Land of Ghosts

ELT 47 : 1 2004 sentimental always fuses feeling and moral value and can hence be very effective indeed. And, in this context, Sublimity (the fourth Meditation) becomes part and parcel of Sentiment. One wishes that Feldman had made less grandiose claims for her theme and had written more fully about her beloved late nineteenthcentury authors, especially women authors, with regard to the domestic or sentimental sublime. Modernism seems to be curiously alien to her concerns. Indeed, a more historical treatment of her subject would have shown her how and why the domestic became a more contested "discourse " in the twentieth century. Two World Wars intervened, wars that play virtually no role in Victorian Modernism. The spatial, which Feldman studies so assiduously, also governs her own analyses with their constant resort to triads and quartets. Individual readings are often acute and original, but Feldman's rigid methodology cannot come to terms with issues of periodization, ethos, and the larger aesthetic climate of the later Victorian era. MARJORIE PERLOFF __________________ Stanford University Land of Ghosts The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Volume 3:1900-10. Thomas Pinney, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. xii + 482 pp. $47.95 The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Volume 4:1911-19. Thomas Pinney, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. χ + 609 pp. $62.95 CAUTIOUS AND RESERVED about his personal life, and usually adopting a playful tone, Kipling rarely revealed his deepest feelings. He corresponded with Conrad, Gosse, Conan Doyle, T. E. Lawrence and Henry James. The latter he perceptively called "head and shoulders the biggest of them all and will in the end be found to be perhaps the most enduring influence." Kipling's letters are especially good in magical evocations to his children about crossing Canada in a luxurious private train, about receiving an honorary degree at Oxford: there was "shouting from a multitude in the distance—exactly like prisoners in a desert island hearing savages eating their companions"; and about getting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm: we "drove through the dark shiny wet streets, where all the lamps were reflected on watery pavements and harbours and canals." His sea voyages ranged from crossing the equator with "warm decks, a double awning, white linen suits and long drinks" to stormy passages where "the boat simply stood still and batted her paddles about as a fainting woman waggles her hands in a crowd." In Les 94 BOOK REVIEWS Baux, a vertiginous aerie in Provence, the seventeen inhabitants of the village looked out "over the sheer drop of rock into the real world." Writing continuously from his dark and gloomy mansion in Sussex —"cold inside the house with the cold of damp"—Kipling expressed boyish enthusiasm for his neighboring rifle range, his military adventures in South Africa and (like Conan Doyle) his work as a correspondent on the Western front. Like Conrad and Edith Wharton, he was an early aficionado of cars. Despite the fizzing and kicking, the frequent and eternal breakdowns, he was delighted to be rid of "the whole tribe of coachmen, saddlers, corn-dealers, smiths, and vets" and to enjoy motoring with an alerter eye and quickened intellect. Coming down a thrillingly high pass in the Pyrenees was "like dropping in a balloon." Known for his adolescent humor, Kipling could also be quite witty. In Canada his sharp eye noted "a gaunt angular but superbly dressed flatfronted old maid of a woman who looked as if she'd run from a mouse"; in Switzerland he saw her companions: "weary, demi-semi old maids . . . long in the tooth, bitter in the tongue." Taking the water-cure in France, he was squirted with a garden hose and manhandled by a burly attendant who "pummels and twists and tortures my arms and legs." A neighbor 's pig, flooded out of its sty, "was running about very clean and washed and very hungry." Coming across a snake while golfing in South Africa and following the proper etiquette, he played the snake the same as a ball: "after the strike, the snake sat there coiled but completely without his head which had been swiped off." When sewer gas exploded in Cape Town, he remarked: "one can...