Sierra Prasada

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.

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.”

Rudyard Kipling was undoubtedly an imperialist and a proud one at that. But was he racist? The debate rages on, in part because racism turns out to be a lot like obscenity – at its margins, it defies definition yet it must be grappled with whenever perceived. Has Kipling’s reputation been weighed down by anachronistic expectations? His more progressive works may not be able to “unwrite” other reactionary prose, but should the one be entirely eclipsed by the other? (In an age when a career can be tarnished if not ruined by one careless ‘tweet’, the question begs consideration.)

As a young man in India, Kipling’s “membership of a masonic lodge enabled him to meet men of different religions on an equal footing: his ‘brethren’ there included members of the Islamic, Sikh, Christian and Jewish religions,” David Gilmour notes in his biography of Kipling. (He comments, in a footnote, that it is precisely this spirit of equality and social mixing that drew Kipling to Freemasonry even though he was never a very active member.)

In a thoughtful 2000 essay for the New Criterion, John Derbyshire points to the care Kipling took while serving on the Commonwealth (then Imperial) War Graves Commission to ensure that “the sensibilities of Hindus and Muslims were respected” and argues that Kipling’s sentiments were more paternalistic than bigoted: “There is no doubt that Kipling looked down on the colored races, but ‘racism’ is not the proper word for his attitude. He did not think them biologically inferior, only incapable of self-government at the time he found them.”

At the same time, it’s clear that the two-sided man will (must?), ultimately, be made to add up to one:

The fact of Kipling’s name still being known to the general educated public today rests on two…props. In the first place he was representative of a cast of mind which later generations came to deplore. In the second place he was a great poet. The first is, to a large degree, consequent on the second, for it was through his verse that Kipling’s opinions became widely and generally known.

Midcentury intellectuals seeking to disparage Kipling did not quote “Kim” or “The Jungle Books”; they whacked you over the head with ‘the white man’s burden’ and ‘lesser breeds without the law’. Kipling’s fame, and his infamy too, rests above all on his verse. This is a tribute, and a back-handed one, to the power of that verse.

Kipling’s studied attention to the plight of the common soldier has been overshadowed by his perceived jingoism, a charge that Derbyshire also tackles in his essay:

Kipling’s entire view of the military experience, as lived by common soldiers, can be seen laid out for inspection (so to speak) in “The Young British Soldier.” Here it is, as it undoubtedly was: cholera and foul liquor, sunstroke and the faithless wife, terror under fire and the horrible, utterly inglorious end.

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains …”

Hardly a recruiting poster.

Kipling penned this particular verse in 1895, but he wrote more bluntly patriotic verse later in his career in the lead up to World War I (and paid the price for it).

The scholar and literary critic Edward W. Said analyzed Kim in an essay (titled The Pleasures of Imperialism) included in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism. He describes Kim as a “remarkable, complex novel,” that illuminates history even as it represents the limited viewpoint of its author who was a “historical being as well as a major artist.”

More than 100 years later, a British soldier fighting in Afghanistan found the 1895 verse so relevant to his own experience that he adapted them and created the poem,Afghanistan (with apologies to Kipling), an effort that suggests Kipling himself, for better or worse, still speaks to us.

Images: Rudyard Kipling (left) and Edward W. Said

In Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, one character offers instructions to another on how to read Kipling, in general, and the novel Kim in particular:

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

Each author I come to know through this project stays with me. I look forward to revisiting them, given the inspiration, as this decade of directed reading plays out.

The ugliest part of the novels and nonfiction masterworks of the early 20th century are not, in the end, what they describe – all kinds of human cruelty, crushing poverty, corruption and violence – but their authors’ limitations, the muck they failed to rake from their minds.

In 1906, just five years after the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Mahatma Gandhi coined the term “satyagraha” to describe a practice that would lead to Indian independence, Gandhi’s dream and Kipling’s nightmare. It is possible to appreciate the beauty and cultural wealth of India reading Kim, but the novel portrays Kipling’s India, a land that fully existed only in the fevered minds of England’s colonial administrators and their admirers.

Kipling’s commitment to Empire clearly overwhelmed the more delicate sensibilities also evidenced in Kim. One of Sinclair’s principle failings, however, is harder to square with his zealous, lifelong defense of the oppressed, that is racism against Africans and Asians made plain in The Jungle, :

…any night, in the big open space in front of Brown’s, one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free – free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves.

They were wanted to break a strike, and when it was broken they would be shipped away, and their present masters would never see them again; and so whiskey and women were brought in by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards. Every night there were stabbings and shootings; it was said that the packers had blank permits, which enabled them to ship dead bodies from the city without troubling the authorities. They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery – scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America. And as the women were the dregs from the brothels of Chicago, and the men were for the most part ignorant country Negroes, the nameless diseases of vice were soon rife; and this where food was being handled which was sent out to every corner of the civilized world.

Biographer Anthony Arthur only briefly touches on Sinclair’s racist attitudes, attributing them to a “surprising blind spot of so many progressives at the time.” Surprising to later readers, that is, who discover that even their “progressive” ancestors were never progressive enough.

Sinclair recognized, in the plight of the working man, a clear parallel with the slavery so recently abolished in the United States, the very “wage slavery” he set out to chronicle. How is it that he could do so but still fail to free himself (and his readers) from those mental fetters that had justified slavery and that continued to prop up the system he loathed? What is it that enduringly prevents even society’s most radical members from breaking free of their own times?

Sinclair’s past, the dark times and states of mind he captured in his writings, horrifies us, but we also need to acknowledge that our present would horrify him.