Friend of all the world

      If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

     Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, ...
     … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, ....

       I was raised on the poem If, from which that extract is drawn. What I didn’t  know until many years later is that it was written by the man who in 1907 became the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudyard Kipling, perhaps most famous for his novel of internal intrigue and spiritual quest, Kim.

      This was one of my mother’s favorite books, and the source of my name as her eldest son. She especially loved the character Kim’s nickname “Little Friend of All the World.”

       Decades later, as an international radio and TV commentator covering the Wimbledon tennis tournament in London, I was thrilled to see the Kipling poem over one of the doorways in the main stand where players—winners and losers—could not fail to get the message. 

       But it wasn’t until I read Christopher Benfey’s Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years (Penguin Press, New York, 2019), that I fully grasped the poem and Kipling’s Anglo-Indian background.

      Benfey traces Kipling’s deep involvement with the United States over the crucial decade from 1889 to 1899 when he lived for four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, striving to turn himself into a specifically American writer. Benfey suggests that this was Kipling’s most creative period, as well as his happiest, during which he wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous.

       Among Kipling’s friends were American luminaries such as Mark Twain, William James (brother of novelist Henry James), Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose ideas about self-trust Kipling embraced in his poem If). 

      Benfey suggests that Kipling may have bequeathed more familiar quotations to the English language than any other writer since Shakespeare, and reminds us that George Orwell said: “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.”

      Kipling was a complex, controversial, and historical  figure who had a long-lasting impact on American political and cultural life right up until his death in 1936.

      But nothing can dilute my personal delight in his poem IF and the life lessons I’ve drawn from it in bringing up my own children and grandchildren:

… trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too; …

… meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same; …

… force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

      To which I would add wisdom from a source that’s been with us far longer than Kipling’s:

       “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9, NIV).

      And, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13, KJV).