On April 20th, WTJX aired My Boy Jack, a film in the PBS Masterpiece series. The film is a fictionalized account of events in the life of the British author Rudyard Kipling starting at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Kipling, who received the 1907 Nobel Prize in literature, was a major force in British letters. By 1914 he had already written most of the works for which he is best known, the novels Kim and Captains Courageous, the story collections The Jungle Book and Just So Stories, the novelette The Man Who Would be King, and poems such as Gunga Din and The Ballad of East and West.
Kipling spent much of his early life in India, at the time called the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire. Kipling's writings are permeated by the theme of Empire. In a 1942 essay George Orwell called him “The Prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase.” In a poem of the same name, Kipling embodied the notion, much in vogue in the 19th century, of the civilizing mission of the Western countries in the phrase “The White Man's Burden.” Ironically, the poem was written not about the British Empire, but about the conquest of the Phillipines by the United States.
The film opens with Kipling in a jingoistic near frenzy in support of a declaration of war by Britain against Germany. War indeed is ultimately declared. The film shows efforts by Jack Kipling to enlist in various branches of the service, all of which are unsuccessful because of his severe myopia. Jack's mother and sister seemed quietly relieved by this but Jack, with his father's support, persists. Ultimately Kipling's influence secures Jack a commission in the Irish Guard, and, at the age of eighteen, he ships off to the Western Front. Three weeks later, in September of 1915, he is reported missing and presumed wounded during the Loos-Artois Offensive. The film then shows the Kipling family's efforts to maintain a sense of hope about Jack, yielding gradually to the realization that he is dead, and the effect his death has on each of them. In real life, Jack Kipling was declared dead two years after he was reported missing. His gravesite is still not known with certainty. In Epitaphs of the War 1914-1918, Kipling later wrote lines which many interpret as an expression of his guilt in procuring Jack's military commission:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Kipling's work demonstrates that he was a thoroughgoing imperialist. However, he was a complex writer, and his work also demonstrates a grasp of the paradoxes and moral ambiguities of imperialism. It also displays a genuine respect for the peoples whom the Brits warred with and conquered. In the poem Gunga Din, for example, line after line of racist slurs culminates with the narrator's admission that, “You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” Similarly, The Ballad of East and West shows an understanding of that which transcends ethnic origin:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
In 1916 Kipling published the elegiac poem Have You News of My Boy Jack? The poem uses the metaphors of wind and tide, and is full of the gentle sadness of a father looking back on the death of his son. One line, however, is discordant:
Except he didn't shame his kind
It is the old imperialism lifting its head for a moment, like a weary lion. But Kipling, beneath the weight of grief, cannot sustain the moment, just as the empire he loved could not sustain itself in the new century. The sadness of the poem is not lifted, it ends with no sense of redemption.
Orwell, as he did with so many others, got Kipling right. He wrote, “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.”
My Boy Jack is available on DVD and will undoubtedly be aired again by PBS in the not-to-distant future. I recommend it highly.
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