"The Long Recessional" by David Gilmour

A biography of the writer who possibly had the greatest influence on the 20th century argues that Rudyard Kipling was no mere racist, warlike champion of empire.

By Allen Barra

Apr 30, 2002 | Next time you're playing literary parlor games, try this question: What author has had the most influence on the 20th century? Not influence as in the ability to inspire imitative neurotics or gossipy biographers or as in the tendency to top end-of-the-millennium reading lists. I mean influence as in shaping the outlook of a generation of world rulers. Influence as in adding more phrases to the English language than anyone since Shakespeare.

I submit the possibility that the most influential writer of the 20th century was the most popular writer of the 19th century: Rudyard Kipling, whom Mark Twain once named as "the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable."

Kipling's image has so faded that many educated people today know him, if at all, only as a writer of books for children (though never let us underrate the influence of books for children). Nonetheless, the work of the man whom George Orwell identified as being despised by "every enlightened person during five literary generations" (better make that at least seven, since Orwell wrote that in 1942) -- lives on. David Gilmour's fascinating new biography, "The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling," tells you why.

Influence? It wasn't Walt Whitman or Henry James who fired the imagination of Teddy Roosevelt, the president who dragged America kicking and screaming into the mainstream of world politics. It wasn't Hemingway who was credited with being the spirit behind the Boy Scouts. It wasn't Shaw who was the lifelong inspiration for Winston Churchill and his famous "never surrender" speech. "The spirit of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain," writes Gilmour, "owe much to Kipling. From Churchill ... to the non-commissioned officers and the ranks, [Kipling] had remained an inspiration." (For his part, Kipling regarded Churchill as the "most untrustworthy man in British politics" and actually preferred Neville Chamberlain as prime minister.)

Both the Spanish fascist leader de Rivera and the Duke of Alba kept framed copies of Kipling's famous poem "If" on their walls; W. Somerset Maugham related that the king of Siam once translated "If" into Thai. (Can T.S. Eliot claim a more eclectic readership?)

Try counting, in the course of a year, how often you see or hear the following phrases: "The white man's burden," "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din," "The Thin Red Line," "Lest we forget," "The female of the species is deadlier than the male," "East is East and West is West," "The road to Mandalay," "East of Suez," "What do they know of England who only England know?" And my own personal favorite, the chilling lines from "Tommy": "Makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep."

Though Gilmour doesn't get far into a discussion of Kipling's influence on popular culture, it isn't much of a stretch to see his imprint on American icons such as Walt Disney (whatever serious students of Kipling might think of the animated version of "The Jungle Book") and John Ford. If the latter connection doesn't come into focus quickly, think of Ford's cavalry films and try the phrase "Thin Blue Line." Think of films like "Drums Along the Mohawk," "The Searchers" and perhaps "The Long Gray Line" and "Sergeant Rutledge" as Ford's take on America's inheritance of the white man's burden.

We can find influence more current than that. Vietnam War films from "Go Tell The Spartans" (1978) to Mel Gibson's recent "We Were Soldiers" emphasize America's good intentions and the self-sacrifice of American soldiers and their families. How to tell the Vietnam films influenced by Kipling's vision from, say, John Wayne's "The Green Berets"? The former don't dehumanize the NVA and Viet Cong, but respect them in the classic Kipling "'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy" mold.

That isn't to say that everyone, from Churchill to John Ford to Mel Gibson, who has been influenced by Kipling agrees with Kipling, or at least with all of Kipling. As Gilmour skillfully illustrates, there were a great many times when Kipling did not agree with Kipling, or, stated another way, "A great deal that Kipling said and wrote can be contradicted by other things he said and wrote."

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