martedì 8 giugno 2010

Kipling beyond India


FROM TLS
Although usually associated with the British Raj, Kipling lived on four continents and visited over twenty countriesElizabeth Lowry 2 Comments
Recommend? (3) Today we associate Rudyard Kipling overwhelmingly with India, but this is a mistake. Never was a writer so much on the go. During a working career spanning half a century he lived on four continents and visited over twenty countries, including not only France, Spain, Italy and Belgium but also the United States and Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Algeria, Egypt and Palestine, Japan, China, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Jamaica and Bermuda.

A journalist by training and by nature a voracious observer, writing at a time when developments in mass transportation were making the globe ever smaller, Kipling was ideally placed, both historically and temperamentally, to chronicle the otherness of Britain’s colonies and beyond for his metropolitan readers at home. His appetite for travel was compulsive, his sense of the strangeness of abroad deeply ingrained. Born in Bombay in 1865 in the heyday of the British Raj, he spent his childhood shuttling between England and India, which appeared to have left him with an abiding sense of dislocation. For Kipling, almost everywhere was “other”: he remained, at heart, an outsider in every country he lived in or visited.

It is this sensitivity to the radical foreignness of foreign places that makes his travel writing so compelling. He has a startling ability – generously represented in Andrew Lycett’s selection – to bring to life the colour and texture and, if need be, the perfume of wherever he found himself. The rubric “Traffics and Discoveries” is borrowed from Kipling’s 1904 collection of stories by that name (a title taken, in turn, from the seventeenth-century travel writer Richard Hakluyt) and it sums up the bustle and spectacle and surprise of the pieces collected here. One of the most remarkable features of Kipling’s prose is that he never reaches for off-the-peg tropes, having an almost Jacobean ability to yoke the familiar and the unfamiliar image together, whether he is depicting the frozen Canadian Pacific Railway in April (“the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles . . . . The snow has smothered the rivers, and the great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge wash-tub”) or the draught-board effect of a Japanese rice field. He may be an emissary of Empire, but he wears his Englishness lightly, remaining even-handedly conscious of the fact that there are different (and sometimes even superior) ways of doing things from the English way. He is as struck by the unfussy aesthetic of the Kyoto porcelain factories as he is by the efficient carnage of the Chicago stockyards; he is alive to the claustrophobic paganism of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and to the claustrophobic Christianity of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Like all good travellers, he tries on the whole not to judge but to suspend his own sense of the normative, and like the very best sort of traveller he never turns up his nose at foreign food. Again and again it is the telling detail that wins us over: his delighted pride in being able to tip us the wink that “the open square, under the great front of Wazir Khan’s mosque” in Lahore is “where any man may find a bed and remarkably good kababs, if he knows where to go”; his eye-watering mortification, when in Nagasaki, at not realizing that you aren’t supposed to devour all the wasabi served with your raw fish in one go.

There are moments of complacency, but overwhelmingly this collection is a sensitive illustration of the awareness expressed by Kipling in his poetry that “If you cross over the sea, / Instead of over the way”, you may end by “looking on We / As only a sort of They”. Oddly enough, this is never more true than when Kipling is describing England itself. When asked what he thought of England, he had a habit of saying that it was “the most wonderful foreign land I have ever been in”. And indeed, in noting the “blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed downs” of Sussex, the London fog, “darker than any dust storm”, or “the icy blackness of the Great North Road banded . . . with smoking mists that changed from solid pearly to writhing opal, as they lifted above hedge-row level”, he is effortlessly able to reinvent England for us. When Kipling tells us that home is exotic, we believe him.

Lycett draws on materials both accessible and inaccessible: articles from Kipling’s first paper, the Lahore Civil & Military Gazette, which are otherwise only available on library microfiche; the poems, collections of short stories, Kipling’s autobiography, and his letters. It is in the letters that Kipling’s marvellous facility for responding to a place comes out most clearly. Here he is in a stalled train with a consignment of ice in the Matopos hills of what is now Zimbabwe, en route from the Kimberley diamond fields to the north, but always, however brief the stop, somehow still acting and reacting, still in the thick of it all:

On the banks of the Macloutsi river – 300 miles from anywhere in particular – I saw a prospector with a pack on his back chucking up green bile under a tree. He was pretty dead with fever and he had an Abra’m Lincoln beard. I stepped out of the train and gave him 20 grains of quinine. Then, like a fool, I offered him whiskey and that set him vomiting worse than ever. Then I thought of the ice: and got out a bottle of soda-water that had been froze into the ice for two days. That fetched him. “My God,” he said, “you’re as good as an uncle,” and he put it down in a minute. “Where do you come from?” says I. “Boston, Mass’chussetts”, was the amazing answer. “And what are you doing here?” says I. “Pegging out claims an’ dyin’,” says he. Then the train went on.

Readiness to engage, can-do energy and unflappability: that’s Kipling the traveller at his best.

Rudyard Kipling
KIPLING ABROAD
Traffics and discoveries from Burma to Brazil
Edited by Andrew Lycett
Elizabeth Lowry’s novel The Bellini Madonna was published in 2009.

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