Rudyard Kipling Hand-Corrected Typed Letter Signed Proposing a Literary Trilogy

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Oct 11, 2023

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• Lot Description
  TLS signed “Ever there, R. K.,” one page both sides, 8 x 10.25, August 18, 1923. Letter to his close friend, the fellow writer H. Rider Haggard, addressing him as "Dear old man," marked at the top: "Confidential & burn after reading." Kipling suggests that he rework his literary material into an epic trilogy chronicling the history of man, using the 'Wandering Jew' as a central conceit. In the myth, a Jewish man who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion was then cursed to walk the Earth until Judgment Day; every hundred years he falls into a trance and wakes up at the age of thirty, becoming wiser and more repentant throughout the ages. Kipling makes several additions and deletions throughout the text.
  
  
  
  In part: "Ask me something easier next time? As I said, I am a whale on giving advice on another man's work. But, I do not think that Wisdom's Daughter ought to be re-written to make her say all that is in your mind. Besides, you wouldn't recapture the roll and swing of a lot of that prose if you went over it again, would you? Interpolation would be more my notion if it were my own output. I grant you that 'She' will abide and, to that extent, 'Wisdom's Daughter' could never be more than a gloss on 'She'‰Û_Personally, as I haven't got to do it, I should say it would be worth the doing. You aren't choosing any small canvas for your latter years to expatiate in—are you—when you turn your mind towards the Jew? Let us be generous while we are about it.
  
  
  
  The little business might be worked out in a trilogy, quite easily. Book One would deal with the origins of the man, far back. He might be a composite & sort of breed, a bit of an Arab, and a bit of a Sephardim; with a Roman ancestor or two in his line. A hell of a school taught intellectual who really was no more than politely cruel to The Lord. He didn't say in so many words, 'Get along with you.' He just hinted to the Figure staggering beneath its Cross that it was blocking his way to an appointment [we can guess the appointment: and the whore comes in, later, too]‰Û_Any how, you would have to close the First Book with the Crucifixion, but you might do it from the wholly disinterested point of view of the Jew upon whom the Doom has not yet begun to work‰Û_
  
  
  
  Book Two leaves one with the whole choice of either the fall of the Roman empire, for the complete history of the Middle Ages introduced by a little talk or two between the Jew, and a wandering disputatious sect on the words of this Hebrew ruffian of thirty or forty years back. The Jew himself is elderly now, and (still ignorant of his lot) looks to be gathered to his fathers before the times get any worse. He is a good Jew, remember. Paul thinks otherwise, but won't give his reasons. The Jew attends a Christian service at the very dawn of the Creed, and warns Paul that he has brought his new faith to a market where it will be bought up by the vested interests attached to the service of the Old Gods. This, Paul don't see. From that point you can go no. Dead easy, isn't it?
  
  
  
  Book Third, is the Great War, and will include about two fifths of your Diary which you have been, though you knew it not, compiling for just this event. It ends in the trenches, as far as the Jew is concerned. And, mixed up with his release is a legend of Our Lady of the Trenches who is seen now and again flitting about abandoned trenches (this tale was told in the war) attending to the forgotten, unburied and dead, sons of mothers.
  
  
  
  Now you won't do one little bit of this, but it will help stir you up to block out the first rough scenario in the intervals of answering the demands of idle idiots and helpless imbeciles, to which cheerful task I am now about to address myself for the next hour. My specialty, for the moment, is infallible plans for perpetual peace, based on the identity of the British with the Lost Tribes! Somehow that doesn't seem to me a secure platform." He adds a handwritten postscript with further suggestions for subject matter, in part: "A crusade or two? Black Death? A trip with one C. Columbus in hope of death which ends in opening up more of the world to misery? A term of service with the Inquisition—just by way of getting over with his Doom? The Plague?" In fine condition, with intersecting folds and light foxing to the lower half of the page.
  
  
  
  Although it appears that Kipling's suggestions for the trilogy were not followed, he was an important influence on Haggard's work, most notably in Red Eve. The friends shared broad views of history and the present proposal contains many of Kipling's own ideas and preoccupations. The allusion to 'Our Lady of the Trenches' anticipates Kipling's own tale of 'A Madonna of the Trenches,' published in a magazine 1924 and collected in Debits and Credits two years later. As in other stories in Debits and Credits, such as 'The Church that was at Antioch' and 'The Manner of Men,' St. Paul plays a central role, as Kipling suggests he should in Haggard's "Book Two." An interesting, lengthy literary letter connecting important authors.
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