J O N K E R S R A R E B O O K S
ii. “Oct. 16. 1900”. An excellent, unpublished letter from Kipling to Edmund Garrett. Five handwritten sides of letter paper (two sheets, folded twice, approximately 920 words), signed “Rudyard Kipling” with a ten line postscript. At the head of the first page, Kipling has written “I apologise for this vile writing. It’s stylographic - not Ara- maic.” [41809] £4,750 An exceptional, detailed and long letter from Kipling to Edmund Garrett on the state of South Africa and the ongoing Boer War. The letter dates from a pivotal time in the conflict, just before the annexation of Transvaal and the capture of Pretoria. By this time, Garrett had been back in Britain recovering from tuberculosis for over a year, while Kipling was now in the habit of making annual winter trips to South Africa. It is Kipling, there- fore, who is sharing the news from there with Garrett, rather than receiving it from him. Kipling’s mention of army reform here is particularly significant. After seeing much of the Boer War and the losses the British incurred with his own eyes, Kipling became very critical of military leadership and wrote privately and publicly of the need to reform in the light of an inevitable future conflict with Germany. At one point in this letter his rage at army officers renders him speechless, and the failure of the British Army to reform was immortalised in his later poem ‘Ep- itaphs Of The War’: “If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.” The architect Herbert Baker had lived with Garrett in Muizenberg, and it was here on an earlier visit that Kipling and Garrett first met. The Honoured Dead Memorial at Kimberley had been commissioned by Cecil Rhodes after that city had been besieged by forces from the Boer repub- lics. Baker’s design was based on the Nereid Monument - being a Doric temple set on a high base - and Rhodes commissioned Kipling to provide an inscription for it, which was to be carved in large Roman capitals. The second half of the letter, concerned entirely with the major figures of the war and South Afri - can politics gives a sense of Kipling’s nuanced positioning. Though he is not jingoistically wed to the British, “Now I do not think highly of British Statesmen”, he shares high praise for Alfred Mil- ner. Equally, while he pours scorn on John X. Merriman, he closes the letter with the suggestion that a Boer military governor be given control of Griqualand West. Kipling also, prophetically, sees that an end to the first phase of the war is close at hand, where he says “both sides are utterly talked out. They are dead sick and weary of the war-exhausted volcanoes.” iii. “Aug. 10. 04”. An excellent, unpublished letter from Kipling to Edmund Garrett. Two handwritten sides of letter paper (single sheet, folded twice, approximately 272 words), signed “Rudyard Kipling”, with a three line postscript signed “RK”. [41810] £1,500 A terrific letter from Kipling to Edmund Garrett, prompted by the Garrett’s parody of him in the Spectator. Garrett’s parody in the Spectator was a poem titled ‘Facts And The Boss’ (August 6 1904), which was a reply to Kipling’s ‘Things And The Man’, dedicated to Joseph Chamberlain (who played a central role in the Second Boer War) and first published in The Times just days earlier (August 1 1904). Later writing of the parody, and Kipling’s response to it, Garrett said “That small jape of mine brought a shower of letters from old friends and acquaintances, but Kipling’s own magnanimous and jolly enjoyment of it was the best”. Garrett, like Chamberlain was a man of action admired by Kipling. Indeed, such was Kipling’s admiration for Garrett that he seems in this letter not at all to mind being parodied in this way, and is more interested in the publication as evidence of Garrett’s return to health than any kind or personal, political or literary slight.
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