Kipling's Uncollected Speeches

For well over a half century film studios in both England and the United States have been intrigued by Kipling's Kim, Captains Courageous, The Jungle Books, and various short stories about India as useful (and highly profitable) source material. However, Kipling himself has been seriously shortchanged. He does not amount to much as a character in his own right. For example, he appears as a ghostly background figure in the final moments of Gunga Din, while a voice-over recites a few lines from the poem; he also turns up as a rather colorless character (played by Christopher Plummer) in John Houston's The Man Who Would Be King. Moviegoers would never guess from these conventional images of a journalist scrounging for his literary materials that Kipling was an orator of considerable power; that he bravely, and sometimes in a manner that brooked no rebuttal, told the world what he believed and what right-thinking Englishmen and Americans should believe as well, on a wide range of topics (the White Man's Burden, the unprincipled Boers, the evil Huns); and he relished the storms of controversy that followed in his wake.

In 1928 he assembled thirty-one of his speeches for A Book of Words, and added six more to the text for the Sussex Edition (Volume 25, 1938). Perhaps surprisingly, though the thirty-one could easily have been doubled, only one more turned up in Uncollected Prose, Part II (Volume 30, 1938). There the matter has rested—until now. Tom Pinney, the distinguished editor of Kipling's letters, Something of Myself, and much else in the canon, has here brought together an additional forty-eight (based on a full or partial text) and has added information about another twenty-eight for which no text can be found. The new total: 114. The end product is a much clearer record of an impressive number of moments when a very busy writer responded to invitations to deliver his opinions to various audiences, what the occasions were, and how his listeners responded. This volume is a splendid addition to our sense of the kind of speaker Kipling was.

It may well surprise those who have gone to see My Boy Jack in the theater or watched the adaptation on Masterpiece Theatre prepared for PBS, which showed it on 20 April 2008. The three-act play (the original version) was shortened to two acts, omitting the third act and updating the action to the 1920s and 1930s, when television's inevitable rewritings took over. David Haig, the author, played Kipling, and Daniel Radcliffe (better known as Harry Potter) interpreted the role of John, Kipling's only son. John's death at the Second Battle of Loos, and his parents' determination to learn just exactly what had happened to him, constitute the main action of the drama. Regrettably, David Haig's bluster created an image of Kipling as a humorless, arrogant, unnuanced, and thoroughly unattractive father who shamelessly used his influence with Lord Roberts to secure a military commission for John (who had wanted to serve in the navy, but could not pass the physical exam). As depicted in the script, John's father bullied him continually.

The few scenes showing Kipling as a public orator are cringe-inducing. They don't sound right, and indeed one quotation that Pinney reprints describes Kipling as public speaker in quite different terms (Daily Mail, 17 May 1898). The reporter wrote that Kipling spoke rapidly in "a light, clear voice, and an utterance utterly free from the affectations of modern oratory," and he added: "His diction is plain and curt, he has no airs or graces, and he talks rather than orates. 'Look here!' he says, with a jerk of the arm, when he introduces his arguments. He pauses in the full flood of adjectives to hope he does not bore his audience. And he acknowledges a cheer with a smart salute, like that of the great Mulvaney...