While he was in the US Air Force back in the late 1950s, my dad bought a set of books published by Blacks Reader Service Company. You’ve seen them for sale at garage sales: more than 20 books, usually with red covers, and each volume is by a dead white guy whose works are now in the public domain. Shakespeare. Ibsen. Longfellow. Poe. He bought them for $10 from another Air Force guy. He never read any of them. He just thought it was a good deal and that maybe he would have kids someday that wanted to read them.
I. Am. That. Kid.
Well, I’m almost 54, not really a kid… but I loaded up these books when I moved out of the house decades ago and have schlepped them all over the US every time I’ve moved. But I had read only the Shakespeare volume before I was 30, until Buster used it as a chew toy. I didn’t take the set to Germany. But once I got back to the USA 10 years ago, I pulled them out of storage and I’ve read various ones over the years since. Stefan has too: when he found out one of his favorite writers, Jules Verne, was influenced by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe, he wanted to read it and, ta da, there it was in the Poe volume in my set.
Since about 2002, I have tried to read at least a few books a year that are so well-known, have been made into movies so many times or are referenced so frequently, that no one reads them anymore, because we all think we know them, that they hold no interesting or unique insights, that they are just like pop culture has told us they are. Often, they are books that aren’t considered great literature, but, wow, some of them have been FANTASTIC. Like Tarzan.
The other day, The Man Who Would Be King was on TCM. I freakin’ love that movie. Sean Connery and Michael Caine are AMAZING together. There should have been a prequel! I am so ready to write Danny and Peachy prequel fanfiction… and I wondered, do I have this story in my Blacks Reader Service Kipling volume? Welp, yes, there it was. So, I read it. And it was terrific. And I kept reading other stories. And… yeah, I’ve really enjoyed Kipling, more than I ever dreamed. Departmental Ditties and Other Verses is, at times, hysterically funny. I’m a veteran of administration in foreign lands, including Afghanistan, and when it comes to silly bureaucracy, not much has changed since Kipling’s time. That he can make me laugh about paperwork 100 years later is a testament to his incredible wit. His ghost stories are chilling. The Finest Story in the World is so incredibly imaginative – took turns I was not at all expecting. For any story, the descriptions of scenes, even just going down a road or sitting in a room, are so rich – you see the surroundings, you hear them, you smell them. His understanding of the complicated nature of boredom, or jealousy, is expressed so beautifully in his writing – often making me uncomfortable in how close-to-home it hits. And the sweeping, adventurous, reckless nature of some of his characters… I admit it, I’ve missed those lately. No wonder I’m so happy about a new Star Wars movie coming out…
There’s not much quotable, though I did love this, from My Own True Ghost Story:
It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.
Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lap in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.
Indeed, Kipling was a racist, expressed mostly through his colonialists views, but I’m surprised no one ever mentions the far, far more common sexism – he did not at all think much of women. Neither did most men of this time (and now?). Why are we outraged about racism from authors 100 years ago but we gloss over the sexism as, “Oh, well, you know, that’s how it was then.”? Why is sexism interpreted as less painful than racism? And he glorifies war and patriotism, two things that just aren’t my thing at all. But it is fascinating to read such devotion to such.
I’m one of those people that can cringe at this, and more, and, usually, still acknowledge the greatness of a work. Like enjoying the Ride of the Valkyrie while also knowing (and hating) Wagner’s racism and that Hitler dug both the music and the artist’s political views. Like hating war but adoring the movie The Dirty Dozen.
So, for all of you horrified I’m delighting in a dead white male writer… don’t worry, I’ll go back to more diverse voices soon, I promise.
My favorite Kipling piece that I’ve read so far? “My Rival,” one of his only stories – a poem, in fact – devoted entirely to women and that isn’t painfully sexist. It is so delightful, I’ve read it probably half a dozen times already. I may memorize it.
My Rival
I GO to concert, party, ball—
What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
They burn before Her shrine;
And that’s because I’m seventeen
And she is forty-nine.
I cannot check my girlish blush,
My colour comes and goes.
I redden to my finger-tips,
And sometimes to my nose.
But She is white where white should be,
And red where red should shine.
The blush that flies at seventeen
Is fixed at forty-nine.
I wish I had her constant cheek:
I wish that I could sing
All sorts of funny little songs,
Not quite the proper thing.
I’m very gauche and very shy,
Her jokes aren’t in my line;
And, worst of all, I’m seventeen
While She is forty-nine.
The young men come, the young men go,
Each pink and white and neat,
She’s older than their mothers, but
They grovel at Her feet.
They walk beside Her ’rickshaw-wheels—
None ever walk by mine;
And that’s because I’m seventeen
And She is forty-nine.
She rides with half a dozen men
(She calls them “boys” and “mashes”),
I trot along the Mall alone;
My prettiest frocks and sashes
Don’t help to fill my programme-card,
And vainly I repine
From ten to two A.M. Ah me!
Would I were forty-nine.
She calls me “darling,” “pet,” and “dear,”
And “sweet retiring maid.”
I’m always at the back, I know—
She puts me in the shade.
She introduces me to men—
“Cast” lovers, I opine;
For sixty takes to seventeen,
Nineteen to forty-nine.
But even She must older grow
And end Her dancing days,
She can’t go on for ever so
At concerts, balls, and plays.
One ray of priceless hope I see
Before my footsteps shine;
Just think, that She’ll be eighty-one
When I am forty-nine!
Leave a Reply