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Rudyard Kipling on America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Hugh Brogan
Hugh Brogan
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
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Extract

Kipling's ripest comments on the United States are to be found in the late (1926) short story, ‘The Prophet and the Country’. The tale begins with the breakdown of the narrator's car on the Great North Road late one summer night. A passing American offers shelter in his trailer, and a tow in the morning: which offers are accepted. The generous fellow-traveller is Mr Tarworth, a former realtor from Omaha, Nebraska, five years a widower. He drops a few hints about the Collective Outlook of Democracy, the Herd Impulse, and ‘the counterbalancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression’ and then launches artlessly into the story of his life. His own Primal Urge for Individual Self-Expression, we learn, came to him on his way home from his wife's funeral, when he had a Revelation qua Prohibition. Prohibition is the sin of Presumption, foisted on the American male by the American female. The sin will be duly punished, because to protect any race from the ‘ natural and God-given bacteria’ of civilization is to induce a condition of virginity which is terrifyingly vulnerable. ‘Immunise, or virg'nise, the Cit'zen of the United States to alcohol, an' you as surely redooce him to the mental status an' outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition.’ Such had been Mr Tarworth's Revelation. The next question was, how to convey it to his fellow-countrymen. He decided to make a movie, even if ‘the Movies wasn't a business I'd ever been interested in, though a regular attendant’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 1973 , pp. 31 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

1 Kipling visited Omaha in 1889, inspected an undertaker's there, and in his account of the visit became the first English writer to comment satirically on American burial rites (From Sea To Sea, vol. 2, pp. 148–50Google Scholar). He alludes briefly to this encounter in ‘ The Prophet And The Country’ (Debits and Credits, p. 183Google Scholar). Earlier, in Japan, a Western American informed him that dice were invented in Omaha, and apparently expected to be believed (From Sea To Sea, vol. 1, p. 399Google Scholar). These and all subsequent references are to the standard Macmillan edition of Kipling's works.

2 The fullest account of this episode is in Carrington, Charles, Rudyard Kipling, His Life and Work (London, 1955), pp. 232–9.Google Scholar

3 ‘The Captive’ in fact also belongs to a group of polemical, Boer War-inspired writings, of which the poem ‘The Islanders’, with its famous phrase about the flannelled fools at the wicket, is the most famous. The group also includes ‘The Outsider’, an extremely unflattering study of a bone-headed subaltern, which impressed Theodore Roosevelt, and ‘A Burgher Of The Free State’, in which an American journalist, a subordinate character, makes some trenchant comments on English incompetence.

4 Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, 12 January 1899; letters of Theodore Roosevelt, selected and edited by Morison, Elting E., Blum, John and Buckley, John J. (Harvard University Press, 1951–1954), vol. 2, p. 909.Google Scholar

5 Roosevelt, Theodore to Roosevelt, Anna, 1 April 1894Google Scholar; Letters, vol. 1, p. 370.Google Scholar

6 Wilson, said Roosevelt, was ‘a scholarly, acrid pacifist of much ability and few scruples. He was born in Virginia, and comes of a family none of whose members fought on either side in the Civil War ’. (Roosevelt, Theodore to Kipling, Rudyard, 4 November 1914Google Scholar; Letters, vol. 8, pp. 829–31Google Scholar.) It is perhaps worth mentioning that Wilson greatly admired ‘ If –’ and asked for an autographed copy. Roosevelt's favourite Kipling poem was ‘The Islanders’, which he alluded to, or quoted, again and again during the Great War. See Letters, vol. 8, passim.

7 This article is an abridged veision of a paper that was read at the 1972 BAAS conference at the University of Durham.