(ii) 2 KIPLING JOURNAL June 1983 June 1983 KIPLING JOURNAL 3 THE KIPLING SOCIETY founded in 1927 by J.H.C. Brooking, m.i.e.e. Registered Charity No 278885 PRESIDENT Sir Angus Wilson, C.B.E. VICE-PRESIDENTS Lt.-Colonel A. E. Bagwell Purefoy T. E. Cresswell, M.C. Mrs M. Bagwell Purefoy Joseph R. Dunlap, D.L.S. (U.S.A.) Peter Bellamy R. Lancelyn Green, B.LITT., M.A. Rear-Admiral P. W. Brock, C.B., D.s.o. Mrs Ivy Morton (Melbourne) James Cameron, C.B.E. Joyce Tompkins, D.LIT. C. E. Carrington, M.C. COUNCIL: ELECTED MEMBERS T. L. A. Daintith Mrs Anne Shelford Bryan C. Diamond Revd Gordon Shelford (Chairman) Mrs Lisa Lewis (Deputy Chairman) Brigadier F. E. Stafford, C.M.G., C.B.E. G. C. G. Philo, C.M.G., M.C., K.M.N. Miss Hilary Thomas COUNCIL: HONORARY OFFICIAL MEMBERS T. S. Bittleston, Treasurer J. H. McGivering, Meetings F. L. Croft, LL.M., Solicitor Mrs G. H. Newsom, Librarian John Shearman, Secretary G. H. Webb, o.b.e., Editor of the Journal HEADQUARTERS OFFICE (USUALLY STAFFED WEDNESDAYS & FRIDAYS) c/o Royal Commonwealth Society, 18 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5BJ. Telephone 01-930 6733 Assistant Secretary: Miss Celia Mundy Honorary Auditor: Brendan Connolly, F.C.A. MELBOURNE BRANCH, AUSTRALIA President: [new appointment awaited] Honorary Treasurer: D. P. Wallace Honorary Secretary: Mrs Ivy Morton, Flat 7, 13 Hughendon Road, East St Kilda, 3182 Melbourne, Australia VICTORIA BRANCH, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA President: Captain D. H. McKay Honorary Secretary: Miss Isabel Howard, 938 Verdier Avenue, Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, Canada VOS 1AO SECRETARIAT FOR CANADA, EXCLUDING VICTORIA BRANCH Honorary Secretary: G. D. Fleming Apt. 1402, 2220 Halifax Drive, Ottawa, Ontario KlG 2W7, Canada Honorary Assistant Secretary: Miss Judith Schrieder 37 Fifth Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario KlS 2M3, Canada SECRETARIAT FOR UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Honorary Secretary: Joseph R. Dunlap, D.L.S. 420 Riverside Drive, Apt. 12G, New York NY 10025, U.S.A. June 1983 KIPLING JOURNAL 5 THE SOCIETY'S ANNOUNCEMENTS FORTHCOMING EVENTS, 1983 Unless otherwise shown, all meetings will be at the 'Clarence', 53 Whitehall, London SWl, near Charing Cross Underground Station, at 5.30 for 6p.m. (n.b.). Wednesday 13 July Miss Audrey Ashley on Children's Responses to Kipling Wednesday 14 September A Musical Evening with Peter Bellamy, we hope Wednesday 12 October The Annual General Meeting at 6.30 p.m. at the Royal Air Force Club, 128 Piccadilly. The A.G.M. will be followed by a Buffet Supper the cost of which will be £8.50 per head. The A.G.M. is a public meeting, but only members are entitled to speak and vote. Guests will be welcome to attend the Buffet Supper. The money will be collected at the time. There will be a cash bar. Please let the Secretary know if you will be attending (1) the A.G.M., and (2) the Buffet Supper. This will help with accommodation and catering forecasts. Saturday 22 October A Joint Afternoon School with the Workers' Educational Association (W.E.A.). See page 55. Wednesday 9 November Mr Bryan C. Diamond, M.Sc, on Some illustrations of Kipling's works: a look at some pictures from books and magazines Wednesday 23 November Mr H. J. D. Ricketts (visiting from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand) on Something of SOMETHING OF MYSELF SUBSCRIPTIONS Still a few laggards! Please check your Standing Orders at your Bank. You may be paying too much! Celia is compiling a list of people who seem to neglect their Standing Orders, so you may be getting a gentle reminder in the post one of these days. May 1983 CELIA MUNDY & JOHN SHEARMAN 'TAKE MORE INK' 'Slower a little. What has a bay mare to do ... Is it Mahbub Ali, the great dealer?' 'Who else? I have been in his service. Take more ink . . .' [Kim dictates to the "slim young Kayeth", the Umballa letter-writer, "by virtue of his office, a bureau of general misinformation". Kayeth or Kayasth was the occupation- caste of scriveners. This drawing is one of Stuart Tresilian's fine illustrations in Macmillan's Young People's Edition of Kim, published in 1958.] THE KIPLING JOURNAL published quarterly since 1927 by the Kipling Society 18 Northumberland Avenue, London wc2N 5BJ and sent free to all members worldwide Volume 57 JUNE 1983 Number 226 © THIS ISSUE OF THE KIPLING JOURNAL IS THE COPYRIGHT OF THE KIPLING SOCIETY Contents The Kipling Society: Officers, Branches, etc. 4 THE SOCIETY'S ANNOUNCEMENTS 5 & 55 Frontispiece: 'Take more ink' 6 EDITOR'S NEWS AND NOTES 8-9 RUDYARD KIPLING, SIR WILLIAM OSLER AND THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE by Dr Alex Sakula 10-24 Illustration: Professor Osler 11 Illustration: Laënnec (1781-1826) 17 Illustration: Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54) 19 Illustration: Laënnec auscultates a child 21 ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE IN KIM by Professor David H. Stewart 25-39 Illustration: 'Ohé, Mahbub Ali!' 35 THE film "GANDHI" reviewed by Colin Baillieu 40 Illustration: Mutual regard? 41 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Hell for leather from Mr A. D. M. Oulton; The Eye of Allah from Professor C. F. Beckingham; The missing Foreloper from Mrs T. B. Beattie; Evans and Zogbaum from Mr J. R. Young; Stalky Televised from Mr R. A. Maidment 42-49 Illustration: Zogbaum's Mulvaney 47 LORDLY OF LEATHER Rudyard Kipling and the Motor Car, Part IV 50 BOOK REVIEW: Shamus Wade's albums, Kipling's Secret Monuments, reviewed by D. H. Simpson 51-52 RECENT MEETINGS 53-54 SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP NEWS 55 A Note on the Kipling Society and the Journal 56 8______________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 EDITOR'S NEWS AND NOTES OBITUARY: THEODORE HENRY WHITTINGTON, M.D., F.R.C.P. I last saw him in 1976, when he addressed one of our meetings on "Kipling as a Poet of the Sea". In the magnificently recitable verse with which he copiously illuminated his talk, his enthusiasm came across infectiously— Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded— The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded? The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing— Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing . . . To communicate to an audience, as he did, the surge and splendour of Kipling's poetry of the sea takes skill and sensitivity. With his fine Edwardian presence, a good voice, and a memory seemingly undimmed by age, he swept us along with him— Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb, And the shouting seas drive by, And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and swing, And the Southern Cross rides high! Few of us who heard him realised he was eighty-nine, but the dates prove it. Active to the last, he died last November at ninety-five. Among much else, he was one of our Vice-Presidents, so it falls to me to pay him our Society's tribute. Kipling had meant much to him since boyhood, and he used to say that after Shakespeare Kipling was the most commonly quoted writer in English literature. He certainly enjoyed drawing up stanza after stanza from the depths of his capacious memory. He also had views on the part Kipling's myopia probably played in developing the brilliantly clear detail of close-up observation that is an element in his descriptive powers. As an eye specialist of distinction Dr Whittington was qualified to judge. He was born in Durban in 1887, a clergyman's son, but his father died next year and his mother took him to England. There and in Switzerland, always in economical lodgings, his early years were spent. At eleven he went to the spartan regime of St Edward's School, Oxford; on at sixteen with a classics award to King's College, London, where he studied medicine. There followed a long and steady climb to the upper rungs of the medical profession, by way of house appointments, general practice, research, specialist qualification, concentration on ophthalmology, Harley Street and a June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL______________________9 string of distinguished consultancies. This summary, though, does no justice to the breadth of his attainments—strenuous R.A.M.C. service in France and Salonika in the first War, extensive voluntary medical work and honorary hospital administration in Surrey, lecturing and teaching carried on into old age, contributions to scientific literature, experimental work on the treatment of eye defects in children. There was also rugby football in youth, later tennis, sailing, bridge and bowls; close involvement in church activities, charities and Freemasonry; and his family—his wife who predeceased him, and his sons, one of whom kindly sent me some material for this note. I lately met another eye specialist, who had known Dr Whittington personally and had written his obituary for an ophthalmological journal. "Give me a line on him", I said. "He lived a full life", he replied. THE MARKET Though people say Kipling is coming back into fashion, it is hardly true yet. His most popular books, to be sure, are in print—but were never out of it. Publishers appear to see prospects for some new Kipling criticism and biography and for forthcoming collections of Letters, but whether enduring sales are likely is another matter: with even Carrington out of print the market is hardly bullish. On shallower levels hopeful signs exist—the BBC's televised Stalky last year and their more recent radio talks by Marghanita Laski on Kipling's India. But to the question whether there is a reading public for even half of the 35 or so volumes of Kipling's main work, the answer must in Britain be doubtful, in the U.S.A. negative—though competent judges in both countries will rate Kipling among the dozen leading literary figures of the last hundred years. For those who are interested, there is a compensation: in both Britain and North America secondhand Kiplings and Kiplingiana can be found fairly cheaply. The Driver and Faversham listings (see pages 3 and 52) will confirm this. So do two tempting advertisements in this issue for rather uncommon items: the lovely Detmold prints (page 54) and the handsome Outward Bound Edition (facing page 56). However when it comes to relative rarities for collectors, Kipling prices are high, and rising. Last year I learnt of a Sussex Edition at £3000. Just recently, John Howell, the San Francisco antiquarian book dealers, offered me a Burwash Edition (28 volumes, limited to 1,010 sets, red cloth, signed) for $2000, and an Outward Bound Edition (one of 204 special sets on Japan vellum, bound by Sangorski, red morocco, signed) for $4000. I could not buy them, but the firm kindly agreed to my recording the prices, for your interest. 10_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 RUDYARD KIPLING, SIR WILLIAM OSLER, AND THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE by Dr ALEX SAKULA. m.d., f.r.c.p, d.h.m.s.a. [Dr Alex Sakula first wrote this article for History of Medicine, a magazine now defunct, which published it under the title "Osler and Kipling" in May/June 1980. It is reproduced here with the author's approval, and with several amendments and additions. It throws some illuminating shafts of light on Kipling's warm friendship with Sir William Osler, a Canadian-born medical man of very high distinction in his time and still held in honour today. Dr Sakula, who is a specialist in diseases of the chest, had his medical training at the Middlesex Hospital (which of course has some strong connections with Kipling): in the Second World War he served as a major with the RAMC in India and the Far East. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London, and became Senior Consultant Physician (now Emeritus) at the Redhill General Hospital, and other hospitals in Surrey and Sussex. He has long been closely interested and involved in the study of Medical History, and has written extensively on related subjects. He is Vice-President (in the Section of History of Medicine) of the Royal Society of Medicine. London; Honorary Secretary (Faculty of History and Philosophy of Medicine and Pharmacy) of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London; Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the History of Medicine; and a member of various French and international societies in the same field. He is also President-elect of the Osler Club, London. (In case of correspondence, his postal address is Pilgrims Corner, Pilgrims Way, Reigate, Surrey RH2 9LG.) As for Sir William Osler, in even the briefest scrutiny of his dazzling career, one must be struck by the succession of eminent positions he occupied, the range of learned books he wrote, the international recognition that he attained, all testifying to a mind of uncommon breadth and culture. Though principally a doctor and teacher of medicine, he also served as President of the Classical Association and of the Bibliographical Society. In a recent letter to me Dr Sakula wrote: "Osler was concerned with the art and philosophy and history and ethic and humanity of medicine, as well as its practice. It is these which have drawn me to him—and I would imagine also drew Kipling to him."—Ed.] It is always a fruitful exercise to explore the basis of the friendship between famous figures of the past, as this often sheds additional light on their personalities and achievements. In the early years of this century, such an association developed between two great men—one PROFESSOR OSLER later Sir William Osler. Bt. From the portrait in oils by Seymour Thomas. 1908. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery. London. 12_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 an outstanding man of medicine, Sir William Osler, and the other a Nobel Prize-winning man of letters, Rudyard Kipling. They did not meet frequently, but there existed between them a great mutual regard and respect for each other's calling, and this served to influence their thought and work. OSLER AND KIPLING: BRIEF LIVES Osler (1849-1919) was born in Canada, qualified in medicine at McGill University, was professor there, and later moved to the United States where he was professor at Philadelphia and then at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. He married Grace Cross (née Revere) in 1892, and in 1905 came to England to be Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. He was sixteen years older than Kipling (1865-1936), who was born in India, educated in England, and then spent the years 1882-89 as a journalist in India, which provided him with the raw material for his tales of life in that sub-continent. In 1892 Kipling married an American lady, Caroline ("Carrie") Balestier, and they lived in Vermont, U.S.A., from 1892 to 1896. Kipling's wife and Osler's wife were related, in that they both claimed descent from Paul Revere (of "Revere's Ride" fame). It would appear that during those years when the Kiplings lived in Vermont and the Oslers in Baltimore, they did not meet. In 1902, a few years after their return to England, the Kiplings settled at Bateman's in Burwash, Sussex. Bateman's was a fine old ironmaster's house in Jacobean style, which has now been bequeathed to the National Trust by Kipling's widow as a memorial to her late husband. The Oslers, on coming to Oxford in 1905, settled at 13 Norham Gardens ("The Open Arms"). INFLUENCE OF KIPLING'S PHILOSOPHY ON OSLER Osler was much impressed by Kipling's philosophy of patriotism and industry, and in his address to the students of the University of Toronto in 1903, he took as his text "The Master Word", borrowed from Mowgli in Kipling's Jungle Book, and assured his audience that their master word should be "Work!". This magnificent address, "The Master Word in Medicine", is contained in the collection of Osler's addresses, Aequanimitas (1904).1 June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________13_ During the Great War, in October 1915, when he was addressing the students at Leeds at the opening of the Medical School, he urged them to use all their energies, and quoted from Kipling's famous poem, "If—": If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!" KIPLING: THE MÉDECIN MANQUÉ As a lad, it was Kipling's ambition to be a doctor. Angus Wilson2 relates that Kipling was "said to have hung around St Mary's Hospital" in his school-days. In his later years, he enjoyed associating with doctors, and was a special friend (as well as a patient) of the great Middlesex Hospital surgeon-pathologist, Sir John Bland- Sutton (1855-1936). Bland-Sutton was nearer his age than was Osler. Victor Bonney3 describes Kipling as having, with Bland-Sutton, "pursued an unwilling cock to verify the working of its gizzard". In 1908, Kipling gave his famous address to the medical students at the Middlesex Hospital, "A Doctor's Work", in which he detailed his high moral concept of the doctor's duty. Kipling himself died at the Middlesex Hospital in 1936. THE KIPLINGS VISIT THE OSLERS AT OXFORD In 1907, Oxford University conferred an Honorary D.Litt. on Kipling, and the Kiplings stayed with the Oslers at 13 Norham Gardens. The Chancellor was Lord Curzon, and it was his first encaenia. The academic procession included several distinguished figures—the American writer Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain); the French sculptor Auguste Rodin; "General" Booth of the Salvation Army—and of course Rudyard Kipling. After the formalities, Kipling was very happy to take Osler's son Revere (then aged eleven) out for a country walk. Kipling's own son John (aged nine) was visiting Brighton while his parents were in Oxford, and on his return to Bateman's Kipling wrote to Osler: 14_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 June 29, 1907 Dear Osler Home again! I have just collected the boy from his Brighton visit. He is very keen on the chance of making Revere's acquaintance and we hope you may be able so to plan your holiday as to include a little visit to Batemans. We are disgracefully young—1634—but the mill at the bottom of the garden paid taxes in Domesday Book. I wish I could thank you enough for the visit that you and your household made so delightful to us. However the wife is writing to Mrs Osler and women are cleverer at these things than we It was all a wonderful and penetrating impression which your kindness enabled us to meet and digest in peace. I am afraid I failed in not going to the Christchurch dinner. I ought to have known it was expected of me but I am not good at knowing the things which I should. Ever sincerely yours Rudyard Kipling I have taken your suggestion and am cutting down my tobacco This letter is now on display at Bateman's.4 On 19th July 1907 Osler wrote of the Kiplings' visit, to his friend Mrs Brewster: We have had such a busy summer, so many people coming & going. I sent you a paper with an account of the Encaenia & the reception to Mark Twain and Kipling. The latter stopped with us—such a jolly fellow, so full of fun and with an extraordinary interest in everything. Mrs K. is very bright, & we fell in love with them both. Mark Twain was most enthusiastic about Kipling. It was delightful to hear them joking together . . .5 OSLER/KIPLING CORRESPONDENCE ON ROGER BACON CELEBRATION Some years later, in 1914, Osler invited Kipling to come to Oxford to speak at the luncheon celebrating the septcentenary of the birth of Roger Bacon. Here is Osler's invitation, and Kipling's charming reply: June 1983_____________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________15 May 9, 1914 Dear Kipling, The Roger Bacon celebration is on June 10th. There is to be a presentation of a statue at the Museum which will be received by Curzon. Bridges has promised to write a brief ode which would be recited at the Museum, in which he says he will deal only with philosophy & that he might not mention Roger Bacon at all. Merton College gives a lunch & the Committee empowers me to ask you to write & recite something for us at the luncheon, dealing particularly with the personality & tragedy of Roger Bacon. Do please accept & come to us & bring Mrs Kipling for a little visit . . . [William Osler]6 May 10, 1914 Dear Osler, I can't tell you how shocked I am to find the practice of medicine at Oxford (Roger's own university) so grossly behind the age. It was Galen who laid down that 'anger at meat' (by which he meant all mental emotion save of the mildest) is the mother of evil; and here are you—Regius Professor—counselling me to recite my own verses 'at'—not before or after but at—a bountiful meal. May I refer you to 'Libellus R.B.A. &c, &c, de retardandis senectutis accidentibus et de sensibus conservandis' (Oxford 1590). But seriously, much as I should love to be of use to you I fear I am no good in this matter. I don't know Bacon except from the popular legend; I have no Brewer and I can't get up to Oxford on the 10th and I am up to my eyes in work and arrears of work of all sorts. Forgive me, and send me, as soon as you can, your paper on R.B. to file with my old doctors. Nicholas [Culpeper], who could write even if he couldn't cure for nuts—says at the beginning of his Herbal, 'I knew well enough the whole world and everything in it was formed of a composition of contrary elements, and in such a harmony as must needs show the wisdom and power of a great God.' That seems to me to cover Roger Bacon's outlook and I present it to you for a quotation. The wife joins me in kindest regards to you both and I am, Yours ever sincerely, Rudyard Kipling7 16______________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 INFLUENCE OF OSLER ON KIPLING: HISTORY OF MEDICINE Kipling's interest in matters medical and his friendship with doctors has already been considered. But it was his contact with Osler which stimulated his interest in medical history, and he became intrigued by medical botany and old English 'herbals'. He was also fascinated by astrology and by the legends of the Sussex country folk. Osler also believed in utilising Kipling's knowledge of the East, as in the case of the restoration of the tomb of Avicenna (980-1037), the great Arab physician. Osler wrote to Sir George Birdwood [K.C.I.E., C.S.I., M.D., etc., (1832-1917)]: May 4th 1914 Dear Sir George, There is a movement on foot to restore the tomb of Avicenna at Hamardan [sic] in Persia. Our mutual friend Kipling tells me that you, better than anyone else, would be able to put me in touch with the Mohammedans in India who would be interested in this project. We should be so glad for any suggestions from you. Kind regards, [William Osler]8 KIPLING'S REWARDS AND FAIRIES In 1910, Kipling published Rewards and Fairies, which he said would need to be read by children before people realised that it was meant for grown-ups. This collection of short stories contained two, "Marklake Witches" and "A Doctor of Medicine", which were remarkable in the way they dealt with two contrasting medical figures.9 In these stories, Una was his daughter Elsie (Mrs Bambridge, who died in 1976), and Dan was his son John. "Marklake Witches" is based on René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781-1826), the inventor of the stethoscope. Kipling creates an imaginary situation in which the young Laënnec, serving on a French privateer, is captured off Belle Ile by the British and put in prison in Rye, but is then allowed to stay in his captor's house in Sussex. A rum old character, the village carpenter "Witchmaster", addresses Laënnec as "Mosheur Lanark". Laënnec whittles some LAENNEC (1781-1826) The celebrated French physician, who plays a romantic part in "Marklake Witches", was born in Brittany, studied in various military hospitals, and by 1814 was editor of the Journal de Médecine and on the staff of the Salpêtrière. In 1816 he became chief physician to the Hôpital Necker. in 1822 Professor of Medicine at the Collège de France. This engraving by Ambroise Tardieu—one of the Tardieu family, who were noted for their engravings from the 17th to the 19th centuries—is reproduced by courtesy of the Wellcome Trustees. 18_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 wooden monaural stethoscopes, which the villagers call "devil's ear- pieces", and the village doctor, on seeing Laënnec auscultating the witchmaster's chest, condemns him as "impudently prying into God's secrets by means of some papistical contrivance". However, Laënnec affirms, "I shall save hundreds, thousands, millions perhaps, by my little trumpets". There is no historical basis for such an incident, although Laënnec, while a medical student at Nantes around 1799, did serve with the military, but it was not until twenty years later in Paris that Laënnec produced his first stethoscope. However, it says a great deal for Kipling's medico-historical sense that he could create such a delightful tale. "A Doctor of Medicine" deals with the "physician-astrologer" Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54). Plague breaks out in a Sussex village, and Kipling describes the plague-stone—"a hollowed stone ... where such as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of their wants, and depart". People come, "snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such goods as their conscience reckons fair value". Nicholas Culpeper works out astrologically the connection between the plague and rats dying in the moonlight, and calls, "Take a bat and kill a rat". The plague is controlled, the village saved, and Nick ascribes it all to "Divine Astrology"! The story, "A Doctor of Medicine", was followed by the poem " 'Our Fathers of Old' ", the subject of which is old herbal remedies. The poem commences with the lines— Excellent herbs had our fathers of old— Excellent herbs to ease their pain— and goes on to relate the many medicinal herbs to the stars, which, it is admitted, is based on ignorance; nevertheless— Yet when the sickness was sore in the land, And neither planet nor herb assuaged, They took their lives in their lancet-hand And, oh, what a wonderful war they waged! Yes, when the crosses were chalked on the door— Yes, when the terrible dead-cart rolled, Excellent courage our fathers bore— Excellent heart had our fathers of old. None too learned, but nobly bold, Into the fight went our fathers of old. NICHOLAS CULPEPER (1616-54) This is an engraving by Thomas Cross, done in about 1651. Cross was an artist who specialised in portrait frontispieces to books. (Courtesy of the Wellcome Trustees) 20_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL________ June 1983 And if it be certain, as Galen says, And sage Hippocrates holds as much— 'That those afflicted by doubts and dismays Are mightily helped by a dead man's touch,' Then, be good to us, stars above! Then, be good to us, herbs below! We are afflicted by what we can prove; We are distracted by what we know— So—ah, so! Down from your Heaven or up from your mould, Send us the hearts of our fathers of old! Osler had invited Kipling to stay with him when he came to Oxford for the Romanes Lecture, but Kipling replied to Osler when he had completed Rewards and Fairies: May 18, 1910 Dear Osler, It is extremely kind of you to think about us for the Romanes Lecture (I thought you were in Canada or I'd have written you). The Vice-Chancellor has just wired me that the date is changed to June 7th, and says he is writing. He asked us to stay with him, and hear the lecture, which we greatly want to do. No (talking of lectures), I did not get the lectures on Servetus or 'The Nation and the Tropics'. Please send 'em along. I've just finished my new book of children's tales and shall be curious to see whether the profession will spot Dr Nicholas Culpeper and René Hyacinthe Laënnec as I have drawn them. With the best regards to you both, Ever yours sincerely [Rudyard Kipling]10 And later, Kipling sent a copy of Rewards and Fairies to Osler, inscribed, Excellent herbs had our fathers of old, together with the following letter: Oct. 3, 1910 Dear Osler, Herewith my book of Tales. I wouldn't bother you with it except for Nick Culpeper and Laennec for whom I feel you are in a way responsible. Yours very sincerely, Rudyard Kipling11 LAENNEC AUSCULTATES A CHILD In 1819 Laënnec published his Traité de l'auscultation médiate, which marked his invention of the stethoscope, and was an important milestone in the development of understanding of diseases of the chest. (His fictitious appearance in "Marklake Witches", where he experiments with stethoscopes, is set in 1806.) This picture is part of an illustration by A. Thom, in George Binder's History of Medicine in Pictures, to which we make grateful acknowledgment. 22_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 Kipling continued to write stories dealing with doctors and disease, among them some of those in Limits and Renewals (1932), which, according to Carrington,12 dealt with topics which now meant more to Kipling than the life of soldiers and sailors that he had written about in his youth. A COMMON TRAGEDY Yet a further bond—this time a very sad one—came to unite these two men, when each of them lost his son in action on the Western Front. Osler had only one son, Revere (born 1896). Kipling had two daughters (Josephine, born 1892 but died aged six; and Elsie, born 1896), and one son John (born 1897). To both these men, their sons were a great source of happiness. John Kipling met his end at Loos in 1915, and Revere Osler at Ypres in 1917. Their deaths were a severe blow to their fathers, and Osler never really recovered from it. In 1920 [after Sir William Osler's death] Kipling and Carrie visited the war graves in France. On his return, Kipling wrote to Lady Osler: April 29, 1920 Dear Lady Osler, Thank you from both of us for your most kind note. We've just come back from the battlefields and visits to the cemeteries. I am so glad to know that you found Revere's grave properly tended. It has been difficult to get forward on some of those Salient cemeteries but the work of planting is being pushed ahead as fast as may be so that the cemeteries shall be closed till the headstones are in place. The difficulty of getting these latter delivered is very great. The fact of having no grave of one's own makes one keener if anything that other folk shall be content as near as may be with their graves, and your letter comes very close to my heart. We expect to be at Oxford for the Eights week when I trust Carrie and you and I will meet again. I want to see the Rhodes Scholars; Elsie naturally wants to see young Oxford life again and C. and I both want to see you. With all our love, Very sincerely yours, Rudyard Kipling P.S. Has it ever occurred to you that our dead in the War Cemeteries are the only class set apart for ever, (as near as human forethought can design it), as a sign to the following generations? June 1983_____________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________23 The rest of us go to our civil death and are dully forgotten; but these should be remembered, more by some, for at least as long a time as divides us from Elizabeth's day. I suddenly realised it when I was watching the work of a nearly completed cemetery by Dieppe. R.K.13 OSLER'S LAST YEAR Osler and Kipling were both members of the Athenaeum. In 1919, Osler was elected to "The Club" (sometimes known as "Dr Johnson's Club"), then the most famous dining club in the world. It met fortnightly at Princes Hotel, Jermyn Street. On 1 April 1919 Osler attended, and among those present were the Archbishop of York in the chair, Sir Henry Newbolt, John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling showed little interest in his food that evening, no doubt because of his gastric ulcer, and was more interested in the conversation. Osler wrote on the back of his menu card: Kipling was in very good form and told many good war stories. He said he would not be surprised if in a few years the monastic life was revived—as men were seeking relief from the burdens of a hard world, and turning more and more to spiritual matters . . . Later that year, in December 1919, when Osler was dying of pneumonia and empyema, among the books he enjoyed having read to him, he especially asked for something from Kipling's Jungle Book. Harvey Cushing's Life of Sir William Osler was first published, in two volumes, in 1925. Kipling received a gift copy of this brilliant biography and wrote to Lady Osler: April 22/25 Dear Lady Osler: I am only just back from France (and an awful channel passage!) to find those two splendid volumes. What a record of what a life! I've just begun the first delightful work of skimming through it before I settle down to taking it from end to end. If it isn't presumptuous of me to say so, I think the study of his life is something like adequate. It gives the multiplicity of his interests and some of the breadth of his mind, but a hint at the love his many friends bore him throughout all his days. Personally, I don't feel that the book-side of his temperament is 24_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 dwelt upon enough, but I am quite sure that every specialist in medicine or old books would say the same thing as to the neglect, or shortening, of his special interest. And that is proof of a good biography. But I'll hope to tell you more about it when next we meet. The wife joins me in very warmest greetings and I am always sincerely yours Rudyard Kipling14 CONCLUSION Very little correspondence between Osler and Kipling has survived. The Kipling Papers in the Wimpole Hall archive, recently made available to Sussex University, do not contain any further relevant material. However, the letters quoted here serve to convey a picture of the relationship between these two men. Kipling's philosophy undoubtedly influenced Osler, and it was Osler who stimulated Kipling's interest in the history of medicine. REFERENCE NOTES 1. Sir William Osler's Aequanimitas and Other Addresses (3rd edn, 1946, H. K. Lewis, London). 2. Sir Angus Wilson's The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977, Secker & Warburg, London), pp 331-32. 3. Victor Bonney, "Kipling and the Doctors", in the Lancet (1937), 1501 [also see Kipling Journal (June 1937)]. 4. The text has been transcribed from photocopied holograph. 5. Text derived from that given in Harvey Cushing's Life of Sir William Osler, (1940, Oxford U.P.), p 783. By courtesy of the publishers. 6. As in Note 5, but p 1094. 7. As in Note 6. 8. From the Cushing Papers, by courtesy of the Osler Library, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Text derived from a typed copy of the letter, supplied by the Library. [Where appropriate with these copies, apparent slight slips in the typing have been corrected. The holograph has not been seen.] 9. L. Bragman, "Laënnec and Culpeper as depicted by Kipling", in Annals of Medical History (1927), 9, 129. 10. As in Note 5, but p 905. 11. As in Note 5, but p 927. 12. C. E. Carrington's Rudyard Kipling (1955, Macmillan, London; enlarged 3rd edn 1978), p 548. 13. As in Note 8. 14. As in Note 8. June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________25_ ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE IN KIM by DAVID H. STEWART [Professor Stewart, Head of the Department of English at the Texas A & M University, is an eminent and energetic figure in the field of higher education in the United States. He was born at Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1926, and after wartime service with the U.S. Navy took a succession of degrees relating principally to English, and Russian Literature, at Michigan and Columbia Universities. During over thirty years of wide-ranging university administrative and teaching experience, he has published many scores of articles and reviews in learned journals, on topics as diverse as L. N. Tolstoy, Thackeray, Turgenev, Dickens, Kipling, Sholokhov, Hemingway, Forster, Faulkner, C. S. Lewis, Science and the Humanities, technical vocabulary and the teaching of English. The article which follows originally appeared as "Orality in Kipling's Kim" in the Journal of Narrative Technique, XIII (1983), and I am pleased to have obtained the author's and the editor's permission to reproduce it here—with a few insignificant adaptations of form, for this Journal. Professor Stewart sent it to me with the comment that it "addresses Kipling's style in a manner intended to enhance appreciation of his work". In this I feel sure it succeeds. It also inevitably embodies several technicalities of a kind much more familiar to students of linguistics than to the general reader: but this is not such a bad thing—particularly when that general reader perceives how impressively Kim stands up to a modern specialist's scholarly and exacting scrutiny.—Ed.] Recent studies of the oral or performative element in literature provide novel methods for understanding the work of Rudyard Kipling. In this essay I shall review Kipling's peculiar approach to the creative process, demonstrate its application to Kim, and note some ways of modifying critical response to Kipling and perhaps other writers. Everyone concedes Kipling's exploitation of the visual possibilities of print. Many of his poems and pages of prose accentuate the typesetter's paraphernalia: dashes, leaders, apostrophes, quotation marks, exclamation marks, and uncommon capitalisations appear constantly. The world "telegraphic" is often used to describe his style. He was delighted to include his father's illustrations to enhance the visual appeal of his books. Having mastered the journalist's craft at an early age, he sensed the power and romance of high-speed presses and made print-technology serve his ends, so that critics often credit him with helping initiate the enhancement (or subversion) of literature by incorporating journalistic techniques.1 26______________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 But this conventional sense of Kipling's procedure cannot be reconciled with his own statements. Late in life, he described his early efforts as a writer: I made my own experiments in the weights, colours, perfumes, and attributes of words in relation to other words, either as read aloud so that they may hold the ear, or, scattered over the page, draw the eye. There is no line in my verse or prose which has not been mouthed till the tongue has made all smooth, and memory, after many recitals, has mechanically skipped the grosser superfluities.2 Here the emphasis is clearly on the acoustic element in his work, although he acknowledges the importance of visual and other sensory elements. His is an excellent example of writing that poses problems for readers in our century because, according to Walter Ong, literary criticism ignores auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile imagination and imageries. We are "addicted" to the visual—and thereby "impoverished".3 The importance of the oral-aural elements in Kipling can be demonstrated in a number of ways. He once admitted that "three generations of Methodist Preachers lie behind me—and the pulpit streak will come out!"4 Probably the moralising strain was foremost in his mind, but this is inseparable from the oral medium of evangelical, indeed of Christian, tradition. How this tradition affected Kipling can be witnessed in a negative and positive way by noting his childhood experiences, first in the House of Desolation, where fundamentalist piety took venomous forms, and second in the presence of his mother and her sisters, women with an uncommon "command of words" inherited directly from a Methodist environment.5 Kipling spoke often of his "Daemon". "My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he would withdraw . . . When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey."6 In some sense, Kipling believed that he "heard" what to write and transmitted the message. To whom was he listening? Psychologists might say, "to his alter ego or subconscious"; but he also conversed about, and read, his work to his parents. Another hypothesis claims that it is small groups of "orally bonded" individuals who create all literature. Writers must listen and speak before they write. Until populations became too large, you simply asked an author or his acquaintances what he meant if his poem puzzled you. The coffee house or salon provided appropriate June 1983________________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________27_ settings. Literary works existed within an oral network that obviated "explication". When the network broke down, as it did at first between dominant critics and Wordsworth or Kipling or Faulkner, wild allegations began to fly; but the normal fabric of communication ordinarily restored itself and conversation resumed. Isolated writers such as Emily Dickinson or Kafka, who worked somewhat outside the network, remained enigmatic until critics brought them inside. In our century, local networks continue to function (for example the Black Mountain poets, and the New York Review of Books coterie) but there is no general network, hence every author requires a biographer and dozens of academic explicators. This situation gives credence to the alternative hypothesis that books are made not from living language but from reading (or from misreading) other books, which seems unsatisfactory when applied to Kipling, although he read widely all his life. That Kipling chose isolation by listening to his Daemon and by using as a sounding-board his parents rather than contemporary writers is confirmed in another way, when he told Rider Haggard that "we are only telephone wires"; that is, we transmit messages rather than originating them. He amplified this by explaining that neither he nor Haggard actually wrote anything. "You didn't write 'She' you know; . . . something wrote it through you!"7 Given this assumption about the genesis of his fictions, we can understand why he confessed to writing not from notes but from memory. "I took very few notes except of names, dates, and addresses. If a thing didn't stay in my memory, I argued it was hardly worth writing out."8 Moreover, we can imagine why Kipling's reading his tales aloud was such a compelling experience for the auditor.9 He became a rhapsode, as Plato would have it, disclosing messages to the souls of those who can hear rightly and respond beneficially. At the very end of his life, when he revised his work for the definitive Sussex and Burwash Editions, the only significant change he made in the text of Kim was italicising key words, evidently to guide the voice of his reader towards correct rhythms, accents and intonations. Perhaps this helps explain the violent reactions of readers to Kipling from the first. Of course, his imperial posturing and anti- intellectualism can account for the intelligentsia's repudiation of his work; but the unique vehemence of this reputation suggests that something in Kipling triggers extraordinary responses. Working by ear as well as by eye, he breaks into our consciousness in ways that prevent our keeping the text at arm's length. Nietzsche called the ear "the organ of fear", and Kipling assaults our ears. The "voices" of 28______________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 Kim occupy us, so that we become bridges threatened by the marching feet of a verbal legion, glass strained to the shatter-point by the pitch of words. His books talk in ways that force us to answer, and we try to reduce the stress of invading language by talking back—by humming along or humming against. How is it that a writer so expert with typographic conventions manages to neutralise them, to elicit continually an aural as well as a visual response? As critics recognised when Kipling's career began, his writing is like speech or music. Already in 1890, Barry Pain wrote a parody of Kipling that included the observation that when we speak ... we often put a full stop before the relative clauses—add them as an afterthought . . . But when we write we only put a comma. The author of Plain Tales from the Hills saw this, and acted on the principle. He punctuated his writing as he did his speaking; and used more full stops than any man before him. Which was genius.10 George Moore claimed that Kipling's language was rhetorical, "copious, rich, sonorous . . . None since the Elizabethans has written so copiously."11 And T. S. Eliot believed that, like Swinburne's, Kipling's work "has the sound-value of oratory, not of music ... is in fact the poetry of oratory; it is music just as the words of orator or preacher are music; they persuade, not by reason, but by emphatic sound."12 That this is equally true of Kipling's prose seems clear from the testimony of Henry James and other critics who sought musical analogues to describe Kipling's style.13 Of greater importance than these impressionistic responses is an approach through Kipling's use of colloquialism, which many critics mistook for journalism. Richard Bridgman examined the rise of colloquialism in American literature, tracing the slow and clumsy process by which authors discovered how to convey dialect and direct speech in a convincing way. He concluded that Kipling's contemporaries, Twain and James, were the first writers to succeed and that, except for James's experiments, "nothing very clear or purposeful happened to the vernacular in literature for a quarter of a century following the publication of Huckleberry Finn.14 Bridgman refrains from noting the parallels between Twain and the so-called "regional" writers all over Europe during this period, from Leskow in Russia to the practitioners of Heimatkunst in Germany;15 nor does he call attention to the similarities between Twain and Kipling as uneducated ex-journalists who expanded the literary lexicon by successfully importing colloquial language. He does not ask the obvious question: Would English and American literature have June 1983_________________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________29_ diverged so significantly in the twentieth century if English writers had capitalised on Kipling's stylistic explorations, as American writers did on Twain's? Approaches to Kipling through dichotomies between journalism and "true art", or between imperialist vulgarity and compassionate humanism, can be productively supplemented by examining the tension between oral and literate strategies. To be sure, others have noted what we may call the "gestic" component in Kipling's language. Even in German translation, Berthold Brecht evidently heard "vividness and epigrammatic directness of speech" in Kipling's diction, which can be called "gestic".16 R. G. Collingwood described Kipling as the one who shocked late nineteenth century aesthetes by reviving "magical art", dead since the Middle Ages. It is an art that has strong vocal overtones which he calls "speech gestures".17 Kim invites us to hear how Kipling conveys orality through print. In chapter VII there are two descriptions that provide entry to the book in a new way. First, Colonel Creighton explains Kim's future in school and as a government servant: Kim pretended at first to understand perhaps one word in three of this talk. Then the Colonel, seeing his mistake, turned to fluent and picturesque Urdu and Kim was contented.18 The second passage is a description of the language of schoolboys at St Xavier's: And every tale was told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed un- consciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. Kim watched, listened, and approved. This was not insipid, single-word talk of drummer-boys. Both passages remind readers that the novel is mainly "oral" (three-fourths is direct discourse), and also that it is a "translation". Kim contains four "languages", each with its own distinctive style. First there is Kipling's (or the omniscient narrator's) style, that encyclopaedic, confiding, emphatic and often elliptical language that was his trademark. We hear it, with all its commas, dashes and foreign words, in the first paragraphs of the novel and from time to time thereafter. For some readers, it obtrudes, as Thackeray's voice does. For most readers, however, it is a supple instrument with astonishing versatility that enables him to present superb descriptions, for example of the Grand Trunk Road in chapter IV. It 30_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 also provides him the latitude to adopt the second person singular— Therefore, you would scarcely be interested in Kim's experiences as a St Xavier's boy . . . [chapter VII]— the first person plural— with almond-curd sweetmeats (balushai we call it) and fine- chopped Lucknow tobacco . . . [chapter VIII]— the imperative mood— Behold him . . . Watch him, all Babudom laid aside, smoking at noon . . . [chapter XV]— and the ironic voice— Never was so unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust upon aliens . . . [the Babu, chapter XIII]. One added trait of this "narrator's language" is the high incidence of compounds, frequently hyphenated— fiend-embroidered draperies; brow-puckered search; many-times- told tale; quick-poured French; de-Englishised; bad-worded in clumsy Urdu . . . In addition to these verbs and verbals, compounding can be found in other parts of speech; and it led one critic to speculate that this is an important source of Kipling's epic flavour and fairy-tale quality.19 Certainly it is Kipling's "deviant language" in Kim (whether the narrator's or some character's) that makes his idioms so emphatic, and that gives the novel a kind of deep-structure that takes us back to Anglo-Saxon word-formation. The second language of Kim is the voice of the homeland (Belait, as Kim calls it). Creighton, the Reverend Bennett and Father Victor, even the drummer-boy from Liverpool, speak "standard English"— more or less. That is, each speaks his own dialect of English, always signalled by the appearance of contractions—'em for them, an' for and, 'ud for would, amazin' for amazing. Moreover, Kipling distinguished Victor's Irish from Bennett's English. It is this conglomerate "normative language" that gives special flavour to what might be called "native English", the third language of the novel. This is Kim's "tinny saw-cut English" ("oah yess") June 1983________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________________31 before he attends school. It is the English of the bazaar letter-writers, for example "Sobrao Satai, Failed Entrance Allahabad University", who added to the lama's letter to Kim: P. M. —[sic] Please note boy is apple of eye, and rupees shall be sent per hoondie [cheque] three hundred per annum. For God Almighty's sake. [chapter VI] This is also the Babu's English, which Kipling exhibits frequently— "the best of English with the vilest of phrases" [chapter XIII]. For example, in chapter XII, the Babu describes himself to Kim in English— By Jove! I was such a fearful man. Nevar mind thatt. I go on colloquially . . . Then he switches to Urdu, which Kipling translates into standard English. But the signal for this switch is now buried for most readers. The compulsory examination for British officers in Hindustani was called the "colloquial".20 Kipling provides an aural sign for the switch between languages. It is in this third language that Kipling often devises colloquial deformations that accentuate an aural response to words. When the Babu says that something is creaming joke, or refers to locks, stocks and barrels, we must "sound out" the right meaning, as we do when Huck Finn describes a subject taught by the Duke as "yellocution". Kipling was especially adept with deviant verbs. Thus a scribe, writing English translated from the lama's dictation in imperfect Urdu, records: The Almighty God blessing your Honour's succeedings to third an' fourth generations and confide in your Honour's humble servant for adequat renumeration . . . [sic, chapter VI] The most dramatic example of Kipling's "foregrounding" of verbs occurs in chapter v, when Kim converses with Father Victor: 'They call me Kim Rishti ke. That is Kim of the Rishti.' 'What is that—"Rishti"?' 'Eye-rishti—that was the regiment—my father's.' 'Irish, oh I see.' 'Yess. That was how my father told me. My father, he has lived.' 'Has lived where?' 'Has lived. Of course he is dead—gone-out.' 32 _______________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 The incorrect present perfect, has lived, is exactly right in place of a past tense of the verb, died, for conveying the un-Western blur of life with death. It is this "translated" Urdu and Hindi (for example, the boys' talk at St Xavier's) that comprises perhaps ten percent of the novel. Finally there is Kim's fourth language, in which over half the book is written. It is "actual" Urdu, often spoken with an accent. Kipling performs an impressive feat here, by making English sound (and look) non-English. He does it by leaving remnants of the original vernacular, single vocables, sometimes translated in parentheses, but always italicised as if inviting us to sound them aloud, however senseless and alien. He does it by "Germanic" capitalisations, a typographic trick which accentuates nominals. He does it by studding the language with borrowed, sometimes inflected, words (usually mispronounced) from English, for example te-rain for train, Berittish for British, tikkut for ticket, takkus for taxes, Ker-lis-ti-an for Christian, and a number of corrupted proper names. He does it by punning—in both English and Urdu, and once in Pushtu.21 He does it with archaic and Biblical constructions— We be craftsmen; the gates of his mouth were loosened; if so be thou art woman-born; whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin; thou wast born to be a breaker of hearts . . . Finally he does it with a variety of malformations. In chapter VII, Kim leaps from a cab to greet the lama. The driver exclaims: But what is to pay me for this coming and recoming? A moment later the lama explains his own sudden appearance: perceiving myself alone in this great and terrible world, I bethought me of the te-rain to Benares . . . Recoming and bethought are little surprises in Kipling's rhetorical armoury, that make his language vitally oral. In addition to these four distinct languages of Kim, there are several other features of the text that enhance its aural appeal. The poetic epigraphs for each chapter serve as a musical "parados". Kipling's habit of radical excision and compression of his manu- scripts (Kim "as it finally appeared was about one-tenth of what the first lavish specification called for")22 has the paradoxical effect of accelerating the reader's "vocalisation" by forcing him to fill in the gaps. Kipling's prodigal descriptions seem all the more copious June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________33, because they are rare. They are showpieces, set in a tale that advances almost exclusively by laconic dialogue. More importantly, Kipling's visual imagery is usually random and non-cumulative. Except for such obvious links as between Kim and a colt or horse, and the recurrent allusions to the Wheel, River and Road as metaphors of life, Kipling's images rise momentarily to the surface and then vanish. By no means does this minimise Kipling's appeal to the eye (or indeed the other senses). His repeated use of horizontal lighting to intensify physical descriptions gives Kim its visual brilliance. But Kipling never organises and unfolds his texts the way Joyce, for example, does. As Hugh Kenner has observed, Joyce depends on "technological space"; that is, on the printed page exclusively, on "the antithesis between the personal matrix of human speech and the unyielding formalisms of the book as book".23 Ulysses strives for a kind of simultaneity in which incremental repetitions and recurrences call attention to themselves. We must refer constantly to the text to see them. Kim inhabits the aural recesses of memory, creates echoes in addition to visions. Still more important in Kim is the constant "translation" from the vernacular, which creates an unusual aural medium. For example, characters "speaking" Urdu use at times an "elevated" vocabulary that would be inappropriate in plain English. Kim tells Colonel Creighton, "it is inexpedient to write the names of strangers". The Jat farmer says of his sick son, "he esteemed the salt lozenges". Later, when Kim scolds him for meddling, he says, "I am rebuked". Kim describes the ash in the farmer's pipe as auspicious. Such diction is incompatible with these characters' vocabularies in English, but here in "translation" it seems normal, therefore doubly suggestive. A second example: the novel is full of oral formulae— Let the Hand of Friendship turn aside the Whip of Calamity— that are unknown in English yet familiar because they conform to the structure of maxims. A speaker of Urdu can actually translate some of them back into the original, so that he may read I am thy sacrifice but hear Main tum pe qurban jaoon, a Muslim oath of fidelity. An English reader hears, instead, echoes from an archaic, perhaps Biblical, past that authenticates such 34_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 statements. Curses— Room for the Queen of Delhi and her prime minister the gray monkey climbing up her own sword!— oaths— I am thy cow!— and proverbs— For the sick cow a crow; for the sick man a Brahmin— abound in Kim. The structure is unmistakable although the words are strange, so that meaning comes as emphatically through rhythm and intonation as through diction. (The continual appearance of conventionalised and formulaic locutions makes Kim rhetorical, dialogic. Its compressed style, confiding narrator, and loquacious characters everywhere reinforce an "apophthegmatic" quality, that transforms the book into a sustained enthymeme which, as students of rhetoric know, forces auditors to participate in and contribute to verbal transactions.24) A final striking characteristic is the appeal to our ears through frequent use of exclamations and the imperative mood that they create25— Hear and obey!—Let all listen to the Jâtakas!—The Search is sure!—Hear the most excellent Law!—It is found!—Be quiett!— These are cries that "leap above" the surface noise of Indian life and Kipling's high-volume prose. The mood is so strong that it deflects the narrator's voice from its normal indicative mood. For example, in chapter v, there is a description of the Mavericks setting up camp for the night, pitching tents, unpacking equipment, and behold the mango-tope turned into an orderly town as they [Kim and the lama] watched! In chapter XV, after summarising Hurree Babu's hoodwinking of the foreign agents, the narrator's voice suddenly rises: Behold him, too fine drawn to sweat, too pressed to vaunt the drugs in his little brass-bound box, ascending Shamlegh slope, a just man made perfect. 'OHE, MAHBUB ALI!' The horse-trader, his deep, embroidered Bokhariot belt unloosed, was lying on a pair of silk carpet saddle-bags, pulling lazily at an immense silver hookah. He turned his head very slightly at the cry; and seeing only the tall silent figure, chuckled in his deep chest. 'Allah! A lama! A Red Lama! It is far from Lahore to the Passes. What dost thou do here?' The lama held out the begging-bowl mechanically. 'God's curse on all unbelievers!' said Mahbub. 'I do not give to a lousy Tibetan; but ask my Baltis over yonder behind the camels. They may value your blessings.' [This drawing is by the British illustrator Robin Jacques, and comes from a fine edition of Kim published in 1962 by Heritage Books, U.S.A. For other examples see our issue of March 1981. Reproduced by kind permission of the Heritage Club.] 36 _________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 The epigraph of chapter I — Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day — and the second sentence of the novel — Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab — are emphatic generalisations that sound like a Commandment. If it is true that Kipling managed his typographical medium in a way that recreates the illusion of hearing rather than reading, then perhaps we can explain Kim's "magical" appeal to readers, and also its peculiar isolation as a modern classic. It speaks to us from an oral- aural world not only of nineteenth century Anglo-India but of childhood. It seems to short-circuit the alphabetical print medium and operate in terms of the seven features of oral cultures that Walter Ong has listed: (1) stereotyped or formulaic expression, (2) standardization of themes, (3) epithetic identification or "disambiguation" of classes or of individuals, (4) generation of "heavy" or ceremonial characters, (5) formulary, ceremonial appropriation of history, (6) cultivation of praise and vituperation, (7) copiousness.26 Illustrations from Kim for each of these come to mind at once and suggest the profoundly conservative tendency of the novel. Formulaic language, clichés, incantatory and exclamatory expressions withdraw us from the abstract, objective world of print, according to Ong, and reintroduce us to a world of matter, potency, indistinctness and subjectivity.27 This occurs because voice "signals the present use of power", sound being "more real or existential than other sense objects, despite the fact that it is more evanescent.28 Like Twain and other American vernacular writers, Kipling transcribed English that was under the stress of an alien environment, which wrenched it with new words and accents, as well as novel concepts. Anglo-Indian English was as different as American English from the language of the homeland.29 Kipling's typographical medium captured the sense of adventure and expansiveness that rapid language modification conveys as it assists us in the struggle to assimilate new experience. (His lexical and syntactic innovations explain in part why Kim is a valuable book for people learning to read.) June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________37 To the triumph of print technology, Kipling reacted one way, Joyce another. Both of them listened diachronically to language, and tried to transmit the word they heard. But Kipling's creed said, "Drift, wait, and obey", which meant that he affirmed traditional wisdom. Joyce followed a more romantic and modern path, preferring what Ong calls the "irenic" stance, and avoiding the "free dialogic struggle with an audience"30 which was the older, perhaps more venerable, way to speak. AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTES 1. Legouis and Cazamian, A History of English Literature (Macmillan, New York [& Dent, London] 1927), p 458; W. Y. Tyndall, Forces in Modern British Literature (Knopf, New York, 1947), p 65; Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Macmillan, New York, 1948 [& London]), p 19. The best survey of English criticism is in J. J. Rouse, The Literary Reputation of Rudyard Kipling: A Study of Kipling's Works in British Literary Periodicals, 1886-1960 (Dissn., New York Univ., 1963). 2. Something of Myself ch III. 3. Interfaces of the Word (lthaca.:Cornell U.P., 1977), p 131. Kipling recalled that his Anglo-Indian audience in the early days was not interested in his dreams and ideals but in the "accuracy" of his stories. "My young head was in a ferment of new things seen and realized at every turn and—that I might in any way keep abreast of the flood—it was necessary that every word should tell, carry, weigh, taste and, if need were, smell" (Something of Myself ch VIII). "Kinaesthesia" in Kipling's work is examined by Antonia Graffin Spee, Der Sinnesimpressionismus bei Kipling, (Dissn., Bonn, 1934). 4. A letter to his cousin Florence Macdonald, see the Methodist Times, 23.1.1936, quoted in A. R. Ankers, "The Kiplings ofYorkshire",Kipling Journal, Sept 1979. 5. A. W. Baldwin, The Macdonald Sisters, (Davies, London, 1960), pp 36 & 40. 6. Something of Myself, ch VIII. 7. Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard, ed. M. Cohen (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson U. P. [also Hutchinson, London], 1965), p 100. 8. Something of Myself, ch VIII. 9. As a child, Angela Mackail [later Thirkell] heard Kipling read. Quoted in ch 12 of Carrington's Life: "The Just So Stories are a poor thing in print compared with the fun of hearing them told in Cousin Ruddy's deep unhesitating voice. There was a ritual about them, each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same each time and without which the stories are dried husks. There was an inimitable cadence, an emphasis of certain words, an exaggeration of certain phrases, a kind of intoning here and there which made his telling unforgettable." 38_________________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________ June 1983 10. "The Sincerest Form of Flattery", in Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. L. Green (Barnes & Noble, New York [also Routledge & Kegan Paul, London], 1971), p 63. 11. "Kipling and Loti", ibid. pp 288-89. 12. "Kipling Redivivus", ibid. p 323. 13. James called The Seven Seas "all prose trumpets and castanets and such— with never a touch of the fiddlestring or a note of the nightingale", (Letter to J. Sturges, 5.11.1896, ibid. p 69). By 1901, when he wrote to Kipling about Kim, James disapproved of Kipling's artistry; nonetheless "the quality, the prodigality, the Ganges-flood [of Kim] leave me simply gaping", (L. Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years [Lippincott, New York, 1969], p 53). For Dixon Scott, Kipling's "tunes" lacked "glides and gracenotes" (Men of Letters [Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1917], p 56). Humbert Wolfe tried to explain Kipling's "sound-control" by analogues with saxophone, fiddle, oboe and flute playing, (Dialogues & Monologues [1929; rept. New York, Books for College Libraries Press, 1970], pp 78-79). 14. The Colloquial Style in America (O.U.P., New York, 1966), p 131. 15. I tried to sketch the complex history of this problem in "Faulkner, Sholokhov, and Regional Dissent in Modern Literature", in William Faulkner, ed. Zyla & Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech. Univ., 1973), pp 135-50. 16. J. K. Lyon, Berthold Brecht & Rudyard Kipling: A Marxist's Imperialist Mentor (Mouton, The Hague, 1975), p 23. 17. The Principles of Art (Oxford, Clarendon, 1938), pp 70 & 243. 18. Margaret P. Feeley notes that these sentences replace two others in the manu- script: "Kim understood perhaps one word in three of this talk to which he listened politely, one eye on the dusky landscape of the Northwest. The Colonel spoke always in Urdu." From "Kipling's Kim: Introduction and Annotations", Dissn., City Univ., New York, 1976, p 556. 19. W. Leeb-Lundberg, Word-Formation in Kipling (Lund: Ohlsson, 1909), pp 45-49. 20. Readers' Guide, p 263. One measure of Kipling's success in transcribing Bengali English is to compare it with Arnold Wright's Baboo English as 'Tis Writ, (T. F. Unwin, London, 1891). 21. Shamsul Islam, "Kipling's Use of Indo-Pakistani Languages", Kipling Journal, Sept 1969. 22. Something of Myself, ch V. Kipling recommended three re-readings of a text, the last one "aloud alone and at leisure", with a camel-hair brush and Indian ink for excisions. "The magic lies in the Brush and the Ink", ibid. ch VIII. 23. The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert. Joyce & Beckett (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1974), pp 47-48. The origin and development of "spatial form" in criticism, beginning with Joseph Frank's well-known essay (1945), are surveyed in Spatial June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________39 Form in Narrative, ed. Smitten & Daghestany (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1981). 24. L. F. Bitzer, "Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited", Quarterly Journal of Speech, XLV (Dec 1959), pp 399-408. 25. The exclamation mark may be the most distinctive part of Kipling's stylistic signature in Kim. It occurs far more often here than in his stories or journalistic writing. Two sections of Stalky & Co., dated 1898 and 1899, are full of exclamations, but the language is the elliptical jargon of schoolboys, "single- word talk" that Kipling avoided in Kim. For comparison, I checked seven other "adventure" stories: Henty's In Times of Peril: A Story of India (1881), Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1894), Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1886), Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters (1896), and Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). Only Steel's novel and chapters 20-33 of Twain's approach Kim in frequency of exclamations, but their effect is different, because the narrator's voice in the former remains unimplicated, and the narrator of the second is Huck himself. 26. Interfaces of the Word, p 102. 27. Ibid. pp 136-37. 28. The Presence of the Word (Yale U.P., New Haven, 1967) pp 111-12. 29. Phiroze E. Dustoor makes an interesting comparison of English in India and America: The World of Words (Asia Publishing, New York, 1968), pp 101-02. And of course one must always consult Yule & Burnell's Hobson-Johnson. 30. Interfaces of the Word, pp 222-23. A decoration by Stuart Tresilian in Macmillan's 1958 edition of Kim 40_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 THE FILM "GANDHI" reviewed by COLIN BAILLIEU "He might almost be called the first citizen of India. And his relation to India determines that about him which is the most important thing about a man, his religious attitude. It is an attitude of comprehensive tolerance. He is not an unbeliever—on the contrary he can accept all faiths: that of the Hindu, that of the Buddhist, Parsee or Jain ..." Richard Attenborough on Gandhi? Could be, but actually T. S. Eliot on Kipling.1 What then would Kipling have thought about Attenborough's "Gandhi"? The great story-teller would have relished the good story, the great mythologiser would have appreciated the mythology, and the great craftsman would have marvelled at Ben Kingsley's performance. The film has one great distortion, and this Kipling would have spotted because it was in direct conflict with his own mythology of the imperial ideal. From the time of his own early success Indian independence had been a matter of when and how: it was seen to be inevitable and indeed the fruition of our imperial mission. Kipling would have wanted a united India, and he certainly wanted Independence to come later than his cousin Stanley Baldwin planned it. However, he would have been angry at the basic assumption of the film that Independence was the sickly child of the Congress Party, revived and brought to maturity by one man alone. He would have been even more incensed by the inevitable polarisation to which such a view led: the assumption that the I.C.S. and the Indian Army were staffed by cardboard nincompoops. Behind the stereotypes and the over-simplification the film has other great heroes—the people of India, and their land. Of these Kipling would have felt proud—they were also his people and his land. The mystical bond between land and people, and the transitory nature of their rulers, are themes well known to Kipling— And the passion and the piety and the prowess of his line Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine . . .2 But that was Sussex, and there in Bognor—where Kipling had talked over old times with his convalescent King—I came out of "Gandhi" and hoped he would have understood. 1. A Choice of Kipling's Verse, by T. S. Eliot, with an essay on Kipling (Faber & Faber, London, 1941: Scribners, New York, 1943). 2. From "The Land" (A Diversity of Creatures, also Definitive Verse). MUTUAL REGARD? This drawing appeared in the periodical John Bull on 15 October 1932, Gandhi being then sixty-three, Kipling sixty-six. Perhaps a reader can supply some particulars of the artist, and confirmation of his name—[Stewart?] Whitelaw. He is erroneously listed as "Whitlow" in Livingston's Bibliography (Suppt. p 244). By 1932, with his unforgettable appearance, enigmatic self-projection, and talent for publicity, Gandhi was very well known in Britain where, before returning to a long hunger-strike and to championship of the Untouchables, he had been the Congress Party representative for part of the protracted and inconclusive Round Table Conference on India. He met a great range of people, and was presented to the King and Queen, but we have no record of his encountering Kipling (who in 1930 in private conversation in Canada had described Gandhi as "a paste-board figure" and politically hypocritical, and was unlikely to have changed his mind since). Gandhi himself, who came to recognise the tendency for passive Civil Disobedience to degenerate into uncontrolled violence, had a warm respect tor Britain and many close personal connections here. He is known to have read Kipling in prison in the 1920s, and to have had particular regard for the poem "If—". 42______________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR HELL FOR LEATHER From Mr A. D. M. Oulton, C.B., 35 St John's Wood Terrace, London NW8 Dear Editor, In your March 1982 issue [page 45, headed Hell for Leather] you kindly published a letter from me, asking for help in preserving the bindings of my red leather Macmillan/Methuen set of Kipling. At a dinner of the Saddlers' Company recently a West country saddler gave me the answer, which is burgundy Meltonian shoe polish, followed by Meltonian white wax to remove any surplus. The results are very gratifying. Do you happen to know whether the title to this letter has anything to do with R.K.? Yours truly, DEREK OULTON NOTES BY THE EDITOR 1. This welcome advice usefully supplements that submitted by another member, Miss Jean McKenzie, which we published in the issue of June 1982, also under the heading Hell for Leather. 2. 'Hell-for-leather' indeed has a strong Kipling connection. He was the first writer to use the term. Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang defines it as "Desperately and vigorously (or swiftly): coll[oquial]: from ca. 1875 (W.) [i.e. Weekley's Etymological Dictionary of Modern English]. Kipling, 1892, 'When we rode hell- for-leather . . .'. Perhaps out of all of a lather by leather, skin as affected by riding (W.)." 3. The pedigree suggested by Weekley may be correct, but the derivation of slang is often oblique and illogical. The inherent violence of this term comes over adequately from hell (which speaks for itself) and from some of the nuances of leather (to leather was to thrash; to lose leather was to be saddle-galled; 'leather- bumpers' was what the infantry called the cavalry; and there were also several low and improper derivatives). 4. Partridge is astray in his dating of Kipling. The term first appeared in "The Valley of the Shadow" (The Story of the Gadsbys, 1888), where Macklin says, "Gaddy, take this chit to Bingle and ride hell-for-leather. It'll do you good." 5. The second and better-known context is in "Shillin' a Day" (1889, later collected in Barrack-Room Ballads), where the retired Troop-Sergeant-Major laments his lot, as a commissionaire in "the wet and the cold" of a London pavement, and recalls his years of active service— Oh, it drives me half crazy to think of the days I Went slap for the Ghazi, my sword at my side, When we rode Hell-for-leather Both squadrons together, That didn't care whether we lived or we died . . . June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________43 THE EYE OF ALLAH From Professor C. F. Beckingham [Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies, University of London], 56 Queen Anne Street, London W1M 9LA Dear Editor, Regarding your footnote to Dr Tompkins's article on "The Variety of Kipling" (Journal of September 1982, page 33], I think it is safe to say that the Arabs did not have the microscope. Juan Vernet of Barcelona, who is very good on such matters, in The Legacy of Islam (2nd edition, Schacht & Bosworth, O.U.P.) writes of Ibn al-Haytham, "He also examined the properties of lenses, whose burning power, as well as their power of magnification, had been pointed out by the classical writers . . . but it is doubtful whether he knew the help they could give to the presbyopic." He quotes from a poem by Jámí (d. 1492), who says, "Thanks to the lenses from Europe I have four eyes instead of two", and infers that in the 15th century Europe was the centre of development of the optical industry. He then comments: "The attempts of Roger Bacon to combine lenses had not led to the telescope nor the microscope because for medieval science—distant echo of the apostle Thomas—only the tangible had a real existence, while the visual was susceptible of being deformed by optical illusions." Yours sincerely, CHARLES BECKINGHAM THE MISSING FORELOPER From Mrs T. B. Beattie, 2 Old Bury Hill House, Westcott, Dorking, Surrey Dear Sir, I enclose an advertisement for the Daily Telegraph, taken from the programme for a performance at the Festival Hall, London, in December 1980. I wonder if its reference to a "lost poem" of Kipling's is of interest, and whether the origin of the poem was ever established? Yours faithfully, JOSIE BEATTIE [see the enclosure printed overleaf] 44____________ _________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 ENCLOSED ADVERTISEMENT [Note by Editor. The advertisement is captioned "THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: More news of the arts then, more now", and consists of an extract from the issue of that newspaper dated 1 January 1909, as reproduced below.] "LAST WON WILDERNESS" A LOST KIPLING POEM In this month's "Illustrated Century Magazine" Mr Edmond S. Meany, of Seattle, Washington, writes an interesting "open letter" on a lost poem by Mr Rudyard Kipling. He says: A few years ago I noticed that Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, of the University of Wisconsin, prefaced his well-known essay on "The Influence of the Frontier on History" with a beautiful and apt quotation of poetry. It was credited to "The Foreloper" by Rudyard Kipling, and ran as follows: And he shall desire loneliness, and his desire shall bring Hard on his heels a thousand wheels, a people, and a king; And he shall come back o'er his own track, and by his scarce cool camp; There he shall meet the roaring street, the derrick, and the stamp; For he must blaze a nation's ways with hatchet and with brand Till on his last won wilderness an empire's bulwarks stand. Professor Turner astonished me greatly by declaring that he not only did not know the rest of the poem, but that he had been unable to find the lines in any of the works of Kipling. I wrote to Mr Kipling at Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, England, and in due time received this reply from his secretary: In answer to your letter of May 6, Mr Kipling has asked me to say that the lines to which you refer are his, but he cannot remember when or where they were published or what the rest of the poem is. NOTES BY THE EDITOR 1. Though the passage as cited above is marred by several slips, it is an extract from a poem now generally known as "The Voortrekker", which is in the Definitive Edition of Kipling's Verse. 2. It was first entitled "The Foreloper", and was coupled with a travel sketch that Kipling wrote in 1892. Both the verse and the prose piece were printed in The June 1983________________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________45 Times (23.11.1892), the New York Sun (27.11.1892) and the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore (10.12.1892). 3. The prose article was eventually collected in "From Tideway to Tideway", under the title " 'Captains Courageous' " (though unrelated to Kipling's novel of the Grand Banks), and it may be found in Letters of Travel. It is a vividly political piece of travel writing, celebrating the sensational phenomenon of the opening up of new areas of Canada, which Kipling had seen al first hand during a journey from Vancouver to Montreal in the summer of 1892. "The Voortrekker" must be understood in that context, even though it was not reprinted in Letters of Travel. 4. When Mr Meany asked him about the poem in 1908, Kipling may have forgotten its provenance; however, possibly stimulated by the enquiry, or by this press report of January 1909, he had it republished in the Bookman in February 1909, and the Century Magazine in April. It was later collected in Songs from Books (1912/13), though it is essentially not a poem from a book. 5. Many Americans, still imbued in the late 19th century with the national excitement of an advancing Frontier, with a mood of confidence and a sense of destiny, found inspiration in Kipling's optimistic enthusiasm for the parallel process of British expansion, expressed as it was in a potent blend of realism, vision and poetry. As for Professor F. J. Turner (1861-1932), he was a distinguished teacher of American history who made the philosophy and the ethos of the Frontier in American life his particular subject. His essay, mentioned by Mr Meany as prefaced by Kipling's verses, was first read to a meeting of the American Historical Association at the Chicago World Fair in July 1893; it was of seminal importance, and easily the most significant thing that Turner ever wrote. 6. Edmond Stephen Meany (1862-1935) was well-known as a journalist in Seattle, an "educator", and a member of the Washington State legislature. THE POEM IN FULL THE VOORTREKKER The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire. He shall fulfil God's utmost will, unknowing His desire. And he shall see old planets change and alien stars arise, And give the gale his seaworn sail in shadow of new skies. Strong lust of gear shall drive him forth and hunger arm his hand, To win his food from the desert rude, his pittance from the sand. His neighbours' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest. He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed. He shall desire loneliness and his desire shall bring, Hard on his heels, a thousand wheels, a People and a King. He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce-cooled camp There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick and the stamp: There he shall blaze a nation's ways with hatchet and with brand, Till on his last-won wilderness an Empire's outposts stand! 46______________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 EVANS AND ZOGBAUM From Mr J. R. Young, J.P.. F.S.V.A.. 18 South Molton St. London WI Y 1DD Dear Sir, I have the good fortune to possess a copy of Plain Tales from the Hills (Macmillan, blue cloth, London, 1893) which is a unique Kipling item, being the copy which Kipling presented to "Fighting Bob" Evans, later Admiral Evans, U.S. Navy.1 Pasted on the back of the title-page is an original drawing by R. F. Zogbaum, who was a well-known American illustrator of military men and matters,2 this illustration being of Private Mulvaney. On the title-page the book has been inscribed by Kipling: To the Captain of the "Indiana" from the author. June 96? In customary style Kipling has crossed through his name on the title-page and signed his full name. The thing however which makes this volume so wonderful is that on the blank page facing the title-page Kipling has written the following lines: Zogbaum draws with a pencil. And I do things with a pen; And you sit up in a conning-tower Bossing eight hundred men. Zogbaum takes care of his business And I take care of mine. And you take care of ten thousand tons Sky-hooting through the brine. Zogbaum can handle his shadows And I can handle my style, And you can handle a ten-inch gun To carry seven mile. "To him that hath shall be given," And that's why these books are sent To the man who has lived more stories Than Zogbaum or I could invent! Rudyard Kipling This particular book is referred to on pages 39 and 40 in Stewart's Bibliography. The poem is also referred to on page 190 of Stewart, ZOGBAUM'S MULVANEY [By courtesy of Mr Jeffrey Young, whose letter, opposite, gives the background] 48_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 under the book which Rear-Admiral Evans wrote, called A Sailor's Log [Appleton, New York, 1901], which included the poem and the sketch of Mulvaney. Sir Angus Wilson in The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling refers on page 207 to Kipling visiting Evans. The poem which Kipling has written in my book is not dated, and I have a feeling it was written-in by Kipling at a date other than June 1896.4 Through your columns I would like to ask other members of the Society whether they can throw light on how Kipling came to write this charming piece linking the three personages. Did Kipling and Zogbaum travel together on the Indiana? Or did Kipling meet Zogbaum when he went to visit Evans and Evans showed him the U.S. Fleet? I am also extremely anxious to acquire another copy of this edition of Plain Tales so that I may compare copies; also the book which Evans wrote, A Sailor's Log; and also any printed version of Zogbaum to go with the original holograph. If any member can assist I would be delighted to hear. Yours faithfully, JEFFREY YOUNG NOTES BY EDITOR 1. Robley Dunglison Evans (1846-1912). A famous American Admiral, whose eventful naval career included some notable episodes in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. 2. Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum (1849-1925). An artist noted for the vivid realism and panache of his depictions of military and naval life. 3. We know from Carrie Kipling's diaries that her husband breakfasted on board the battleship Indiana in New York on 23 April 1896. 4. In the Kipling Journal of April 1955, p 16, a literary magazine called the Academy is quoted in its issue of 4 February 1899 to the effect that Kipling had "recently presented a set of his works to a captain in the American Navy, accompanied by" these Zogbaum verses. (He had landed in New York from England on 2 February. As for Evans, his ship had fired the first shots in the overwhelming American defeat of the Spanish fleet at the battle of Santiago de Cuba on 3 July 1898). 5. The Indiana, completed in 1895 and soon followed by her sister ships Oregon and Massachusetts, was the first new capital ship built under a long overdue programme to enlarge and modernise the U.S. Navy. These ships were soon to seem very small by battleship standards, and at 15½ knots rather slow, but in the thickness of their armour, up to 18 inches of toughened steel, they outdid their successors. Actually, Kipling's specifications for the Indiana are not quite right: her displacement was indeed 10,228 tons, but her complement was 500, and she had thirteen-inch and eight-inch guns, not ten-inch. June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________49 STALKY TELEVISED From Mr R. A. Maidment, 81 Richmond Rd, Montpelier, Bristol BS6 5EP Dear Sir, I must say I have been rather surprised by the kindly treatment given by your correspondents to the television serialisation of Stalky & Co. [see Letters to the Editor, issues of March, June and September 1982]. Despite two excellent performances by John Woodnutt ("King") and David Parfitt ("Beetle") it seemed to me that some of the essential guts of the work were noticeably missing; that in fact the BBC had managed to produce a bowdlerised version of a Victorian children's classic—quite a feat in the 1980s. Why was the atmosphere wrong? Was it just that Kipling's "grim white barrack by the shore" had been replaced by an elegant ivy- covered mansion? Or was it the missing cliffs and people of North Devon—so important as a focus to the background of these stories? And what of the 'rough specimens' who are reputed to have inhabited the United Services College? It wasn't just that the BBC Collegers were too smartly dressed (modern fabrics just don't sag and crease like good old serge); they were also too innocent by half. The violence and the close emotional friendships which characterised the public schools in that Victorian age—still untroubled by Dr Freud's strange dreams—were clearly alien to both the BBC producer and his young actors; so the war-dances and the rough horseplay of the Stalky trio were turned into an uneasy ritualised prancing, and the savage treatment meted out to the bullies in "The Moral Reformers" became—incredible to view—an honest bout of fisticuffs. Whatever else Stalky & Co. may be, it is not a eulogium of the Queensberry Rules! This surely is the most substantial criticism. Because the producer considered the underlying message of Kipling's parables to be outdated on a political level he tried to play that aspect of them down, leaving us with a 'period' production of ripping school yarns taken somewhat out of context. So the last chapter—"Slaves of the Lamp, Part II", with all its imperial moralising—was omitted altogether, and the last shot showed us instead the headmaster musing over the future of his three young charges as they departed down the drive. That, surely, was a point on which the author intended there should not be any doubt whatever! Yours sincerely, RICHARD MAIDMENT 50_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 LORDLY OF LEATHER Rudyard Kipling and the Motor Car, IV In such small space as pressure of other items allows us here, one agreeable duty can be done: to direct your attention to Meryl Macdonald's engrossing little booklet, Kipling the Motoring Man, just published by the National Trust. As Mrs M. M. Bendle, the author has appeared in our correspon- dence pages; as Meryl Macdonald, she wrote the last "Lordly of Leather" piece. (She has also written an article about Kipling's schooldays at Westward Ho!, in Country Life, 21 April 1983.) Kipling the Motoring Man, attractively printed and illustrated, offers in small compass much information hard to find elsewhere. Anyone interested either in Kipling or in the early days of motoring will be pleased by Meryl Macdonald's lively and enthusiastic narrative, by a surprisingly relevant drawing from Punch, by a hitherto unpublished Kipling letter about an accident, and by all too brief accounts of Kipling's cars—from a hired one-cylinder Embryo and a steam-powered Locomobile, through Lanchesters and a Daimler to the eventual run of Rolls-Royces. We get glimpses of breakdowns and collisions, hints of punctures and pot-holes, and a whiff of the dust of French roads. Yet the author can display a mere fragment of what might be collected under this title: it is sad that the publishers' caution had to confine her to 12 pages, when the untapped source material available could fill 120. That however would cost more. As it is, you need only send 40p (+postage, 12½p in U.K.—abroad, being under 60g, it should go by surface mail for 35p) to the National Trust at Bateman's, Burwash, Etchingham, East Sussex TN19 7DS, or at Wimpole Hall, Arrington, Royston, Hertfordshire SG8 OBW. Kipling's sketch of his Daimler in the rain — from the booklet reviewed June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________51 BOOK REVIEW KIPLING'S SECRET MONUMENTS: the title of a set of Albums compiled by Shamus Wade, a member of the Kipling Society, and presented to its Library, 1982. Street names form a fascinating study. They can reflect local history, preserving the names of long-vanished houses or estates; they can be the random choice of some bored local official designating a new road Devon Gardens or Chatsworth Avenue; and they can reflect the events and personalities of an era. One can browse in street directories and turn up many examples—Balaclava Road, Magdala Road, Mafeking Road, Jutland Road, to take only a random few. Shamus Wade has had the idea of tracking down names associated with Kipling, and in the four handsomely produced albums, Kipling's Secret Monuments, which he has presented to the Kipling Society, he displays his results—a mixture of history, social observation, one- man poll of literary knowledge, and urban architectural record. The places he describes are Kipling Tower at Ealing on what was once Soapsuds Hill (1964); Kipling Place, Stanmore (1953); Rudyard Grove, London NW7 (1924); Kipling Terrace, N 9 (1933-37); Kipling Road, Bexley Heath (1930); and an area in Bermondsey, London SE 1, to which he devotes nearly half his space. This comprises Kipling Street and the now nameless Rudyard Place, renamed in 1893, and the Kipling Estate consisting of five groups of dwellings named in Kipling's centenary year of 1965—Simla House, Burwash House, Heldar Court, Mulvaney Way and Dunsterville Way. Mr Wade is a skilled and imaginative photographer—his five different views of Kipling Tower are a good example—with an eye for the unusual and obscure, and he catches the different atmospheres of these streets in photographs and narrative. Most of what he has to say is of greater interest as a reflection of social life than of direct Kipling significance, but he includes interviews with local residents on their knowledge—usually rudimentary—of Kipling. What induced local authorities to commemorate Kipling's name in this way? Mr Wade cannot always tell us, but he has discovered that in Bexley Heath the Urban District Council rejected a builder's suggestion of Ruskin Road, and he came up with Kipling as an alternative. They may have accepted this as killing two birds with one stone, as there had been a notable doctor named Kipling. The case of Kipling Street and Rudyard Place is more complex. These were introduced in 1893 in place of Nelson Street and Alfred Place, of which there were a confusingly large number of other examples in 52_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 London. Mr Wade has pursued the renaming through the Minutes of various Bermondsey and L.C.C. bodies, and poses the problem as to why the Liberal L.C.C. should commemorate a man who had just savagely attacked their party. His answer is to produce old photographs in which these thoroughfares look extremely drab, but one must leave it to the individual reader to decide whether this ingenious explanation is likely to be the true one. The fourth volume finishes with a very miscellaneous collection of items, including the Kipling Telephone Exchange, and the Kipling School of Motoring named after it—both of which have ceased to exist—also Kipling Transport, the Esso advertisement tiger whose name is Kipling, and Mr Kipling Cakes. Mr Wade records, on the authority of the marketing controller, that the last name had no direct connection with Rudyard Kipling, but he adds that visitors to Bateman's sometimes ask to see the kitchen where the cakes are made. There is also a page devoted to the one item that has a direct connection with Kipling himself: Kipling House, formerly Embank- ment Chambers, 43 Villiers Street, where he lived from 1889 to 1891. It is a pity that Mr Wade's zeal appears to have deserted him at this point; we might at least have had some interior pictures and perhaps the view from the third floor window, even though it has vastly changed in the intervening ninety years. Idiosyncratic to the last, Mr Wade finishes up with five street names including the word Bathurst, commenting that the story "Mrs. Bathurst" is a puzzle, and an additional puzzle is why the name is used—is it after the capital of The Gambia? The obvious answer seems to be that both street names and capital come from the Earls of Bathurst, but perhaps this is taking the quirky finale of this ingenious gift too literally. DONALD H. SIMPSON June 1983_______________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________53 RECENT MEETINGS KIPLING SUNG On 10 November 1982 Mr Peter Bellamy gave a Recital of Songs from Kipling, both with his own characteristic instrumental accompani- ment and with an evocative backdrop of slides. Mr Bellamy's individual and successful style has been frequently described in the Journal (e.g. March 1981, pages 35-39 and December 1981, page 8) and will not be forgotten by those who have heard and seen him. Others will have enjoyed his records: may we again commend his collection Keep on Kipling (advertised in the Journal, June 1982: Fellside FE032, from Fellside Records, 34 Uldale Road, Workington, Cumbria, £4.50 including postage). Some readers may care to note that Mr Bellamy accepts professional concert commitments: his address is 11 Victoria Street, Norwich NRl 3QX. Mr J. H. McGivering chaired this meeting. Others present included: Miss A. M. D. Ashley; Mr T. S. Bittleston; Mrs D. M. Carpenter; Mr & Mrs M. Connolly; Mr & Mrs S. Cottrell; Mr R. J. W. Craig; Mr N. Entract; Mr W. Greenwood; Mr & Mrs H. R. Harlow; Mr G. Hermges; Mr D. T. Irvine; Miss A. M. Jackson; Mrs L. A. F. Lewis; Mr & Mrs F. P. W. Moor; Miss C. Mundy; Mrs G. H. Newsom; Mr J. Parker; Mr G. C. G. Philo; Mr C. Roberts; Miss D. Salter; Mr J. Shearman; Miss V. C. Smith; Dr B. Verdcourt; Mr S. Wade; Miss S. E. Wagstaff; Mr & Mrs G. H. Webb; Miss H. M. Webb; Miss C. M. Wilmot-Dear; Mr & Mrs P. W. Wilmot-Dear. THE ARMY IN INDIA On 17 November 1982 Brigadier F. E. Stafford, C.M.G., C.B.E. addressed a meeting at the Royal Society of St George: he was also our host, having kindly arranged both the venue and the refreshments himself. His talk, "Back to the Army again", was a pleasure to listen to and a stimulus to thought. He took up the position of not aspiring to literary analysis but only to "light-hearted comment" from the standpoint of one who had served in the ranks in India in 1914. He then expressed some healthily iconoclastic views, critical of the military authenticity of substantial details in certain stories, notably "The Drums of the Fore and Aft" (Wee Willie Winkie), "The Daughter of the Regiment" (Plain Tales) and "His Private Honour" (Many Inventions). As in his previous talk (see Journal, December 1980), he said he found Kipling's soldier ballads in some ways more convincing than his soldier tales. Copies of his paper are with the Editor and in the Society's Library. THE LARGE DETMOLD ILLUSTRATIONS The sixteen superb coloured plates by Maurice and Edward Detmold, which illustrate themes from The Jungle Book, are offered for private sale by a member in London. In 1903 they were specially published by Macmillan in a mounted set in a portfolio 15½x21½ inches. (Reduced in size, they featured in the 1908 edition of The Jungle Book.) These large plates are not in Stewart's Bibliography but are cited by Livingston, p 136. £42.50 each. Enquire by telephone to 01-262 8587. evenings or weekends. 54_____________________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________June 1983 Mr J. H. McGivering was in the Chair. Others present included: Mr & Mrs W. H. Alexander; Mrs D. M. Carpenter; Mr C. E. Carrington; Mr & Mrs D. S. Cottrell; Mr R. J. W. Craig; Mr & Mrs T. L. A. Daintith; Mr B. C. Diamond; Mr N. Entract; Mr W. Greenwood; Mr H. R. Harlow; Miss A. M. Jackson; Mrs L. A. F. Lewis; Mr F. P. W. Moor; Mr M. J. Moynihan; Mrs G. H. Newsom; Mr R. O'Hagan; Mr & Mrs G. C. G. Philo; Mr C. Roberts; Miss C. Rolfe; Miss D. Salter; Mr J. Shearman; Miss B. Smith; Miss V. C. Smith; Mrs F. E. Stafford; Miss H. Thomas; Mr S. Wade; Miss S. E. Wagstaff; Mr & Mrs G. H. Webb. MEDIEVAL On 9 February 1983 Mrs L. A. F. Lewis spoke on The Historical Background of "The Eye of Allah", and presented an entertaining and instructive collection of slides of her own choosing, to illustrate her very original examination of what Dr Tompkins has called an "intricately-patterned tale" of moral dilemmas. She placed it all in the context of Kipling's career and suggested some probable sources of his inspiration, decorating her presentation with over a hundred miscellaneous pictures—some of rare delicacy and beauty over which it would have been agreeable to linger longer. Visual aids apart, her intellectual theme, convincingly conveyed, was that in "The Eye of Allah", in the very small compass of thirty pages, Kipling created a complex yet flawless masterpiece of subtlety and unobtrusive allusion, distilling into it a wealth of material, with no resultant sense of crowding. Mr J. H. McGivering was in the Chair. Others present included: Mr & Mrs W. H. Alexander; Mr M. Ashlin; Mr R. J. W. Craig; Mrs G. Darling; Mr B. C. Diamond; Mr N. Entract; Mr M. J. Grainger; Mr G. Hermges; Miss C. Mundy; Mrs G. H. Newsom; Mr A. D. M. Oulton; Mr G. C. G. Philo; Mr J. Shearman; Miss V. C. Smith; Miss H. Thomas; Dr B. Verdcourt; Mr S. Wade; Miss S. E. Wagstaff; Mr & Mrs G. H. Webb; Miss H. M. Webb; Miss C. M. Wilmot-Dear; Miss J. V. With; Mr J. B. Wright. THE SOCIETY'S ANNOUNCEMENTS: SUPPLEMENT [see main Announcements on page 5] Saturday 22 October 1983 at 2 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. at 26 Russell Square, London WC1 (the west corner of the square—Under- ground Stations, Russell Square or Goodge Street), a Joint Afternoon School with the W.E.A. (London District). Andrew Rutherford, Regius Professor of English at the University of Aberdeen, will speak on Kipling's Poetry. He is author or editor of several works on Kipling, and is currently editing a new edition of his poetry. Mrs Lisa Lewis will speak on Kipling's Women, illustrating this theme with extracts from his prose and verse. There will be a charge of £1.25 to include tea and biscuits. The lecture room, at the University of London Department of Extra-Mural Studies, holds eighty people, but to be sure of admission tickets may be purchased in advance from our Secretary or from the W.E.A. (London District), 32 Tavistock Square, London WC1 (telephone 01-387 8966). We are privileged that Professor Rutherford will speak to the School. This event should be of use to members who cannot attend our Wednesday meetings; and will allow us to meet W.E.A. members who are interested in Kipling. SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP NEWS NEW MEMBERS We welcome Mr J. Bartlett (Devon); Colonel G. Boardman (Georgia, U.S.A.); Mrs M. Brock (Indiana, U.S.A.); Mr E. Cassidy (Nottinghamshire); Mrs D. Cavicke (Connecticut, U.S.A.); Mrs J. C. Clapham (Suffolk); Mr J. M. Collins (Virginia, U.S.A.); Mr R. J. Cornish (London); Mr J. V. Cracknell ( Wisconsin, U.S.A.); Mr F. P. Fellers (Indiana, U.S.A.); Miss S. Foss (London); Brigadier W. J. Jervois (East Sussex, rejoined); Modern Languages Association Center for Bibliographical Services (New York, U.S.A.); Professor R. S. Potts (New Jersey, U.S.A.); Professor T. B. Ragle (Vermont. U.S.A.); Miss L. Shaughnessy (London); Mr I. C. Stuart (Lancashire); Miss E. Talbot Rice (London); Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas (Texas, U.S.A.); Mrs J. Train (New York, U.S.A.); Tulane University Library (Louisiana, U.S.A.); Miss G. L. Vousden (London); Mr J. R. Young (London); Mrs P. D. G. Young (London). DONATIONS Three years ago, at a time of severe inflation, we launched an Appeal, having regard to the soaring cost of maintaining the newly-enlarged Journal. The response was generous, and helped us to carry on. Since then, inflation has eased, membership has expanded, and our finances are a bit sounder. However we are not well-heeled, publication costs do not fall, and we are always extremely grateful when unsolicited donations come in. Two or three have recently been received, and will be acknowledged with thanks in the next issue. A NOTE ON THE KIPLING SOCIETY Office at 18 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5BJ This literary and historical society is for anyone interested in Rudyard Kipling's prose and verse, life and times. His published writings, in 35 volumes, are by any standard remarkable. His life (1865-1936) was very eventful. The period through which he lived and about which he wrote with such vigour was one of huge and dramatic change. As a non-profit-making cultural organisation run on an essentially unpaid footing to provide a service, the Society has the status of a Registered Charity in Britain. Its management and principal activities are in England, but it has branches or secretariat arrangements in Australia, Canada and the U.S.A. About a third of its members, including scores of universities, colleges and libraries, are in North America. Founded in 1927, the Society has attracted many notable literary and academic figures, including of course the leading authorities m the field of Kipling studies; but it also caters for an unspecialised public of general readers, from whom its wider membership is drawn. Its managing focus is the Secretary in London, John Shearman. He and other office-holders arrange various activities, including regular talks and discussions in London, and an Annual Luncheon; answer enquiries from corre- spondents; and maintain a specialised Library for reference and research. The quarterly Kipling Journal is sent free to all members. In this issue, on pages 4, 5 and 55, is some general information on the Society. More can be obtained from John Shearman or branch Secretaries. Applications for membership are always welcome: the Society and this Journal depend absolutely on such support. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES Britain Overseas Individual Member £6.00 £7.50 Junior Member (up to age 24) £3.00 £3.00 Corporate Member £12.00 £15.00 LITERARY AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE KIPLING JOURNAL The Kipling Journal is essentially the Kipling Society's publication, and though the Editor selects its contents with an eye to merit, originality and an interesting range of topics, he must always allot space to the Society's business, including at least a few of the addresses delivered at the Society's meetings, if they are short enough. Independent literary contributions, however, are very welcome. If we cannot print them at once we may be able to place them in a later issue. Like other literary societies, we do not pay for articles: authors gain the satisfaction of publication in a periodical of authority and repute, recognised as the only one in the world specialising in this subject. We have at present much more publishable material than we can print, and have to defer or decline some items of interest. However this is healthy. We would like more, to improve our variety and quality. It should invariably be sent to the Editor. Articles submitted should be fairly brief. Our average page carries only 400 words of text. A 4000-word article, however good, may be hard to place. We impose no limit, but should remind contributors of this factor which can influence selection. Letters to the Editor are welcomed: unless told otherwise, we reserve the normal right to shorten. Book Reviews, usually invited, may be volunteered: a range of 200 to 800 words is suggested. We will gratefully accept, even if we cannot quickly use, relevant and reproducible illustrations, news cuttings, book excerpts, catalogue data and other miscellanea which might enhance the Journal's interest. Since Kipling touched the literary and practical world at many points our terms of reference are broad. ADVERTISING. We welcome regularly placed advertisements compatible with the style of the Journal: for our rates, please enquire of the Editor. The Editor's address is Weavers, Danes Hill, Woking, Surrey GU22 7HQ. (iii) The fine OUTWARD BOUND EDITION of Kipling This handsome edition, in brown cloth, in 36 volumes, octavo, cumulatively published between 1897 and 1937 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, rarely comes on the market complete; in Britain, even single volumes are seldom seen. It includes many items not found in any standard British edition, e.g. several short stories, some substantial newspaper writing on the First World War, and dozens of early verses. It contains a long array of Lockwood Kipling's incomparable illustrations which are virtually unknown here, as well as pictures by other artists—not least, by the author himself in an extra Just-So Story, "The Tabu Tale". Full particulars of the edition are given in Stewart's Bibliography, pages 560-63; also see Livingston's Bibliography, page 432, where it is recorded that "Kipling read the proofs and revised the text for this edition". A London member of the Kipling Society is now willing to dispose of his set: though some of the spines are faded its general condition throughout is excellent. The price for the 36 volumes is £360 (ten per cent of which he will donate to the Society). Enquiries to the Editor of this Journal (address, opposite).