Kipling, Waugh, Tolkien and the Island of Civilisation

It would at first glance be difficult to find three modern English writers more unlike in their interests, preoccupations, circles of friends and lives than Rudyard Kipling, Evelyn Waugh and J.R.R. Tolkien. There is no evidence that they particularly admired each other’s work, indeed Waugh was disparaging of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Tolkien mentioned in the foreword to later editions of The Lord of the Rings that as far as those who found the work “boring, condemnable or absurd” were concerned, he had no cause to complain because he held similar opinions of their own works, or at any rate the works they seemed to prefer.

It is safe to say that Tolkien would have found the louche side of Waugh’s world repellent. Kipling also repeatedly wrote contemptuously of the arty-pretentious, self-indulgent types who inhabited Waugh’s “Metroland”. They were the Bandar-log, the stupid, useless monkeys of The Jungle Book. (Waugh himself seemed to despise them equally, yet they constituted much of his milieu.) Kipling wrote of “brittle intellectuals that crack beneath the strain”. Waugh’s targets were not intellectuals so much as idle social butterflies incapable of thought or action or taking anything seriously.

Kipling was fascinated by industrialisation, Tolkien largely horrified by it, Waugh interested in other things.

Yet the things that the three had in common were very important. All three were political conservatives, all were patriots. All would, with varying emphasis, have agreed with Shakespeare:

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.

Kipling’s fascination with machinery notwithstanding, all were opposed to the program of the modern world. Tolkien and Waugh were emphatically Catholics; Kipling had an idiosyncratic religion, probably owing more to the Old Testament than the New, but accommodating to Christianity, as shown in a number of stories, including “The Church That Was at Antioch”, “The Conversion of Saint Wilfrid” and “On the Wall”.

Unlike a number of prominent writers of the period (Lawrence, Auden, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Dylan Thomas) Tolkien and Waugh saw active service as officers in the First and Second World Wars respectively. Kipling would certainly have been enthusiastic to have served in “the lordliest life on Earth” had poor eyesight not kept him out. He may have done some secret intelligence work in India, judging by Kim and “The Ballad of the King’s Jest”—or this may have just been part of his amazing talent for putting himself inside other people’s—and animals’—skins.

Kipling did see some real fighting as a correspondent in the Boer War and was a visitor to the trenches and at sea with the fleet in the First World War, and played a leading role in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, being responsible for some of the most notable characteristics of Commonwealth War Cemeteries. He worked with the Premier of Victoria, Sir Stanley Argyle, on the design and building of the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance. He would have agreed with Dr Johnson that every man thinks badly of himself who has not been a soldier or sailor.

He gave thanks for having two separate sides to his head: the literary artist and the admirer of “man and muscle”. Putting the dichotomy another way, according to the inclinations of those opposite sides of his head he was both the man of modernity, like McAndrew, fascinated by technology and progress, and also the adventurer in the wild, admiring Vikings, smugglers and Eskimos unspoilt by contact with civilisation:

The people of the elder ice,
Beyond the white man’s ken—
Their spears are made of narwhal horn,
And they are the last of the Men!

 It might be said that Kipling admired both the soldier and the warrior—anyway, people who did things, like Tolkien’s heroes and unlike the arty inhabitants of London salons. The Jungle-boy Mowgli, raised by wolves, calls up the animals to destroy a village that has persecuted his parents and sends it back to jungle, but ends up working as a forester in the Indian civil service.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Waugh intrigued desperately but with limited success among his influential friends for a posting as a fighter at the front. His hero Guy Crouchback, and presumably Waugh himself, viewed the Nazi-Soviet alliance with joy and relief rather than disillusionment and despair: “The enemy was in full view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. This was the modern age in arms.” Waugh joined the Royal Marines, and later took commando and paratroop courses, though he was really too old for either. He saw action in Crete and Yugoslavia, and that he did not see more was not for want of trying.

Both Kipling and Waugh have been called anti-Semitic at times, but both were capable of highly sympathetic portraits of Jews, Kipling in particular in the short stories “The Tree of Justice” and “The Army of a Dream”. Waugh’s most moving portrait of Jews is to be found in Unconditional Surrender, the final volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy, his most mature production and his pre-eminent masterpiece.

Some stories by Kipling had anti-Semitic tones, or at least anti-Semitic characters, but in a snobbish rather than the racist, and ultimately exterminationist, sense found in the works of many writers on the Left, including Shaw, Wells, Marx, the Webbs and the blood-and-soil obsessed proto-Nazi, D.H. Lawrence (who wanted gas chambers for the racially unfit). Kipling seemed to rather like Jews as exotics, and admired, or perhaps envied, the ritual and structure in their lives.

Tolkien, when asked by his German publishers in the 1930s if he was “Aryan”, wrote back pointing out that “Aryan” meant Indo-Iranian. If, he said, they were really asking if he was Jewish, “I regret that I appear to have no connection with that gifted people.” More questions like this, he said, would make him ashamed of having a German name.

One crucial overarching fact about the work of all three unites them and is more important than any other, and underlies almost all their major works. All three saw civilisation as an island, threatened by a surrounding welter of barbarism. This is perhaps seen most clearly in Waugh’s work in Black Mischief, a prophetic study of Africa which seems to anticipate the states of the likes of Emperor Bokassa, Idi Amin and today Boko Haram. The African Emperor Seth’s BA from Oxford and his progressive intentions avail him not at all in the general miasma of savagery and cannibalism. It is also powerfully expressed a different key in the novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Even Waugh, however, might not have foreseen Western progressive intellectuals like Germaine Greer supporting female circumcision.

Hostile critics of Waugh have condemned his work for racism and snobbery, yet his two African novels contain nothing that much exceeds straightforward modern reportage. As far as snobbery goes, the matter is more complicated. The upper classes, in Waugh’s vision, have deserted their posts as the guardians of civilisation, a process Waugh may have seen as beginning with the Reformation. In his earlier books he satirised them savagely as traitors who had betrayed a sacred trust. Something of this is also to be seen in Brideshead Revisited—its aristocrats, apart from Cordelia, are mostly a pretty unattractive bunch who in the darkening days of the 1930s do nothing to provide leadership by example.

In his first novel, Decline and Fall, the aristocratic university Bollinger Club is simply a bunch of destructive drunken louts. In his next book, Vile Bodies, noblemen of ancient and sonorous title work as gossip columnists on tabloid rags. However, in a generally admiring letter to George Orwell he said Nineteen Eighty-Four was too pessimistic in that it gave no credence to the role of religion, and men who worshipped a crucified God would not all be cowed by totalitarianism and torture.

The frantic partying of Waugh’s Vile Bodies (published in 1930), with its Bright Young Things and trash Bandar-log celebrities, like those of modern women’s gossip magazines, ends with a barbaric world war, conducted with liquid fire and leprosy germs. Tony Last, in A Handful of Dust, last indeed of a noble line and heir to a great house, ends up in a jungle clearing in South America, reading Dickens over and over again to an illiterate madman.

Waugh’s later novel Brideshead Revisited contains the same theme in a different key, as does the Sword of Honour trilogy, which tells of the Second World War seen through the eyes of Guy Crouchback, son of an old Catholic family. In Sword of Honour the most aristocratic officer, symbol of everything Guy Crouchback admires and seeks to emulate, and of the aristocracy as a whole, literally deserts his post, though he later redeems himself with an “honourably incapacitating” wound, fighting with the Chindits in Burma. The cowardly prole Trimmer, a former ladies’ hairdresser, ends up a media-feted colonel as the result of a propaganda exercise.

With the Soviet Union an ally, the initial crusade for civilisation has become irrevocably tainted. The daring Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook ends up as a sad, suicidal crank. British Stalinists infiltrate the policy-making establishment, and Britain, horribly, declares war on Stalin’s victim, Finland. With the exception of Cordelia, the aristocrats of Brideshead Revisited are at best useless. Lord Brideshead, heir to the ancient family title, collects matchboxes.

Although he modified his opinions later, when Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited, during the Second World War, he saw the civilisation he valued as doomed, unless the Church should save a remnant—mercifully, he hardly foresaw Liberation Theology being the instrument by which the Church would be largely hijacked by the Enemy, though he regarded the vernacular mass and the Vatican II reforms as harbingers of worse to come. His self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold was of a character that rejected everything that had come into the world in his lifetime—“plastics, Picasso, sunbathing”—and confronted that world with an exterior “as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass”. The Loved One satirised modern attempts to remove death from consciousness, rather than regarding the Christian life as a preparation for death and eternity.

Civilisation as an island under siege was also a theme in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There Kurtz, initially a man of enlightenment and ideals, is overthrown by the all-pervasive savagery. However, apart from Kipling and Conrad, whose Polish antecedents and experiences as a sailor and sea-captain were of course completely atypical of literary Englishmen, this was not a major theme in English literature before 1914. A Conrad hero is cheered and reassured to find in an African hut a reminder of civilisation—a book by an old British sailor on rope-work. Conrad’s anarchists, the urban terrorists of his day, set out to destroy that centrepiece of civilisation, the Greenwich Observatory.

From the Enlightenment until about 1914 the eventual universal triumph of civilisation seemed largely taken for granted and was hardly an issue.

Kipling conceived imperialism as an altruistic endeavour, not something done for the benefit of the imperial power, but a duty, like noblesse oblige. In “The White Man’s Burden” he told the United States on its acquisition of the Philippines:

The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

The worlds of Tolkien and Waugh, despite all their differences, are littered with the wreckage and isolated remnants of past civilisations. The hobbits of Tolkien’s Shire, like Waugh’s Bright Young Things, are hardly aware of this. The hobbits take the great roads and bridges they use for granted as simply having always been there, although they have vague folk-memories of a greater civilisation.

The rustic peace and prosperity the hobbits enjoy in their little country is a local and temporary accident. Similarly Waugh’s Bright Young Things have no awareness that beyond the English Channel civilisation is collapsing or, in the world of Black Mischief and Scoop, never existed. The Loved One deals with barbarism of a different kind.

In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits never know, until too late, that they have been guarded by the Rangers, the last remnant in the north of the kings of old. The great north road has become so overgrown with grass that men call it the Greenway. The inn at the nearby human–hobbit village of Bree, chief village of a small settled island “in the empty lands about” is far larger—now—than it needs to be. The gate is shut at night and guarded by a gatekeeper. Slowly we realise that we are looking at a world in ruins. Gondor, the last great city of the good people, which the hobbits hardly know about but which protects the south, is far gone in decay. The noble and beautiful elves are leaving Middle-Earth.

Kipling is a more complicated case. He was, as he himself said, a writer with two separate sides to his head, on one a love of the exotic and romantic, which he could evoke with consummate skill, and on the other, most unusually for a major English writer, a fascination with Western machinery, organisation and administration. One of his poems begins with the peace of an idyllic country evening shattered by a loud, smelly motor-car racing through it—disgust at this intrusion of noisy machinery is a conventional poetic response. But then in the final stanza we learn the car is carrying a doctor to a sick child.

His narrator in “The Explorer”, with heroic and even mystical resolution, discovers a new country in order to see it industrialised. A soldier sings:

We broke a King and we built a road—
A court-house stands where the reg’ment goed.

“Pharaoh and the Sergeant” is a tribute to the British sergeant-instructors who licked the Egyptian troops into shape for modern warfare: “He made a mummy fight.” In “McAndrew’s Hymn” the old ship’s engineer asks for a poet like Burns (Kipling himself?) to “Sing the song of steam”. America has a vast railway literature and considerable poems in praise of steam were written by American poets including Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman but were rare indeed in Britain (ironically, the birthplace of the Industrial and Agrarian Revolution, which, even more ironically, owed more than a little to that old reactionary, George III).

Kipling’s young Roman soldiers—obviously he has in mind young British officers—struggle and sacrifice to preserve law and order on the frontiers of an empire which we, the readers, know is doomed. It is summed up in “The Pirates in England”:

When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall,

And the sceptre passed from her hand,

The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall

To harry the English land.

The little dark men of the mountain and waste,

So quick to laughter and tears,

They came panting with hate and haste

For the loot of five hundred years.

They killed the trader, they sacked the crops,

They ruined temple and town—

They swept like wolves through the standing crops

Crying that Rome was down.

They wiped out all that they could find

Of beauty and strength and worth.

They could not wipe out the Viking’s Wind,

That brings the ships from the north.

They could not wipe out the North-East gales,

Nor what those gales set free—

The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails

Leaping from sea to sea.

They had forgotten the shield-hung hull

Seen nearer and more plain,

Dipping into the troughs like a gull

And gull-like rising again—

The painted eyes that glare and frown

From the high, snake-headed stem,

Searching the beach while her sail comes down—

They had forgotten them!

There was no Count of the Saxon Shore

To meet her hand to hand,

As she took the beach with a grind and a roar,

And the pirates rushed inland!