Posted on 05/12/2003 6:09:40 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
'Take up the White Man's burden," Rudyard Kipling implored the Americans in 1899 as they began ruling the Philippines, hoping that they would better the lot of the inhabitants, whom he characterised as "new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half devil and half child".
That poem has wrecked Kipling's standing with bien-pensant opinion ever since, but as the United States now bravely embarks on its much more modern form of empire-lite, his reinstatement as a serious political figure - as opposed to merely a pre-eminent phrase-coiner - has received a huge boost.
The Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography prize has been awarded to David Gilmour's superbly revisionist work The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, which triumphantly succeeds in rescuing Kipling's reputation as a significant political thinker.
As the sole Tory reactionary among the judges - the others on the panel were Lady Antonia Fraser, Flora Fraser, Michael Holroyd and Ben Pimlott - I was delighted that Gilmour's argument received such admirably objective appreciation, as he attempted to save Kipling from the taunts of "racist" and "fascist" that have followed him down the decades in countless polytechnic Eng Lit seminars and Left-liberal literary drawing rooms.
The prize was set up in memory of Elizabeth Longford, who died last year aged 96 and whose many biographical subjects included the definitive works on Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. The financier Peter Soros and his wife, Flora, Lady Longford's granddaughter and the biographer of Emma Hamilton and Queen Caroline, have very generously endowed the annual prize. Solely with biographers for its judges, the ELHB prize is set to become a tremendously prestigious award.
It is all the more satisfying that a scholarly work placing the poet laureate of the British Empire in his proper historical and political context should have won the inaugural prize, and won it unanimously. Only six years after his death in 1935, Kipling was declared to have "dropped out of modern literature" by the critic Edmund Wilson.
In 1942 George Orwell declared that "during five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him" as "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting". Although Kipling's aesthetic appeal, summed up by Philip Hensher as "his formal skill in verse and his visionary strangeness in prose", has long been revived by critics, his politics have continued to outrage the politically correct.
Until now. David Gilmour's scholarly and wide-ranging book establishes that, far from being a jingoistic drum-banger and racist flag-waver, Kipling held far more complex and subtle views about the Empire he loved. A racist would not have glorified Gunga Din in the way Kipling did, while a gung-ho wider-still-yet-wider imperialist would never have chosen Recessional as the title of his poem to mark Queen Victoria's ebullient 1897 Diamond Jubilee, in which Kipling warned of the day when "Far-called, our navies melt away/ On dune and headland sinks the fire".
The abuse of Kipling has been long and sustained, yet his works might prove our ideal cultural reference for the next stages of the war against terror: he warned that imperialists could only expect "the blame of those ye better,/ The hate of those ye guard".
Gilmour does a good job explaining the most notorious lines in the canon, in which Kipling seems to describe native peoples as "lesser breeds without the law". I have never believed anything other than that those lines referred to the Kaiser's Germans, who were giving imperialism a bad name in Africa and elsewhere by their brutal and arbitrary conduct.
It has been argued that "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" only referred to the irreconcilable points on the compass, whereas Kipling believed that easterners and westerners could meet as equals. Oscar Wilde's barb about Kipling's "superb flashes of vulgarity" more and more looks like a commonplace inversion of cliché, typical of the kind of gag on which so much of his over-lauded wit depended. Far from being vulgar, Kipling's writings on the British squaddie and British India show how much he idolised, but never idealised, those huge entities in his life.
Edward Said's 1993 book Culture and Imperialism denounced as "profoundly embarrassing" Kipling's masterpiece, Kim, the book that thrust the struggling journalist into the global limelight, but Gilmour has the courage not only profoundly to disagree but also to point out why it is a truly great book. Yet this is not primarily a work of literary criticism. As its subtitle suggests, it is a political examination of the poet's public life and actions.
Gilmour points out how often his subject was proved right in many, if not most, of his predictions. Kipling predicted the Boers would establish apartheid if they were allowed to; as early as the mid-1890s, he warned that the Kaiser would unleash an aggressive world war; he said that communal genocide in the Punjab would accompany any over-hasty transfer of power in India; and he denounced the appeasement of Adolf Hitler. It is a noble, but by no means exhaustive, list.
Of course, it is as the finest phrase-maker since Shakespeare that Kipling will be remembered; many of the phrases we associate with the First World War and its commemoration were his. Kipling sacrificed his beloved son John, who died at the Battle of Loos in 1915 serving with the Irish Guards, for the British imperial ideal; his body was never found. As Gilmour puts it, "John Kipling did not shame his kind", and it was a grieving father who chose many of the inscriptions for the war memorials, such as: "A Soldier of the Great War known unto God."
This chivalrous and well-researched resuscitation of Kipling as a political animal, as opposed to just a man of letters, convincingly absolves him from allegations of racism, fascism, homosexuality and any number of lesser accusations. A genuine hero has been restored to us, in an age that affects not to recognise the species. Best of all, perhaps, for a brand new prize with a sparkling future, for its quality of writing and fearlessness of opinion, Elizabeth Longford herself would have loved this book.
It's one thing to laud Kipling's works; it quite another to attempt to make him into another Nostrodamus, when historical fact is in question, and is so easily proven.
Yes, that's how I first learned it. As I read through it now I hear the music in my mind.
You may be right. I recall Scourby (IMHO the best narrator there ever was) and the series, but I don't remember Mandalay.
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