Kipling— ‘a nice little earner’

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 19

Kipling — ‘a nice little earner’

By

ALAN RUSBRIDGEF

El of the “Guardian.”

Rudyard Kipling was taken ill with a gastric ulcer at Brown’s Hotel 50 years ago and died the following week. This is a cause of some rejoicing among British publishers and academics and of some anxiety for Macmillans and the National Trust. The old boy — Mrs Thatcher’s favourite poet — will be out of copyright at last

The anniversary has rather more significance than most since Kipling is still, as one of his Cockney privates might or might, not have put it a nice little earner. The royalties have piled up steadily ever since 1936, enabling his daughter to leave a hefty £1.6 million bequest to the National Trust — one of the biggest bequests ever received — along with - one of Cambridgeshire’s largest country houses. Since when (1976) the National Trust itself has derived a steady £50,000 or so a year from the prose and poems. But the anniversary also comes at a time when Kipling’s reputation is undergoing a reappraisal, with his output reaching a wider public, willing to see in him more than a rather distasteful jingoistic versifier. It can’t be said that he is coming back into fashion; but there’s no doubt that he is less out of fashion.

The Kipling Society, founded in 1927, is a perfect reflection of the ambiguous way in which Kipling is now regarded. At first sight it all looks predictable enough — a genteel organisation run from a dusty little room in the Royal Commonwealth Society. The Secretary is a Mr Norman Entract; amongst the Vice-Presidents are a Rear-Ad-miral Brock and a Lt.-Col. A. E. Bagwell-Purefoy. There is a small library of books, collections of yellowing cuttings, and a complete run of the quarterly journal in which brigadiers speculate on the topography of Pook’s Hill and Kipling’s cousin Lorna reminisces about Uncle Ruddy’s bee-keeping.

But the list of Vice-Presidents also included — until last year — the name of James Cameron. Sir Angus Wilson is the president and the past secretary and mainstay of the society. John Shearman, is a Fabian socialist and CND supporter. Flick through the journal a little more carefully and you will find Yevtushenko explaining why Kipling is the most popular English poet in the Soviet Union.

Look through the cuttings book and you will come across the occasional chorus of praise from “Marxism Today.” Not so simple. "I should think that about 2 per cent of the Society is composed of old India and military buffs,” says Shearman, a retired documentary film maker. “I’m personally not interested in that stuff at all. I like the late works — the ones that used to be considered ‘difficult.’ After his son’s death most of Kipling’s work took on a completely different tinge. “There is no doubt in any intelligent person’s mind now that he was not just a bloody old imperialist People are thinking more about Kipling in terms of, for instance, his intense lateflowering love of England, and especially its country dwellers. People have come to recognise

the extraordinary range of subject matters on which he wrote with considerable authority. There really has been a revival of literary interest and a feeling that this is important literature.” There is, for instance, the gargantuan edition of letters being prepared by Thomas Pinney in California — the heavilyselected collection runs to 1500 pages of typescript. That takes us to 1902. There is a collection of 300 new verses due out next year; someone is engaged in tracing all the manuscripts; there is a collection of all the Indian

journalism in preparation. Penguin is bringing out all the fiction and some of the poetry in 16 volumes. Craig Raine of Faber’s is producing an edition of selected prose. The Oxford University Press is bringing out some of the early verse, much of it hitherto unpublished. Kipling’s own publishers, Macmillan, > sweating slightly at all the competition about to open up, has got out new editions of the “Jungle Book” and “Just So Stories” as well as assorted companions, studies and criticism — not forgetting the letters. The publishing craze extends even to France, where a team of six or seven translators have already been working for three years on a massive general edition of his work. And yet Kipling is most of the things people said he was during the long, highly unfashionable years. “There are terribly offensive bits,” concedes Shearman. “He was probably less racialist than Buchan and certainly less than Sapper. I say he was antiZionist — the stuff he wrote about Balfour barely stays on the page even now — but there are terribly distateful mentions of yids and so forth, so anyone is entitled to think he was antisemitic. He didn’t much like Hindus, either. “But then again there is a wonderful Jew in ‘The Treasure and the Land’ — drawn with much admiration and sympathy. Some of the unpleasant imperialism derived from his obsessional enthusiasm for any subject he was writing about - it might have been aircraft the next day. And an awful lot has been quoted out of contest. ‘Lesser breeds without the law’ is always used as though talking about a white man kicking a coolie. In fact he was writing about the menace of rising German nationalism." Others are less inclined to be so generous — or are generous in different ways. David Trotter, a lecturer at University College, London, who is editing one of the Penguin series, believes that aca-

demic criticism has “laundered” Kipling’s reputation by trying to divorce his literature from the political beliefs. “I think you can’t do that. I think you have to take his politics along with his imagination. The political motivation matters. “But I also think that what starts out as a political necessity — given his background, he could have been anything other than what he was — actually becomes his subject matter. Kipling’s was never a reflex patriotism or jingoism. It was something he thought about quite carefully. That, I think, is the best way to save Kipling from his assumptions.

“He was not worse than his contemporaries in this respect, in that most of them don’t actually bother to make their pre-concep-tions an object of inquiry. Very few writers thought themselves completely beyond the framework of imperial ideology — and even people like Conrad who are always said to have done that are in fact closer to Kipling than one might suspect.”

Not that much of all this appears to have mattered to the general book-buying public, who have never deserted Kipling, in spite of all the things they were told to think by what Kipling referred to as the “higher cannibals.” His agents and literary executors, A. P. Watts, say sales have been steady ever since his death, with something of an upturn recently.

The merchandising and publishing will go on for some time yet: there is no shortage of unpublished material lurking in various corners of the world. But will the reassessment ever be

such that Kipling comes close to ; the sort of popularity he once enjoyed? John Shearman thinks so - and perceives a gradual i revival which He dates to the ,1941 T. S. Eliot introduction to the selected poems. Kipling himself would be pleased to be widely read once more and would utterly hate the thought of all that academic attention.