(Pound’s ‘Canto I’, initial by Henry Strater)
I see that, 118 years ago today—a nice round number, as they say—Ezra Pound, on a fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania to study Spanish literature in Madrid, ‘went down to the ship’, specifically the König Albert, and left New York, landing at Gibraltar on 7 May. On that later day, he wrote to his parents to announce his arrival, mentioning that he’d been reading Rudyard Kipling’s From Sea to Sea and quoting from that work: ‘Imagine a shipload of people to whom time is no object, who have no desires beyond three meals a day and no emotions save those caused by a casual cockroach.’ He added: ‘for this voyage. deduct the cock roach, as the boat is clean.’[1]
Pound went down to the ship on several occasions in this early part of his life: the European tours with his Aunt Frank Weston in 1898 and 1902; the 1906 trip; the departure on 17 March 1908, on Cunard Royal Mail Steamship Slavonia, to Gibraltar in March, then Venice for much of the summer and on to London in August 1908.[2] In 1911, after more than six months in the United States, he returned to Europe, boarding S. S. Mauretania on 22 February 1911. Then followed something of a pause in those sailings, before he boarded the Rex in Genoa, 13 April 1939 – that pause being a little over 28 years.[3]
(S. S. Slavonia)
Kipling himself went down to ships a great deal more often than ‘the Idaho kid’. Born in Bombay—now Mumbai—he was taken to England, aged two, by his mother when she travelled there to give birth to her second child, Alice (‘Trix’). Then they returned to India. Aged 5, he took ship again, he and his sister being left in Southsea at ‘The House of Desolation’ as Kipling later termed it.[4] He was there for five years. In 1882, he sails back to India, returning to England seven years later via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco and New York. His trip around the world follows in 1891. The following year sees more voyaging, to America and Japan. After the return to England the frequent trips to winter in South Africa begin – and there’s more to come, including the West Indies and South America.[5]
Much of the 1890s journeying fed into the many letters and sketches which provided the material for the two-volume From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, as well as the later Letters of Travel (1892-1913). In that sense, the voyages were not simply leisure; yet Kipling could somehow combine work and play to a striking degree. Immediately preceding the lines quoted by Pound in the letter to his parents, Kipling writes: ‘Now we are lying off Moulmein [later renamed Mawlamyine] in a new steamer which does not seem to run anywhere in particular. Why she should go to Moulmein is a mystery; but as every soul on the ship is a loafer like myself, no one is discontented.’[6]
He wrote again about his experience of a specific ship in the article, ‘Sea Travel’, first published as ‘Egypt of the Egyptians’ in Nash’s Magazine (June 1914). Some of the men working on the ship brought back vivid memories of his early years in India: ‘Serangs [lascar boatswains] used to be very kind to little white children below the age of caste. Then: ‘Most familiar of all was the ship itself. It had slipped my memory, nor was there anything in the rates charged to remind me, that single-screws still lingered in the gilt-edged passenger trade.’ This was an exciting discovery for some ‘North Atlantic passengers’, who were ‘as pleased about it as American tourists at Stratford-on-Avon.’ The passengers are disembarking at Port Said, towards which the ‘one-screw tub thumped gingerly’. Kipling has leisure to observe the table linen, the glassware, the poor waiting service, the cabins lacking curtains and other dispiriting features: ‘time and progress had stood still with the P. & O.’ He then gets into conversation with other passengers and is entertained by the telling of several stories but ‘no stories could divert one long from the peculiarities of that amazing line which exists strictly for itself.’ He reflects on the glory days of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and concludes that: ‘To-day it neither feeds nor tends its passengers, nor keeps its ships well enough to put on any airs at all.’[7]
Ships and stories. His biographers explore his love of both. He would later enjoy trips on Royal Navy vessels but in From Sea to Sea the author of Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) remarked that: ‘The blue-jacket is a beautiful creature, and very healthy, but . . . I gave my heart to Thomas Atkins long ago, and him I love’ (I, 292). Marghanita Laski observes that, ‘As a traveller, his chosen transport was the most comfortable steamer available, and even so, if the sea was at all rough, he was usually seasick.’[8] Nevertheless, a remarkable number of articles, fictions and poems centre on, or strongly feature, Matthew Arnold’s ‘unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’.[9]
When I was a child and my father was posted to Singapore, we flew out and sailed back. I can’t be entirely sure of the ship’s name but believe it was the S. S. Oriana, at that stage owned by the Orient Steam Navigation Company. The flight out had its moments—an impressive bout of air sickness, melting tarmac under the feet at the airport in Tehran, brief stops at Istanbul and Mumbai, I think—but the voyage home, three years later, unsurprisingly, had far more. Pyramids and Tutankhamen in Cairo, fierce heat and alley cats in Aden, light and colour in Lisbon. Sea, sky, the shipboard entertainment uncritically consumed, the table tennis tournaments, ferreting about in forbidden corners, running like lunatics up and down stairs and along narrow corridors. Even a fine romance –as fine, at least, as an inexperienced thirteen-year-old could make it. . .
(A boy on a camel)
At that age, it occurs to me, Kipling’s work was appearing for the first time in The Scribbler, a family magazine, in collaboration with May and Jenny Morris (daughters of William and Jane), and Philip and Margaret Burne-Jones (children of Edward and Georgiana). More precocious than some, that Kipling.
Notes
[1] Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72n., 73.
[2] J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 66.
[3] A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume II: The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 301.
[4] Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, edited by Thomas Pinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7; and see the story, ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, in Wee Willie Winkie, edited by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 260-288. An ‘English Heritage’ blue plaque is on the house now: I see it’s not so very far from where I lived in Southsea for several years.
[5] Much of the chronology lifted from Norman Page’s indispensable A Kipling Companion (London: Macmillan, 1989), 1-7.
[6] Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1900), I, 230.
[7] Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Travel (1892-1913) (London: Macmillan, 1920), 210, 211, 219.
[8] Marghanita Laski, From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 142.
[9] ‘To Marguerite – Continued’, Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 81. Familiar to some readers from its use in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Reconstructionary Tales 