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| Boris Johnson was unwise to quote Kipling. But he wasn’t praising empire | Boris Johnson was unwise to quote Kipling. But he wasn’t praising empire |
| (14 days later) | |
| During the foreign secretary’s visit to Myanmar last January his hosts in the former capital, Yangon, took him across town to see the Shwedagon Pagoda, which as the repository of eight hairs from the head of Gautama Buddha is Myanmar’s most sacred Buddhist site as well as a piece of spectacular architecture, gilded and bejewelled, that has been a prominent feature of the city’s skyline for at least 10 centuries. Rudyard Kipling wrote of his visit to Yangon (then Rangoon) in 1889 that “a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire … Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now?” | |
| Boris Johnson’s reaction to the pagoda, so far as we understand it, wasn’t quite so verbose. Perhaps it might be described as irrepressibly English. A now famous piece of footage in last Sunday’s Channel 4 documentary Blond Ambition shows him being taken round the temple with the British ambassador, Andrew Patrick, when he is invited to hit an enormous bell. Johnson obliges, the bell tolls, and the voiceover says that the sound “seems to dislodge some half-remembered verses” from Johnson’s childhood. Cut to Johnson, surrounded by a small crowd of dignitaries, reciting “The temple bells they say / Come you back, you English soldier” – lines the voiceover identifies as fragments from “the pro-colonial classic poem” Mandalay, by Kipling. As Johnson continues his recitation, the ambassador warns that a microphone is picking up his words, and that the poem probably isn’t a good idea. “What? The Road to Mandalay?” asks Johnson. “No, not appropriate,” says the ambassador. | Boris Johnson’s reaction to the pagoda, so far as we understand it, wasn’t quite so verbose. Perhaps it might be described as irrepressibly English. A now famous piece of footage in last Sunday’s Channel 4 documentary Blond Ambition shows him being taken round the temple with the British ambassador, Andrew Patrick, when he is invited to hit an enormous bell. Johnson obliges, the bell tolls, and the voiceover says that the sound “seems to dislodge some half-remembered verses” from Johnson’s childhood. Cut to Johnson, surrounded by a small crowd of dignitaries, reciting “The temple bells they say / Come you back, you English soldier” – lines the voiceover identifies as fragments from “the pro-colonial classic poem” Mandalay, by Kipling. As Johnson continues his recitation, the ambassador warns that a microphone is picking up his words, and that the poem probably isn’t a good idea. “What? The Road to Mandalay?” asks Johnson. “No, not appropriate,” says the ambassador. |
| The implication is clear enough, and hard to resist: Johnson is behaving like a klutz once again, displaying the kind of sloppy, attention-seeking arrogance that his fans in the Tory party mistake for Churchillian genius. | The implication is clear enough, and hard to resist: Johnson is behaving like a klutz once again, displaying the kind of sloppy, attention-seeking arrogance that his fans in the Tory party mistake for Churchillian genius. |
| But I wonder if in this case we shouldn’t resist the charge – that with Mandalay we need, however reluctantly, to cut him some slack. Kipling isn’t the wisest poet to quote in a country that Britain subjugated in the 19th century over the course of three wars, but is it right to describe the poem as “pro-colonial”? Kipling wrote poetry and prose that certainly deserve the epithet, notably The White Man’s Burden; he was a child of empire, and became the empire’s laureate. But Mandalay isn’t so much an argument for colonialism as an evocation of its personal effects. | |
| In 1889, prosperous from his early success as a journalist and storywriter in India, the 23-year-old Kipling decided to return to Britain the long way round, and sail east to America. The first stage of the journey took him from Calcutta to Rangoon, where he made a side-trip south by a smaller steamer to the port of Moulmein. There, on the steps of another temple, less distinguished than the Shwedagon Pagoda, he was taken with the beauty of a Burmese girl. “When I die I will be a Burman,” he wrote soon after, “ … and I will always walk about with a pretty almond-coloured girl who shall laugh and jest … and look all the world between the eyes, in honesty and good fellowship.” Kipling promises himself to “teach her not to defile her pretty mouth with chopped tobacco in a cabbage leaf, but to inhale good cigarettes of Egypt’s best brand”. | In 1889, prosperous from his early success as a journalist and storywriter in India, the 23-year-old Kipling decided to return to Britain the long way round, and sail east to America. The first stage of the journey took him from Calcutta to Rangoon, where he made a side-trip south by a smaller steamer to the port of Moulmein. There, on the steps of another temple, less distinguished than the Shwedagon Pagoda, he was taken with the beauty of a Burmese girl. “When I die I will be a Burman,” he wrote soon after, “ … and I will always walk about with a pretty almond-coloured girl who shall laugh and jest … and look all the world between the eyes, in honesty and good fellowship.” Kipling promises himself to “teach her not to defile her pretty mouth with chopped tobacco in a cabbage leaf, but to inhale good cigarettes of Egypt’s best brand”. |
| A year later, he had his poem. The voice belongs to a Cockney army private, a favourite Kipling narrator, who over six stanzas sets out his longing for his girlfriend and his old posting in the east, where (as the author says elsewhere) he fought in the recently ended campaign that conquered Upper Burma and its capital, Mandalay in the third and last of the Anglo-Burmese wars. Kipling saw a road that led to romance rather than to slaughter. “By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,/ There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;/ For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:/ Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!” | A year later, he had his poem. The voice belongs to a Cockney army private, a favourite Kipling narrator, who over six stanzas sets out his longing for his girlfriend and his old posting in the east, where (as the author says elsewhere) he fought in the recently ended campaign that conquered Upper Burma and its capital, Mandalay in the third and last of the Anglo-Burmese wars. Kipling saw a road that led to romance rather than to slaughter. “By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,/ There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;/ For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:/ Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!” |
| To Kipling’s soldier, Buddhists are incomprehensible heathens: the girl worships a “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud / Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd”. But British womenfolk come off worse. The housemaids he walks out with from Chelsea to the Strand may talk “a lot o’ lovin” but they understand nothing. “Beefy face an’ grubby” and – “Law! wot do they understand?’/ I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!” | To Kipling’s soldier, Buddhists are incomprehensible heathens: the girl worships a “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud / Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd”. But British womenfolk come off worse. The housemaids he walks out with from Chelsea to the Strand may talk “a lot o’ lovin” but they understand nothing. “Beefy face an’ grubby” and – “Law! wot do they understand?’/ I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!” |
| Postcolonial studies can have few richer specimens to tease apart in the space of 51 lines: race, class, power, gender, the erotic, the exotic and what anthropologists and historians call “colonial desire”. But a century ago what gave Kipling most trouble from his readers were his liberties with geography. The dawn couldn’t come up like thunder “outer China ’crost the Bay”, because the Bay (of Bengal) lay to the west of Burma, not the east. According to the memoir the author wrote at the end of his life, the complaints came mainly from pedantic Americans on cruise ships who had become familiar with a shortened version of the poem after it was set to music as a song, to become a hit as sheet music and, from 1912, as a gramophone record. | Postcolonial studies can have few richer specimens to tease apart in the space of 51 lines: race, class, power, gender, the erotic, the exotic and what anthropologists and historians call “colonial desire”. But a century ago what gave Kipling most trouble from his readers were his liberties with geography. The dawn couldn’t come up like thunder “outer China ’crost the Bay”, because the Bay (of Bengal) lay to the west of Burma, not the east. According to the memoir the author wrote at the end of his life, the complaints came mainly from pedantic Americans on cruise ships who had become familiar with a shortened version of the poem after it was set to music as a song, to become a hit as sheet music and, from 1912, as a gramophone record. |
| Kipling began to wish that he had written “Oh, the road to Mandalay” rather than “On the road … ”, to show that the song was “a sort of general mix-up of the singer’s Far-Eastern memories against a background of the Bay of Bengal as seen at dawn from a troopship”. But “on” was the more singable version, and in any case the nonsensical geography proved to be only a slight flaw when compared to the damage Frank Sinatra’s 1957 recording did to the words, where “a Burma girl” becomes “a Burma broad”; and “man”, as in “where a man may raise a thirst”, is switched to “cat”, as in cool. | |
| I saw a copy of the sheet music on a piano stool at Bateman’s, Kipling’s home in East Sussex, when I went there this week. It was busy. Every room had its little crowd of visitors asking questions of the attendant, learning that Stanley Baldwin was Kipling’s cousin, or that the upstairs rooms didn’t have running water till the late 1920s: the peculiar mixture of the elevated and the banal – “Oh, that looks a proper dust trap,” said a woman of a study chair – that marks an encounter with the National Trust. | I saw a copy of the sheet music on a piano stool at Bateman’s, Kipling’s home in East Sussex, when I went there this week. It was busy. Every room had its little crowd of visitors asking questions of the attendant, learning that Stanley Baldwin was Kipling’s cousin, or that the upstairs rooms didn’t have running water till the late 1920s: the peculiar mixture of the elevated and the banal – “Oh, that looks a proper dust trap,” said a woman of a study chair – that marks an encounter with the National Trust. |
| When Kipling bought this house in 1902, he was already at 36 the most famous writer in the Anglosphere, with Kim and The Jungle Book behind him and the Nobel prize only five years ahead. By twiddling a knob on what looked like an old-fashioned radio we could listen to Ralph Fiennes reciting If, and that moving Great War poem, My Boy Jack (“Have you news of my boy Jack? Not this tide”). Later we saw local historian Geoff Hutchinson pretending to be Kipling and making a pretty decent job of it: My Boy Jack again, and as good as Ralph Fiennes (“When d’you think that he’ll come back? Not with this wind blowing, and this tide”). | When Kipling bought this house in 1902, he was already at 36 the most famous writer in the Anglosphere, with Kim and The Jungle Book behind him and the Nobel prize only five years ahead. By twiddling a knob on what looked like an old-fashioned radio we could listen to Ralph Fiennes reciting If, and that moving Great War poem, My Boy Jack (“Have you news of my boy Jack? Not this tide”). Later we saw local historian Geoff Hutchinson pretending to be Kipling and making a pretty decent job of it: My Boy Jack again, and as good as Ralph Fiennes (“When d’you think that he’ll come back? Not with this wind blowing, and this tide”). |
| But there is always, eventually, an awkwardness with Kipling: the race and empire issue. Hutchinson got round it by having his Kipling say something to the effect that he knew his views grew out of different time – though even in that different time, Kipling was unusually committed to mystical ideas of national character and destiny. | |
| You could hear a tame, ironised echo of these ideas in Boris Johnson’s speech to the Tory conference: “We are not the lion. We do not claim to be the lion. That role is played by the people of this country. But it is up to us now – in the traditional non-threatening and genial, self-deprecating way of the British – to let that lion roar.” | |
| First Mandalay and now The Jungle Book: can it be that inside the foreign secretary’s fat head, a thin English mystic is struggling to get out? | First Mandalay and now The Jungle Book: can it be that inside the foreign secretary’s fat head, a thin English mystic is struggling to get out? |
| • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist | • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist |
| • This article was amended on 20 October 2017. An earlier version referred to Yangon as the capital of Myanmar. Yangon is the former capital of the country. |