KIPLING'S CURSE

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 6, 6 July 1935, Page 24

KIPLING'S CURSE

Mr. Kipling's youthful • curse upon America (long ago suppressed) has been revived in letters to the "New York Times Book Review." One writer quoted thus from the "sevenfold curse":—

Your women shall scream like peacocks when they shall talk and your men neigh like horses when they laugh. You shall call "round" "raound," and "very" "varfy," and "news" "noose" till the end of time. You shall be governed by the Irishman and the German, the vendor of drinks and the keepers of vile dens, that your streets may be filthy in your midst and your sewage arrangements filthier.

The same correspondent added: "I never heard of; the curse being so named, but when in Japan,, in May, 1889, Rudyard Kipling was approached by a representative of the Seaside Library Publishing Company, which had put out cheap pirated editions of all well-known American and English authors and offered them for sale. Kipling was so . outraged that in his current letter to the 'Pioneer' he delivered the famous 'Curse on America.' When the 'From Sea to Sea' letters were afterwards collected, first in an unauthorised edition and later by Kipling himself in 1889, this 'curse' was omitted. I have it in a scrapbook, kept in India contemporaneously with the publication of these letters." Another correspondent asserted that Mr. Kipling wrote the "curse" before he ever saw America. "It was a righteous but very vehement outburst of a 24-year-old writer who accidentally stumbled on a Seaside Library piracy of one of his books. At the time Kipling was en route to the coast of Japan to make his first visit to America. The curse appeared originally in the 'Pioneer Mail' (of India), the newspaper in Allahabad for which Mr. Kipling wrote letters of travel in 1889." i