Poor man's Kipling?

RIDER HAGGARD AND THE LOST EMPIRE

Weidenfeld, #20 (pp 263)

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RIDER Haggard was, I suppose, the poor man's Kipling. Both men wrote

high adventure novels concerned with the bizarre and the exotic and both

were natural esotericists. Kipling believed in the mysterious Law and

loved the arcana of freemasonry; Haggard, a simpler soul than his

friend, believed in Empire and the masonry of the white races.

Pocock is alive to the obvious connections between the two: ''They

stayed at each other's houses, happily spending hours in the study,

wrapped in the scent of wood smoke and swapping ideas for plots and

musing on the meaning of life. They had much in common; both men were

highly successful but subject to carping criticism; both were married to

agreeable but unimaginative wives and had growing families . . . and

both had lost a child to illness.''

However, what Pocock does not say is that Kipling was a genius while

Haggard was a mere talent. Also -- and this is an abiding fault of this

book -- Pocock never probes for the deeper levels of psychology; in this

case it is clear that Kipling and Haggard were also introvert and

extrovert respectively, with Kipling more concerned with the world of

imagination and Haggard with the world of external objects.

Indeed Haggard's ambition was to be a genuine man of action and

political affairs, and he regarded his writing as a mere sideline,

providing the money for his wider aspirations. As a young man he went

out to South Africa, first as secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer in Natal and

then with Sir Theophilus Shepstone in the Transvaal, where he took part

in the ill-fated annexation of the Boer republic to the Crown -- an

action that precipitated the first Boer War of 1880-81. Yet he failed to

see action in the great Zulu War of 1879 or against the Boers in 1881

and had to content himself with the memories of Africa he put to such

good use in the best-selling King Solomon's Mines (1885).

King Solomon's Mines was the product of an imaginative low-level

administrator in the British empire in South Africa, just as Buchan's

Prester John was 25 years later. But it was Buchan's literary ''father''

who was the greatest influence on Haggard, for he wrote the book after

accepting a bet from his brother that he could not write anything as

good as Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson himself, suitably primed

by Andrew Lang, was prepared to concede that Haggard had equalled his

achievement but, as Pocock fails to make clear, his enthusiasm fell away

under the withering animadversions of Henry James (''the unspeakable

Haggard'').

Pocock misses a trick by not making a close comparison of King

Solomon's Mines with Treasure Island, for then the force of James's

critique could be appreciated and it is a fault of this book that none

of Haggard's productions are subjected to even the most superficial

literary criticism.

Pocock's defence would presumably be that Haggard himself lusted after

the baubles of political honours, trinkets, knighthoods etc. He can be

compared with Stevenson also in that both wanted to be men of action. In

RLS's case, the spirit was willing but the lungs were weak; in Haggard's

case it was more that he failed to find the right niche.

A career like Buchan's, culminating in the Governor-Generalship of

Canada, would have been exactly the ticket, but Haggard was always the

wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pocock's book is crisp,

well-written, and admirably concise -- he does not stretch the rather

tedious raw material of Haggard's later life farther than it will go --

but it fails us with Haggard's books, his psychology, and even with such

obvious matters as the Haggard family constellation.

However, Pocock does score with his tale of Haggard's lost love Lily,

an attractive blonde he lost through being away too long on government

service in South Africa. Haggard contracted a mariage de raison, but

always pined at the memory of Lily. Lily's husband turned out to be a

bounder of Mills and Boon stripe. First he embezzled Lily's money and

decamped to Africa, leaving her and her three children penniless.

Desperate, she turned to Haggard for help, and he gave her a generous

allowance.

Then the demon husband reappeared and summoned Lily to Africa.

Syphilitic from his numerous affairs he soon died, but not before he had

infected Lily with the then incurable disease. Pocock is at his most

convincing in his comparison of the hideously disfigured and dying Lily

with the withered and aged Ayesha in She -- a strange case of life

imitating Haggard's fantastic art.