Jottings from the Editors Desk

Our last meeting was certainly a success, despite a move to a temporary location. Thanks to Ian Claridge, who not only organised the event, but borrowed the projector and returned it after the meeting.

The meeting room was smaller than our usual one, and we filled quite well.

Dr Philip Holberton gave us a well researched talk on RK’s schooldays, with portraits of his contemporaries, school masters, and a run down on Westward Ho. Besides this Dr Holberton has given us articles for this quarters newsletter. We are extremely grateful for the talk and the articles. It is a pity he lives quite a distance away, but we hope we do see more of him.

Next August’s talk by Naren Menon on Kipling and India will be at our usual hall , Lord street, Roseville, followed by Professor Alexander on October 24th, and Dr Cowan on February 27th. Still arranging dates for 2010, we have a talk on Kipling and the Masonic movement coming up, and a musical event.

Susannah Fullerton, has just had a book published, which is reviewed later on. The launch was at the Art Gallery of NSW, I am very sorry to have missed it ,I was in hospital, minor problem, but Susannah has promised to bring some copies to our next meeting.

We seem to be getting more enquiries from our website, I have put some in the newsletter as examples. Where the enquirers put in their email address we can reply straight away.

The poem we have printed was requested by a member some months ago and no, I did not forget! It is almost a poem to print around Christmas, but the weather we have been having recently makes it topical.

RK’s translation of a Horace Ode into a Devonshire dialect, done while he was at school, is new to me, and again we have to thank Philip Holberton for it.

- D.W.

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Corespondence from The Kipling Society Australia website

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RUDYARD KIPLING a new Appreciation
by HILTON BROWN

Each newsletter we will try and review a book about Kipling, preferably the less well known

Rudyard Kipling... a New Appreciation..by Hilton Brown. First published in August 1945 by Hamish Hamilton London.

Hilton Brown was a well known author of Prose and poetry in the 30’s and 40,s, with a good general knowledge of India, he wrote “The civilians South India”, and as a novelist he draws a good picture of Kipling, one of his more trenchant phrases is still very relevant today ‘No writer was more keenly loved, debated, plumbed, searched and remembered, except among those whose business it was to set the standards of literary taste’

There has been debate on how closely Trix (Mrs Fleming) RK’s sister, was associated with this book. Certainly she supplied Hilton Brown with a lot of family history and detail unknown to the general public at the time the book was written, this is acknowledged by Hilton in his authors note.

While not the first of books about Kipling, Sir George MacMunns books, and writings by Bonamy Dobree, GCBeresford, Cyril Falls, RT Hopkins JV Jensen and Edward Shanks all published prior to 1945 come to mind, this book was arguably the first by a popular novelist of the day, George MacMunn would, I am sure, preferred to be called a historian , soldier and writer.

Hilton Browns book marks the start of the postwar (39-45) acceptance , paving the way to the growing appreciation in the more rarified circles of academia, as evidenced today by the increased number of students doing thesis on aspects of Kipling for their masters and doctorates.

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Kipling and THE LAW

Most of us remember the verse in the Recessional “lesser breeds without the Law” so avidly seized upon by Left wing critics (and there are not many other literary critics) as evidence of RK’s bias against less fortunate people. However the idea of the Law in some of the more popular of RK’s writings is worth a little exploration.

Soldiers Three, and in conversations with Private Ortheris, the Law was regimental orders. Orde refers to traditions of the Service, whilst in Kim Mahbub Ali calls it the will of Allah, the Lama calls it the Way, and later Ram Das referred to the Puranas. Frequent references to Masonic ritual, and to a lesser extent the reference to Mithras in the Church that was at Antioch are all relevant to RK’s interpretation of the Law.

All these references to a higher authority are as different as the strictures of the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Hindu religions, but they all mean, although to different people, a higher authority, and a way to live.

Kipling often used the term “The Law” , which had no more definition than many a generalised term, but he very carefully refused to define the word, and he used it to describe the overlying thoughts behind any person or system who subscribes to a definite code, whether of conduct, behaviour, business pattern, ethics or the like.

To RK’s way of thinking all disciplined people obeyed some sort of unwritten law, often by tradition, but, except for some isolated examples, ie some quotations of the Lama, RK left it as a vague and all embracing “Law”, which he frequently wrote, and alluded to in his later works.

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BRIEF ENCOUNTERS:
Literary Travellers in Australia

Susannah Fullerton, Picador, $34.99

Rudyard Kipling was not an assertive lover - his 'romances' with women were hesitant, rather confused and he was invariably attracted to older, bossy women who told him what to do. His favourite method of dealing with a romance that was growing complicated, was to flee from it. This is what happened in 1891 when Kipling set off on what he called "a small excursion to the other end of the world" because he didn't know what to do about Caroline Balestier. He fled to Australia!

Kipling spent only 2 weeks in Australia - he saw Tasmania from the boat, he spent time in Melbourne, took a train to Sydney and had all of 2 days there, then went by train back to Melbourne. He was already famous by the time of his visit although he was only 24, so he was introduced to various dignitaries, was interviewed by several journalists, and was quoted extensively in the press. It was not an entirely happy visit. Having travelled so far to try and work out his feelings for one young lady, he was appalled to read in the newspaper that he was evidently engaged to another, Florence Garrard, one of his earlier flirtations. He raised hackles when he criticised Australians for having too much government for the size of population, being too prone to go on strike and for not being cautious enough about the "Yellow Peril" on the doorstep.Not everyone was pleased with his remarks.

Kipling's visit may have been a short one, but it was productive, although it took time before its true effect appeared. It was only in the Boer War that he came to really like Australians, and his experiences with that group of soldiers left him impressed. Never, he felt, had he met "a cleaner, simpler, saner, more adequate gang of men". As a result, he wrote a beautiful poem Lichtenberg about a homesick Aussie soldier riding through the little South African town of Lichtenberg, but remembering his Hunter Valley home as he does so. Kipling's short story A Sahib's War also demonstrates his respect for the Australian fighting man.

Australia was also included in the Just-So Stories, with The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo. It is an intensely Australian story, with hungry Dingo "grinning like a rat trap", places names such as Warrigaborrigarooma, and even the free verse style catching the rhythms and tone of 'Ocker' speech.

Kipling also wrote poems about Australia - The Young Queen and the Ode which he was asked to write especially for the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance.

Brief Encounters covers all these aspects, and more, of Rudyard Kipling's visit to Australia. It also includes the stories of other famous writers who visited - Charles Darwin who came on his "Beagle' voyage; Anthony Trollope who came to see his son and write an early version of the Lonely Planet Guide to Australia; Joseph Conrad who got to know the docks of Australian ports but little else; Robert Louis Stevenson who came for his health and got sick every time; bankrupt Mark Twain who came to earn money by lecturing to Australians but who made them laugh so hard they barely noticed the expense. Then there was Jack London, whose articles written about what he saw here provoked race riots in America; there was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who came to preach spiritualism to people who only wanted to hear about Sherlock Holmes; Agatha Christie who saw no corpses and had a very peaceful visit; D.H.Lawrence who sat by the beach at Thirroul and wrote a novel called Kangaroo which is very poor in parts, but totally brilliant in its evocation of the Australian bush. And lastly there was H.G.Wells who fought very publicly with the Prime Minister while here, and managed to upset the Catholics, Jews, teachers and journalists as well.

Discover what these literary visitors can tell us about Australia and its history, how each visit inspired fascinating literary works, what they thought of us and what we thought of them, and much more!

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: Literary Travellers in Australia is available from all good bookshops, or by email from fullerto@bigpond.net.au

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KIPLING, SWINBURNE AND BRET HARTE

Philip Holberton

In Something of Myself, Kipling writes: “Swinburne did not strike my very young mind as 'anything in particular' till I read Atalanta in Calydon, and one verse of verses which exactly set the time for my side-stroke when I bathed in the big rollers off the Ridge. As thus:-

Who shall seek - who shall bring
Who restore us the day
When the dove dipped her wing
And the oars won their way
Where the labouring Symplegades whiten the Straits of Propontis
with spray ?

If you can time the last line of it to end with a long roller crashing on your head, the cadence is complete.”

Kipling here ignores his own advice that “You should always verify you quotations” and he doesn’t get this “verse of verses” quite right. The verse is actually personal, addressed to the dying Meleager. The speaker is reminding him of his glory days as one of Jason’s Argonauts. They have come to the Clashing Rocks, great black continually-moving pinnacles which smash together and rebound. They send out a dove, and she flies between the rocks, only losing the tips of her tail-feathers as the rocks come together again. Encouraged by the omen, they row till the oars bend like bows, and they get through, though the Rocks shear off the mascot from Argo’s stern. So the verse really reads:

Who shall seek thee and bring
And restore thee thy day
When the dove dipped her wing
And the oars won their way
Where the narrowing Symplegades whitened the Straits of Propontis
with spray?

Kipling goes on: “I even forgave Bret Harte, to whom I owed many things, for taking that metre in vain in his ' Heathen Chinee.' But I never forgave C- [Crofts, the prototype of King in Stalky & Co.] for bringing the fact to my notice.”

“The Heathen Chinee” is Bret Harte’s best-known poem, though in these politically-correct days we should probably give it its proper title - “Plain Language from Truthful James.”

Which I wish to remark
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,
Which the same I would
rise to explain.

Atalanta came out in 1865, and The Heathen Chinee in 1870, which gives Swinburne priority. But Bret Harte had used the metre in “Dows Flat” in 1858.

You see this ‘yer Dow
Hed the worst kind of luck:
He slipped up somehow
On each thing that he struck.
Why, ef he’d a-straddled that fence-rail,
The derned thing ‘ed get up and buck.

It would be nice to think that Swinburne somehow got to know the work of an obscure compositor from San Francisco, but it’s pretty unlikely.

So did Bret Harte and Swinburne each develop that metre independently?

Or had another poet, whom they had both read, used it before 1858?

- Philip Holberton

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RK’s translation of a Horace Ode into a Devonshire dialect

Donec Gratus Eram
(Horace Book III, No.9)

HE
So long as 'twuz me alone
An' there wasn't no other chaps,
I was praoud as a King
on 'is throne
Happier tu, per'aps.

SHE
So long as 'twuz only I
An' there wasn't no other she
Yeou cared for so much - surely
I was glad as could be.

HE
But now I'm in lovv with
Jane Pritt-
She can play the piano, she can;
An' if dyin’ ‘ud 'elp 'er a bit
I'd die laike a man.

SHE
Yeou'm like me. I'm in lovv
with young Frye -
Him as lives out tu
Appledore Quay;
An' if dyin’ ‘ud 'elp ‘im I'd die
Twice ovver for he.

HE
But s'posin' I threwed up Jane
An' niver went walkin' with she-
And come back to yeou again-
How 'ud that be?

SHE
Frye's sober. Yeou've allus
done badly -
An' yeou shifts like cut net floats, yeou du:
But – I’d throw that young Frye
ovver gladly
An' lovv 'ee right thru!

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A Kipling Poem

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