KIPLING INTRODUCES THE WANDERING JEW TO HAGGARD

KIPLING (RUDYARD, 1865-1936, novelist and poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) IMPORTANT TYPED AND AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED WITH INITIALS, SUGGESTING A TRILOGY ON THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, TO RIDER HAGGARD ('Dear old man'), the autograph section largely a long note at the end, also with autograph corrections and additions throughout, headed 'Confidential and burn after reading': the trilogy, which would centre on the 'Wholly disinterested point of view of the [Wandering] Jew upon whom the Doom has not yet begun to work', was proposed by Kipling as an alternative to Haggard re-writing Wisdom's Daughter ('..."She" will abide and..."Wisdom's Daughter" could never be more than a gloss on "She". The only question is whether you have the time and the inclination to make it the deuce and all of a gloss...The little business might be worked out in a trilogy, quite easily...'); Kipling suggests the following breakdown:

BOOK ONE would deal with the origins of the man ('...He might be a composite sort of breed, a bit of an Arab, and a bit of a Sephardim...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.']; or he might have told one of the soldiery to shove the malefactor out of his light; which the just-minded Latin refused to do, and -- here is a point -- had his reward in later incarnations...') and ending with the Crucifixion ('...What he noticed most was the dust-storm that darkened the City, and again interfered with his appointment...and the row that two or three low-class women made over the fellow's tomb...');

BOOK TWO would be about either the fall of the Roman Empire or the complete history of the Middle Ages, 'introduced by a little talk or two between the Jew and a wandering disputatious little chap of the name of Paul who seems to have built up some sort of sect on the words of this Hebrew ruffian of thirty or forty years back' ('...The Jew...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 on. Dead easy, isn't it?...'); in the long autograph note Kipling suggests possible additional subjects for Book Two, including the Black Death, The Plague, a 'trip with one C. Columbus in hope of death which ends in opening up more of the world to misery?', and 'a term of service with the Inquisition - just by way of getting even with his Doom?';

BOOK THREE would centre on the Great War, incorporating two fifths of Haggard's Diary and the legend of Our Lady of the Trenches 'who is seen now and again flitting about abandoned trenches (the tale was told in the war) attending to the forgotten, unburied dead, sons of mothers...';

Kipling ends the letter with the conviction that Haggard '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...'), and alludes to his own endeavours ('...My speciality, for the moment, is infallible plans for perpetual peace, based on the identity of the British with the lost Tribes! Somehow that don't seem to me a secure platform...'), 2 pages, small folio, some spotting, [Kipling's occasional typing errors have been silently corrected in the quotations given herein], Bateman's, Burwash, 18 August 1923

An important letter to one of Kipling's few real friends proposing the mythic Wandering Jew as the central character for a major work. Having insulted Christ as he was bearing the cross to Calvary, the Jew was condemned to wander the world until Judgment Day. At the end of every hundred years he falls into a trance and wakes up as a man of thirty years of age, becoming wiser and more repentant throughout the centuries.

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 broadbrush views of history and the present proposal contains many of Kipling's own ideas and preoccupations. The allusion in the letter to 'Our Lady of the Trenches' anticipates Kipling's own tale of 'A Madonna of the Trenches', published in 1924 and incorporated in Debits and Credits two years later, in which a sergeant in the First World War sees the ghost of his lover in the trenches and kills himself in order to be united with her. 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 Book Two of the trilogy. Other themes discussed in the letter were also taken up in stories such as 'The Enemies to Each Other', a pseudo-oriental version of the legend of Adam and Eve.

£2,500