The Portable Kipling

...is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and former editorial page editor of the Washington Star...

...Nevertheless, the System was founded during the New Deal, and is preserved today by appealing to some of the most decent sensibilities of the American people...

...The fabric, for all its outward brilliance, was rotten...

...J . F . Powers's best work would fit handily into a single volume, as would Colette's...

...Today's regime governs invisibly, not publicly, evincing a design upon the democratic right of self-government...

...The current season has brought us two brand-new Portables...

...but the fundamental lack of sympathy between author and editor necessarily poses a real problem to the reader looking for a solid approach to Kipling...

...THE PORTABLE KIPLING Edited by Irving Howe The Viking Press, $17.95 / Penguin Books, $6.95 Terry Teachout Alexander Woollcott's final literary venture prior to his untimely death in January...

...This thwarted affinity, which was to end in two great world wars, is not the subject of this biography of the Iron Chancellor...

...but today, each season sees one or two imaginative additions to the growing list of Viking Portables--and though The Portable Kipling could certainly have been done better, it still deserves to be greeted with genuine praise...

...His especial target, when muttering about this "English" or "petticoat" influence, was the Princess Augusta, the liberal wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia and one of Queen Victoria's far-flung brood...

...In his memoirs he analyzes the younger William's defects of character with a bluntness not far short of lkse-majestd...

...and of this fact Bismarck was well aware...

...Crankshaw doesn't--that the disasters of August 1914 and after were somehow implicit, even foreordained, in the events Bismarck did manage: an internal contradiction Mr...

...For all its faults, The Portable Kipling is a more than welcome reminder that Viking-Penguin is once again looking to breathe some muchneeded life into the Viking Portable series...

...Howe's five dozen inclusions are good enough...

...It also turned out to have a longer life, in a manner of speaking, than any of Woollcott's more original productions...

...and in the absence of a better and more sympathetic attempt .to anthologize Kipling, Mr...

...But the main elements are familiar...

...Confessing his incurable sympathy for England and t h e English to a friend in 1862, Otto yon Bismarck added, almost plaintively, "but they will not let us love them...

...A neat little handful of a book much like the pre-Random House Modern Library volumes in outward appearance, it received a wide and appreciative circulation in its day...

...After a long dry spell, Penguin Books took over principal responsibility for the Viking Portable series some six years ago, updating a few of the old classics and commissioning several new volumes: an excellent Nabokov, a very good Shaw, a plausible Graham Greene...

...He blamed her, for instance, for the pressure brought against William I to avoid the use of heavy siege guns against Paris in the war of 1870-71--a compunction that, to his mind, prolonged the war, increased its political risks for everyone, and for that matter was not any more humane than the alternative: starvation...

...The legitimist principle was brilliantly applied by Metternich while he survived...

...It is the maintenance of those ties, not merely the selfishness of the program's participants, that makes any reform of the System extremely unlikely...

...a Dorothy Parker anthology, Edmund Wilson summed up those features which have distinguished the many excellent volumes of the Viking Portable Library to this day: '~[T]he format of this volume . . . is appropriate to and worthy of the contents...

...One could imagine a really worthwhile Portable Raymond Chandler or Flannery O'Connor, for instance...

...They fought, not only in two wars and half a war in Vietnam, but above all on the hustings for the public's support of their programs...

...In a review of the first Portable...

...No prize for picking out the planted axiom in that statement...

...and here, I am glad to report, he has not done a half-bad job...

...But none of the Portables are less than serviceable, while some (Morton Dauwen Zabel's Henry James, for example, or Bernard DeVoto's Mark Twain) are veritable masterpieces of compression...

...As the principal founder of the greater German empire, as conqueror of Austria (1866) and of France (1870), he created the state that Crankshaw as so many before him views as the incubator of twentieth-century German militarism...

...They negotiate the redistributions of entirely relative, private costs and benefits_by a regime that strikes at the heart of American self-reliance...

...BISMARCK Edward Crankshaw / The Viking Press / $19.95 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...

...After the final defeat of Napoleon, it became the objective of the Allied powers at the Congress of Vienna (1815) to recork the bottle of nationalism and revolution, to demote Napoleon's upstart monarchs, and to resuscitate the dynastic principle ("legidmism") as the fundamental principle of European order...

...One could imagine a less perfunctory choice of Kipling's verse, but Mr...

...There is a bracing perversity, it must be said, in assigning to the editor of Dissent the task of assembling a one-volume compilation of Rudyard Kipling's best work...

...Crankshaw doesn't bother to resolve...

...But in this Indian summer legitimism was being undercut by industrial development and the middle-class parliamentary liberalism associated with it...

...Bismarck's extraordinary term as chancellor ended in 1890 and he died Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...

...Howe is obviously interested in Kipling, and he has some genuinely intelligent, if elaborately tolerant, things to say about him from time to time...

...Now *Woollcott's skills as an anthologist, as it happens, were far more considerable than his generally unenthusiastic reviewers cared to admit...

...But in Crankshaw's pages Bismarck is subjected to all the quibbles, qualms, and complaints...

...and a passage which tells us a great deal more about Mr...

...and at least one, Malcolm Cowley's famous Portable Faulkner, was chiefly responsible for a largescale revival of interest in the output of a formerly neglected author...

...The doctrine of "indirect responsibility" is tenable only if you take the view--and Mr...

...The volume, called As You Were, contained (in Terry Teadmut is jazz critic for the Kansas City Star...

...Bismarck, remembering one of the recurrent terms of scorn that mark his reminiscences, would doubtless find it an example of that "English sentiment" that seemed to him so inappropriate to rational statecraft...

...Crankshaw does, that Bismarck was "indirectly" the source of the calamities that were to overwhelm the old Europe in the twentieth century...

...that an enlightened Gladstonian conscience can bring to bear upon a master of Realpoli'tik...

...Howe's Viking Portable will do quite nicely...

...and the two long-forgotten Woollcott Readers, tbQugh marred by what Woollcott called his "incorrigibly miscellaneous" literary tastes, nevertheless served to introduce such first-rate works as A Handful of Dust, Cakes and Ale, and A Christmas Garland to a wider American audience...

...Indeed, they do...

...Contemporary politicians, including many conservatives, could do worse than emulate New Dealers...

...Wilson crusaded tirelessly in his later years for an American-made counterpart to Gallimard's celebrated Editions de la Pl~iade, enumerating the French series' virtues in distinctly similar terms...

...several of the authors covered by the series do not fit at all well into its stylized single-volume format, and more than a few of the best Viking Portables have been out of print for years...

...by nationalism...

...Certainly he had an inkling that the cocky young kaiser, William II, would bring Germany to a bad end...

...Nor has the list of possible authors been exhausted by their recent efforts, either...

...Chesterton...

...Eliot, Randall JarreU, George Orwell, Angus Wilson, and V.S...

...As You Were is an admirably compact "traveler's library...

...and it is rather surprising that the critics who have lately declared open season on the ill-begotten Library of America, that etiolated attempt at a home-grown Pl~iade Aaaderaique, seem to have overlooked the fact that we already have in the Viking Portable Library a rough but workable equivalent of our own...

...eight years later...

...It is compact, well-printed, and small, easy to carry and handle: the kind of thing that ought to be encouraged, as distinguished from the more ponderous type of omnibus...

...I n d e e d , this common view of Bismarck happens to be historical nonsense...

...At the microscopic level European diplomacy and statecraft in the Bismarckian period were enormously complicated: more complicated than Mr...

...Pritchett, to name the most obvious examples) and which contains only a mere handful of disjunct biographical details...

...Ten years ago, the Viking Portable Library was beginning to look like a thing of the past, and speculation such as this doubtless would have been idle and futile...

...Not the New Deal, but the bureaucratic regime initiated by Kennedy and Johnson saps the citizenry of its resources for self-government by raising taxes progressively, by dishonoring honest labor and decent family life in the name of a spurious poverty, and by placing the details of commerce and local politics under the tutelage of federal regulations...

...Instead, we get an elaborate and forced skein of Kipling-Freud parallels...

...But inasmuch as William II reversedthe policies that Bismarck had successfully urged upon his grandfather--settling on the coui-se of hostility to Russia that Bismarck had worked so hard to avoid--it is extravagant to argue, as Mr...

...Nor were New Dealers wimpy...

...Crankshaw at times admits...

...Admittedly, he has found room for three insignificant occasional pieces and four children's tales while leaving out such key stories as " 'They,' . . . . Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,' . . . . Wireless,' . . . . An Habitation Enforced," and " 'Loveo'-Women.'" The problematic late stories are adequately represented, though (both "Dayspring Mishandled" and "The Gardener" are here, for instance), and there are eight of the Indian stories as well...

...for in 1944, the Viking Press, which published As You Were, borrowed its Woollc0tt-devised format and subtitle--"A Portable Library of American Prose and P o e t r y " - - t o use as the trademarks of a new reissue series which has since become a familiar fixture on the American literary scene: the Viking Portable Library...

...Howe makes no mention of the important contributions of T.S...

...Granted, the Viking Portables are at once rather erratic in quality and far more restricted in scope than the freshly edited, all-encompassing Plliade sets...

...Howe has chosen 28 short stories and 58 poems as illustrative of Kipling at his best...

...Edward Crankshaw's militantly anti-Bismarckian views are not utterly unfounded...

...These sensibilities are ties of mutual obligation between citizens and between generations, without which the preservation of a free society would be more difficult...

...1943 was an anthology tailored to fit the needs of a very specific audience: America's soldiers and sailors...

...Not surprisingly, there is no bibliography and only the skimpiest of chronologies...

...As this example illustrates, New Dealers understood that the American welfare state could be founded (as to some extent it is still preserved) upon the principles of self-government...

...and by republicanism...

...He did not live to 'witness the culmination of the strategic problems and trends he managed and manipulated for almost thirty years...

...Howe's literary priorities than it does about the place of Rudyard Kipling in English literature: "[A] handful of Kipling's late stories rank with the great short fictions of our century, if not quite with those of Joyce and Lawrence, then certainly with those of Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor...

...Of course, the public's support for Social Security has been short-sighted: No government program can make everyone independently wealthy...

...a diverse assortment of leftish critical cliche's...

...Woollcott's words) " a variety of reading m a t t e r . . , reprinted on thin paper in a pocket-size volume for the convenience of men who are mostly on the move and must travel light...

...it is as if Bill Buckley had somehow been conned into editing, say, a Portable Gore Vidal...

...The problems start, logically ~By T. John Jamieson, The American Spectator, August 1982...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 37...

...And nothing would be more welcome in conservative circles than a Portable devoted to that most anthologizable of great authors, G.K...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 enough, with Mr...

...Howe's introductory essay, a discussion which fails to summarize even briefly the intriguing and substantial body of existing Kipling criticism (Mr...

...one, Russell Kirk's Conservative Reader, has already been justly praised in these pages.~ The other, however, is a bit of a curate's egg: A Portable Kipling edited by, of all people, Irving Howe...