Rudyard Kipling: 'The Changelings'

Rudyard Kipling, let it be said again, is the finest short story writer in English. At least, I haven't read a better. Much as I adore the plotted viciousness of The Jungle Books, my favourite collection is Debits and Credits (1926), which comes late enough in Kipling's career to be classified as---in Edmund Wilson's pointed phrase---'the Kipling that nobody read'. Although the book contains several masterpieces which regularly appear in selections from Kipling's work (most notably, 'The Wish House', 'The Bull that Thought', 'The Eye of Allah'), it has fallen out of print for long periods. The neglect is incomprehensible. Debits and Credits is the work of a Prospero-figure, abjuring his powers at their height, seeking forgiveness for himself and for a ruined world.

To call Debits and Credits a book of short stories is to do it a disservice. The fourteen stories are held together (and kept apart) by poems which commentate obliquely or directly on the themes of the prose. 'Sea Constables', for example, is a merciless tale of maritime revenge against 'Uncle Newt' --- war-profiteering neutrals being more offensive even than an honest enemy --- and it is preceded by Kipling's poem, 'The Changelings'.

The Changelings

Or ever the battered liners sank
   With their passengers to the dark,
I was head of a Walworth Bank,
   And you were a grocer's clerk.

I was a dealer in stocks and shares,
   And you in butters and teas,
And we both abandoned our own affairs
   And took to the dreadful seas.

Wet and worry about our ways---
   Panic, onset, and flight---
Had us in charge for a thousand days
   And a thousand-year-long night.

We saw more than the nights could hide---
   More than the waves could keep---
And---certain faces over the side
   Which do not go from our sleep.

We were more tired than words can tell
   While the pied craft fled by,
And the swinging mounds of the Western swell
   Hoisted us Heavens-high...

Now there is nothing---not even our rank---
   To witness what we have been;
And I am returned to my Walworth bank,
   And you to your margarine!

This is light verse of the darkest kind. Its rhythms are a variation on the ballad stanza --- four beats followed by three --- but their jauntiness disguises intimate dangers. How easy to read that final line as a joking pay-off, as if the speaker were to be believed that the horrors of war can be pushed away and a banal diurnal career resumed. Everything in the poem resists that paraphrasable meaning. Even the final exclamation mark manages to betray anxiety.

During the Boer War, Kipling had written of the difficulties faced by soldiers returning to civilian life. The irregulars come home to a petty, prissy nation, with its ''ouses both sides of the street'. In this context, there can be nothing pettier than a career in 'margarine'. For all that the banker and grocer are traumatised by memory of---a horrible euphemism---'more than the waves could keep', they continue to hanker for 'what they have been'. As the poem title reminds us, they have changed and cannot go back to their previous lives. Could it be that the trauma of naval warfare is outstripped by the greater trauma of trying to resume the trite rigmarole of civilian existence?

Rudyard Kipling: 'A Death-Bed'

When I blogged about Swinburne's Boer War poem, 'Transvaal', I noted that it broke down into incoherence, as if unable to formalise into art its visceral hatred. The record seems to show that it is harder to write an effective poem of hatred than of love. War poetry may have more reason to express hatred than other kinds of verse, but even here, an example such as Swinburne's stands out as (at best) eccentric and at worst morally repugnant.

Daniel Karlin has made a strong case for Robert Browning as a 'good hater', but after Shakespeare the most brilliant explorer of hatred in all its depths and shades must be Rudyard Kipling. Stories like 'Letting in the Jungle', 'Red Dog' and 'Mary Postgate' are terrifying in the pure intensity of their emotion. Kipling provides no refuge for the sentimental reader.

Hatred is often a possibility in Kipling's verse, but is less frequently realised except when he is thinking about the Hun (a term which he himself popularised). He stated in 1915 that the world was divided into 'human beings and Germans'. His poem 'Justice' from 1918 comes very close to describing the German nation as 'Evil Incarnate', and calls for a 'reckoning' whereby, 'till the end of time, / Their remnant shall recall / Their fathers' old, confederate crime / Availed them not at all.' Even so, this seems mild compared with 'A Death-Bed', written that same year in response to rumours that the Kaiser was suffering from throat cancer. The detail with which Kipling describes the final stages of the disease, and juxtaposes the Kaiser's death with the deaths for which Kipling held him personally responsible, is done with such authorial relish that I can think of no more vicious poem. Swinburne's hatred seemed ridiculous and self-defeating; Kipling's has an irresistible power.

A Death-Bed

'This is the State above the Law.

   The State exists for the State alone.'

[This is a gland at the back of the jaw,

   And an answering lump by the collarbone.]

Some die shouting in gas or fire;

   Some die silent, by shell and shot.

Some die desperate, caught on the wire;

   Some die suddenly. This will not.

'Regis suprema voluntas lex'

   [It will follow the regular course of --- throats.]

Some die pinned by the broken decks,

   Some die sobbing between the boats.

Some die eloquent, pressed to death

   By the sliding trench as their friends can hear.

Some die wholly in half a breath,

   Some --- give trouble for half a year.

'There is neither Evil nor Good in life

   Except as the needs of the State ordain.'

[Since it is rather too late for the knife,

   All we can do is mask the pain.]

Some die saintly in faith and hope ---

   One died thus in a prison-yard ---

Some die broken by rape or the rope;

   Some die easily. This dies hard.

'I will dash to pieces who bar my way.

   Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!'

[Let him write what he wishes to say.

   It tires him out if he tries to speak.]

Some die quietly. Some abound

   In loud self-pity. Others spread

Bad morale through the cots around...

   This is a type that is better dead.

'The war was forced on me by my foes.

   All that I sought was the right to live.'

[Don't be afraid of a triple dose;

   The pain will neutralize half we give.

Here are the needles. See that he dies

   While the effects of the drug endure...

What is the question he asks with his eyes? ---

   Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.]

['Regis suprema voluntas lex' --- the King's will is the supreme law. ]

A. C. Swinburne: 'Transvaal'

I'm starting to think about Boer War poetry for my talk at next week's symposium in Bristol on Kipling's 'The Absent-Minded Beggar'. Kipling supported the Boer War, although he retained a great admiration for 'the Burgher of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony'. After the war he admitted that he was 'almost sorry to see them go under'. But Kipling's primary concern throughout was for Empire, believing it to be a civilising power, and he considered the Boer War a timely warning against national complacency: beforehand, we had been 'bung-full of beastly unjustified spiritual pride as we were with material luxury and over much ease.' Kipling's rage against the Establishment --- the politicians and generals who would betray the nation during the Boer War and fail to heed the warnings in the run-up to the Great War --- predicts the ire directed by the war poets of 1914-18 at the enemy behind the lines.

Kipling is often portrayed as a jingoist by those who have never read him. Yet his Boer War poetry makes him seem like a moderate whose work charts a route between extremists like Hardy, who was denounced as a pacifist for being outspokenly against the war, and Swinburne, whose 'Transvaal' is an exercise in hatred.

Transvaal

Patience, long sick to death, is dead. Too long
Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be
What Cromwell's England was not, when the sea
To him bore witness given of Blake how strong
She stood, a commonweal that brooked no wrong
From foes less vile than men like wolves set free
Whose war is waged where none may fight or flee---
With women and with weanlings. Speech and song
Lack utterance now for loathing. Scarce we hear
Foul tongues that blacken God's dishonest name
With prayers turned curses and with praise found shame
Defy the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life. Strike, England, and strike home.

It did not take long for the anti-war movement to respond that the only jaws afoam were Swinburne's own. But such poetry was admired, and could expect to be published in leading broadsheets. Kipling, at other times, was the great writer of hatred, and he did not hold back in his assaults against Germans and Russians. 'Mary Postgate' is one of the most brilliantly vicious stories ever written. Even so, for all his populism, Kipling never sacrificed his art as Swinburne does here. So overwhelmed with fury does the sonnet become that its syntax lapses into incoherence, if not incontinence. Never mind his reputation as a 'braggart in matters of vice': it is his Boer War poetry for which Swinburne deserves vilification.

The Absent-Minded Beggar

Rudyard Kipling's Boer War poem, 'The Absent-Minded Beggar', is the subject of a study day at the University of Bristol on 19 June. Speakers include Peter Bailey, John Lee, Simon Potter, Edward M Spiers, Andrew Lycett, and yours truly.

The poem was written to raise money for the families of
soldiers fighting in the Boer War. It proved to be extraordinarily successful, raising more than £250,000 (the equivalent of £14 million today).

The study day will consider the following questions: 'What, though, does it mean when we say that a poem raised £250,000? How does a poem raise money? How did this poem become so immediately famous, nationally and internationally? How long did that fame last, and what were its literary and cultural effects?'

Christina Rossetti: 'In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857'

The Jhansi Fort

Events in India during 1857-58 have proved so contentious that even naming them has caused difficulty. Was there a mutiny, an uprising, a rebellion, an insurrection, a war? Indian, or merely sepoy? Wikipedia refers to the 'Indian Rebellion of 1857', whereas Gautam Chakravarty's study of its effects on the British imagination prefers 'Indian Mutiny'.

Writing three or four decades after the violence, Rudyard Kipling referred frequently to the rising as an unforgettable trauma in Anglo-Indian relations. One of his greatest stories, 'The Undertakers', has the Mugger crocodile feeling nostalgic for the rich harvest of that year: 'I got my girth in that season---my girth and my depth'. The Mugger remembers how he 'lay still in the slack-water and let twenty [bodies] go by to pick one; and, above all, the English were not cumbered with jewellery and nose-rings and anklets as my women are nowadays.' When the supply of English corpses stops, the river is empty for a while: 'Then came one or two dead, in red coats, not English, but of one kind all---Hindus and Purbeeahs---then five and six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the North beyond Agra, it was as though whole villages had walked into the water.'

Here is Christina Rossetti's Indian Mutiny poem, first published in her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862):

In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857

A hundred, a thousand to one: even so;
  Not a hope in the world remained:
The swarming howling wretches below
  Gained and gained and gained.

Skene looked at his pale young wife.
  ‘Is the time come?’—‘The time is come.’
Young, strong, and so full of life,
  The agony struck them dumb.

Close his arm about her now,
  Close her cheek to his,
Close the pistol to her brow—
  God forgive them this!

‘Will it hurt much?’ ‘No, mine own:
  I wish I could bear the pang for both.’—
‘I wish I could bear the pang alone:
  Courage, dear, I am not loth.’

Kiss and kiss: ‘It is not pain
  Thus to kiss and die.
One kiss more.’—‘And yet one again.’—
  ‘Good-bye.’—‘Good-bye.’

Rossetti appended a footnote in 1875: 'I retain this little poem, not as historically accurate, but as written and published before I heard the supposed facts of its first verse contradicted.' She had discovered (or thought she had discovered) that, far from committing suicide, the Skene family had been captured and killed. There is still no consensus as to their fate. Here is one rather melodramatic Victorian view of the Skenes' demise:

John Major and Rudyard Kipling

The guest on Radio 4's Great Lives this week was John Major, who, supported by Andrew Lycett, chose Rudyard Kipling as his exemplary figure. You can listen to the programme here.

Kipling might have been my choice, too, so it was fascinating to hear John Major justify his reasons. Major referred to Kipling as a 'poet' primarily. Much as I love Kipling's poetry, I love Kim and the short stories more. There are stories in The Jungle Books and Debits and Credits which seem flawless. Is there a better short story writer in English than Kipling? If you're sceptical, read this, this, or this.

Of course, half an hour is insufficient time to give Kipling anything like his due. He was the cousin of Stanley Baldwin, the nephew of Edward Burne-Jones, and the friend of (inter alia) Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Baden-Powell and Theodore Roosevelt. Kipling was the last British writer whose opinions mattered. Not only did he whisper into the ears of emperors, he thrust his own arguments noisily into the public forum, and was listened to, enthused about, admired and loathed by a world-wide audience of which modern writers can only dream.

P.S. Still on the subject of Kipling: yesterday this site received a record number of hits, mostly thanks to South Africans searching for the phrase 'flannelled fools'. Can anyone tell me why?

Flannelled Fools and Muddied Oafs

The first day of the second test between England and the West Indies seems as good an occasion as any to revisit Rudyard Kipling's 'The Islanders'. The poem dismayed many of its readers when it was first published on 3 January 1902, and its relevance to our current situation ought still to make us uneasy.

'The Islanders' was written towards the end of the Boer War. It amounts to a fierce denunciation of the British public's priorities, and a demand for national service to prepare for the coming European war which Kipling foresaw. Rounding on those who sent an ill-trained army to fight on their behalf, Kipling condemns a nation rendered complacent by bread and circuses:

So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?

How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?

But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”

And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:

And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,

Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!

Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls

With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.

At the time, those flannelled fools were touring Australia in the 1901-02 Ashes series. Meanwhile, poorly-equipped British and Australian soldiers were losing their lives in South Africa. Plus ça change: our soldiers still die for the want of basic equipment; and we are all aware of the money and attention invested in flannelled fools and especially muddied oafs. Even those who loathe football have heard of the Kop; far fewer know the battle (see its aftermath, above) after which it was named. Would wars be more urgently resolved, perhaps avoided, if the football and baseball seasons were suspended for as long as those wars continued?

Kipling did more than any poet before or since to raise the status of the British Tommy. He should be living at this hour: stories about soldiers being thrown off trains or refused a hotel room make 'Tommy' essential reading once again. For all its sound and fury, contemporary anti-war poetry ignores the experiences and usually even the existence of our soldiers. We know the reasons why, and it is not the soldiers who are discredited by them.