What was unexpected was that she singled out Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads for special praise - perhaps this was because she was given the poems as a Christmas present.
Her actual words about the poems surprised me too:
“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 and gain a much clearer realization of all the myriad forms of life that are beating around your own little one. And this is good for a person even if one does slip back afterwards into the narrow bounds of one’s own life. We can never be quite so narrow again.”
From The Complete Journals of L. M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1900-1911
I certainly know what it is like to be thrilled and taken out of myself and swept into another, wider, world by certain poems, Rudyard Kipling’s in particular, but the Barrack Room Ballads are not among them. They have on the whole a negative effect.
This enthusiasm was so surprising that I went to Project Gutenberg to refresh my memory of the Ballads in the hope of understanding why L. M. Montgomery felt this way about them.
Something about Barrack Room Ballads
These ballads have never been on my list of favourite Kipling’s works. A quick skim through them reminded me why.
Almost all of the poems are written in a vernacular dialect. I find the language, which is Kipling’s imitation of the way that the common soldier spoke, difficult to take. It puts me right off, and makes it difficult to appreciate the good lines.
The poems are a depressing reminder of the appalling conditions the common soldiers of the Late Victorian era lived, fought and died in. Kipling speaks on behalf of these soldiers; he puts their viewpoints, experiences and sad stories into words far better than they ever could have and as no one else did.
I find Danny Deever and Gentleman-Rankers particularly disturbing.
It is also depressing to be reminded of all the elephants, horses, bullocks, mules and camels who suffered and died alongside the soldiers in the service of the British Empire.
However, despite the pseudo-Cockney dialect and the other factors, I do like a few of the poems, Gunga Din and Mandalay for example.
Writing to order
L. M. Montgomery mentioned a compulsion to write even if there was no publication and no money in it. She also had views on writing that comes from anything other than genuine inclination, inspiration and creativity.
Extracts from her letters provide independent confirmation of some of the material in the article about Rudyard Kipling’s Daemon.
She wrote this in 1908, by which time much of Kipling’s best work was behind him:
“I don’t think Kipling is "written out." I think he is just in a transition period and that he will emerge from it with something better than he has yet done. Still, of course he may not. I don’t think our writers of today have the "staying power" of the older novelists. They are more of sky-rockets than of calm planetary continuance. When a man begins "playing to the gallery" he is done for.”
From The Green Gables Letters from L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909
I like what she says about ‘one-hit wonders’ and people who write primarily for show and effect.
I said that writing can become a tedious task, a burden and an imposition, when it is done to meet the demands of readers and publishers who are clamouring for more.
L. M. Montgomery supports this with some words about the follow-up book to Anne of Green Gables. She wrote this in another Green Gables letter:
“...the publishers have been urging me to have the second volume ready for them by October—in fact insisting upon it. I have been writing "like mad" all through the hottest summer we have ever had. I finished the book last week and am now typewriting it, which means from three to four hours’ pounding every day—excessively wearisome work; I expect it will take me a month to get it done—if I last so long...but I’m so horribly tired of her that I can’t see a single merit in her or the book and can’t really convince myself that people are sincere when they praise her.”
Luckily for their readers, both Rudyard Kipling and L. M. Montgomery recovered their creative inspiration and went on to produce more immortal works.
