Sierra Prasada

It is sometimes said that there are only two ways for a story to begin: Someone sets out on a quest or a stranger comes to town. Both come into play in Rudyard Kipling’s long-beloved (if now also half-forgotten) only novel-length story Kim. The novel first appeared twice in serial form in magazines, beginning in December 1900, before its publication as a book in 1901.

An orphan who roams the streets of Lahore (in then-British imperial India), Kim is appealingly known as both the Little Friend of All the World and, less frequently, the Friend of the Stars. He meets a Tibetan lama passing through town and quickly becomes his chela (disciple, assistant). Together they set out in search of destiny (Kim) and enlightenment (the lama) on the Grand Trunk Road, a journey that Kipling lovingly details:

By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango-tree; the parakeets and doves were coming home in their hundreds; the chattering, grey-backed Seven Sisters, talking over the day’s adventures, walked back and forth in twos or threes almost under the feet of the travellers; and shufflings and scufflings in the branches showed that the bats were ready to go out on the night-picket.

Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the cartwheels and the bullocks’ horns as red as blood. Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes.

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment seat;
…
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.

-The Ballad of East and West, 1889

Why do we remember Kipling? He spent his early childhood and youth in what was then British Imperial India and his fame as what one biographer, David Gilmour, calls the “chroniqueur of Anglo-India” preceded still greater fame as the ‘voice’ of British empire. He believed wholeheartedly in the defense of that empire and he successfully and bitterly predicted its decline. Apart from a few still widely known poems, such as If, his legacy too has faded some. He was a man ahead of his time but not of ours.

At the same time, it has never been easier to read Kipling, thanks to numerous digital collections of his stories and poems, and to appreciate him as a gifted scribe, his writing, though fraying a bit at the edges, still muscular and sensitive. It is also worth remembering the firm impression he made in the minds of powerful contemporaries, not to mention the 1907 Nobel literature committee – he remains today the youngest winner of literature prize.

In his biography of Kipling, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, Gilmour records that American president Woodrow Wilson “treasured” a newspaper clipping of If and Prime Minister Winston Churchill liked to read Kipling’s poems aloud while in the bath. What’s more:

The Spanish fascist leader, José Antonio Primo de Revera, hung a copy [of 'If'] on the wall of his office, while the Duke of Alba kept one in a gold frame by his bedside in Madrid. The King of Siam, ‘a very great admirer’, told Somerset Maugham he had been moved to translate it into Thai, and a ‘devil of a job he found it…to get the rhythm and metre to his satisfaction’. Mr. T. A. Brocklebank put a tiny copy of the poem into his watch while attempting to climb Mount Everest, but unfortunately in a high wind ‘the watch sprang open and the ms flew away’.

Painting by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Kipling’s uncle by marriage

For those who lack the luxury of time to read all of Kipling’s works and draw their own conclusions, myself among them, the complexity of the man is suggested most evocatively, perhaps, in his own poem The Two-Sided Man, and articulated more clearly and directly by George Orwell. (Commonalities between the two authors inspired a debate earlier this year at the Oxford Literary Festival.)

An excerpt from Orwell’s eulogy of Kipling in 1936:

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular English writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer. His popularity was, of course, essentially middle-class. In the average middle-class family before the War, especially in Anglo-Indian families, he had a prestige that is not even approached by any writer of to-day. He was a sort of household god with whom one grew up and whom one took for granted whether one liked him or whether one did not. For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him.

And another from Orwell’s essay on Kiping’s legacy, penned in 1942:

Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there…Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

Orwell wrote the first, brief piece only five days after Kipling died. In the second, longer piece, he argues that the “storyteller who was so important” to his childhood may have been a 19th century imperialist and (he says) a sadist, but that he was certainly not a fascist; that he had a sense of “responsibility” that more “enlightened” people typically lack; and that he produced “the best” and “the only literary” picture of Anglo-India, an accomplishment that stands out even more against the “great dearth” of so-called colonial literature. The essay is much more than a piece on Kipling himself though, it is a telling meditation on the “overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man.” Both pieces are well worth reading in full.

Images of George Orwell

Friday fun from Hirsute History

I love seeing writers’ rooms. I wrote my first (though, hopefully, not my last) book in a then-broken down, legally contested and now shut down-student flat in West Beirut with a lemon tree painted on the wall. A lot less glamorous, not at all Victorian, but a memorable sanctuary nonetheless.

From The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling:

As usual in his more mature work, [Kipling] obsessively excised superfluous words – and quite often words that would have made the sense rather clearer. ‘Wordiness is effeminacy, and unforgivable,’ he told poor Edmund Gosse, who had sinned: unnecessary words were ‘the enemy of vigour’ and weakened the ‘instrument of language’. He had learned to prune them from writing telegrams at the Gazette and claimed his style was not indebted to anything or anybody but the telegraph system.

Wielding a camelhair brush dipped in Indian ink, he read his work and blacked out the superfluities. Before re-reading, he let it ‘drain’ and then blacked out some more – and still more. Craftsmanship, he called it, and he never regarded himself as anything other than a craftsman. But then all true artists were craftsmen, even Shakespeare, who was ‘first and foremost a good workman with his eye on his actors’. The Elizabethan bard was a craftsman and not an ‘irresponsible demigod’; his ‘soul-development’ was not important.

True artists were men who went soberly each morning to their desk, their easel or their keyboard. They did not see the world through an opium haze or the ‘green hour’ of absinthe and sugar and cracked ice.

In the years leading up to 1914, Rudyard Kipling may have spoken out and waved the flag for what he believed to be a necessary and inevitable war (“What stands if freedom fall? / Who dies if England live?”), but he paid dearly for his own integrity. His own 18-year-old son, John, went off to war and died on his second day in France, after his father pulled strings so that he might “do his bit” as they both so clearly wanted him to. His eldest daughter Josephine had previously died of illness at age six. In the words of John’s mother, Carrie:

One can’t let one’s friends’ and neighbours’ sons be killed in order to save us and our son. There is no chance John will survive unless he is so maimed from a wound as to be unfit to fight. We know it and he does. We all know it, but we all must give and do what we can and live on the shadow of a hope that our boy will be the one to escape.

Kipling memorialized his son directly in the poem My Boy Jack and, indirectly if no less devastatingly, in another poem, The Children. The events surrounding John’s death also inspired writer-actor David Haig to write a play that has since been turned into a television film (now available on DVD). Despite one surviving daughter, Kipling would have no grandchildren, so his children’s stories would be read by other people’s children to their children.

Rudyard Kipling is credited with introducing ‘The Great Game’ to the masses in his novel Kim, but it is Arthur Conolly, an intelligence officer with the British East India Company’s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, who reportedly coined the term in order to describe the protracted 19th century conflict between Great Britain and Russia for hegemony over central Asia.

Conolly (1807-1842) was a writer, traveler and man of action. While on the road and in disguise, Conolly styled himself “Khan Ali” – can it be mere coincidence that one of Kim‘s characters is named Mahbub Ali? Regardless, if Conolly hadn’t really existed, Kipling would have had to invent him.

In the novel, the orphaned Kim fulfills his destiny and becomes a British agent in the “Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India”.

In another excerpt from the novel, Mahbub Ali defends Kim’s desire to return to the Road:

“He went alone before he came under the Colonel Sahib’s protection. When he comes to the Great Game he must go alone – alone, and at peril of his head. Then, if he spits, or sneezes, or sits down other than as the people do whom he watches, he may be slain.”

The term, however, gained yet more resonance as sports became a popular means to prepare young men for the coming wars of the young 20th century. Indeed, ‘great games’ were a direct precursor to the Great War, writes Caroline Alexander in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Complementing a classically oriented curriculum that celebrated the imperial militarism of the revered ancient world, athletic games strengthened the British race, giving young boys the physical training to become hardy servants of the empire, as intrepid missionaries as well as soldiers.

Image: Soldiers playing soccer during the 1914 Christmas Truce

Did Rudyard Kipling “incarnate the late Victorian sense of Empire” or did he create it? David Gilmour asks in his biography:

An ingenious theory suggests that officers who read Kipling somehow managed to mould their men so that they became like his soldiers. General Sir George Younghusband had served in India for many years without hearing the words or expressions used by the fictional men; puzzled, he asked his brother officers, who confessed that they too were ignorant of the diction. But a few years later he discovered that ‘the soldiers thought, and talked, and expressed themselves exactly like Rudyard Kipling had taught them in his stories…Kipling made the modern soldier.’

…While serving in Ceylon in 1907, Leonard Woolf observed that the British there were ‘astonishingly like characters in a Kipling story’. But he could never make up his mind ‘whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story.’ Sometimes he wondered whether he was a real person with a real job or simply living a story from “Under the Deodars.”

Gilmour ultimately concludes that the answer to his question and the quandaries presented by Younghusband and Woolf must be “a bit of both.”