The Professor Reads Kipling
THE professor surveyed his class, as they sat around the long table in the seminar room. He liked nearly all of them, though he wished Johnson would wear a necktie, and Jones would realize that dirty white shoes are no longer a badge of collegiate correctness. The class looked at him, vaguely conscious that he had something of academic moment to announce.
‘I hope you all know,’ said he, ‘that the new Kipling autobiography was published to-day. I expect to find my copy when I return to my office.’
There was a polite silence. It was as if he had announced the birth of a son to his wife’s second cousin in Omaha. The professor was taken aback by this negative response, and for a full five seconds was quite at a loss for words. It was his task to guide the class in the practice of writing plays, so Kipling had not been any part of the course. This was his first intimation that to these youths of 1937 Kipling was not an exciting phenomenon. The professor pulled himself together with a wry smile.
‘After all,’he said, ‘I suppose it was forty years ago that the “Recessional” was cabled across the Atlantic and printed on the front pages of our newspapers. Not one of you was born. But I was in college. A new Kipling poem or story in those days was international news. It can’t be that some of them are n’t still good. You’ll have a chance to discover at the next meeting of the class. Jones, how about your new scenario?’
The professor whipped his flagging attention, and listened to Jones’s scenario, aware that it was terrifically important to Jones. He could n’t at the moment see its importance to anybody else. But how about that editor in Lahore? Did he see anything important in the work his young assistant turned in? The answer was probably waiting in the professor’s office. Would the hour never be over?
It was over at last, and, forgetting Jones’s problems (at another time one of them would have interested him, for it concerned the reconciliation of reality and fantasy in a contemporary setting), the professor hurried across the campus and tore the new book from its wrappers. He did not open the pages with his finger, as Kipling himself would have done; he employed a reverent penknife. But he could not read consecutively — not now. He was curiously and disturbingly excited, not so much by a new Kipling work as by all the memories a new Kipling work evoked of old Kipling works once new, when he and the world were new also; and, too, by that astonishing passivity of his class at mention of this event. Presently he laid the book down, and sought on his shelves for older volumes, to select what he should read to the young skeptics to-morrow. Verse— it would have to be verse. No time for prose, except maybe that sentence about Swift and Gulliver’s Travels — how Swift had turned on a red volcano’s glare to light a child to bed. And ‘Wireless’ — he could tell Jones to read that for help in his problems. Verse, let’s see — ‘The English Flag,’ ‘The Three-Decker,’ ‘The Conundrum of the Workshops.’ Yes, those would do. He read them aloud.
(The same mental image came back to him of black bodies dangling in battered palm trees over a coral beach strewn with wreckage.)
The professor had no delusion that he could define poetry, and fortunately he did n’t have to. But he knew this was vivid writing, sharp imagery drawn from a keen observation of physical facts, and as exciting to him now as it used to be — or almost. He tucked the book under his arm and went to lunch.
‘What have you got there?’ one of his colleagues in the English Department asked.
‘Kipling.’
‘Good Lord, why?’
‘I’m going to read him to my class to-morrow.’
‘They’ll think he’s a Boy Scout,’ said the colleague.
‘Meaning you do?’ the professor retorted, a bit sharply.
The lunch went none too well after that, and he had no time the rest of the day and evening to read the autobiography. But he read the poems to his class the next morning. The class was polite but unresponsive. They did smile a little at the Devil’s question, ‘It’s pretty, but is it Art?’ — but they looked even a trifle pained at ‘The English Flag.’
‘I suppose,’ one of them ventured, ‘that kind of chauvinism helped to bring on the World War?’
The professor swallowed hard, and in a secret corner of his brain a still small voice (was it the Devil’s?) whispered, ‘How about it?’ Perhaps it was in answer to the voice that he attempted to point out how Kipling was n’t so much the ‘Imperialist’ here as the Colonial in India, telling the heedless at home how the blood of Englishmen supported them in every corner of the seven seas. He knew what he meant, still better what he felt; but somehow it did sound like an apology, and he switched to the technique, and pointed out the supreme rightness and sharp clarity of the images, the selective realism, the memorable swing of the rhythm. Yet even as he dwelt on this last the same small voice whispered, ‘Do you mean, by any chance, “easily memorized”?’ On the whole, it was not a happy hour, and he was conscious of a vague impatience in the class to be getting on with their personal problems in expression. He looked at them for the first time across a gulf, and felt a faint stirring of distaste, the most distressing emotion a teacher can experience toward his pupils.
He put Kipling hastily aside.
That night he read the autobiography. It was impossible for him — and perhaps, he reflected, for most men of his generation — to read it with detachment. Kipling had bulked so enormously in his consciousness during his formative years that every mention of those well-remembered tales, those poems he could still repeat almost by heart, roused such a host of associations that the reading would have to stop till they could be attended to. And there was the eternal problem of literary creation, which so intimately concerned him now as a teacher of young literary aspirants, and about which Kipling had such sudden, sharp, illuminating things to say. ‘What do they know of England, who only England know!’ — Kipling’s mother gave him that line, when any he could hit on kept going ‘soft,’ and until he got it the poem would n’t come right. Once he had it, ‘the rest of the rhetoric came away easily; for it was only pictures seen, as it were, from the deck of a long fourteen-footer, a craft that will almost sail herself.’ But what critic would know that? Who can so creep into another man’s creative processes as to say what is the key line that releases the rest of his rhetoric?
The professor thumbed back in his new book to a passage where Kipling mentions noticing the face and voice of a woman who sold him beer at a little hotel in Auckland. Ten years later, in South Africa, he heard a petty officer tell a companion about a woman in New Zealand who ‘never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a scorpion.’ And he goes on, ‘Then — precisely as the removal of the key-log in a timber jam starts the whole pile — those words gave me the key to the face and voice at Auckland, and a tale called “Mrs. Bathurst” slid into my mind, smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank-high river.’
If Kipling had never told this incident himself, what research scholar of the future could ever have come at the real genesis of ‘Mrs. Bathurst,’ the professor reflected. For ten years the memory of a chance-seen face ‘down under’ had lurked below the threshold of Kipling’s consciousness. But what had been happening to it in those years? In the dark mystery of the subconscious mind the creative process goes on, and if we know every book that an author ever read we still know next to nothing, really, of his secrets. Every book — But here was no book. Here was a woman serving beer in Auckland, and ten years later a soldier on a troop train in South Africa. How little of Kipling could ever, even remotely, be traced to books! It came out of life, out of observed reality, out of the heat and strangeness of India, the ripple of water along the rail of a Gloucester fisherman, the sweat of the barracks, the dials of an engine room, the pound of her great drivers on the rails as the 007 bored through the night.
And suddenly the professor stared sombrely at the rug before his fire, and reflected on Kipling’s schooling for literature. Suppose, at sixteen, he had entered this quiet college instead of a newspaper office on the jungle edge in Lahore, and suppose he had been taught how to write by a few ‘ scholarly’ professors, with examples set from books; and suppose his adolescence had been prolonged with football and coddling and week-end dances, and not a thing that he wrote ever really mattered except to get him the necessary grades for a degree? A degree! What earthly relation is there between marks, a degree, and literature? What idiocy to grade the creative process! And what idiocy to suppose that people can be taught to write before they have something to write about! It is the something to say which drives you to find the way to say it.
Kipling, of course, was a reporter. He began as a reporter at sixteen, in a hard school, but amid a life incredibly picturesque and colorful. And as he himself said later, ‘once a reporter, a reporter forever and ever.’ The imagery of his verse was reporting, his stories were reporting; the sights and sounds and motion of life, the drive of machinery, the tramp of regiments, all were there incessantly and with such startling accuracy that they captivated his generation, who seemed suddenly to see them in a new light, or even for the first time. A boy of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, daily he felt them, tried to express them, knew when he failed by the ragging he got from his editor, from his elders in the club, from his own artistic conscience. Daily, through tropic heat and fever, he had to pack his words into rigidly restricted space. Daily his eye sought copy everywhere, and stored it away in memory. What a training! What a contrast to the piffling little exercises of academic Bunthornes who turn in a few sheets of theme paper a week to some professor, daintily dissecting T. S. Eliot; or to the clumsy compositions of those delightful, carefree boys who are happy to get a ‘gentleman’s C,’ and run over on Sunday to see the girls at Vassar!
The professor was becoming extremely despondent. Did it mean that creative writing (a horrid phrase, he thought, smacking of summer schools, which in turn smack of academic racketeering) — well, then, the actual practice of the art of writing, has no place in a college curriculum? Must the dramatist, to be first rate, get himself fired from Princeton not later than his freshman year, and ship before the mast? What is the test of a bridge? That it shall bear the traffic. What is the test of a dynamo? That it shall deliver power in a steady flow. What is the test of literature? That it shall entertain and move men and women. We say Time is the one true test of art, but that means merely the poem or play is rich enough to entertain and move men and women of later generations. It may be art for its own age, though forgotten in a later.
To make academic grades the test of literature is ridiculous. At best, that is to test the work by one person’s taste — the professor’s. And nobody is so afraid of his taste in contemporary expression as your average professor. Easy enough to test mathematical accuracy by grades, or chemical experiments, or even literary research (if your student does n’t get out of hand, and start having opinions). Easy enough to exaggerate ‘accuracy’ to the peak of all the virtues, and crown its attainment with the loftiest of academic degrees. Make education a search for truth, define truth as the ascertainable facts, and grades and degrees are comfortably possible, the researchers in literature can go right on counting the semicolons in the minor poems of Milton, and everybody will be happy. Art does n’t belong in the academic curriculum. Life is its laboratory, and no marks but the public’s approval can — or should — mean anything to the artist.
The Public! Kipling! An entire generation in the entire English-speaking world are different men and women because he lived and wrote! As the professor once heard somebody say, ‘Take the Taj Mahal, Kanchanjanga, and Kipling away from India, and what have you left?’ Well, of course you have Gandhi. Kipling most assuredly would not have approved of Gandhi. The professor’s classes most assuredly did approve of him. Kipling spoke for his age. Even his reportorial imagery was a part of the great realistic movement in literature and the materialistic bent of our minds. There was a generation’s universal religion in McAndrew’s hymn. And that just won’t do any more. Why boggle at the change? The professor learned Kipling in the ’90s, and tramped the Appalachian trails to his swinging rhythms. Just how present-day students tramp to the rhythms of Auden and Spender the professor could not guess. Perhaps there was no need. They don’t tramp any more. It is something else they ask of poetry. It is something else they ask of prose. They are searching, with pitiful lack of assurance in anything they find, but with instinctive insistence, for an expression of their age, their emotions, their ideals which float so wraith-like in the cloud of the Future. What can possibly be so important as to help some young writer to find them in himself, and give them tongue? Of course, nothing!
But how can he give them tongue if he has n’t the materials of life to draw on, and how are you to know it if he does? The professor attempted an answer to his latter question first. It was easier. You know it because you do not test the work on yourself alone, but on the class; their response tells you much. And you know it because you have kept your sympathies fresh, have not attempted to compel composition by rote, and vigorously refuse to permit craftsmanship to count more than 50 per cent in your grading. You must demand of the student that he have something to say, which seems to him important. If you can’t do all this, you are unfit to teach aspirants in the arts.
The academic Bunthornes! How insidiously they tend to dominate advanced composition courses for undergraduates— and how little they have to say! They say nothing neatly, or sneer with style. Are they the product of our ‘appreciation’ courses, or of the sheltered life? Or are our vigorous creators out in the world, perhaps in newspaper offices like Kipling, leaving to the colleges only those feebler aspirants who have tastes but no guts? Then the professor thought of O’Brien, earning his way through college as a waiter, a product of South Boston or some such place, who had just turned in a play about a longshoreman’s strike which certainly had guts, and a strange quality of bewildered compassion. Too many little sheltered boys in college, too much æsthetics in all college-taught art. Must be plenty of undergraduates, actually, who have faced realities. How many of them are driven away from art by the rule of academic Bunthornism — or, later, by the dry rot of ‘literary research’?
And if literary creation is primary, and the kind of literary scholarship which wins a Ph. D. is far, far down in the scale of actual values, why should there be no room in graduate departments for the creators? Oh, well, that one’s easy! Because you can’t grade creation. Imagine going up before the pundits of a graduate school for your orals in novel writing! But why grade literature? Why give any degrees for its creation? Why not say to certain men of promise, ‘Come and create, with our blessing, and what help we can give you’? A few foundations do that for a few men and women — too few. But the universities, which should lead the way, keep all their fellowships for ‘research,’ for the comma counters, not the creators. They do not put the cart before the horse — they put the trailer. It is simply not true that if a man is destined to be an artist he will be an artist come hell or high water. He must have time and opportunity and training, and these may often be beyond his power to make for himself. Or, if he does make them, the struggle may consume the best years of his life. Yes, there should be creative fellowships in art in every university worthy the name of university, and nothing should be asked of the fellows but the best literature they can create. They should he held in too high esteem to be inflicted with examinations and grades. Degrees are for plodders behind the cart.
The professor began to muse on that idea, and smiled faintly as he imagined the faces of the Graduate School faculty after he had proposed the revolution. Faces. . . . The face of a woman selling beer in Auckland. . . . Once he had seen the face of an old man in Franconia, who was watching the first automobile plough through the sand up the Landaff Valley. He had always remembered that face. He had often thought that some day he could . . . The professor’s eyes were fixed on the red coals in the fireplace. He thought he was getting it at last. . . . His eyes closed. His chin hit his bosom.