Hesketh Pearson

by The Marrying Americans

  Kipling had reached a point of extraordinary eminence by the end of the century. He was popular with the navy as well as the army, and accompanied the Channel Squadron on a cruise. The sole fly in the ointment was the piracy of his works in America, and he went there with his family to arrange matters—an unlucky journey because his eldest daughter died while they were in New York and he nearly followed her. Worldwide sympathy was aroused by his condition, and when it looked as if he would not recover, the streets outside their hotel were packed with silent crowds. Carrie behaved with great fortitude throughout a period of terrible anxiety, and Kipling believed that he owed his life to her.

  Not long after their return the South African war broke out. Kipling wrote some verses called “The Absent-minded Beggar” which were set to music by Arthur Sullivan and played on every barrel organ in the country. They resulted in a quarter of a million pounds for charitable purposes and the offer of a knighthood for Kipling, which he declined. Early in 1900 the Kiplings paid their yearly visit to Cape Town, where Rhodes was building a house on his own estate for the use of writers and artists, Rudyard and Carrie being the first to occupy it for several years in succession. The Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, asked Kipling to join the staff of a newspaper, and he went to Bloemfontein in March to repeat the labors he had once undergone at Lahore. He also had his first experience of being under gunfire at a minor engagement with the Boers, after which he returned to Cape Town, having been absent for a fortnight.

  Back in England by the end of April, he helped to organize a rifle club at Rottingdean, attended many discussions at the Plough Inn, and wrote a poem in favor of compulsory military service, in which he enraged many of his compatriots by referring to “the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.” Throughout the war they continued to winter at Cape Town, and when hostilities were over, Rudyard appeared in a new character. His aunt, Lady Burne-Jones, had sympathized with the Boers, and when they finally surrendered she hung a black flag from a window of North End House. A crowd assembled in ugly mood, and Kipling saved her house from damage by remonstrating with those who wished to put “the law of the pack” into operation. Both Carrie and himself were getting tired of the Rottingdean radicals, more especially of the mobs of trippers from Brighton who made life difficult at The Elms; and at last they found a house near Burwash in east Sussex, known as Bateman’s, which lay in a secluded valley and owned some thirty acres of pasture. For a little over £9,000 they bought this eminently desirable residence in 1902, moved there in September, and made it their home for the remainder of their lives.

  Being some distance from a railway station, Kipling experimented with various kinds of mechanical vehicles and soon became independent of trains. Those were primitive times for motorcars, and he spent many hours on the roads getting what has been called “the inside dope on gadgets.” His main hobby in life was the collecting of information, and this led him to believe in the common delusion that travel broadens the mind. Substituting information for insight, many of his stories were unreadable, and he himself could become a bore because he pumped people for whatever knowledge they possessed and when the pump ran dry he lost interest in them. It is permissible to guess that his friend Rider Haggard was especially welcome at Bateman’s on account of the agricultural instruction he could impart.

  But when he allowed his imagination free rein Kipling’s stories were incomparable, and the first decade of the twentieth century saw the peak of his creative genius. Approaching the summit by way of “They,” a superb story inspired by the memory of his dead daughter, he began a series of fairy-tales. With so much of the child within himself, Kipling sympathized with children and understood them. He was devoted to his own, telling them stories, reading to them, answering their questions, playing with them. They were disciplined with some strictness by their mother, who enforced obedience and favored a Spartan upbringing, but they could relax with their father. One summer they persuaded him to play the part of Bottom in scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with his son John as Puck, his daughter Elsie as Titania, their stage being an ancient quarry where the Romans had worked a forge. That set his mind going, and he began to retell historical episodes in the form of fantasy which are equally delightful to children and adults. Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) contain his best prose and poetry and in their kind have been equalled by no other writer. They can be read with increasing pleasure from early youth to old age, and of not many imaginative works can that be said. Kipling’s sensitiveness to the air and earth of England is touchingly expressed again and again, perhaps most exquisitely in the verses beginning:

  Take of English earth as much

  As either hand may rightly clutch.

  In the taking of it breathe

  Prayer for all who lie beneath.…

  Lay that earth upon thy heart,

  And thy sickness shall depart!

  It was the most peaceful and satisfying period of the author’s life, with his children about him, the house of his dreams, and a second home near Cape Town for the winters. But a Liberal Government came to power in 1906. South Africa was handed over to the Boers with apologies for any inconvenience caused them while fighting the British Empire for two and a half years; Kipling’s friend Dr. Jameson ceased to be Premier, and the family discontinued their annual visits after the spring of 1908. At home he was again offered a knighthood, but he preferred freedom to speak his mind and turned it down. The Laureateship was not offered him because it was known that he would not accept it. But he had no objection to academic distinctions, receiving doctorates from Durham, Oxford, Cambridge and McGill, for the last of which he visited Canada; and the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature. His mother died at the end of 1910, his father a few weeks later, both having lived to see him “bear his blushing honours thick upon him.”

  His home life was governed entirely by Carrie, who dealt with his correspondence, ran the farm, and decided on the number and quality of their visitors, keeping away all those who wished to see her husband from mere curiosity. She was an economical housekeeper and made rather too much of her hospitality; she suffered from rheumatism, which, from 1908 onwards, tended to exacerbate her arbitrary, moody, suspicious and captious nature, as a consequence of which the family life was permeated with “a sense of strain and worry amounting sometimes to hysteria.”{39} Having finished with South Africa, the Kiplings spent some weeks in Switzerland at the beginning of each year, going on to Vernet-les-Bains for the sake of Carrie’s health.

  The war of 1914-18, foreseen by Kipling, brought all sorts of eagerly accepted duties. He visited the French and Italian fronts, and inspected ships, training grounds, etc. He wrote articles galore, poems, and histories of one thing and another. He was on his feet or at his desk from morning to night. And he endured the tragedy of losing his eighteen-year-old son, at first reported missing. For two years they hoped for good news but at last accepted the fact that they would never see him again. They scarcely ever talked of him, bottling up their grief, and both of them seemed suddenly to have grown much older. Kipling undertook a History of the Irish Guards, which had been his boy’s regiment, and he got some comfort from talking to those who had served with the youthful subaltern. Later he was an active member of the War Graves Commission, but his son’s body was never found and had no grave.

  From 1915 on, Kipling became the victim of a gastric complaint, and the doctors could make nothing of it, dieting and purging him, cutting down his consumption of cigarettes, and ultimately advising an operation, which he sustained, but to no purpose. Sometimes he felt quite well, often he suffered agonies, and the cause of his illness was not discovered until 1933, when a French doctor diagnosed duodenal ulcers of some fifteen years standing, at the end of which he was not strong enough to survive an operation. Little wonder that he was usually depressed and that his later stories largely dealt with diseases. No amount of worldly acclaim could make
life worth living, and among other honors he refused the Order of Merit, though he took a doctorate from the University of Paris and was elected Lord Rector of St. Andrews University.

  Although he could escape from melancholy by work and could feel liberated in the exercise of his genius, he had no abiding pleasure in existence, agreeing with Rider Haggard that the world was one of the hells, containing as it did doubt, fear, bereavement, mental and physical torment, temptations that were almost irresistible, and ultimate execution. He believed in a personal devil, but had little sense of God’s existence; and when Haggard said that at least the other had achieved fame, Kipling replied with a gesture of disgust: “What is it worth?—what is it all worth?” Haggard admitted that most of his friends were dead, but that he still made acquaintances. “I don’t,” was Kipling’s grim comment. On hearing that Haggard was ten years older than himself, Kipling remarked: “Then you have the less time left in which to suffer.”{40}

  “Temptations that were almost irresistible.” He was in fact afraid of life, knowing enough of human weakness to decide that he did not wish to know more. In one of his sillier stories, written at the end of his life, he makes Shakespeare say that his works did not express his own feelings and that he had served up King Lear as a vomit for Burbage when that actor was at odds with the world. Kipling’s inability to appreciate the profound reality of Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece indicates more clearly than anything else his stunted spiritual nature, which had scarcely developed since leaving school. Once he confided to Hugh Walpole that there was “too much of the abnormal in all of us to play about with it,” and Walpole perceived that he hated “opening up reserves.”{41} For this reason he loathed what he called muckraking. As there is a good deal of muck in the world, it can do with a little raking occasionally, and Kipling had done some in his own field of storytelling; but he drew the line at disclosing the truth about actual human beings. For this reason he needed, more than most men, a protector who would shield him from the world, and after starting with his parents he found one in Carrie. For this reason too he was at his happiest when writing stories about animals or children or (regrettably) machines, and one of his last works dealt with dogs.

  In spite of increasing disability Carrie continued to be his secretary, bailiff, accountant, housekeeper and warder, and after the marriage of their daughter Elsie to Captain George Bambridge in 1924, her ministrations were concentrated on her husband. “Even if I wanted to run away from Carrie I couldn’t do it,” he told Lady Milner, “because she would have to look out the train and book the ticket.”{42}

  The village of Burwash saw little of Kipling, who was scarcely known in the place, and once when a sturdily built man of 5 feet 6 inches in height with excessively bushy eyebrows and expressive eyes walked through the main street, no one recognized him except the visitor who noted the fact.{43} His wife sealed him off from contact with other people, and when it was necessary that he should visit London for the day she allowed him a certain amount of money for his lunch.{44} In company he was genial and talked like his books, taking “a flattering interest” in other people and asking them countless questions about matters on which they were experts.{45} But what he really extended was an unflattering self-interest, for he docketed the information so gathered for future use in his work. He seldom spoke of himself, probably because his wife was on the watch. She had an eye on him even while talking to others, and interrupted his conversation if she thought him on dangerous ground. When he embarked on a story she would sometimes cut him short and complete it. Her close guardianship had an unfortunate effect because it made him defer to her in company. Lady Astor thought him laughably servile. At Cliveden he sat on a sofa with Carrie and applied for her opinions before answering questions. Try as she might their hostess could not get him alone.

  But now and again the inseparables were apart, as when he spent a weekend at Balmoral with the King. Old friends got the best out of him because he felt at ease with them. Asked by the present writer whether Kipling was lovable, his cousin, Stanley Baldwin, replied: “I loved him. But it was difficult to get to know him. He didn’t open out to many. With a pen in his hand he came to life, and would roar with laughter over his own things. He didn’t mind me sitting there while he was working, and sometimes he would get up and walk up and down the garden chanting his poetry. It was only, he said, by singing it aloud that one could get poetry right.”

  “Did you see much of him in London?”

  “Occasionally at the Athenaeum. He said to me once that whenever he went into the lavatory there he expected to find a bishop on his back kicking his legs in the air like a black beetle....Kipling disliked connecting a man with his work. He wasn’t given to personalities of any kind, and I never heard him express an opinion on any of his contemporaries, though there were two he mistrusted, not on literary grounds, but for their effect on the young.”

  One of the two was H. G. Wells. The other was Bernard Shaw, who described his only meeting with Kipling to the present author. It was at Westminster Abbey, and they were acting as pallbearers at the funeral of Thomas Hardy, the others being John Galsworthy, James Barrie, A. E. Housman and Edmund Gosse. The latter to his amazement discovered that Shaw and Kipling had never met before. Gosse was a great promoter of the get-together spirit among men of letters. So taking no account of the fact that Kipling detested everything that Shaw stood for, Gosse seized Kipling and dragged him across to effect the introduction. “Kipling was nervous and fidgety,” said Shaw. “He made a little dive at me, thrust out a hand quickly, said ‘Howdyedo,’ withdrew the hand instantly as if he hardly dared to trust me with it, and bolted like a rabbit into a corner where Housman was there to protect him....As we marched, pretending to carry the ashes of whatever part of Hardy was buried in the Abbey, Kipling, who fidgeted continually and was next in front of me, kept changing his step. Every time he did so I nearly fell over him.” The change of step may have been the imperialist’s revenge for being compelled to march with a socialist. Shaw, having no rancor in his nature, was amused.

  In 1929 Carrie added diabetes to rheumatism among her disabilities, and they visited the West Indies, where she came down with appendicitis. Kipling got her home via Canada. His last work was called Something of Myself, which, though interesting, should have been entitled Scarcely Anything of Myself, the main emotions of his life being carefully veiled.

  Intending to spend the early part of 1936 on the Riviera, they put up at Brown’s Hotel in London on the way. But during the night of January 12th, Kipling had a very serious hemorrhage and was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital where he underwent a major operation, from which he did not recover. He died on the 18th, and by a curious irony of fate “The Red Flag” was being sung at Golders Green crematorium by the admirers of Saklatvala, an Indian communist whose body was being cremated as Kipling’s arrived under a Union Jack. Kipling’s ashes were laid in the Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey. Carrie survived for another three years.

  CHAPTER 16—A Producer Reproduced

  Helen Huntington and Harley Granville Barker

  However strong the influence of a woman over a man, she cannot radically change his character, and if he is a man of genius, such as Kipling, she can do no more than change his habits. But if a dominating female marries a man of talent she can change the direction of his life and destroy the peculiar faculty with which nature has endowed him. This was the fate of Harley Granville Barker, who might have revolutionized the art of stage presentation and lifted the whole tone of the theatre, but whose second marriage caused him to lapse into the minor role of professorial commentator. It was a tragedy for the theatre, which has not since produced a talent that can compare with his, and it was a tragedy for himself, who knew that he had committed the sin of the man in the parable: he had hidden his talent in the earth and could not claim the commendation: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

  Since the author knew the leading figures and received firsthand accou
nts of several episodes in the story that follows, it will again be suitable to write occasionally in the first person.

  Harley Granville Barker was born in London on November 25, 1877,{46} and appears to have taken no pride in his parentage, since he never referred to his mother or father and scarcely ever to his upbringing, though I once heard him say that childhood was often the least pleasant part of a man’s life. His father, Bernard Shaw told me, “was an architect turned building speculator,” and met with no success. His mother earned a living by public recitations of poetry and imitations of those birds which make easily recognizable sounds, but she too was often out of work. From about the age of eight Harley accompanied his mother to the various provincial halls in which she appeared, being taught by her to recite popular poems, clothed in a sailor’s suit. But the affection usually bestowed on child-performers did not much increase their comfort, and at the age of fourteen he received some training as an actor in the hope that he would soon be able to support himself. He got a job in a touring company, was seen by a dramatist named Charles Brookfield, and played a small part in a London production before he was sixteen. He read greedily, particularly the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Dickens, and started to write dramas with a fellow actor, one of which was given a single performance at a London theatre. He got to know Gilbert Murray and William Archer, both of whom fostered his ambition as a playwright, and soon he was taken up by William Poel, who believed that Shakespeare’s plays should be performed on the sort of stage for which they were written. Barker appeared as Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II in Poel’s productions, and made something of a reputation. Poel taught him a great deal, and influenced his future work in poetic drama.