Rudyard Kipling’s Burden
I picked up a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories to add to the two foot high pile of books I don’t have the time to read that is sitting on my coffee table the other day. Today is my only day off and I hope to get knock off a few stories. But for some reason, as I sit and look at the mustached, bespectacled, Anglo-Saxon profile on the cover of the book, a strange sadness has drifted over me. I can’t help but think what a tragic figure Kipling is. He’s sort of emblematic of a bygone time and place, the poet laureate of a lost civilization, his reputation viciously sullied, accused of being a racist, fascist, warmonger simply for writing poetry and stories. Somehow Kipling has become the poster-boy for all that was wrong with the Victorian age. He is held responsible for sending whole generations of young men to their deaths in futile quest for glory, for condoning every imperialist evil, and justifying the subjugation of a host of nations. But if you read his works this is FAR from the truth. If anything some of his most famous works have a vein of foreboding and doubt in them, not only a celebration of those manly virtues held so dear by the people of the age, but a recognition of the grim realities of the world and a warning that with glory there is also death.
I’m thinking of Kipling’s son John who was killed in the First World War. He was terribly myopic but desperately wanted to join the army. Kipling was able to pull some strings and get John gazetted to the Irish Guards. John was sent to France and went over the top during the bloody Battle of Loos before he disappeared in the fog of battle. John was apparently later seen horribly wounded, blindly crawling in the mud, screaming in pain. Kipling undertook an enormous effort to find his son’s body but it was only a few years ago, many many years after the elder Kipling’s death, that John Kippling’s grave was identified.
Kipling’s tales and stories of adventure and mystery have been beloved for generations. And as each generation has grown to view it’s fathers with greater and greater disdain ( I myself have a deep mistrust of baby-boomers) I think we should remember that as we consign our ancestors to the dustbin of history we throw bits of ourselves therein as well. Though many today may want to wash their hands of the past, to revile what Kipling once symbolized as hypocrisy, and self-righteousness, and close-mindedness they ought remember that the Wheel of Fate turns for them as well.
Kipling, I think, deserves a much less shabby treatment. ANnd so does what he stood for.
