Reading extracts from the newly (re)published diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon.
Sunday 13th July 1924.
An enormous Saturday to Monday party at Fairlawne. Rudyard Kipling was there. He is a tiny apelike simian little man with incredible eyebrows of great bushiness and deep endless brown eyes. He is brown and a little dirty, and clumps of hair protrude from his ears. He talked to me all afternoon and was very vivid in his description of bull fights, which he had evidently relished. With a wealth of gesture he described in vigorous, colourful English the entire ritual, we could almost hear the moans of the dying horses and smell the blood stained sawdust. He is at his best in his descriptions of action. I got them both onto politics and Mrs Kipling, good old Tory, regretted that all the power in England was no longer in the hands of 40 families as it had once been. They are both ardent Conservatives and bring to it all the freshness and enthusiasm of radicals. They have a slightly Disraelian outlook on life, empire, heraldry, rank and Dukes.
Mrs Kipling is an intelligent plain little woman but much easier to talk to than most writers wives. Miss Kipling I found a dull.
Page 119. Henry Chips Channon. The Diaries 1918 to 1938. Edited by Simon Heffer.
Saturday 18th of January 1936.
The year has indeed, begun in gloom. I opened the newspapers at 9:30, Kipling dead and the King ill. Kipling was has put up a stiff fight for his life and early this morning he collapsed and died. He was a great man, a writer whom I could never read nor appreciate, nevertheless an Empire figure. I met him once in the 20s. I was staying at Fairlawne……. towards tea time a middle aged couple and daughter arrived…..I did not take in the names and identity of the distinguished trio, who looked doughty and the middle class. Over the port I found myself next to this small man, and was immediately and immensely struck by the long hairs protruding from his ears, and next somehow the subject got onto bull fights, and he recounted in vivid language all he had witnessed. A few moments later I discovered he was Kipling. Kipling had no, or little, message for the youth of this country, the present youth that is, certainly none for our class by whom he was respected, but not liked. In America he is still a best seller. The ‘World’, fashionable and political, ignored Kipling.
Page 493. Henry Chips Channon. The Diaries 1918 to 1938. Edited by Simon Heffer.
Re-reading the Irish Guards in the Great War.
London Review of Books.
Review of the Irish Guards.
John Bayley
Kipling describes the slaughter soberly and in meticulous detail, as he describes every regimental engagement of the war. The Irish Guards had been fortunate ‘to find as their historian the greatest living master of narrative’, John Buchan wrote in his review when the book appeared in April 1923. In an honourable sense that judgment needs qualifying. Kipling had no experience of writing such a narrative; he had never even written a normal novel. His preferred oblique technique, as shown in his brilliant handling of the short story, was as distant as could be from what was required. But he had volunteered,…
Picked up a copy of Debits and Credits and have been reading The Gardener.
https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/DebtsandCredits/gardener.html
There are just so many ways this story can be interpreted.
Check out https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/the-gardener-in-the-strand/ : George Simmer'd research blog for information on the original publication, including illustrations.