Happy Birthday, Rudyard Kipling

“I worshipped Kipling at 13, loathed him at 17, enjoyed him at 20, despised him at 25, and now again rather admire him.”
– George Orwell, 1936

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India on December 30, 1865.

Orwell’s progression of reactions to Kipling is a pretty common one (that is, if you don’t dismiss him outright, or refuse to read him on principle). Kipling defended the indefensible, in many cases, and was trumpeting the cause of Empire literally in the “moment before” Empires started collapsing (“like flan in a cupboard,” to quote Eddie Izzard) around the globe. Maybe Kipling sensed the coming collapse. Who knows. I’m sure someone knows. I’m no scholar, just a fan of much of Kipling’s poetry and prose. I’m a curious woman. I want to know how other people thought in other times. I want to understand context. I realize my own time is just one time. I also realize that we – in our own time – as not as “enlightened” as some think, congratulating themselves for how much better we are than those who came before. Please. You can only feel that way if you haven’t read all that much history. Kipling is great for all of this, because he did not write about Empire in a once-removed way. He was in the thick of it.

But I am not only interested in Kipling for his historical relevance, or to argue with his ideas. I’m interested in him as a writer, and what he did as a writer.

Kipling inspired a generation, many of whom broke away totally from his example. The generation that came after Kipling’s was the generation that saw the destruction of Empire in the first World War.

But my “way in” was not academic, was not historical at all. My “way in” – so strong it was almost an obsession – was the Chuck Jones animated cartoon version of Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi, shown on television when I was a kid, narrated by Orson Welles. I LIVED that story and LIVED for re-runs of it. I was so afraid of the blinding yellow close-ups of that cobra head my parents would tell me beforehand when it was coming so I could hide my eyes. To be honest, it still freaks me out.

The opening paragraph of Rikki Tikki Tavi:

This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry, as he scuttled through the long grass, was: ‘_Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!_’

And let’s not forget Donovan’s song on the subject:

As a child, I loved the stories and the rhythmic beat of the poems. I loved the animals. Kipling’s verse has what Michael Schmidt calls “metrical drubbing”, a drumbeat forcing you to continue. Some people dismiss him because his attitudes aren’t “correct”, according to our modern era. Well, yes, that is true. But he came from another time? Maybe … we can learn a lot about that time by reading the words of a man who was immersed in it? Yes? No? Okay, suit yourself. Kipling is seen as a jingoistic supporter of violent Empire (only a fantasist in total denial would claim that this was not true.) However, this view of him is simplistic. If our time is complex, as experienced on the ground, then so are other times. We should always be curious about the past. If you dig a little bit deeper, you learn Kipling had VERY conflicting feelings about what he supported.

Not only that, but he gave us one of the greatest anti-war poems of all time, which runs just two lines, two lines filled with rage towards heartless governments sending young men off to fight in ridiculous wars built on trumped-up premises.

“If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Kipling is complicated.

If the work stunk AND it was propaganda, then yes, put it on the trash-heap, except as a curiosity. But it doesn’t stink. It’s revealing in a way the work of his contemporaries is not. He was hugely imitated in his time and after. He helps us understand a lot of things because he was an eyewitness: what Empire looked like to those who believed in it, what Empire DID, how it operated, what the people who participated in it felt and said. (Maybe you think, “I already KNOW all that.” Don’t be so sure.) He also helps writers understand how to write a poem. Some people have trouble separating content from form. I get it. I guess. I’ve never had an issue with it (or, it’s rare that I have an issue with it.) This pisses some people off, and that’s fine. We all are not the same. We all have different interests. One of my interests is language, and how language developed, how different writers do what they do, AND what it IS about some writers that click with audiences. Is it the rhythm? Or is it the content? Is it both?

Kipling shilled for Empire. My ancestry is fully Irish, and Kipling was no friend to my people (understatement). However, I read his stuff sometimes and think: Every Empire should have such a talented shill! (This attitude requires distance from him. Again, my interest is primarily art – at least when it comes to, you know, artists. Even political artists. Lots of political art stinks, especially the kind of political art ONLY concerned with content. That kind of work usually doesn’t “travel” as well. It becomes dated in, like, a year.)

One of the most interesting element of Kipling’s work is that it clamors with voices: shouts, catcalls, countless dialects (showing the SIZE of the British Empire). You can feel the dust and heat of India in them, the cacophony of accents, the bustling activity. These are not poems written in quiet isolation and philosophical contemplation. They rustle, rumble, jostle, shout. Kipling’s ear was to the ground.

On a personal note: I will always love Kipling for his story “The Cat That Walked By Himself.” I read the story when I was a kid, and it struck a chord: I took it personally, even as a child, and one section in particular would come back to me again and again. It still does.

The Cat. He walked by himself. He went through the wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone.

It’s not often you read something that helps explain you to yourself. Or, even more powerfully, gives you permission to just go ahead and be yourself, even if everyone around you doesn’t behave that way. Humanity is a communal experience. The group is prioritized over the individual. “Walking by your wild lone” is often not understood; on the contrary, it’s seen as somewhat suspect. Other people want you to submit to the group so that THEY will feel validated in their desire to always be with the group. (This has been intensified for me – in ways I don’t fully understand yet – by social media. In many ways, social media is antithetical to everything I’m about. I am not an extrovert. I need lots of “quiet time.” Maybe I have noise sensitivity – which – uhm – is why I live in one of the busiest cities in the world, apparently. Hm. We don’t always make sense. The sheer NOISE of being in the presence of all of humanity 24/7 is completely against my nature. I submit, because social media has made so much possible, and it has many good aspects. But for those who prefer “walking by his wild lone” it requires self-discipline to get OFF social media for some hours of the day, to limit one’s time in the throng.) The need for community – the need for togetherness – shows up in daycare, kindergarten, so it’s probably built into our cell structure, or at least encouraged by thousands of years of evolution. Humans are stronger when they are together. Nevertheless: When I needed “down time” as a child (and I needed a lot of “down time”), I thought of that cat strolling by himself through the wild woods and I understood why I needed that down time, even though my friends didn’t get it.

“The Islanders”, written in 1902, was one of Kipling’s more controversial pieces. It was a shuffling hat-trick: he spoke directly to those who were his most feverish supportive followers (flag-wavers, Empire lovers, xenophobic Englishmen), and then went about lampooning them, destroying them. (Again, this is the kind of subtlety of message one misses if you dismiss Kipling as not worth listening to because he doesn’t line up with “enlightened” 21st century thinking.) The poem is one of those brilliant unforgettable moments where someone who may be perceived as being on a certain “side” (even helping to articulate the philosophy of that side), turns around and says, “Nope. You got me all wrong. Let me show you what you sound like.”

No wonder George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens love the guy, because that’s pretty much all they did in their own writing lives. They were both incredibly slippery that way. Or, I would call it fluid. Intellectual independence. The opposite of “partisan hacks.”

Here’s the poem. In so many ways, it is a sick sick BURN.

Perhaps Kipling had some consciousness that the end was nigh. Perhaps his reporter’s instincts were always in operation, and so he set out to capture “how it was for us”, “what it was like”, “how we spoke,” “who we were,” because he knew, somehow, that all of it was about to vanish.

Mummy Gina (my grandmother on the O’Malley side) had a great affection for Kipling’s poem “If”, and could recite portions of it from memory. (My cousin Mike has carried on the tradition. In a recent email blast when our family was trying to organize a get-together, Mike commanded that if people didn’t respond in a timely manner, they would be forced to recite “If” immediately upon arrival at the gathering.)

“If” always makes me think of Mummy Gina.

If–

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Speaking of “If,” here is an extraordinary moment, when Dennis Hopper recited the poem from memory on The Johnny Cash Show. With all of Hopper’s great performances, this is one of my favorites. It’s so pure.

Mummy Gina would heartily approve.

QUOTES:

Christopher Hitchens:

When he was living among the whores and shore-leave drunks on the Thames Embankment, by Charing Cross (and writing The Light That Failed), Kipling used to go to music halls and pick up the melodies of the masses. When he was keeping company with regiments overseas, he would attend church parade, and attend to the hymnal. During the Boer War he was made to feel slightly uneasy when Sir Arthur Sullivan (partner of Sir William Gilbert) set one of his patriotic doggerels to music. But his entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak. He was a hit with the troops and the gallery because of the very vulgarity that Max Beerbohm despised, Oscar Wilde rather envied, and Henry James could only admire. But he was also, because of his capacity for sonority and high-mindedness, the chosen poet of the royal family and the Times. (In my opinion, he declined the laureateship so that he could keep one foot in each camp.)

George Orwell:

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, “The Light that Failed”, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

Jorge Luis Borges:

After all it is not very important whether a writer has some political opinion or other because a work will come through despite them, as in the case of Kipling’s Kim. Suppose you consider the idea of the empire of the English – well, in Kim I think the characters one really is fond of are not the English, but many of the Indians, the Mussulmans. I think they’re nicer people. And that’s because he thought them – no! no! not because he thought them nicer – because he felt them nicer.

Ted Hughes:

[When] I was about fourteen, I discovered Kipling’s poems. I was completely bowled over by the rhythm. Their rhythmical, mechanical drive got into me. So suddenly I began to write rhythmical poems, long sagas in Kiplingesque rhythms.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

He supported British imperialism, but also attacked British xenophobia. He famously wrote, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twin shall meet” in “The Ballad of East and West,” but he could mock cultural distinctions absurdly drawn on the basis of eating and dress habits in “We and They”: “Their full-dress is un– / We dress up to Our ears.” He rallies for war, but like other modern war poets he attends to its human tragedies and deprivations, brutalities and losses.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

As a verse writer, he has become something of a special case. The Barrack-Room Ballads of 1892 are authentic “popular poetry” and persist.

James Joyce, 1907:

“If I knew Ireland as well as RK seems to know India, I fancy I could write something good.”

Christopher Hitchens, “Pakistan: On the Frontier of Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, 2002:

I truly wanted to be the first writer to visit Peshawar and not quote Rudyard Kipling, but as I walked alone through the many marble memorials I remembered some long-forgotten lines and couldn’t help myself:

And the end of the fight is a tombstone
white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here
who tried to hustle the East.

And of course from that it’s only a step to the imperishable verses of Kipling’s “Arithmetic on the Frontier.” The gates of memory swing open fully: my father’s father had been a soldier in pre-partition India.

A scrimmage in a Border Station–
A canter down some dark defile–
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.

With its unconsoling conclusion, about the military proportions between locals and intruders:

Strike hard who cares–shoot straight
who can–
The odds are on the cheaper man.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

When we say he was popular, we can quantify what we mean. By 1918, Departmental Ditties, his least achieved book, had sold 81,000 copies; by 1931 it had sold 117,000 copies. Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses remained his most popular book, selling 182,000 copies by 1918 and 255,000 by 1931. The Definitive Edition of the poems, published in 1940, had gone through sixty impressions by 1982. Like Housman, even when his shares were no longer quoted on the intellectual bourse, and critics turned their backs on him, he remained popular with readers.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

The dark side of Kipling’s view of civilization comes from his sense that the city is perpetually in danger–besieged from without by hostile tribes, menaced within by mendacious and greedy betrayers. Far from being boisterously optimistic, Kipling’s social and political views often remind one of Joseph Conrad’s.

Christopher Hitchens:

If one were to assemble a balance sheet of Kipling’s own explicit contradictions, it would necessarily include his close relationship with the Bible and the hymnal, and his caustic anti-clericalism; his staunch Anglo nationalism, and his feeling that England itself was petty and parochial; his dislike of nonwhite beliefs, and his belief that they were more honest and courageous; his love-hate relationship with the Irish; his contempt, and deep admiration, for the United States; his respect for the working class, and his detestation of the labor movement; his exaltation of the empire, and his conviction that its works were vain and transient.

L.M. Montgomery, in her journal:

“I forget all my worries while under its magic. And there are critics who say Kipling is ‘outmoded’. It is to laugh. I would not give the tale of the Captains of the Wall for all the reeking sex stuff of the past 20 years.”

Michael Schmidt:

Everywhere in his poetry we are confronted by formidable skill. Though he wrote few fine lyrics, few lyric writers could achieve his balladic forms. In “The Ballad of East and West” his aptitude with long lines is unmatched: “There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between, / And ye may hear the breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.” This is the natural, expressive style Kipling evolved: it can deal with surface reality, it can name things – anything, the style is inclusive – and it can suggest depths without damaging the surface. Though it has the veracity of speech, it also has the authority of song.

Angus Wilson on “The Islanders”

[It] takes each sacred cow of the clubs and senior common rooms and slaughters it messily before its worshipers’ eyes.

W.H. Auden, from original version of “In Memory of WB Yeats”:

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, March 1960

The Kipling I’ve been using for going-to-sleep reading. A few I had never read and all the others mostly years ago when I went right through him at the public library. (However, I re-read The Jungle Book and Just-So Stories and Kim, every so often. Isn’t Harriet almost old enough for the Jungle Books?–or some of the stories?) I think I feel about him exactly the way Max Beerbohm did–such a hideous mis-use of magnificent talents. (And also he was to blame for the worst side of Hemingway.) I don’t care what he’d been through (& Randall’s good about that part) but anyone who goes on all his life walking about “wonderful beatings”–for boys, men, elephants, anything–just had something too wrong with him.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

“The Way Through the Woods” is always reciting itself in my head. Its hint of a lost eros may be the largest clue to Kipling’s many enigmas.

Michael Schmidt writes of “The Islanders”:

Magesterial, with vehement sarcasm, he turns to the flag wavers, the lazy, the malingerers, and shows them where they are likely to fail. They serve false gods, like the chosen people who, in the Bible, suffer the scourge of the angry prophets. Despite his formal variety, he always sounds a hectoring note; he insists in the way that Marlowe’s dramatic verse or the Old Testament insists, with severity.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Kipling lived for sixteen years after the armistice, long enough to see his work, gone out of fashion, treated almost with contempt. Kipling and King George V died within days of each other; it was said, “The King has gone and taken his trumpeter with him.”

Christopher Hitchens:

To those born or brought up in England after 1914, let alone 1945, the sense of a waning day is part of the assumed historical outcome. It was Kipling’s achievement to have sounded this sad, admonishing note during the imperial midday, and to have conveyed the premonition among his hearers that dusk was nearer than they had thought.

Michael Schmidt:

In Kipling as in Hardy we find a poetry from the turn of the century without traces of poetic weariness, without the rhythmic overemphasis of Swinburne, the esoteric qualities of Arthur Symons, or the twilight of early Yeats. He was a plain-speaking poet, nowhere more pithily than in his “Epitaphs of the War”. These brief, uncompromising last words illustrate his skill in poetry of summary declaration, tough yet humane. “The Coward” is the best of them: “I could not look on death, which being known, / Men took me to him, blindfold and alone.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, journal about Barrack-Room Ballads:

“They are capital — full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world … We can never be quite so narrow again.”

Michael Schmidt:

Insider and outsider: Kipling was an innovator from within tradition, inventing forms, developing rhythms, pursuing a poetry that instructs as it entertains. The instruction is of its period; it repels readers with the experience of the Second World War behind them, and young readers who cannot abide incorrect notions. Insistence on racial superiority, on “The Blood” that binds the English, and the paternalistic note reserved for the people of the colonies, grate. But Kipling also wrote Kim. His critics deduce his politics selectively, finding in him a crude consistency of thought that the major works themselves belie. Hardy is a pessimist, but not a programmatic one, any more than Kipling is a thoroughgoing racist, sadist, protofascist or feudalist – all terms his critics have applied to him. Each poem aspires to consistency and truth to itself. But the poet is neither philosopher nor politician. He retains the essential freedom to change, to start a new book, a new poem, to find a new path or an old path through the woods. As an epitaph for journalists killed in the First World War Kipling inscriped, “We have served our day.” This is what he did, in a day when journalism was not merely a job but a vocation, and when ideals of service were not held suspect. Was he an interpreter of popular will or the inadvertent advocate of a new barbarism, the barbarism inherent in the imperial ideal? Robert Buchanan, a Gladstonian Liberal, characterized him as “the voice of the hooligan”, and – yes – we can agree, but beyond the hooligan there is the deep believer, who knows what he has seen and deduces from it what might be, against the current of what actually was happening: the Empire’s overextension and eventual decline. “Recessional” is the great poem of Empire, discursive rather than dramatic, expressing anxiety at imperial habits, the pride before the fall.

Christopher Hitchens:

I paid a call on Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in late 1977, and fell into a trap from which I had no desire to escape. He was blind and lonely, and said he liked my voice, and asked me if I would stay and read to him for a while. He knew exactly where on the shelf to find the Kipling, and on what page I would find “Harp Song of the Dane Woman.”

She has no house to lay a guest in –
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

“Long sips, please – more slowly,” the old man beseeched as I reached the lines

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turns from our side, and sicken –
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters, –
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter quarters.

I had never read the poem with such attention before. And, though I knew it expressed something profound and eternal about men and women and warfare, I had not noticed until then that it is made up of Old English words. It was a leathery old aficionado of Anglo-Saxon, sitting in a darkened room many leagues below the Equator, who lovingly drew this to my attention.

George Orwell:

It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

Christopher Hitchens:

The Irish question stirred Kipling to produce some of the worst political verse ever written. It also moved him to support a shameful Tory mutiny against parliamentary rule. His speeches and poems from the period are hysterical in their anti-Catholicism and their invocation of blood and conspiracy…Yet when Kipling needed a romantic or daredevil or charmingly courageous character in fiction or ballad, he almost unfailingly selected an Irishman (or at any rate an Irish name).

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21 Responses to Happy Birthday, Rudyard Kipling

  1. kellyofsiam says:

    I remember reading Kipling from my school days in the 50’s & early 60’s. I came to appreciate him while serving in the army during the Vietnam conflict. I really enjoyed his no nonsense poems on the soldier’s life.

    Later as I read history, I disliked Kipling’s politics but still admired his skill and his respect for the soldiers…I admired Ezra Pound but not his politics…though Pound sat in a cage at Pisa his genius can not be denied.

    Years later, I was a public school teacher on a small island in NW Washington state on a small island near Victoria, BC. I taught both middle & high school. For 15 years I taught 7th grade Language Arts and one of the most delightful memories is having the students read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. They seemed to enjoy the story and taking turns reading it aloud. They insisted that I show the film. On this small island, everyone knows everyone and parents would relate to me how much their children, who at this age, were pretending sophistication still were delighted with Rikki-Tikki.

  2. sheila says:

    kellyofsiam – It totally warms my heart to hear your stories of teaching this to middle schoolers. I can totally get why they would click with it – it’s such a good story! And Rikki Tikki Tavi is a terrific hero.

    And it’s very nice to hear a soldier’s perspective. I think that’s one of the reasons why I love his stuff: you really feel the dust, the boots in the dirt, the FEELING of battle. He was a man of his time. That’s okay. Makes him interesting! And, always, a hell of a writer.

    Happy new year to you!

  3. D. C. says:

    I loved Rikki Tikki Tavi, too. I was about the same age when I saw it. It’s interesting how, as a child, you just enjoy things for what they are, without any thought or pretense to the person or persons related to it. I have the same fond memories of all those old monogamous classics – Rudolph, Frosty, Charlie Brown, the Grinch. A walk down memory lane, ideed.

  4. sheila says:

    I mean, look at that artwork! Chuck Jones was a wonder. The whole thing is on Youtube if you want to relive it further.

  5. D. C. says:

    Aiye, don’t get me started on Chuck Jones. I could talk about that man for pages (lol). He was one of my idols growing up, along with Charles Schultz, Walt Kelly, and of course Hanna-Barbera.

  6. sheila says:

    Go ahead and talk! I’d love to hear! Have you read the interview Peter Bogdanovich did with him in Bogdanovich’s collection Who The Devil Made It? Great appreciative piece – they knew each other.

    Jones to Bogdanovich: “These cartoons were never made for children. Nor were they made for adults. They were made for me.”

  7. sheila says:

    “If you want to hire an animator today to do something for you in a classic style – if ours was classic – you’d have to hire the same man you hired in 1940. Many of the new animators can’t do it because they have only learned to answer the needs of Saturday morning. Well, you can learn that in six months or less if you can draw. But if you want to animate, it takes almost as long as it does to become a doctor – six years of hard work to become a full animator.” – Chuck Jones to Bogdanovich

  8. D. C. says:

    Nope, never heard of that one. I should clarify – it is his cartoons I could talk about for hours. I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know a lot about the man personally. I just loved his cartoons. His creations were a great inspiration and influence for me as a young artist and I feel privileged to have been around to watch them. Sadly, they don’t make them like that anymore.

    What Chuck did was art, in the truest sense of the word; it came from his heart. Not like today where cartoons are a few cheesy frames slapped together with about as much substance as a cardboard box. Chuck’s creations had character, style, and life. They were funny because they were original. As Chuck himself said, “Each character represented a trait that resides in me.”

    I feel the same way about my own artwork today. For me it isn’t about drawing flat 2D graphics, but about taking a dream, an idea, an inspiration, and giving it life in a truly unique and memorable way. This is what Chuck did for me. His cartoons have character and personality. Through his creations he showed me how much he cared. And I believe that should be the driving force behind any great creative endeavor; that you don’t do it because you can, but because you love it.

  9. sheila says:

    // about taking a dream, an idea, an inspiration, and giving it life in a truly unique and memorable way. //

    Very nice. The interview is great – it’s all about his work. He is so woven up in my childhood – I didn’t even know who he was but I had seen almost ALL of his work – it’s cool to hear how he did it.

  10. sheila says:

    And yes: what he did was art. I mean look at those first four screengrabs of Rikki Tikki Tavi. That’s art. It all is- but I love the nighttime scenes the best. I love the opening too – with the rain falling on all the statuary.

  11. D. C. says:

    I love how Chuck Jones is mentioned alongside Howard Hawks. Hawks is one of my favorite film makers of all time. Of course this just goes to prove again my point that truly great creations come from the heart. Hawks cared as much for his films as Chuck did for his animations.

    My favorite Hawks film is Rio Bravo. Although he made some great classics with Cary Grant (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride).

  12. sheila says:

    Oh, and don’t get ME started on Howard Hawks!! :)

    My favorite Howard Hawks is Only Angels Have Wings, which is in my top 5 movies of all time. Never get sick of it. N.E.V.E.R.

    But I love them all. Scarface, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby – all of ’em!!

  13. D. C. says:

    Well, if I started discussing Hawks I would have to go into how much I love The Duke, and we could be here all year. But hey…what a great way to start the new year, eh?

  14. D. C. says:

    You can get all kinds of fun and interesting Chuck Jones tidbits on Chuck Redux – a blog by Chuck’s grandson, Craig Kausen. Although it was not a Chuck Jones one, there is a Daffy Duck cartoon which stands out in my mind. It was Quackodile Tears, in which Daffy is forced to sit on this egg by his domineering wife.

    Honeybunch: Oh darling…..? (brief pause) Hey stupid!
    Daffy: Um…uh….um, yes dear?
    Honeybunch: It’s your turn to sit on the egg.
    Daffy: But, Honeybunch, sitting on eggs is sissy stuff!
    Honeybunch: Stop mumbling and sit on that egg!
    Daffy: I’m not sitting on no egg!
    Honeybunch: Sit on that egg or I’ll…
    Daffy: Nope, no sitting!
    (there’s a muffled whump! and Daffy walks back to the nest with his butt kicked up above his head)
    Daffy: Someday she’s gonna go too far.

    I laughed so hard I cried.

    Sorry, I kind of sidetracked away from Kipling. So back to our regular scheduled programming (lol).

  15. sheila says:

    Ha!!!!

    Classic screwball stuff.

    And yes – Kipling goes with Chuck Jones goes with the Duke – it all makes sense here at chez Sheila.

  16. Nick says:

    Remember Auden’s discarded ending for “In Memory of William Yeats”:

    Time that is intolerant
    Of the brave and the innocent,
    And indifferent in a week
    To a beautiful physique,

    Worships language and forgives
    Everyone by whom it lives;
    Pardons cowardice, conceit,
    Lays its honours at their feet.

    Time that with this strange excuse
    Pardoned Kipling and his views,
    And will pardon Paul Claudel,
    Pardons him for writing well.

    Truer words seldom spoken.

    Besides, we are each creatures of our time, like you said. Miss a lot of great stuff if you go round judging people too harshly.

    Kipling’s one of the greats.

  17. rae says:

    Well, dang, now all I want to do is rewatch Rikki Tikki Tavi. I think we still have it on VHS!

  18. Fiddlin Bill says:

    Those epigrams are breath-taking. Reading this piece of yours, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” came to mind: a portrait of an occupying army, the everydayness of it, the way the army is a kind of home. The humane quality of Brittle’s solution to the problem of the hostile force facing him stood out to me the last time I watched the film. Don’t massacre them (Custer’s solution, and Col. Thursday’s failed approach in Fort Apache), just run off their horses and they’ll walk home, defeated.

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