
shared his apprehensions.)
*
Kipling’s early letters are full of his delight in the world. At
twenty-three he boasted that in Montana “I’m moving among the lordliest
scenery in a wilderness of Indians, cow punchers, herds of horses
wandering loose over the prairie, pink and blue cliffs, cascades,
tunnels and snow clad mountains that would make your very camera’s
mouth water with envy. Each day I meet some new character madder than
the last.” Four years later in Vermont he found “sunshine and a mind at
ease, peace and my own time for my own work and the real earth within
the reach of my hand, whenever I tire of messing with ink”.
But in the postwar years the epistolary Kipling became something of a
bore. He sent frequent suggestions to H.A. Gwynne, the editor of the
arch-conservative Morning Post,
as to how the paper might advance their mutual political goals. “I want
a list in the M.P. of all the heads of the Unions on the T.U.C. and the
extent to which each of them were affiliated with Moscow.” “Can’t you
start an awkward correspondence in your letter columns of folk who draw
parallels between the Soviet and our Govt, and who want to know how
close the relationship really is.” Professor Pinney’s annotations often
read “I do not find that any of these suggestions was taken up”.
And when his daughter Elsie married and left home, his frequent letters
to her were full of dinner parties and country houses and grand hotels.
“Another plunge into the gay life in town this week. We went up to
lunch…with the Duchess of Montrose, and I sat next to that Miss Graham
the Duke’s sister, who is the home Lady in Waiting to the Duchess of
York.” At a “dinner at the Salisburys to meet the K[ing] and
Q[ueen]…there was Lady Helen Brockhurst and the Duchess of Portland and
Lady Dabernon and Lady Middleton and Lady Cranbrook…” Professor Pinney
suggests that all this was more for Elsie’s benefit than her father’s;
she had married an aspiring diplomatist, whose advancement much
depended upon social connections. But it’s a far cry from the young
writer who hung around in music halls and consorted with physicians and
soldiers and engineers.
It's a one-sided conversation that we see — Kipling had the habit of
burning the letters that he received, so we seldom know what his
correspondents had written to him. But Professor Pinney’s footnotes
explain many things, for he has been assiduous in tracking down
senders’ copies of letters to Kipling where these have been preserved,
and in searching through old newspapers and magazines to track down
material that might have provoked a Kipling letter, or been influenced
by one. Professor Pinney’s annotations do a splendid job of identifying
the people to or about whom Kipling is writing, and the incidents or
utterances upon which he comments. And he is not ashamed to admit when
he has been unable to track down an explanation that a reader might
reasonably expect.
*
The tragedy of Rudyard Kipling is that he not only outlived two of his
three children, but also he outlived himself — that earlier younger
Kipling who found in Allah’s Diversity of Creatures something to be
praised rather than an unfortunate error in Creatorial judgement. The
irony is that he failed to take the advice that he offered to the world
at large in what has become the most popular poem in the English
language. “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue / and walk
with kings nor lose the common touch…” The young Anglo-Indian whose
greatest gift was an intense curiosity about the world and all its
peoples, whose greatest emotion was gratitude to “…Allah Who gave me
two / Separate sides to my head”, grew over the years into a man whose
lengthening walks with kings indeed lost him the common touch.
None of this touches upon my admiration for The Books He Left Behind.
If reading 2,864 pages of his letters diminishes my regard for Rudyard
Kipling as a person, that is the penalty I have earned for disregarding
his explicit wishes. But I am not entirely disillusioned. I have gained
something valuable from the experience: not only a greater
understanding of the man who gave me more pleasure than any other of
the world’s writers, but also a greater understanding of the
contradictions that add depth to our experience and enjoyment of this
world and the Diversity of Creatures within it.
*
This essay originally appeared in Lofgeornost #86, February 2007. It also appeared in Kipling Journal vol. 87 #328, September 2008.