Two on Kipling

ELT 43 : 3 2000 Which Subversion does not, at least on North's showing, exist. I have dwelt on this sorry performance because North, perversely, gives over about a tenth of his book to it, and because it exemplifies the qualities which prevent that book from fulfilling its great promise. Reading 1922 is plagued by what someone has dubbed "presentism," the practice of arraigning the past according to the standards of your own age, which must of force be the more enlightened of the two because after all it is the one with the great good fortune to have you in it. Such is the strange infirmity of a book which sets out (often successfully, in spite of itself) to recapture the past. All in all, it is enough to recall yet another literary event of 1922. Proust died. John Gordon __________________ Connecticut College Two on Kipling The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 4, 1911-1919. Thomas Pinney, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. 620 pp. $62.95 Harry Ricketts. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London : Chatto & Windus, 1999. xii + 434 pp. £25.00 THE FOURTH VOLUME of Pinney's excellent series The Letters of Rudyard Kipling illustrates more clearly than ever the extraordinary mixture that Kipling was. It seemed inevitable, knowing his writings and the events of his life in the decade 1911-1919, that to read his letters of the time would be more ordeal than pleasure. This is the Kipling who wrote against trades unions, Irish nationalism and women's suffrage; the author of the Germanophobe story "Swept and Garnished" (A Diversity of Creatures) and of the poem "A Death-Bed" (The Years Between), wishing the Kaiser a terminal cancer. This is the Kipling whose son's death in action brought on deep depression and the ever-painful stomach ulcer that took twenty years to kill him. That Kipling is certainly present. But so is the man with the magic pen, sharing his experience with the reader. On a voyage to Egypt, he sees the Mediterranean "all sapphire, with a shark's fin of a lateen sail here and there"; visiting the Royal Flying Corps, he smells "a rather shrill stink if you understand—like chlorine gas on top of petrol fumes plus gummy calico in a shop"; at a service in the ruins of Soissons Cathedral , between shellings, he hears "that valiant little trickle of voices (and the priest's deep bass) against the silence." Sometimes, as in the Egyptian desert, he falls into the picture-postcard style of description that 338 BOOK REVIEWS Virginia Woolf disparaged as "notebook literature." He can be utterly tasteless, comparing the "coffee-brown" waters of the English Channel in stormy weather to "a crowd of mulattoes in a fit." But there is also a jovial description of the party given for the team of builders who had just converted a cottage on his estate—the songs, the convivial atmosphere, the phenomenal amount of beer consumed—ending "if only you had been there!" Reading his account, for a moment we feel that we were. If his gift of observation remained as sharp as ever, now, as he passed his fiftieth birthday, he was mixing with the powerful: senior army officers not rankers, Western politicians not street characters in Lahore. His contacts in the press were proprietors like Max Aitken or editors like H.A. Gwynne. He campaigned tirelessly for imperial causes, since, as he tells the French critic André Chevrillon: "the Empire was the fabric of my mental existence." He had small political sense, and his opinions often seem foolish in retrospect, for he believed what he was told by persons remote from ordinary life or who followed agendas of their own. Nowhere is this clearer than in his letters about the situation in Ireland. The nationalists, he believed, were only a few hotheads and most of the population was happy under British rule. The spinelessness of the Liberal government in London caused all the trouble. In the last weeks before World War I, he was panicking that the Ulster Protestants, feeling betrayed by London, would ally with the Germans. But in reality the Ulstermen did...