A Cruise with Kipling

Kipling Abroad is a collection of travel snippets lifted from Kipling’s works. Reading the book resembles taking a cruise: one day pausing in Japan, the next day bouncing on to France, the next to South Africa. The excerpts are entertaining, especially those lifted from Kipling’s letters and his articles in India’s Civil and Military Gazette. Kipling’s India with Bombay’s Towers of Silence, its vultures, and bearers of the dead makes one hanker to travel the Grand Trunk Road and along the way imagine meeting a bejeweled “Dainty Iniquity.” Kim’s world, of course, has vanished. Gunga Din has become Gunga Dell, not fetching water but providing solace for sahibs in London and New York thirsting for answers to their computer problems.

Excerpts are touchstones, at their best awakening dormant and usually sentimental memory, perhaps, too, a moment of desire. Because excerpts are brief, they rarely convey place well—say, the smell of jasmine or train smoke, cindery in damp air. The Road to Mandalay with its “Burma girl,” temple bells, and wind in the palm trees evokes the “gone past”—youth—a time when the dawn seemed to come up like thunder, a time before one aged into being labeled teacher, banker, doctor, writer or, blandest of all, administrator. Sometimes I wonder if Time exists—certainly its movement, if such an abstraction has movement, is erratic and often silent as solidity.

“All things considered,” Kipling once wrote, “there are only two kinds of men in the world—those that stay at home and those that do not.” There are probably almost as many kinds of men as there are males themselves. Still, this book is for a particular third kind of man, the man who stays at home, most of the time at least, but who imagines traveling—over the hills and damn far away. Travel coursed through Kipling’s blood, and he thrived on trains and boats. He “loved” being driven around France in his Rolls Royce. For the armchair reader, unless the virus of professional sports has gnawed his capacity to dream into frass, the Land of Pure Delight is at Port Said where “the evening smells and the sight of the hibiscus and poinsettia will unlock his tongue in words and sentences that he thought he had clean forgot.” Or maybe on the moors in Yorkshire where the wind cuts like a knife and the windhover goes to and fro like a kite.

Although Kipling Abroad appeals to the sentimental, and perhaps softening, mind, the sort of mind whose presence I enjoy, not all the descriptions provoke pensive melancholy. Of Vermonters, he writes, “They seem to kill, for one reason or other, everything that moves in this land. Hawks, of course; eagles for their rarity; foxes for their pelts; red-shouldered blackbirds and Baltimore orioles because they are pretty, and the other small things for sport—French fashion. You can get a rifle of a kind for twelve shillings, and if your neighbor be fool enough to post notices forbidding ‘hunting’ and fishing, you naturally seek his woods. So the country is very silent and unalive.” On the Fourth of July in the Mammoth Hot Spring Hotel, Kipling listened to a clergyman addressing guests, telling them “they were the greatest, freest, sublimest, most chivalrous, and richest people on the face of the earth, and they all said Amen.” On the docket for the next meeting of my local town council is a proposal to begin business by saying the Pledge of Allegiance, this country, of course, being the greatest, freest—well, we have all heard the litany countless times.

What does one do after reading a book like Kipling Abroad? Age, of course, demands its due. But, if a person is not young, then he should reread Kipling, not in a paperback edition but if possible in a leatherback edition, one of those book-club collections published in the 1920s that made purchasers imagine themselves latter-day English gentlemen...