orwell kipling essay

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Orwell on kipling.

During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

Orwell's essay on Rudyard Kipling in the Letters and Essays is both more favorable and more perceptive than one would expect of a discussion of Kipling by a British left-wing intellectual c. 1940. Orwell recognizes Kipling's intelligence and his talent as a writer, pointing out how often people, including people who loath Kipling, use his phrases, sometimes without knowing their source. And Orwell argues, I think correctly,  that Kipling not only was not a fascist but was further from a fascist than almost any of Orwell's contemporaries, left or right, since he believed that there were things that mattered beyond power, that pride comes before a fall, that there is a fundamental mistake in 

But while there is a good deal of truth in Orwell's discussion of Kipling it is mistaken in two different ways, one having to do with Kipling's view of the world, one with his art.

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Orwell writes:

It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. 

There are passages in Kipling, not Loot , the poem Orwell quotes but bits of Stalky and Company , which support the charge of a "strain of sadism." But the central element which Orwell is misreading is not sadism but realism. Soldiers loot when given the opportunity and there is no point to pretending they don't. School boys beat each other up. Schoolmasters puff up their own importance by abusing their authority to ridicule the boys they are supposed to be teaching. Life is not fair. And Kipling's attitude, I think made quite clear in Stalky and Company , is that complaining about it is not only a waste of time but a confession of weakness. You should shut up and deal with it instead.

A more important error in Orwell's essay is his underestimate of Kipling as an artist, both poet and short story writer. Responding to Elliot's claim that Kipling wrote verse rather than poetry, Orwell claims that Kipling was actually a good bad poet:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published What (Elliot) does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. 

I am left with the suspicion that Orwell is basing his opinion almost entirely on Kipling's best known poems, such as the two he cites here, both written when he was 24. He was a popular writer, hence his best known pieces are  those most accessible to a wide range of readers. He did indeed use his very considerable talents to tell stories and to make simple and compelling arguments, but that is not all he did. There is no way to objectively prove that Kipling wrote quite a lot of good poetry and neither Orwell nor Elliot, unfortunately, is still alive to prove it to, but I can at least offer a few examples:

The Mary Gloster : This is Kipling's version of a Browning monolog, and I think better than any of Browning's.

Hymn of Breaking Strain : A modern poem in a sense in which most modern poetry isn't; the central metaphor is the table of breaking strains at the back of an engineering handbook.

The Palace : Kipling's modest account, if I read it correctly, of the function of his own art. "After me cometh a builder. Tell him, I too have known."

Sestina of the Tramp Royal : In a sestina every verse has the same end words with the order permuted. Writing one and not being obvious about it is a non-trivial project. Kipling makes it look effortless.

The Song of the Men's Side : The story this accompanies, The Knife and the Naked Chalk , is told by a member of a tribe of stone age shepherds who bought for his people the knowledge of how to make bronze knives with which to defend themselves and their sheep — and paid for it with an eye. The poem is the same story from the point of view of the tribe. In both, the central point is that the real cost is not the loss of his eye but the loss of his status as a human being; his fellows now regard him, and treat him, as a god.

And, for an example of technical virtuosity in the use of rhythm, these lines from The Last Suttee :

The stories discusses in the essay are the early ones that first made Kipling famous, many written before his 22 nd birthday. He shows no sign of having read the works of Kipling with which one would expect him to be most in sympathy, the short stories about English history in Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies . Stranger still, Orwell not only does not mention Kim , Kipling's one really successful novel, he does not know that it or Captains Courageous were ever written, since he refers to The Light that Failed as Kipling's "solitary novel."

Kipling died in 1936, Orwell published the essay in 1942; every work of Kipling’s that Orwell mentions in the essay, with one exception, was published before 1903. His evaluation of Kipling as an artist is based on work much of which, in a less talented author, would count almost as juvenilia. 1

There is one other thing that Orwell gets wrong:

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

Orwell’s view of the economics of empire has a testable implication, that if Britain abandoned the empire the British standard of living would drop sharply.

India, the most important of the colonies, became independent in 1947. By 1966 all of Britain’s African colonies were independent. The average real wage in the UK did not drop substantially at any point during the process and by 1966 was fifty percent higher than when Orwell wrote.

While Orwell had no access to future economic statistics he could observe contemporary conditions in different countries. Switzerland in 1938, which had no colonies, was richer than England. Denmark, with no significant ones, was almost as rich as England, Portugal, with an enormous African empire, much poorer. 2  Orwell was an admirably independent thinker, as demonstrated by the essay on Kipling, but here and elsewhere he badly overestimated his understanding of economics.

He writes, about Kipling in the years after WWI:

He could not understa nd what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house.

It is not clear which view of imperialism was more nearly correct.

When I posted an earlier version of this post on my blog, there was one perceptive comment:

Meaning no disrespect to your examples of Kipling's good poetry, most of which are also favorites of mine, I think that "Danny Deever" has more real merit than Orwell recognizes. The verse structure has an effect much like that of traditional ballads, with the question/answer alternation and the repetitiveness (compare "Edward, Edward," for example). Some of the emotional points are made in an interestingly understated way: For example, the hardened old sergeant explaining, first, that the rear ranks are breathing hard because of the cold, and then, then the front ranks are fainting because of the hot sun—suggesting that he himself is shaken enough not to notice that he's talking nonsense. And the hint at the supernatural at the end, with the whimper of Danny's departing soul, adds to the emotional effect. Kipling was a more skillful artist in that poem than Orwell is prepared to notice. He's seldom a romantic poet, but classical restraint has its own intensities. (William H. Stoddard)

“Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919) is the only work Orwell mentions published after 1903.

There is a complete list of Kipling’s poetry in order of publication online. The first poem on the list that I was already familiar with was written when he was eighteen. There were four more, one famous — “The Ballad of East and West” — written when he was nineteen. Looking up the list instead of down, the last of my favorite poems was published in 1935, the year before Kipling died.

My source is Estimated pre-Second World War gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of selected countries, territories, and regions in 1938.

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George Orwell on Kipling

I found George Orwell’s essay on Rudyard Kipling recently. It appears Orwell was responding to a T.S. Eliot essay that prefaced selections of Kipling’s poetry as well as an essay by Edmund Wilson. While much of the review is about the poetry itself (Orwell’s take in a nutshell—third-rate, but a guilty pleasure that speaks to many people), Orwell has many points on Kipling that mirrored much of what I tried to say in a previous post.

Orwell doesn’t try to defend the indefensible…Kipling was a proud advocate with of the empire. But neither does he dismiss him out of hand, looking not at just what he said but how he said it. I’ll include a few lengthy quotes from various parts of the essay below:

Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact….

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. …

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. … How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. …

Any soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my England?’ is essentially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately with ‘What has England done for me?’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to ‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’ motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private’s life, and the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield….

He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you DO?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.

Update : Kipling’s reputation is still being debated. Here is the conclusion of a essay on Kipling by Roger Kimball in The New Criterion :

The key word is “civilization.” Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of “the civilized man.” It’s a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds. Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, “believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” Kipling endeavored to man those defenses partly through his political oratory, but more importantly through a literary corpus that taught the explicit lessons and the implicit rhythms of emotional continence and restraint.

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“Orwell and Kipling: Global Visions”, Orienting Orwell: Asian and Global Perspectives on George Orwell. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40:1 (March 2014) 35-50.

This essay argues for a close relationship and intriguing similarities between George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, writers a generation apart, who are usually thought of as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, with Kipling’s wholehearted conservative belief in the British Empire standing in contrast to Orwell’s socialist hatred of the same institution. Yet these two great writers of fiction and journalism have much in common: born in India into what Orwell called “the ‘service’ middle class”, both had their political and intellectual formation in the East. Empire made Kipling proud and it made Orwell ashamed, but their imperial experience overseas gave both of them a global vision, which each in turn tried to share with their readers at home who understood too little, they felt, of Britain’s global responsibilities (Kipling) or her reliance on a “coolie empire” (Orwell). This essay examines the global vision of both writers, and the highly partial perspective conferred on it by the optic of empire. It does so by looking at two journalistic or “travel writing” texts about other people’s empires: Kipling’s account in From Sea to Sea of a visit to China in 1889, and Orwell’s essay “Marrakech”, written during his stay in French Morocco in 1938-39.

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Construction of the Orient by the 'West' in narrative imaginations involves numerous problematic distortions in its depictions. This ‘construction’ follows the view of the Orient through the ‘western gaze’, which establishes and further thrives on binaries and hegemonies between the Occident and the Orient, mainly through the processes of ‘exoticisation’ and ‘othering’. Kipling’s ‘Kim’ and Davies’ adaptation of the book can be seen to employ the ‘western gaze’ in different manners according to their respective affiliations with the colonial and postcolonial periods. This paper seeks to trace the transformation of this western gaze from the colonial to the Postcolonial period; from a book to a film, and explores how it brings about numerous consequences of the colonial period to the modern contemporary world.

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This paper deals with Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) Kim (1901) based on Edward Said (1935-2003) and Homi K. Bhabha’s (1949) postcolonial theories, regarding ‘the Other’ and ‘hybrid identity’. Moreover, this paper shows how Kipling is in favor of imperialism in order to support the British Empire in India. The whole novel depicts the British administrators’ desire for power in order to provide their supremacy politically, economically and culturally. Based on Bhabha’s theories, the present paper investigates how concepts like ‘liminality,’‘ambivalence,’ and ‘hybrid identity’ of the colonial subject are constructed in a space that is called ‘Third Space of enunciation’. By considering the conditions of hybrid characters like Kim and Babu, the British imperial power attempts to educate and reform them as agents for its own desire. Through the process of reformation, although the hybrid characters endeavor to adapt the British habits, behaviors, values, language and culture, they are in...

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Orwell, Kipling and Empire

12th January 2012 by Douglas Kerr

One of the greatest of modern British writers was an Englishman who was born in India. He was privately educated in England, did not go to university, and returned to the East to work after leaving school. Empire, and the relation between those in authority and those under authority, became one of the principal themes of his writing, both in journalism and in fiction. He lived by his pen, and made a name as an author of strong political convictions. Many of his stories and phrases have embedded themselves in the English language and the consciousness of its users, even of those who have never actually read his work. Both admired and hated in his own lifetime, his genius made him a spokesman and a symbol in the great ideological contentions of modern times, and after his death he was considered not only an important writer, but also but a particular embodiment of the character of his country.

Well actually, not one of the greatest of modern British writers. Two of the greatest of modern British writers. Orwell and Kipling emerge – and I think are beginning to emerge, even in the academic discourse of English literature – as giant figures, or twinned heraldic animals like the lion and the unicorn, of modern British writing. And though our first instinct is to think of them as opposites, the curious similarities between them proliferate. Both of them were patriots, though highly critical of their fellow-countrymen and frequently of their government. Both were public intellectuals who used their writing to raise political consciousness. Both loved animals and wrote books about them, and both had a strong feeling for the English countryside.

Both were men of principle, but they were also realists in the sense of a non-theoretical empiricism. They were both impatient with orthodoxy and theory. Orwell’s disgust at W. H. Auden’s glib phrase about “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” – “It could only be written,” Orwell said, “by a person to whom murder is at most a word” (XII, 103) *1 reminds me a little of Kipling’s rage at liberals like “Pagett M.P.” who pontificated about India without bothering to learn about it. Both attitudes, to be sure, have something of the smugness of a man of the world, playing the trump card of experience.

Importantly – this is part of what makes them modern – both had a global vision. Though Orwell at one point kept a village shop, and Kipling for years impersonated a country gentleman at Burwash, they were the opposite of provincial. Both of them were exasperated by British (English?) insularity. “What do they know of England, who only England know?” was Kipling’s lament that his neighbours knew and cared so little about their achievements, and obligations, in the wide world. Orwell agreed about the ignorance. He pointed out that most ordinary people at home had no idea or understanding of the fact that their whole economic way of life depended on Britain’s “coolie empire” overseas. His words, though brutally phrased, have a resonance for those of us who enjoy a more modern form of globalization. “We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue” (XIII, 153). This comes from his Horizon essay on Kipling (1942), one of the best he wrote.

Kipling and Orwell were citizens of the world. But the origin of this cosmopolitanism was rather different in their two cases. For Kipling, it was a function of empire. He travelled all over it, he came to think of himself as its bard, and though he was an acute observer of its local differences, he also found it everywhere the same. The empire he knew or imagined was a world network of power, hierarchical relationships, security and welfare. Globally diffused, it had little to do any more with the European island that had given birth to it. Sometimes when he speaks of it, he makes it sound like the United Nations. Empire was something the African bushman and the Himalayan hillgirl and the Irish infantryman had in common. It was, at its most exalted, a global moral force. At its core, of course, for Kipling, was the authority and duty of white people, the “white man’s burden”. Kipling’s empire was a vision of the world, a global Utopia, but it was a racially understood and organized world, under white government. Like his friend Cecil Rhodes, he continued to hope that the United States would re-federate with the British Empire (perhaps after a handsome apology on both sides?) and rule the world.

Orwell, of course, did not recognize that empire in the least, except as a foreshadowing of the terrible warring superpowers envisaged in Nineteen Eighty Four. His own global vision derived from his socialism, which is always a kind of internationalism. That was what gave him a feeling of kinship with the Italian militiaman he describes meeting in the opening pages of Homage to Catalonia: and it was that sense of the world that had brought him to fight with the POUM militia in Spain, among people with whom, admittedly, he had very little in common and whose speech he could hardly understand. It was the betrayal of that internationalism, first in Barcelona and later everywhere else, that most disgusted him about Stalin and the regime he ruled in a country that had the word “socialist” in its name. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Orwell and Kipling were globalists. There was nothing narrow about either of them. They could see the whole picture.

The similarities are intriguing. The differences, of course, were polar. “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person,” Orwell writes (XIII, 151). Kipling was an imperialist – though not a fascist (his outlook was “prefascist”, says Orwell carefully). Orwell was anti-imperialist; in fact his entire politics was erected on the emotional experience of his service in Burma as a policeman of the British Empire, and it was when he came to understand the relation between that, and what he saw and experienced in Spain, that the Orwellian politics emerged in its mature form. He was prepared to argue that some of what empire did was for the good: what it was, however, was indefensible.

There were personal and aesthetic differences as well as ideological ones. Kipling was brilliant and precocious, doing some of his best work in his twenties. He had his unhappiness, but I think he never doubted his imaginative and creative powers. He would not have understood Orwell’s gloomy statement that writing a book was like undergoing an illness. Orwell’s genius was entirely prosaic, he was a slow starter, diffident and often clumsy, always disappointed with his own work, the kind of writer for whom every book was doomed to be, in T. S. Eliot’s words, a different kind of failure. I don’t know that Kipling ever read anything written by Orwell. When Orwell criticizes Kipling’s work, he objects to his ideas, but also repeatedly to his vulgarity, and this is a complaint that probably has its roots in Eton rather than on the road to Wigan Pier. But one thing that the 1942 essay shows very clearly is that Orwell knew Kipling’s writing very well indeed. *2

This is hardly surprising. For a boy of Orwell’s class and generation, and especially for one whose father actually worked for the Government of India, Kipling was the author of childhood.

First The Just So Stories , then the Jungle Books , Puck of Pook’s Hill , Rewards and Fairies , Kim , Stalky and Co …. Not just a favourite on the nursery bookshelf, Kipling was the author of childhood for the sons (daughters too) of empire in a wider sense; they experienced the world through his eyes, and Kipling’s books helped them to see and relate to the important things in their environment – animals, the natural world, home, parents and other adults, jokes and games, friends, school, and later more abstract issues, like duty, work, country, masculinity and femininity. When the young Eric Blair, fresh from school, went to Burma to serve in the police, he was going to a place that Kipling had more or less invented for the benefit of his fellow-countrymen: they knew about the Orient, and Orientals, through him.

Leonard Woolf, who belonged to the generation between Kipling and Orwell, went to work as a colonial official in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1904, and found the place uncannily familiar. It was Kipling country. Woolf said he could not decide whether Kipling had been brilliantly accurate in his description of the British in the East, or whether by now the British in the East modelled themselves on Kipling’s characters. *3

Orwell too must have felt a sense of déjà vu in the “Kipling-haunted clubs” of British Burma. Kipling is a ghostly background figure in “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”, and above all in Burmese Days . The racist mediocrities who hang out in the club at Kyauktada are Kipling characters, stripped of the glamour and charm with which Kipling invested them. But Veraswami, the comically pro-British Indian doctor, is a variation on a theme by Kipling too, and so is the wily and corrupt U Po Kyin. As for the central character Flory, his local mistress, his white fiancée, his enjoyment of the jungle, his sporting activities, his close friendship with an Indian, his moment of heroism during a riot, his disgrace, and his eventual suicide, all have identifiable precedents in Kipling. One thing you do not find in Kipling, though, is the central theme of Burmese Days , an Englishman in the East who has lost his faith in empire.

A knowledge of Kipling helps us to understand Orwell, for no writer was more important to him, as an influence, example, and antagonist. In some sense Orwell’s whole life was a conversation, or quarrel, with Kipling. He seemed to acknowledge this when he wrote, when Kipling died, “I worshipped [him] at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him” (X, 409).

But a knowledge of Orwell also helps us to understand Kipling, in a number of ways. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot talks about how, when a new literary work appears on the scene, every existing work is modified by it and the whole scene subtly rearranged. Thus, we can’t really read Kipling’s stories of the Raj in the same way once we have read Burmese Days . Though Kipling’s words are unchanged, the Orwell novel has changed how we read them.

Kipling, who died in 1936, did not know that the empire he loved would disappear within a lifetime. So in a sense we know more about the British Empire than Kipling did, because we know what was to happen to it. The one thing Kipling seems not to have been able to imagine was an alternative to empire. But if we know Orwell, we know the work of someone who devoted his whole writing lifetime to answering the question of what such an alternative might look like, and how – and how difficult it would be – to achieve it.

Notes 1. These references are to The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998) by volume and page. 2. Most of the references to Kipling’s work in Orwell’s essay are to the poems. This is partly because the essay was prompted by Orwell’s reading of T. S. Eliot’s A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941). But it is also a reminder that, though nowadays Kipling is admired and discussed chiefly as a writer of prose fiction, many readers of an earlier generation thought of him first and foremost as a poet. 3. Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961) 46.

Orwell, Kipling and Empire, by Douglas Kerr

Published Finlay Publisher Sept-Dec 2008

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Rudyard Kipling & George Orwell: Stories of Empire

A resource by sarah gibbs.

Sarah Gibbs recently completed her PhD in English Literature at University College London (UCL). Her doctoral thesis examined print culture and political communication in the works of George Orwell. She is Instruction & Research Librarian at Medicine Hat College, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Art (RSA).

Orwell on Kipling

[In Anglo-Indian families,] [he] was a sort of household god with whom one grew up and whom one took for granted whether one liked him or whether one did not. […] For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five, and now again rather admire him. George Orwell’s obituary for Rudyard Kipling, New English Weekly , 1936

It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realise […] that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. […] George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling.” 1942 Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language. George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling.” 1942

For anyone writing on the Raj, that is, the direct rule of India by the British Government from 1858 to 1947, Rudyard Kipling, the “unofficial poet laureate of Empire”, loomed large. George Orwell, the son of an Indian Civil Service member, who, like Kipling was born in India and had served as a British police officer in occupied Burma, was compelled to respond to his famous literary forebearer. Many scholars consider Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days (1934) a cynical riposte to Kipling’s pro-Empire writings. This resource introduces the differences, and similarities, between the authors’ colonial experiences, and the works those experiences inspired. It also examines the limits of Orwell’s anti-imperialism.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Mumbai (then Bombay), India, and passed what he characterised as an exceptionally happy childhood there. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a well-respected expert in Buddhist art. Kipling considered Hindustani to be his first language. The great trauma of his young life occurred in 1871 when he was sent to England for schooling.

Kipling rejoined his parents in India at the age of seventeen and began work as a journalist for the Civil & Military Gazette . He reported for newspapers for over six years. His first book, a collection of satirical verse about official life in India entitled Departmental Ditties , was published in 1886. He returned to England in 1889 to pursue literature full-time.

Although Kipling never again lived there, his best-known works consider the British Raj. His Empire-focused novels and stories became so popular that they furnished the entirety of many people’s knowledge of India. His texts, often humorous, are characterised by Kipling’s fascination for Indian culture, fully endorsed British rule in the country.

Kipling’s masterpiece is Kim (1901), the story of Kimball O’Hara, an Irish orphan raised in the backstreets and bazaars of Lahore. The author wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in 1900:

I’ve nearly done a long leisurely Asiatic yarn in which there are hardly any Englishmen. It has been a labour of great love and I think it a bit more temperate and wise than much of my stuff.

The critics agreed. The narrative, which portrayed India under British rule as both protected and prosperous, won universal praise. Even Henry James was moved to declare in a letter to Kipling, “[T]he beauty, the quantity, the Ganges-flood leave me simply gaping as your procession passes.”

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Though the young Orwell, then Eric Blair, was an active reader and won a scholarship to Eton, he became an indifferent student, and was not recommended for university admission. In 1922, he sailed to Burma, where he would spend five years in the Indian Imperial Police.

During his colonial service, Orwell traversed Burma, working in six different locations. His duties included overseeing ammunition and equipment stores, managing the investigation of minor crimes, supervising night patrols, and organising the local police stations and training schools. From his subsequent writings, although he never confirmed it, we can also conclude that he participated in the executions of prisoners. Orwell contracted dengue fever at his final posting and returned to England in 1927 on medical leave. While at home with his family, he resigned his commission. He wrote in “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) that his time in the police force had shown him the “dirty work of Empire at close quarters”; the experience made him a lifelong foe of imperialism.

QUESTION: Think about the difference in Orwell’s and Kipling’s personal experiences within the British Raj. Before you read, imagine how this might shape their viewpoints of Empire.

The Limits of Orwell’s Anti-Imperialism

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. […] [W]hen the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. “Shooting an Elephant.” 1936

For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered faces–faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies [sic] I had hit with my fist in moments of rage […] haunted me intolerably. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate . The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937 Hitler is only the ghost of our own past rising against us. He stands for the extension and perpetuation of our own methods, just at the moment when we are beginning to be ashamed of them. Notes on the Way. Time and Tide , 30 March 1940

While Orwell acknowledged the unjust and exploitative character of imperialism (as seen in the quotes above), his condemnation of Britain’s Empire did not always generate in him a corresponding sympathy for indigenous peoples suffering under it. Professor Douglas Kerr, who has written extensively on Orwell’s colonial experiences and works, identifies a number of limitations to the author’s anti-imperialist attitudes.

Burmese Days is thoroughly Eurocentric, a novel of colonial life squarely centred on the experiences of an English timber merchant, John Flory, a member of a small European community in a town in Upper Burma. It rarely enters the private life or the consciousness of local people. Flory has an Asian mistress, an Asian friend, and an Asian enemy, but virtually all the novel’s action is focused through his European consciousness. (151)

In Orwell’s Empire-focused novel and essays, indigenous characters are under-developed, and peripheral to narratives of European experience. Furthermore, he notes in “Law and Race in George Orwell” (2017) that Burmese Days fails to engage with the racial hierarchies that allow John Flory, a civilian, to command Indian army officers in a moment of civil strife; the novel relies on the assumption that the white man or “sahib” will always be in control (312). According to Kerr, the text does not support imperialism, but neither does it endorse Burmese independence.

QUESTIONS FOR DEBATE AND DISCUSSION

• Can we enjoy a writer’s work if we don’t like their politics?
• How far can people ever truly step outside their experiences?
• What does it mean, as an author/writer to show solidarity/sympathise with someone elses’s experiences? What are the limitations of this?

READING & WRITING EXERCISE

• Read George Orwell’s Essay ‘Shooting An Elephant’
• How the writer communicates conflicting feelings and pressures about an action
• Have you ever felt that kind of inner conflict in a personal situation? Why? How does it manifest? What does it feel like?
• Consider the language used within ‘Shooting an Elephant’ think about how Orwell builds a picture of place and people. Some of the way that Orwell uses language feels uncomfortable today, why?
• Consider how you might write about your own experiences of internal conflict, could you portray it through the creation of a character or new scenario? Would you give your reader insight into the protagonist’s thoughts like Orwell? Or use external third person description to build a sense of conflict?
• Consider how the events of “Shooting an Elephant” may have been perceived by the Burmese people, rewrite the events from this perspective
• In 1950 Rudyard Kipling’s novel ‘Kim’ was adapted into a film. The film trailer (linked below) is a shocking time capsule of racist stereotypes and whitewashing. This trailer is difficult and uncomfortable viewing, but it raises important questions about representation and damaging colonial stereotypes.
• Watch here – Warner Brothers “Kim” Trailer (1950)
• “Splendid adventure and exotic romance”
• “Actually, filmed in its authentic location…India, sparkling jewel of the mystic orient!”
• “The man of mystery”
• “Turbulen t empire of unbelievable magnificence”
• “Strange land of princes and beggars”
• “Of hard riding mountain fighters and perfumed hareem girls”
• “Forbidding men of 100 races”
• “The threat of wild bandits”
• Representation: Another shocking facet of this trailer is the casting of white Americans within the roles despite Kipling’s claim that his novel contained “almost no Englishmen”. What does this reveal about the way that writers works were – and still are in different ways – translated, adapted and claimed by different groups for different audiences?

FURTHER READING/WATCHING:

• Burmese Days, George Orwell (1934) – Try your local library – find out more here
• Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901) – Try your local library
• Douglas Kerr: Orwell, Kipling, and Empire

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Mathew Lyons

WRITER & HISTORIAN

Kipling’s shadow: Orwell, Rushdie and the critics

This piece follows on from my other post about Kipling here . Both first appeared as part of Norman Geras’ Writer’s Choice feature on his blog.

If we are ever to understand and appreciate Kipling’s art, we have to discard all our preconceptions about him and his world view. It is surprising how hard many critics find this; indeed, the dualities that are present in Kipling seem to draw similar contradictions – albeit unconsciously so – out of those who write about him.

The most egregious example, because perhaps the best known, is George Orwell, whose 1942 essay on Kipling begins as a review of TS Eliot’s collection of Kipling’s poetry. At its best, it reads as a conversation Orwell is having with himself, as if the different Kiplings represented different aspects of Orwell’s own personality. At its worst, which is most of it, Orwell’s essay is little more than a tirade:

It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person… [T]here is a definite strain of sadism in him… [H]e is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting… [His] is a crude, vulgar picture… Kipling himself was only half civilized… crude and vulgar… strange and even disgusting

Clearly, these quotes are selective. But it would be a rare reader who came away from Orwell’s essay without the firm idea that, whatever caveats he threw in by way of praise, Orwell found Kipling to be a crude, vulgar and morally disgusting writer. Orwell’s justifications for such abusive epithets are thin, where they are not self-contradictory or entirely absent, and it is hard to see – on the basis of the essay – quite what drives Orwell’s obsessive loathing of its subject. When Oscar Wilde described the experience of reading Kipling’s short stories as feeling “as if one were seated under a palm tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity”, we might accept the condescension because it is clearly also a compliment, and because we might accept that to a fin-de-siècle aesthete like Wilde much of Kipling’s work – concerned as it is with, in Kipling’s phrase, “the mere uncounted folk” – could, by his lights, appear brash and uncultured, aggressively disinterested in either high culture and high society.

But Orwell? Vulgar? Really? It is a class-based judgement if ever there were one – Orwell, the Eton-educated son of privilege speaking – and one moreover that reveals more about Orwell’s psychology than it does Kipling’s qualities as a writer. The same is true of the quite bizarre side-swipe Orwell indulges in at those who “snigger [at Kipling] in pansy-left circles”; but who, presumably, would feature quite prominently among the early readership of Orwell’s essay. What point is Orwell trying to make? That he too can be vulgar and crude? That you don’t have to be ‘a pansy’ to attack Kipling for his jingoism?

But Orwell’s arguments are weak on their own terms, even fatuous, too. For instance, Orwell decries Kipling’s attempts to represent dialect in his poetry as simply due to “his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent”. Yet there is nothing anywhere to suggest that Kipling finds non-standard speech inherently ridiculous nor that he was trying to do anything other than be as truthful as he could to reality – and nor does Orwell produce any evidence to substantiate the charge. “In the ancient ballads,” he continues, as if to clinch the point, “the lord and the peasant speak the same language” – a statement that is broadly meaningless and, insofar it can be made to make sense, untrue.

Kipling’s problem with the working class, the source of his desire to mock their speech patterns, Orwell says, is that he “ is looking down a distorting class-perspective”. And yet, he notes a little further on, Kipling “has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own.” Kipling is also “almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere”. But, lo and behold, a few lines later, “[Kipling] sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards.”

And so on. When Orwell actually considers Kipling’s work directly, he sees immediately that the image of the man as an uncivilised, unthinking, unfeeling reactionary buffoon – which Orwell affects to argue with but nevertheless works to reinforce – falls apart as soon as it comes into contact with the human empathies that are everywhere in the work. But, for some reason, Orwell cannot or will not fully recant from the his preconceptions about Kipling’s art.

Certainly, Kipling’s politics are not my own. He is far from being a liberal and could not, I think, be called a humanist. But his writing – as opposed to his political thought – is prodigal with its human sympathies and rich in emotional generosity  and insight – qualities that are often conspicuously lacking in his critics.

As for Orwell, his most patronising, unsympathetic and damningly inaccurate judgement had been made a few years earlier.  “If [Kipling] had developed, as he might well have done, into a writer of music-hall songs,” Orwell had written, “he would have been a better and more lovable writer.”

It was with some surprise that I came across an echo of this sentiment in Salman Rushdie’s 1990 essay on Kipling, collected in Imaginary Homelands. “There is something condescending about Kipling’s mimicry,” Rushdie writes of the regional British dialects in Kipling’s early collection Soldier’s Three . And its protagonists’ “suffering is curiously diminished by the music-hall orthography”. I would hazard a guess that Rushdie, born in 1947, has never stepped inside a music hall in his life, so the chances of the opinion being one received, de haut en bas, from Orwell, are high. Is it Kipling who is condescending, or are Orwell and Rushdie, uncomfortable with the intrusion of non-standard “vulgar” English, merely projecting there own social unease on him?

But, unlike Orwell, Rushdie is at least self-aware enough to recognise the complexity of his emotional response to Kipling. “I have never been able to read Kipling calmly,” he writes, with what he calls Kipling’s racial bigotry in mind. “Anger and delight are incompatible emotions, yet these early stories do indeed have the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance.”

Moreover, he is also conscious of Kipling’s duality, writing that in Kipling’s Indian stories he presents “a personality in conflict with itself, part bazaar-boy, part-sahib”. However, he fails to recognise how interpenetrated these different personalities are in Kipling, nor how subtly Kipling negotiates their complexities. Indeed, taking as his theme an early story, ‘On The City Wall’, Rushdie argues that the two Kiplings are ‘at war’ in it – and that the Indian Kipling subverts the controlling narrative and wins that war – unbeknownst to the author.

It is a curious claim for one writer to make of another – particularly one whom the former professes to admire – but it stems from a profound misreading of the story, which misreading derives ultimately from the same flaw that undermines Orwell’s essay: the inability to escape from under the shadow of received opinion about Kipling.

The action of ‘On The City Wall’ takes place in a brothel set in the walls of Lahore, and the story is narrated by an unnamed British resident – a journalist – who visits it regularly, in keeping with members of almost every other faith and race in the city. (The Jews are excluded; but I am inclined to ascribe that less to anti-Semitism, in this instance, than a dry nod towards the story’s source in the Old Testament book of Joshua and the tale of his capture of Jericho thanks to the harlot, Rahab, whose house was also on the city wall.)

Rushdie describes the three main characters in ‘On The City Wall’ as being Wali Dad, an Anglicised, somewhat affected, young Muslim; Khem Singh, an aged anti-imperial revolutionary, recently imprisoned in the city’s fort; and the crowd of Shia Muslims who pack the streets during the Muharram processions and whose rioting against the Hindu population forms the narrative’s apparent, if not actual, climax.

It is striking that Rushdie thus ignores the character of Lalun, the prostitute whose house contains much of the action and about whom the whole story pivots. Indeed, Lalun is the point of the story, since she is also India, agelessly old and – whatever the British think – ultimately in control of its own destiny. Rushdie sees this, but he cannot bring himself to think that this might have been Kipling’s own point, since – as we know – Kipling was a jingo imperialist.

Briefly, as the narrative of ‘On The City Wall’ unfolds, Wali Dad throws off his British identity and joins the Muslim mob, and Lalun manipulates the narrator into helping to free Khem Singh from his prison. However, Singh finds the young men of his people uninterested in rebellion and chooses therefore to return to the relative comforts of his confinement in the fort.

It is Kipling’s treatment of Wali Dad that most angers Rushdie: it is, he says, “by any standards pretty appalling. He build him up purely in order to knock him down… [T]he meaning [of Dad’s regression to Islam] is clear: Western civilisation has been no more than a veneer; a native remains a native beneath his European jackets and ties. Blood will out.”

But again, Kipling is more subtle than that. As the narrator makes fairly clear, Dad’s problem isn’t that he is incapable, as a native, of assimilating English culture. It is that the culture he has immersed himself in isn’t worth assimilating in the first place:

He was a young Muhammadan who was suffering acutely from education of the English variety and knew it. His father had sent him to a Mission-school to get wisdom, and Wali Dad had absorbed more than ever his father or the Missionaries intended he should. When his father died, Wali Dad was independent and spent two years experimenting with the creeds of the Earth and reading books that are of no use to anybody.

The point about Wali Dad isn’t that he cannot find his place in a “superior” culture – and therefore spends his days pining with affectionately comic futility for Lalun – nor that he is incapable of benefiting from his western education. It is that he doesn’t – or shouldn’t – need to. Dad suffers from a characteristically Western kind of intellectual ennui; and he can only, in the end, rid himself of it by reclaiming his own urgent identity amid his own culture. We may or may not agree with that; but it is far from being a racist or patronising position.

As for Lalun, Kipling is at pains to point out, in the very first lines of the story, that she is part of a tradition that reaches back to the beginnings of time and – quite explicitly – before the beginning of the Judaeo-Christian world:

Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve as every one knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice; and that is a distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.

The narrator addresses quite a few remarks on the inability of the indigenous peoples of the Empire to govern themselves through the story, of which this is the first. He is, of course, blindly confident in his pronouncements, but the whole story works its way to a conclusion which makes the opposite point unarguable: the people of the East manage their own affairs very well and subject themselves to the West only out of convenience.

Singh, the revolutionary volunteers to return to his British prison; but he has – again explicitly – not given up the struggle. He merely prefers the comforts. And Lalun? The very last line of the story has the narrator recognising how wholly he has been seduced by her: “I had become Lalun’s Vizier after all.” He, too, must now drift, wait and obey.

It is Lalun, the embodiment of the Eastern, who ultimately controls her destiny under British rule – and implicitly the destiny of the British in India. British command is apparently suffered; but it is, or will prove to be in time, all an illusion.

Rushdie knows this, and allows that the story confounds the narrator’s apparent confidence in British cultural supremacy; but his perception of Kipling’s thought so clouds his judgement that he finds himself arguing that it does so without Kipling realising the fact.

This is unfortunate, not least because Rushdie is imperiously dismissive of another critic who suggested that Kipling erred in placing Khem Singh’s escape at the end of the story. “It seems to be not at all unusual for a climax to be placed near a story’s end,” he thunders, “and far from being a minor incident, Khem Singh’s escape seems central to the story’s significance.” Yet over the following three sentences Rushdie himself contrives to claim that Kipling failed to understand the meaning of the very last sentence of his story. It is not particularly persuasive.

What hope has Kipling of receiving a just assessment of his work when his own long shadow can so deceive the critics? It is probably fortunate that so many of us encounter Kipling first in childhood – most likely through The Jungle Book or The Just-So Stories – otherwise one wonders if he would be read at all. And that would certainly be a loss.

Kipling makes us feel – and compels us to think. This is not because the views his characters express are different from ours – or not merely so –  but because we feel the force of their humanity so intensely we can’t help but think. He is an authority on the diversity of peoples, and where – as in his Indian stories – cultures collide, the idea that Kipling colludes as an artist in the oppression of one is untenable.

I was going to write that I can forgive Kipling anything, but that is not quite right. We do not need to forgive artists their private – or indeed public – errors. We may judge them, of course, but that is another matter. As for the work, it speaks or does not speak for itself. And Kipling’s work hums and frets and flames with impossible life. If we can accept Christopher Marlowe’s greatness while allowing the viciousness of The Jew of Malta , then why not Kipling’s?

In the preface to Life’s Handicap , another early collection, Kipling writes of a holy man who told him tales “not one in twenty [of which] could be printed in an English book, because the English do not think as natives do. They brood over matters that a native would dismiss till a fitting occasion; and what they would not think twice about a native will brood over till a fitting occasion: then native and English stare at each other hopelessly across great gulfs of miscomprehension… All the earth is full of tales to him who listens and does not drive away the poor from his door. The poor are the best of tale-tellers; for they must lay their ear to the ground every night.”

It is a fair prospectus of Kipling’s art: comprehending the mute, forgotten peoples of the world; listening for the distant halting rhythm of another story, for the approach of the Daemon: waiting patiently, as Lalun’s vizier must wait on the city wall, and as Bagheera waits, too, dark and still and deadly amid the shadows and shapes of things that are and are not there, ready to make his kill that death might buy another life.

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4 thoughts on “ Kipling’s shadow: Orwell, Rushdie and the critics ”

I feel Salman Rushdie sees himself in Wali Dad!

A while ago I read Orwell’s essay on Kipling and was so annoyed, over an extended period, that I wrote my own blog post to vent my dissatisfaction. (It’s here, if you’re interested: http://garethseducation.blogspot.ca/2012/09/rudyard-kipling-racist.html ). It was good to find someone who got as much pleasure out of Kipling as I have and is willing to defend him from what are, in the end, baseless slurs.

-Gareth Jones

• Pingback: My post on Kipling and his critics for Normblog « Mathew Lyons
• Pingback: The Jungle Book, Kipling and me « Mathew Lyons

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A brief survey of the short story part 41: Rudyard Kipling

For George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling was "a jingo imperialist … morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting". Frank O'Connor thought him "a damned liar"; Craig Raine has bemoaned his "grating air of worldliness"; Edmund Wilson described his entire body of work as "shot through with hatred". For Barbara Everett he is "the easiest of great writers to find repellent".

But Orwell also admired Kipling; O'Connor considered him, albeit grudgingly, one of the great short-story writers; Raine calls him England's "greatest short-story writer … whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognise". Wilson states, "Kipling really finds new rhythms, new colours and textures of words, for things that have not yet been brought into literature … he is extraordinary as a worker in prose"; and Everett asserts that his work possesses "an extreme originality of technique, which deserves all the recognition it can get." You can't, it seems, be unalloyed about Kipling. He not only divides opinion; he subdivides it.

Kipling was just 23 when his first collection, Plain Tales from the Hills , was published in Calcutta and London. Many of these short, tough-hearted stories about civil and military Anglo-Indian administrators began life as "turnover" pieces in a Lahore newspaper. The economy they demanded persisted in his writing, becoming fundamental to his style. In his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself , Kipling wrote: "A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked." The influence of Plain Tales is easily discernible in the work of Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway , who also worked as journalists. This passage from The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows (1884) is perhaps a single repetition away from signature Hemingway:

One of the Persians got killed in a row at night by the big well near the mosque a long time ago, and the Police shut up the well, because they said it was full of foul air. They found him dead at the bottom of it.

One of Kipling's most famous innovations is his use of dialect, which begins agonisingly with the 'Oirish' of Private Mulvaney in Plain Tales, but which he honed into a powerful storytelling tool. Without it, wrote Edmund Wilson, we wouldn't have had "either the baseball stories of Ring Lardner or the Cyclops episode in Ulysses", to which Raine adds the cockney pub conversation in A Game of Chess from The Waste Land. Meanwhile, Kipling's love of intricate hoaxes, which attains its artistic climax in the Jamesian revenge story Dayspring Mishandled (1928), prefigures Borges.

It is fitting that a narrator so concerned with imparting technical knowledge (how to build a bridge, what being shot is like, the way a boat sinks in calm water – what Pound called "Kipling's 'Bigod, I-know-all-about-this' manner") should have continually developed his technique throughout his career. Some critics maintain, as Raine has noted, that "whereas in the early work excision creates intensity, in the later stories it merely creates obscurity". Certainly ellipsis and ambiguity define Kipling's post-1900 work, which, if not modernist itself, travels on a modernist trajectory. Here, as WW Norton identifies, Kipling "brought to its strange perfection that narrative manner of implication, abstention, and obliquity of which the first considerable example is Mrs Bathurst ".

This confounding story of 1904 begins with a detailed description of place – a burning hot beach near Cape Town – and a series of missed connections, both of which take on symbolic importance as four men engage in desultory conversation. They discuss a deserter, his connection to the eponymous Auckland hotelkeeper, and his death in a Bulawayo teak forest, burned to charcoal by lightning. Why did the dead man obsess over a newsreel image of Mrs Bathurst detraining at Paddington? Who is the charred figure found squatting at his feet in the forest? Several theories have been advanced, but Everett thinks decoding the story misses its point. John Bayley sees it as "a perfect artistic embodiment of unreliable narrators and partial views scattered Empire-wide, and also of the fact that most things in life never 'come out'". Its "ambiguous charge of human feeling," writes Everett, "is the very stuff of Kipling's greatest stories".

A similar cryptic energy inhabits They (1904) and The Wish House (1924), which the younger Kipling, beholden to Poe and Maupassant, would have made more shocking and less resonant. The first, written in the aftermath of the death of Kipling's daughter, describes an isolated country house in which the ghosts of dead children congregate. The second – shadowed, like all the stories written after 1915, by the death of his son, John Kipling, at the Battle of Loos – portrays a Sussex cook who visits a "token", or wraith, to take on the suffering of the man who rejected her. Thus her cancer becomes both physical manifestation of her disappointment and symbol of unconditional love. Typically of late Kipling, this moving and disturbing story poses more questions than it answers.

Repressed or thwarted love is a dominant theme in this period, from the strange sadism of Mary Postgate (1915), where a lady's companion appears to orgasm while watching a German airman – whom she may be hallucinating – die at the bottom of a country garden, to its most powerful evocation in The Gardener (1925). The story begins by describing how Helen Turrell's nephew, born of an unsuitable union, came to be in her care. Years after his death in the trenches, Helen travels to Belgium to visit her nephew's grave. The story turns on one word in its closing lines, easy enough to miss, which reveals that he is her illegitimate son, and that the story's third-person narration is in fact an expression of her self-deception. This realisation unlocks the story's freight of sadness, and explains the genteel, buttoned-down quality of its prose. Only once does this mask of reserve slip, when Helen ascends to the cemetery, like a soldier going over the top to face the enemy:

Culverts across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.

The effect, emerging from such nondescript passages, is pointedly dizzying. Kipling may be unfashionable. He is certainly at times objectionable. But at his best he is also indelible, and a much more exciting, original writer than his reputation allows.

Next: Danilo Kiš

• A brief survey of the short story
• Short stories
• Rudyard Kipling

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George Orwell (1903-1950)

Study questions, activities, and resources: george orwell, study questions and activities, “pleasure spots”.

• Compare Orwell’s idea about the modern world with the depiction of Lenina’s dates with Henry and Bernard in Chapters 5 and 6 of Brave New World , especially her date with Bernard.

“Can Socialists Be Happy?”

• This essay appeared under the byline “John Freeman,” in Tribune , December 20, 1943, yet it has been attributed to George Orwell. Read the following discussion and, in point form, list the reasons Orwell has been credited with authorship. http://georgeorwellnovels.com/essays/publication-of-can-socialists-be-happy-by-john-freeman/
• Orwell writes, “All the evils and miseries we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia?” Write a brief essay defending Brave New World as a utopia in which one might want to live.

Read Orwell’s brief essay on Kipling, 1936. http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/rudyard-kipling-1936/

Now, after reading Orwell’s 1936 essay on Kipling (not to be confused with his longer essay written in 1942), clarify what Orwell means in the following sentence, taken from the 1936 essay: “…The picture then called up by the word “empire” was a picture of overworked officials and frontier skirmishes, not of Lord Beaverbrook and Australian butter.”

You might also enjoy reading Orwell’s longer essay on Kipling, published in 1942: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/rudyard-kipling/

You might also wish to view the following clips: http://theorwellprize.co.uk/events/oxford-2011-orwell-vs-kipling/

Attributions

Figure 1: George Orwell press photo by Branch of the National Union of Journalists (BNUJ) ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Orwell_press_photo.jpg ) is in the Public Domain.

• British Literature: Victorians and Moderns. Authored by : James Sexton. Located at : https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature . Project : BCcampus Open Textbook Project. License : CC BY: Attribution