I always wondered whether Andrew Barton Patterson ever met Rudyard Kipling
and now I know that they did.  It seems that they first met as war
correspondents 
in Bloemfontein during the Boer war in 1900, where Kipling as an associate
editor,
and other war correspondents wrote for the Bloemfontein "Friend".   
Banjo Patterson later visited Kipling at Rottingdean, England.
Amongst these fascinating observations, there are some interesting insights 
to the writing of the much admired poem "Lichtenberg".
Can anyone give the date of Patterson's visit to Kipling at Rottingdean?


Rudyard Kipling                            
First meeting with Kipling of Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson,
(1864-1941). 
Happy Dispatches 


March 25th 1900 — Bloemfontein. Met Kipling. He has come up here on a
hurried visit, partly to see what a war is really like after writing so
much about soldiers, and partly in search of health after his late severe
illness. 
He is a little, square-built, sturdy man of about forty. His face is well
enough known to everybody from his numerous portraits; but no portrait
gives any hint of the quick, nervous energy of the man. His talk is a
gabble, a chatter, a constant jumping from one point to another. In
manner, he is more like a business man than a literary celebrity. There is
nothing of the dreamer about him. The last thing anyone could believe is
that the little, square-figured man with the thick black eyebrows and the
round glasses, is the creator of Mowgli, the Jungle Boy; of 'The Drums of
the Fore and Aft;' of 'The Man who would be King'; to say nothing of
Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd, and other celebrities. He talked of little
but the war and its results, present and prospective. His residence in
America has Americanized his language, and he says "yep" instead of "yes". 
After talking a little while about Australian books and Australian papers,
he launched out on what is evidently his ruling idea at present — the
future of South Africa. 
"I'm off to London," he says. "Booked to sail on the eleventh. I'm not
going to wait for the fighting here. I can trust the army to do all the
fighting. I knew this war was coming and I came over here some time ago,
and I went to Johannesburg and Pretoria. I've got everything good and
ready. There's going to be the greatest demand for skilled labour here the
world has ever known. Railways, irrigation, mines, mills, everything would
have started here long ago only for this government. The world can't
afford to let the Boers have this country to sleep in any longer." 
I said that our men did not think the country worth fighting over; that it
would not pay to farm unless one were sure of water. 
"Water. You can get water at forty feet anywhere. What more do they want?" 
I said that there was a vast difference between artesian water which rises
to the surface and well water which has to be lifted forty feet. When it
comes to watering 100,000 sheep, one finds the difference. 
"Well," he said, "that may be so in this Karroo desert. But you haven't
seen the best of the country yet. Wait till you get to the Transvaal." 
"If you take the country," I said, "what will you do with the Boers?" 
"Give'em back their farms. But we'll show them how to run the country as
it should be run. They don't know what a grand country they have got." 
There spoke the idealist and the theorist. That was over thirty years ago
and the great rush of skilled labour has not happened yet. 
I was amazed at his cock-sureness; for I felt certain that I knew more
about land settlement than did Kipling, and I would have hesitated about
telling the Boers how to run their country. Then I remembered that he had
been for years on the editorial staff of a big Indian newspaper. Once a
man has been privileged to use the editorial "we" he feels that the world
is out of joint, and that he is born to set it right. Remember Dickens's
editor who said: "Let us remind the Emperor of Turkey that we have got our
eye on him." 
Kipling is two men — a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I sat next to him at
dinner one night, and he put off the toga of the politician and put on the
mantle of the author. It was most fascinating. He yarned away about shoes
and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings; interested in
everything; asking questions about everything; jumping from one subject to
another, from his residence in New York to border battles on the Indian
frontier; from the necessity of getting your local colour right, to the
difficulty of getting a good illustrator. As he spoke, his face lit up and
you began to notice the breadth of his head and the development of the
bump of perception over his eyes. His training as a journalist may have
made him a bit of an adviser-general to the world at large, but it taught
him to talk to anybody and to listen to anybody, for the sake of whatever
story they might have to tell. You could have dumped Kipling down in a
splitter's camp in the back-blocks of Australia and he would have been
quite at home; and would have gone away, leaving the impression that he,
was a decent sort of bloke that asked a lot of questions. 
I asked him how he got all his material, and he said: 
"Some of it I saw; some of it I was. As for the rest — I asked questions."
Later on, I was to stay with Kipling in England and to see more of this
many-sided character. 


A visit to Kipling in England

Without haste without rest — The world's hardest worker — A man of many
houses — "You must get things right" — A genius with no redeeming vices —
Kipling and the butcher — "You must buy Empire lamb" — "It's their guts
they think about." 
ONE expects a great literary genius to he in some way a sort of freak:
drink, women, temperament, idleness, irregularity of habits — nearly all
the great writers of the past have had one or other of these drawbacks,
and some of them have had them all. Byron's life consisted mostly of
purple patches; and Swinburne was not the hero of the song about the good
young man that died. So, when I went to stay with Kipling in England, I
was prepared for literally anything. Would he drink? Would he be one of
those men who had half a dozen wives with a complementary number of
concubines? Would he sit up all night telling me how good he was, or would
he recite his own poetry with appropriate gestures? 
None of these things happened. We have read in one of O. Henry's books of
a citizen of a South American republic, where everybody was "grafting" day
and night, who determined to make himself conspicuous by being honest.
Greta Garbo, one of the world's great film stars, got pages of publicity
by refusing to be interviewed. Shakespeare himself seems to have dodged
the publicity man to such an extent that even now there is some doubt
whether he wrote all his own works, or whether they were done by somebody
else of the same name. Kipling was remarkable in that his life was so very
unremarkable. 
He hated publicity as his Satanic Majesty is supposed to hate holy water;
and in private life he was just a hard-working, commonsense, level-headed
man, without any redeeming vices that I could discover. A pity too,
perhaps; for there is nothing so interesting as scandals about great
geniuses. Though he was a very rich man, I found him living in an
unpretentious house at Rottingdean, Brighton. The only thing that marked
it as the lair of a literary lion was the crowd of tourists (mostly
Americans) who hung about from daylight till dark trying to look over the
wall, or waiting to intercept his two little children when they went out
for a walk. By having his car brought into the garden and getting into it
from his own doorstep, Kipling was able to dash out through the ranks of
autograph hunters even as a tiger dashes out when surrounded by savages. 
His wife, a charming and cultivated American lady, was in her own way just
as big a disappointment as was Kipling. She did not seek to be a society
star, nor to swagger about covered with rubies and emeralds. 
"In the States," she said, "when people push their money in your face, we
always wonder how they got it." 
Kipling's house was a home. And it was a home of hard work, for he allowed
nothing to interfere with his two or three hours of work a day. The rest
of the time he roved round getting material. 
"I must buy a house in Australia some day," he said. "I've a house here,
and in New York, and in Capetown; but I'd like to live in Australia for a
while. I've been there, but I only went through it like the devil went
through Athlone, in standing jumps. You can't learn anything about a
country that way. You have to live there and then you can get things
right. You people in Australia haven't grown up yet. You think the
Melbourne Cup is the most important thing in the world." 
Motoring in those days was just in the stage when the betting was about
even whether the car would get its passengers home or whether the wife
would sit and knit by the roadside while the husband lay on his back under
the car and had his clothes smothered in dust and oil. 
Kipling, it appeared, had a new car coming on trial, and our first
excursion was to be a run in this new car. One of the newly-invented
Lanchester cars arrived, driven by a man in overalls, who looked like a
superior sort of mechanic. He said that his name was Laurence. When he
heard that I came from Australia, he asked me whether I knew his brother
in Sydney. It so happened that I did know his brother; thereafter things
went swimmingly. "I have another brother," he said, "a high court judge
here. When I take these cars round for a trial I generally drag in
something about my brother, the high court judge, for fear they'll send me
round to the kitchen. Sometimes," he added, "I would prefer to go to the
kitchen." 
Kipling and I piled into the back of the car, with the great man as
excited as a child with a new toy. Out we went, scattering tourists right
and left, and away over the Sussex downs. We were climbing a hill of about
one in five with nothing much below us but the English Channel, when
Kipling, possibly with a view to getting some accurate copy about
motoring, said: 
"What would happen if she stopped here, Laurence?" 
"I'll show you," said Laurence. He stopped the engine and let the car,
with its illustrious passenger, run back towards that awful drop. I had a
look over my shoulder and was preparing to jump when Laurence dropped a
sprag and pulled her up all standing. Then he threw in the engine and away
we went. I said to Kipling: 
"Weren't you frightened? I was nearly jumping out." 
"Yes," he said, "I was frightened. But I thought what a bad advertisement
it would be for the Lanchester company if they killed me, so I sat tight." 
Away we went through the beautiful English lanes, where the leaves swirled
after the car, and one expected to see Puck of Pook's Hill peering out
from behind a tree. We passed military barracks, where Mulvaney, Ortheris,
and Learoyd, with their swagger canes, were just setting out for a walk.
We saw the stolid English farm labourers putting in the oak bridge that
would last for generations. We saw a sailing-ship ploughing her way down
the Channel, and noted "the shudder, the stumble, the roll as the
star-stabbing bowsprit emerges."   It was like looking at a series of
paintings — and here at my side was the painter. 
Earnest in everything that he touched, he pulled the car up outside a
butcher's shop to do a little Empire propaganda. Pointing at the carcass
of a lamb hanging in the window, he asked me to guess its weight. Not
being altogether inexperienced in the weight of lambs, I had a guess, and
he said: 
"I'll go in and buy that lamb, and we'll see if you're right; and we'll
see where this butcher is getting his mutton." 
It turned out that I was within two pounds of the lamb's weight. This
seemed to astonish Kipling very much, and he said to the butcher: 
"This gentleman comes from Australia, where they do nothing but weigh
lambs all day long. You must buy all the Australian lamb you can get, and
keep the money in the Empire." 
The butcher, not knowing in the least who he was, said: 
"The Empire. Ha! My customers don't bother about the Empire, sir. It's
their guts they think about!" 
This unedifying incident of the butcher may be some sort of guide as to
what Kipling's English contemporaries thought of him. Frankly, they looked
upon him as one of these infernal know-all fellows, who wanted to do all
sorts of queer things. What right had anyone to come along and suggest
that some day there would be a big war, and that England should be
prepared for it? Fancy advocating that we should give more time to drill,
and less time to sports! The flannelled fools at the wickets, forsooth,
and the muddied oafs at the goals — when everybody knew that all battles
were won on the playing-fields of Eton and Rugby! 
Kipling, out of his own pocket, bought enough land for a rifle-range, and
paid the wages of a retired sergeant-major to teach the yokels drill and
musketry, Was he applauded by his neighbours? Not that you would notice
it. A local magnate, stodgy as a bale of hay, looked in for afternoon-tea
and confided to me that Kipling was undoubtedly a clever man but too
unconventional. 
"All this business about drilling men," he said, "is just putting wrong
ideas into their heads. I wouldn't let my men go." 
Later on, in the Great War, he was to know more about it. Kipling himself
lost his only son in the Great War, and was asked to write an epitaph to
be put on a tablet in the centre of the thousands of war graves. He wrote:
"Had our fathers not lied to us, so many of us would not be here." And who
shall blame him? Needless to say, they did not use it. 
So Kipling stalked through the land of little men, as Gulliver stalked
through the land of the Lilliputians. He would never have made a political
leader, for he was less of a quack, less of a showman, and less of a
time-server than any public man I ever met. Had he been a spectacular
person like Gabriel d'Annunzio he might have led a great Imperialist
movement. But he had no gift of speech, and his nature abhorred anything
in the way of theatricalism. He wrote of things as he saw them, bearing in
his own way the white man's burden and expecting no fee or reward. 
 
His Work
Kipling carried his earnestness into his work, for he must have everything
right. Smoking one evening, he picked up some manuscript, and said: 
"Here's something I am working on, and it brings in your country. Just see
if it's right, will you?" 
The verse in his hand was: "The scent of the wattle at Lichtenberg, riding
in the rain." And the lines that troubled him were: 

My fruit-farm on Hunter's River
With the new vines joining hands.

For some reason or another he was worried as to whether these lines were
right. 
I said that in Australia we would speak of an orchard, not of a
fruit-farm; and that we called it Hunter River, and not Hunter's River.
But why worry! He wasn't writing a geography or a gardener's guide. Even
old Ouida, who was a best-seller in her day, once made one of her
guardsman heroes, weighing thirteen stone, ride the same horse to victory
in the Derby two years running — and nobody murdered her. 
"They should have murdered her," said Kipling. "Writing things wrong is
like singing out of tune. You don't sing, do you?" 
"No. But how could you tell?" 
"Nobody that has the ear for rhythm ever has the ear for music. When I
sing, the dog gets up and goes out of the room." 
This insistence on photographic accuracy, so unusual in a poet, may have
been the one loose bearing in the otherwise perfect machinery of his mind;
or it may have been that his training as a sub-editor had bitten so deeply
into his system that he looked upon inaccuracy as the cardinal sin. There
was no satisfaction for him in a majestic march of words if any of the
words were out of step. 
I said to him: 
"You ought to be satisfied. You seem to get things pretty right, anyway.
How did you come to get that little touch about the Australian trooper
riding into Lichtenberg when the rain brought out the scent of the
wattles? Inspiration?" 
"No," he said. "Observation. I used to poke about among the troops and ask
all the silly questions I could think of. I saw this Australian trooper
pull down a wattle-bough and smell it. So I rode alongside and asked him
where he came from. He told me about himself, and added: "I didn't know
they had our wattle over here. It smells like home." That gave me the
general idea for the verses; then all I had to do was to sketch in the
background in as few strokes as possible. And when you're only using a few
strokes you must have 'em in the right place. That's why I asked you
whether it was right to talk about the fruit-farm and Hunter's River." 
All very well, but being somewhat in the verse line myself, I knew that
only a master could have written those few little verses. Possibly only
one man that ever lived could have done it — Kipling himself. 
He was sub-editor of a big Indian paper, and all the news of the world
came through his hands to be trimmed up and cut down and put under
headlines. The worst training in the world for a poet, one would think.
Yet, it gave him his crisp, clear-cut style. He thought in essentials, and
scorned padding, as a sub-editor should. "The Wake a Welt of Light," "He
looked like a lance in rest," "Oak, Ash, and Thorn," "The Joyous Venture."
These are all headlines — not a word wasted. Phil May had this gift of
condensation in art, and Kipling has it in literature. Then, as to his
gift of vivid description. Here are a couple of lines from the "Ballad of
East and West", describing the chase of an Indian raider by an officer on
a troop horse: 

"The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above,
But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden plays with a
glove."

I said: "How on earth did you manage to write that, you who say that you
know nothing about horses? It's just a picture of the way the horses would
gallop. You can see the well-bred mare getting over the ground like a
gazelle with the big, heavy-headed horse toiling after her." 
"Observation," he said. "I suppose I must have noticed the action of
horses without knowing that I noticed it." 
It must have been the same sort of observation that made him call the
pompous heads of army departments "little tin gods on wheels." The phrase
was not new, but like Homer going down the road, he went and took it. Like
all great artists, he was quite dissatisfied with his own work: 
"If you can write a thing about half as well as it ought to be written,"
he said, "then perhaps, after all, you may not have written it so badly." 
I asked him how he came to write Kim with its mass of material and its
infinite (and no doubt accurate) detail. 
"Oh," he said, "the material was just lying about there in heaps. All I
had to do was to take it and fit it together." 

His Outlook
And now the reader asks, hadn't the man any hobbies? Did he garden or play
cards or shoot or hunt or fish? Not a bit of it. He took a great deal of
interest in small improvements to his property, such as you may read about
in Puck of Pook's Hill, but I think that was mainly on account of the
enjoyment he got from watching the habits and customs of the English
agricultural labourer, as set forth in the same book. His sight was too
bad to allow him to race over raspers in the hunting-field or drop a dry
fly over a rising trout: hence his nick-name of Beetle in Stalky & Co. His
only hobby was work. And like Goethe's hero he toiled without haste and
without rest. Look at a collection of his works and you will get some idea
of the urge that must have driven him to keep working. At the age of forty
he had written more books than most men write in a lifetime, and not a
line went into one of those books that he did not verify. True, he did
once describe the Maribyrnong Plate as a steeplechase; but if he had had
an Australian turf-guide at hand, he would have corrected the error. I
have already quoted the Scotch engineer's objection to Kipling's
description of the destroyers lying in wait for their prey in the swirl of
the reefs — "and they drawing six feet forrard and nine feet aft." But did
not Shakespeare once locate a navy in Bohemia or some other inland
country. Apart from his literary work, he felt that the white man's burden
was laid on him to advocate in every way this bringing of the British
peoples under Empire council, with India as a sort of apprentice nation
until it learnt to govern itself. In view of what has happened lately, he
might have also questioned the ability of the white parts of the Empire to
govern themselves; but he said that, when the Australians grew up, and
when the young Africans forgot to be Dutch, there would be such an empire
as the world never saw. By way of contribution to the debate, I suggested
that the Australians would always put Australia first, and that the young
Africans did not care a hoot about the Dutch — they were Afrikanders
first, last, and all the time. But the only motherland he had known was
that "grim stepmother," India, and he could not conceive that South
Africans or Australians would study the interests of their own territories
when they might be partners in a great empire. One must concede it to him
that he took a large view. 
As to the Indians, he said that the Indian peasant could neither
understand nor make any sensible use of self-government; and he wrote all
sorts of nasty things about the British M.P.s who wandered over to
"smoodge" to the Indians. He would cheerfully have seen them get their
throats cut. 


Extract from: 'Happy Dispatches' by Banjo Patterson - 
appearing in "Three Elephant Power"

Source:
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/browse.html

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/pubotbin/toccer-new?id=pat.p00055.sgml&tag=
ozlit&images=acdp/gifs&data=/usr/ot&part=0

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/pubotbin/toccer-new?id=pat.p00055.sgml&imag
es=acdp/gifs&data=/usr/ot&tag=ozlit&part=11&division=div1



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