THE LETTERS OF RUDYARD KIPLING. Volume Five: 1920-30. By Thomas Pinney,
editor.
592pp. 1 4039 2131 8. Volume Six: 1931-6. 544pp. 1 4039 2132 6 Palgrave
Macmillan. Pounds 64 each volume.
What Kipling chose not to leave behind Only its publisher could have picked
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence as a Christmas present for Rudyard Kipling.
The volume came from Heinemann in 1932, a couple of years after Lawrence's
death, along with a handful of other recent titles. Kipling, now
sixty-seven, writes back in thanks for the parcel, saying that "it was
in all ways a treat. All except Lawrence's letters . . .". We brace
ourselves for what might follow, since so many of the sentiments presented
in those letters, while true to themselves, might have been set up to
antagonize Kipling. These are a few from the years of the Great War, in
which Kipling's son was killed:
. . . how good my stories are . . . . Shall they be called The Fighting Line?
After all this is the real fighting line, not where soldiers pull triggers .
. . .
I do not belong to the ship . . . . I don't care if sixty million individuals
die . . . . At present I am laid up in bed with a very bad sort of cold. I
wish to heaven the war would cease, so that one could feel more at rest . .
. . My life is one repeated, tortured, vale! vale! vale! I cannot bear it.
But it isn't the content of these letters that Kipling chooses to object to:
rather, the injustice (and this is to their publisher) of their publication:
. . . All except Lawrence's letters which made one sorry for him. I suppose
people must write letters, but it is not fair to have 'em collected.
This conviction, from which Kipling never wavered, may sometimes have given
pause to Thomas Pinney during the twenty years he has spent on his massive
edition of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling -which is now, with the appearance
of its fifth and sixth Volumes, triumphantly complete. If so, he could have
comforted himself with two particulars. First, that in the weeks following
Kipling's death, in January 1936, his widow destroyed whatever she deemed
sensitive among his papers, so that what has survived (though that includes
over 7,000 letters, of which Pinney has selected a mere 1,888) might seem
more like legitimate salvage. Second, you are less to be pitied, having your
letters collected, if you are Kipling rather than Lawrence: a statement such
as "I myself am always on the brink of another collapse" could
apply in either case, but only one of them would be caught saying it.
Kipling was in more or less constant pain for the last twenty years of his
life, and sometimes dangerously ill, from a duodenal ulcer that went
undiagnosed for all but the last three. But you could not guess the
seriousness of his condition from his own glancing record of "tummy
trouble". (He is more forthcoming about his wife's parallel complaints: "The
pus of the abcyss WAS discharging through the bowel" -good news, by the
way.) In this he follows the mysterious example of one he calls "the
biggest man . . . I ever knew" (Pinney supposes this to be Dr Jameson):
who "never said or hinted in any way under any conditions whether he
was hot or cold or full or empty or sick or sorry. That's character and I
think it gives the highest form of courage". In his admiring essay on
Kipling, T. S. Eliot thought the most distinctive feature of the poems and
stories was the reserve of their author: "no writer has been more
reticent about himself, or given fewer openings for curiosity". One of
our nearest approaches to the quick of Kipling comes in the devastated non-
combatant's war poem "The Children", in which mental and physical
pain are grindingly joined:
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes – to be cindered by fires –
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
But who shall return us our children?
Yet even here – and is Kipling not the only major writer to lose a son in the
First World War? – the poet is absorbed in a plural pronoun that stands for
England.
On those occasions when choric expression failed him, Kipling would take the
option of dignified silence. In August 1930, at Loos, he rose to give the
dedicatory address at a memorial to those "missing" on the
battlefield, among them his boy John.
When, "overcome by emotion", he found himself unable to continue, he "quietly
resumed his seat". It was not his way to show wounds, nor to leave
untidy traces for his interrogators. An autobiographical project left
unfinished at his death, Something of Myself, is "true" only if it
is taken, as Mrs Kipling said it was designed, to deal "with his life
from the point of view of his work".
And Kipling was no more inclined to make an exhibition of himself in letters
than he was in manuscripts intended for publication. Almost inhuman powers
of composure are displayed in a letter he wrote a month after John's death
in 1915: "It was a short life. I'm sorry that all the years work ended
in that one afternoon but - lots of people are in our position and it's
something to have bred a man". It need hardly be said that the
catastrophe of the war in general, and the loss of his son in particular, is
the burden (he favours the sense of "refrain") carried by all he
wrote in the years that followed; it gives his "late" manner its
ground of common pain and mangled perseverance.
Pinney closes the introduction to the fifth volume of the correspondence,
covering 1920-1930, by regretting the prominence there of letters to Elsie
(nicknamed "Bird"), the Kiplings' youngest and only surviving
child (her sister, Josephine, had died of pneumonia in 1899). Although these
are "vivid and entertaining", Pinney says, they are "limited
in their range". Since few of us would wish to plough through the lot
of them, word by word, we can sympathize with this, as with almost every
judgment of such a dedicated and unpretentious editor. But the regret, it
must be said, is a little disingenuous, since he had the power to promote as
many or as few of those letters as he thought proper to the integrity of his
selection. It is also perhaps mildly impertinent: these are unambiguous
private messages doing private work, addressed to a daughter's needs and not
to posterity's appetites.
And it overlooks what is cumulatively revealed by this mass of letters: a
volume and pitch of paternal care, of doting even, that we might never have
suspected.
Plain in person, with her mother's squat figure, and unbiddable by nature,
Elsie Kipling found it difficult to cope with the undivided force of her
parents' affection -especially when their spirits were otherwise so
dejected.
In haste to leave the family home, Bateman's, in Sussex, she married, in
October 1924, a man they could not have liked much. It helped a little that
George Bambridge, a tall, stiff Old Etonian, had been an officer in John's
regiment, the Irish Guards. But at the time of the wedding he was an attache
in Madrid, and so took Elsie out of England to live: Kipling described
himself as feeling "orphaned" by her absence. Moreover, Bambridge
had been too close to the family favourite, Oliver Baldwin (the son of
Rudyard's cousin, the Prime Minister), with whom Elsie had formerly been
besotted. Oliver's homosexuality was no longer a secret, and Bambridge's
marriage to Elsie was childless. But her parents would not be disaffected.
The prime motif of Kipling's letters to his daughter, an understandably
exaggerated concern for her health, gives them a rhythm of mounting anxiety
and hollow relief:
Dearest Bird - I have been out for a walk. On my return found Mother happy
with the wire from G. saying that your cold is "gone". Hurrah! As
I said, it had been bothering me a bit . . . .
For the rest, the antics at Bateman's of successive generations of Scottish
terriers are fully logged; and there is a comprehensive account, page after
page of it, of the Kiplings' social round -a regime partly undertaken,
Pinney suspects, to maintain a supply of the sort of gossip Elsie delighted
in: "lunch at Lady Sybil's! – She do climb. Here's the list: Austen
Chamberlain and his wife; Lord and Lady Carisbrooke" etc. The tone of
all is bravely jolly and performative. The final letter of the decade ends
with another graceful variation on the father's sign-off, the despatch of "a
heartful of love" that has demonstrated its abundance.
Of the remaining letters in these two volumes, a high proportion are to men of
the world, publishers, old soldiers, kindred spirits. The register of these
is rather less sweet, and occasionally nasty. It is the procedure nowadays,
when approaching Kipling's writings, to establish a distance from his
reactionary politics and ideology: usually (in a literary context) with a
nod to Auden's verdict, on "horrible old Kipling" (New Year
Letter) and his "views" (a dismissive but curiously wan usage, in
the elegy for Kipling's exact contemporary, W. B. Yeats). The diatribes
against democracy, against "women-ridden constituencies of 30,000 head
– without brains" are one thing; the blithe racial taxonomy is
another. Travel tends to inflame the habit. This is the smell of Algiers,
described in 1921: "a mixture of warm dust, petrol and jasmine, and
Arab. I have not smelt Arab before. He is milder than nigger but not so nice
as decent Asiatic". Blunter still is Kipling's sense of the "Other
People" of Palestine in 1929: "It is true that Jews smell. So does
everything about them".
Irishmen and Hindus are also routinely abused; though there are political
overtones here, and the slighting humour of a sally against Gandhi has grown
subversive with age: "no one cares two hoots for him and his silences
and his goat's milk".
There seems less to offend the liberal conscience when Kipling applies similar
methods to white races or nation states. His distaste for America's
assumption of moral leadership glows eerily across the years -albeit his
stance is hardened by winters spent in a South of France whose watering
holes are infested by liquorish fugitives from Prohibition. Moreover, his
racially based reading of Europe, through her prolonged, phoney and
malignant peace, now seems less hidebound than smartly prophetic. A
prediction of 1932, for instance:
With luck we may have 7 years or even 10 more of nominal peace but it will be
full of threat and menace. Italy (for very good reasons) will probably come
in with the Hun at the pinch.
A year later, he foresaw the exact form and the narrow margins of the Battle
of Britain:
. . . the next war will be a civilian's affair.
The People themselves will be attacked from overhead without warning and
before Army or Fleet can mobilize. If we have not enough fighting planes up
and out (it will be a question of hours) to beat off the enemy bombers, we
shall be gassed and burned to quietude in a few days.
Auden himself predicted, with one foot on the boat, that Time would pardon
Kipling the ideologue and honour Kipling the writer. But a reader coming to
these letters for direct light on the poems and stories, or on Kipling's
working practices, will be largely frustrated. Partly this is to do with
diminished output. In the last sixteen years of his life Kipling produced
just two volumes of stories (and their complementary poems), to which he
gave the comically drab or clerical titles, Debits and Credits (1926) and
Limits and Renewals (1934). And it seemed at points that his ferocious
willpower would never again be employed on creative projects.
From 1917 to 1923 he sacrificed himself to writing the history of his son's
regiment, The Irish Guards in the Great War (in two volumes), "a weary
weary job of stale records of lost work".
There were also his duties as a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission,
which gave him more satisfaction -at least in the short term, "until
the same ground is shot over once more". In addition, as the most
famous writer in the world, he had to sort a postbag stuffed with the
petitions and manuscripts of "the helpless, the crank, the imbecile and
the lazy", the less mad of them receiving dutiful but unvarnished
replies. Pinney picks us a handful of these:
"Dear Somerset, You are quite right. I have read your Enter Napoleon and,
as you say, it is pretty bad".
Suddenly, on August 26, 1924, Kipling announces that he is "on twelve
days holiday . . . after rather a long spell of work that I've immensely
enjoyed -tales, all of 'em: and all of 'em came by themselves". These
are some of the great stories of Debits and Credits, with its cast of the
maimed and the partly mending, the bereaved and the shell shocked, many of
them brothers in the Masonic Lodge which hosts four of the tales.
Kipling's pride in these pieces coming "by themselves" -as if the
writer of fiction were a sort of medium -is repeated in bulletins on the
succeeding (and not so evenly successful) volume, Limits and Renewals. The
now celebrated "Dayspring Mishandled", set around a Chaucerian
hoax and seemingly carefully elaborated, is "not at all a nice tale,
but it came by itself". The charming French story "The Miracle of
St Jubanus" "suddenly descended upon me three or four days ago,
and I found it doing itself while I held the pen". And it is certainly
the case that we open these late books with the prospect of chancing on
something memorably queer, deep, involuntary.
Yet the letters provide equal evidence of another method, the very opposite of
automatic writing. That Kipling was a stickler for detail is apparent in the
exacting instructions he gives in his war-graves work, and in his dealings
with the publishers of his books. Imagine the groans in Macmillan's art
department when they opened the following:
I have gone carefully through the drawings for The Complete Stalky & Co.
and wish Macmillan's attention drawn to the fact that in the illustration
with the title "The Pleasant Isle of Aves", the cap worn is
incorrect. It should be black, with flat pipings of eight sections
horizontally, as in the Haileybury cap, not as shown in the illustration.
And there are stories, especially in Limits and Renewals, that by no means "come
by themselves", that seem to have been assembled by a patient
collection of all the right bits and ballast. One such is "The Manner
of Men", about St Paul's shipwreck on Malta. For this, Kipling writes
to Sir Percy Bates, Chairman of Cunard, and quizzes him about the "lading"
of ships in the Mediterranean in the second century ad:
Now comes the question of dunnage at the sides. What do you think? The bins
would be clear of her sides by more than usual allowance, to permit of the
wheat swelling. Would the bins be like ore-bins? And would it be good
stevedoring to put say horns and horn tips for the side-stuff . . .?
The next letter to Bates pursues the matter of "undergirding", the
use of cables to strengthen the hull. And it is Kipling's insistence on
fitting his stories with facts (with "research", we would say)
that makes them so confident in their element. "The Manner of Men"
sets off with an ebullient flourish of such side-stuff:
Her cinnabar-tinted topsail, nicking the hot blue horizon, showed she was a
Spanish wheat-boat hours before she reached Marseilles mole. There, her
mainsail brailed itself, a spritsail broke out forward, and a handy driver
aft . . .
And the stylish entrance is rounded off with a humorously apt simile: "she
threaded her way through the shipping to her berth at the quay as quietly as
a veiled woman slips through a bazaar".
(That Kipling's curiosity ranged so widely, that he made himself fluent in so
many arcane technical and professional tongues, makes him the devil to
annotate. Working out of California, Pinney's reach has its limits, as he
acknowledges when he runs against them: "I have been unable to discover
. . .", etc. He falls into error in places - one two-word reference, to
the Scottish town of "Moffet, Dumfrieshire", misspells both
elements -but is less to be blamed when much of Kipling's own spelling is
treacherously improvised.) This is not to suggest that any of these late
stories are merely studied into existence. There is a spiritual dimension to
the least of them, a strong taste for which modern readers are not
immediately prepared. If "The Bull That Thought", about an animal
artist of the Camargue, is the most beautiful, "The Wish House"
(also from Debits and Credits) may have meant most to its author. In a
prosaic Sussex village, two widows -chosen, perhaps, to further deflect an
autobiographical reading – are exchanging their closer reminiscences or "back-lookins".
One, dying slowly of cancer, confesses to using the London establishment of
the title, a place where the visitor may alleviate the illness of a loved
one by accepting other pains for herself: in Mrs Ashcroft's case, the ulcer
on her leg, which she has worn to secure the health of a man she has
secretly favoured. No reader in the 1920s could fail to supply the analogy
of Christ's agony on the Cross; and the story ends with an idiomatic cry to
match His cry of doubt: "It do count, don't it -de pain?"
Several of the stories end in this fashion -with a question mark, real or
implicit. On the other hand, the poems which complement them in the
published volumes nearly all finish with an exclamation. A suggestion that
the stories thus roam our "Limits", the mystery and suffering of
the world, and the poems our "Renewals" or delivery on another
plane, would be only too cautious. Indeed, the last act of Debits and
Credits, in the poem "The Burden", is no less, and no more "fictional",
than the Resurrection of Kipling's Saviour: "His Angel saw my tears /
And rolled the stone away!".
Against the post-war fashion, Kipling was a believer, and wrote like a seer: a "Jeremiah"
or "Old Testament prophet", in the terms of ridicule that greeted
him latterly. He did exactly three score years and ten. At the end, he finds
himself "busy with odds and ends as a man ought to be, when the lights
are getting dimmer". Worn away by age and sickness, he is amused by the
cartoon image he has come to inhabit: "There isn't much more left of me
than a pair of eyebrows and a pair of spectacles and an overwhelming desire
to sleep and sleep and sleep". For one who has followed Pinney's
edition, there is an unconscious meeting here with the son he had outlived,
whose body had been "wiped out" by shellfire in 1915; who had lost
his identification-disk, so that in the wilderness of his grief Kipling had
to summon an itemized description, in a letter to a distant ambassador, in
the pathetic hope of locating something like a corpse:
He is dark with strongly marked eyebrows small moustache, thick brown hair
(straight) dark brown eyes with long lashes.
Height about 5.7 1/2. Small white scar on forehead and one front tooth
slightly discoloured.
He is short-sighted and is most probably wearing gold spectacles.
. . . All his clothes are marked.
The subdued injunction of Kipling's last poem or epitaph, "The Appeal"
– "Seek not to question other than / The books I leave behind"
– was never going to be granted. But if we must have his letters, they earn
him more credits than debits: not least in the loyal service and monumental
labour they have drawn from Thomas Pinney. Kipling may not have thanked him,
but others will.
