Books
Hearing the call of the east
Richard West
Rudyard Kipling Lord Birkenhead (Weidenfeld E7.95) Rudyard Kipling Charles Carrington (Macmillan £8.95) The biography of Kipling by the late Lord Birkenhead was banned for thirty years by the late Mrs Bambridge, Kipling's daughter, who had obtained such a right in return for giving the author access to family papers. She saw only a first draft of the book and refused to justify the ban; a foreword by the present Lord Birkentiead takes us no further; but Charles Carrington, who also studied the Kipling papers and whose own biography published in 1955 has just been re:issued, says that Mrs Bambridge disliked Birkenhead personally. Comparing Carrington's sober and scholarly work with Birkenhead's racy, if no less scholarly rival, one sees why Mrs Bambridge preferred the former and why the public may come to prefer the latter.
The two biographers are in general agreement on Kipling's character and the development of his career; the early childhood in India; the miserable period boarded out with foster parents in Southsea; the schooldays that were to be glamourised as Stalky & Co; the joyful return to India as a journalist working ten to sixteen hours a day (what would the NUJ have thought?); his first Indian books and his conquest of literary London, still at only twenty-two; the marriage to an American and his not very happy stay in New England; the death of his first daughter, from Which grief he never really recovered; his Part in the Boer War; his mounting alarm at the German threat; the death of his only boy, fighting the 'Hun'; and the final years of agonising disease through which he warned, correctly, of yet another German war.
Because he began his research more than thirty years ago, Lord Birkenhead was able to interview many who knew Kipling, not least his high-spirited sister Trix, who Shared the incarceration at Southsea. In Spite of her testimony, Lord Birkenhead refused unreservedly to condemn the foster-mother — `the Woman' — remarking that Kipling at that age was no doubt annoying and 'bumptious', a word that recurs throughout the book. He notes that, while at school, Kipling the future militarist and man-of-action was an habitual bookworm who scorned the discipline and the sense of duty that he later required from the British nation.
. Although Kipling hated reporters, especially those meeting the boats in New York, he was a natural journalist, ever inquisi five.% an adjective that Lord Birkenhead uses almost as often as 'bumptious'. Throughout his life he was fascinated by what we should now call technology, by the operation of gold-mines, the fishing fleet, radio, naval torpedo-boats, aeroplanes and the motor-car. His inquisitiveness could extend to the pigeons in St Mark's Square; 'For, say 300 years, there must have been a 12 o'clock gun fired in Venice — the easiest way of marking time. Still all the pigeons rise in their thousands and fly hurtling round the square when the gun fires. Why? . . . Explain!
At Cannes in 1921, Kipling met Bonar Law who had come to rest on the Riviera under doctor's orders. Kipling observed with fascination how few resources in him self the politician possessed. 'Twenty years of political life leaves a man with fewer resources. . . than I should have conceived possible . . . he plays one set of tennis per diem, and bridge when and where he can. Outside of that nothing...' Kipling loathed most Tories, especially Churchill and Beaverbrook. He came to suspect even his friend and first cousin, Baldwin, of socialist sympathies. His feelings for the Liberal Party were summed up in the striking last line of one of his poems: We are not ruled by murderers, but only — by their friends.
Kipling's loathing of all things German became almost insane by 1917 when propaganda stories were spread that the 'Hun' was processing wai-dead for pig-food: Charlotte, when she saw what Herman . Yielded after he was dead, Like a well-conducted German, Spread him lightly on her bread This was the last of what Kipling called 'an otherwise unprintable set of verses dealing with the subject'. His other main hatreds included Ireland— 'that dam', pernicious little bitch of a country' — the Boers, the Jews and, except for a few pals like Theodore Roosevelt, the Americans because of their failure to enter the war.
Lord Birkenhead is disturbed by George Orwell's famous essay of 1942 in which he called much of Kipling's work vulgar, brutal, sadistic and even 'aesthetically disgusting'; I suspect that Orwell used such language to soften up his readers for what was in fact an apologia. Unlike most of the British intelligentsia, Orwell was honest enough to see that, whatever his politics, Kipling was a superb writer, and even that some of his politics were more sensible than those of the 'pansy-left' (Orwell's phrase, not Kipling's).
Lord Birkenhead suggests that many readers take a dual view of Kipling, disliking the politics and even the man, while revelling in his use of language. I would suggest a different reason why Orwell and others felt ambivalent; this was brought home to me by Lord Birkenhead's casual remark that Kipling's poem Mandalay has 'lost [its] magic' George Orwell not only liked Mandalay but went so far as confessing to a friend that it was almost his favourite poem in the language. The reason for this is not hard to seek: Orwell had served in the Burma police and found in that poem everything that had once enchanted him and still lured him back to the East. The spell still holds, for almost every Englishman that I know who knows the East is fascinated by Mandalay.
Somerset Ivlaugham, another East Asia hand, wrote of Kipling: 'His influence for a while was great on his fellow writers, but perhaps greater on his fellow-men who led, in one way or another, the sort of life he dealt with. . . Rudyard Kipling was the first to blaze the trail through the new-found country, and no-one has invested it with a more romantic glamour'. It could be argued that all Kipling's best work was inspired by his experiences in the East, from the youthful Plain Tales from the Hills, to the Barrack Room Ballads, the] ust So Stories and Kim which, as Lord Birkenhead rightly points out, shows a tolerance and a sympathy for people of other views that is absent elsewhere in Kipling. Besides giving a picture of Indian life, that even some Indian writers say cannot be equalled, Kim poses the ancient choice between the life of prayer and the life of action. Kipling, the arch man-of-action, not only sympathised here with the man of prayer but as Lord Birkenhead says: 'It is highly significant of the mood in which Kipling wrote the book that the timid and garrulous Babu, an example of a type of Bengali he despised, should be shown capable of high courage and endurance when put to the test . '
Of Kipling's letters quoted by Birkenhead, none are so vivid and exuberant as the ones he wrote as a boy of seventeen from the sensuous, exhilerating city of Lahore. There is, for example, a stunning account of how a villainous Afghan offers to bribe Kipling with bank-notes, horses and a girl, all of which Kipling refused, although being a lusty young man, he snatched a kiss from the girl while the Afghan's broad back was turned.
To many readers, including Orwell I should imagine, Kipling was never as good as when he wrote of the East. He wrote beautifully about Sussex and its past but somehow the fire was missing. Could it be that his later interest in technology — in bilgepumps, carburettors and flying machines — was somehow an attempt to suppress the sensual call of that hot, exciting continent; a call which is the theme of Mandalay?Even Kipling's South African poems express none of the passion he felt for India; they are for the most part shrill and didactic. It is astonishing that, although an inveterate traveller, Kipling never returned to India after the age of twenty-six. 'Why? Explain!'
It is sad that Lord Birkenhead did not live to see the publication of what is a great biography, stuffed with fascinating perceptions, anecdotes, jokes and asides, as for instance Trix Kipling describing Oscar Wilde as looking like 'a bad copy of a bust of a very decadent Roman Emperor, roughly modelled in suet pudding'. Written with unflagging gusto and style, this is a book for which it was well worth waiting thirty years.
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