Sir Anthony Gloster's delusions

Sir Anthony Gloster’s Delusions



T. S. Eliot said of Kipling’s two companion piece dramatic monologues, “The Mary Gloster” and “McAndrew’s Hymn,” that the latter is generally thought the better, though the rapacious old ship-owner Sir Anthony Gloster of the first is a considerable character.
“McAndrew’s Hymn,” Eliot said, showed the success of failure – McAndrew, an old ship’s engineer, had thrown away his only chance to make money through a patent, but was happy in his way and reconciled to God tending engines at sea.
In “The Mary Gloster,” Eliot continued, the speaker, Sir Anthony Gloster, showed the failure of success. The poem might also be said to illustrate the inadequacy of money as a substitute for love. Though a millionaire ship-owner and industrialist, Sir Anthony is dying miserably. His monologue is a torrent of reproach to his silent son Dickie, who, he claims, had broken his heart by becoming an arty aesthete (a type Kipling himself tended to detest), though one can soon see how having a father like Sir Anthony might drive anyone to “books and art.”

I thought - it doesn't matter - you seemed to favour your ma,
But you're nearer forty than thirty, and I know the kind you are.
Harrer an' Trinity College! I ought to ha' sent you to sea –
But I stood you an education, an' what have you done for me?
The things I knew was proper you wouldn't thank me to give,
And the things I knew was rotten you said was the way to live.
For you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans,
And your rooms at college was beastly - more like a whore's than a man's…

Kipling's cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. Interestingly, in a letter to his aunt when he was working ar a junior reporter in Lahore, Kipling once wrote: “I’d give something to be in the sixth at Harrow as [Stanley] is, with a University education to follow.” Howeverr, there is no evidence Kipling and Baldwin were on anything but cordial terms, and indeed Kipling is credited with having supplied Baldwin with bon mottes, such as “the difference between a man of intellect and an intellectual is the difference between a gentleman and a gent,” and that the press had the harlot’s historic prerogative of power without responsibility.
These dramatic monologues seem plainly to owe a debt to Browning, and “The Mary Gloster” has obvious similarities with Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His tomb at St Praxed’s.” In both, the speaker, a dying and confused old man, who has been powerful, domineering and sinful in life, now pleads desperately for his issue to make a magnificent tomb for him, probably knowing in his heart that they will do no such thing. Broiwning’s bishop refers confusedly to “Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,” although Saint Praxed was a woman. It seems not unlikely that Kipling consciously set out to update this poem, the powerful bishop being replaced by a late 19th Century magnate demanding an even grander tomb, but like the bishop with his sons who are waiting impatiently for him to die, able only to rely for its execution on the son, who, thanks probably to his own bad parenting, he sees now as the weakest of reeds.
Sir Anthony’s wife, Mary, died many years ago in their first ship, also called the Mary Gloster, and was buried at sea in Macassar Straits, in the Indonesian archipelago. Now, he tells Dickie, he has secretly arranged with McAndrew for his body not to be interred in the vault he has bought at Woking, but to be taken in the Mary Gloster and buried at sea in the same spot, and then for the Mary Gloster to be scuttled there.
It doesn’t take long for Sir Anthony to reveal himself as an old horror. Emotional blackmail in infantile language: “Dick, it’s your daddy dying, you’re got to listen to him,” soon gives way gloating malevolence, though this may be full of defensiveness and defiance.

Never seen death yet, Dickie? Well, now is your time to learn,
And you'll wish you held my record before it comes to your turn.
Not counting the Line and the Foundry, the yards and the village, too,
I've made myself and a million; but I'm damned if I made you.
Master at two-and-twenty, and married at twenty-three –
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll, and forty freighters at sea!
Fifty years between 'em, and every year of it fight,
And now I'm Sir Anthony Gloster, dying, a baronite:
For I lunched with his Royal 'Ighness -- what was it the papers a-had?
"Not least of our merchant-princes."Dickie, that's me, your dad!

He soon seems to be glorying in his past crimes (sinking ships for the insurance as a young Master mariner) and rapacity, to be taking pleasure in cutting off his long-term and apparently faithful and supportive mistress, Aggie, with the pittance of a hundred pounds, and threatening her with lawyers if she asks for more. She was “the best of the boiling,” but he is obviously wracked with guilt and dread over his association with her (and also, probably, over taking his wife to sea where she and their other children died), and seeks in a twisted way to punish her for it. He has cheated his dead partner’s widow:

I went through his private papers; the notes was plainer than print;
And I'm no fool to finish if a man'll give me a hint.
(I remember his widow was angry.) So I saw what the drawings meant,
And I started the six-inch rollers, and it paid me sixty per cent –

He is even a snob: he has never asked his oldest friend, McAndrew the engineer, round to dinner, though he now pins all his hopes on him and Dickie.
He mentions twice that he has “ten thousand men on the pay-roll” – this can be taken as something positive and to be genuinely proud of. He has in fact done good, been a great creator of wealth and jobs – the reference to “the village” even suggests he has built a model village for the workforce - but he only refers to it in passing as part of rather desperate his self-aggrandisement. Like many other rapacious capitalists, he seems unable to express, or is perhaps not even fully aware of, the good that he has done. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is invisible indeed.
This is not all however. It gradually emerges that Sir Anthony in addition is, and probably for some time has been, raving mad.

For you are the son o' my body, and Mac was my oldest friend,
I've never asked 'im to dinner, but he'll see it out to the end.
Stiff-necked Glasgow beggar, I've heard he's prayed for my soul,
But he couldn't lie if you paid him, and he'd starve before he stole!
He'll take the Mary in ballast -- you'll find her a lively ship;
And you'll take Sir Anthony Gloster, that goes on 'is wedding-trip,
Lashed in our old deck-cabin with all three port-holes wide,
The kick o' the screw beneath him and the round blue seas outside!

The plan which he now reveals for scuttling the ship Mary Gloster (“without it's hurting the will” he claims) is full of holes:

You know the Line? You don't, though. You write to the Board, and tell
Your father's death has upset you an' you're goin' to cruise for a spell,
An' you'd like the Mary Gloster -- I've held her ready for this –
They'll put her in working order and you'll take her out as she is.
Yes, it was money idle when I patched her and put her aside
(Thank God, I can pay for my fancies!) -- the boat where your mother died,

The reference to “the board” indicates that the Gloster empire is, as is to be expected, a company (This is confirmed by the fact that he has delighted in springing on Dickie the fact that all his capital “goes back to the business” – Dickie will only get the interest from a sum held in trust). The board are actually most unlikely, once Sir Anthony is dead and his presumably domineering and terrifying presence removed, to give his son a ship to go privately cruising the world in.
Further, the proverbially and Calvinisticly honest and God-fearing McAndrew (of whose personal creed we learn a lot more in “McAndrew’s Hymn”) seems highly unlikely to be an accomplice in a massive act of theft from either the company’s share-holders or insurers. Nor, presumably, would he be a party to exposing the crew the perils involved in scuttling (abandoning ship in the days before radio was not something to be done lightly, especially since those seas were by no means free of pirates – a point made elsewhere by Kipling in stories like The Devil and the Deep Sea).
Furthermore, McAndrew is in any case an engineer, not a Master Mariner or a ship’s captain. He is “Chief of the Maori line” – that is, chief engineer (In McAndrew’s Hymn” McAndrew mentions that he was once Third Engineer in the Mary Gloster). Sir Anthony, perhaps optimistically, says McAndrew’s employers will give him leave if Dickie simply tells him it is to attemd to the late Sir Anthony’s business. “Mac will take her in ballast,” Sir Anthony says. He can’t. It would be both illegal and impossible. The ship would not be allowed to sail except under the command of a Master Mariner. No captain has been mentioned, yet the ship can hardly be scuttled without both the Captain and the Chief Engineer being in on it.
Sir Anthony says the Mary Gloster has been laid aside. This means, apart from the whole extreme unlikelihood of the board lending it to Dickie for a private cruise at all, it will have to be bunkered, provisioned, generally made ready for sea, and a captain and crew engaged. I wondered – it would make the whole picture of Sir Anthony’s psychology more complex – if Dickie is actually a ship’s captain and can command the Mary Gloster himself, but his has been specifically ruled out of the question. The poem was written before the First World War, but I played with the idea that it was post-war, and that Dickie had in fact had a good war, qualifying him for command – something for which Sir Anthony refused to give him any credit whatsoever. That would have made quite a Kiplingesque situation.
How accurate Sir Anthony’s characterization of him as a useless aesthete is, we do not know, just as we do not know if Dickie’s wife is really as hypocritical as Sir Anthony believes when she weeps for him – for all we know, she, and Dickie too for that matter, may see, and be genuinely grieving for the fact, that a life of such drive and worldly success has been combined with such a wretchedly wasted and desolate spirit.
Anyway, the whole matter of who will be Captain has not been looked at. Nor has the matter of how Sir Anthony’s body will actually be spirited out of the Woking vault and placed on board. He looks forward to his body “lying in our standing bed” in “our old deck-cabin, with all three port-holes wide.” Unless the body is in a sealed coffin, it could be a rather unpleasantly odiferous experience for the crew as the ship makes its way through the tropics (plus it will have taken several weeks to ready the ship for sea), and if the body is in a sealed coffin, then it is quite likely to float, which rather defeats the purpose of the exercise. In any case, there will be nothing left of Mary Gloster’s body except (as modern exploration of shipwrecks has shown us) possibly a pair of shoes, so there will not even be a reunion of corpses. Sir Anthony recognizes this in a confused way when he says: “But you are a spirit now.” Part of the reason he has cut off most of Dickie’s inheritance is so that he can hold the five thousand pounds over him in an attempt at coercion, presumably the way he has conducted most relationships:

And Mac'll pay you the money as soon as the bubbles break!
Five thousand for six weeks' cruising, the staunchest freighter afloat,
And Mac he'll give you your bonus the minute I'm out o' the boat!
He'll take you round to Macassar, and you'll come back alone;
He knows what I want o' the Mary . . . I'll do what I please with my own.
Your mother 'ud call it wasteful, but I've seven-and-thirty more;
I'll come in my private carriage and bid it wait at the door. .
. .
Someone, evidently McAndrew and any putative Captain, will return the Mary Gloster to the site of Sir Anthony’s burial at sea and sink it, the honest McAndrew thus committing the crime of barratry. Or do the words “you’ll come back alone” suggest that he seriously expects McAndrew to go down with the ship? He dies in a somewhat gruesome confusion of nautical imagery and biological events:

An' Mac'll take her in ballast -- an' she trims best by the head . . .
Down by the head an' sinkin', her fires are drawn and cold,
And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty hold --
Churning an' choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy and dark --
Full to her lower hatches and risin' steady. Hark!
That was the after-bulkhead . . . .She's flooded from stem to stern. . .
Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . . Well, now is your time to learn!

“They’ll try to prove me crazy, and if you bungle, they can” Sir Anthony fears. He has reason to fear. He is crazy. Dickie would be well advised to get onto his lawyers and see about contesting the Will. It could buy him a lot more etchings and fans.

[Ends]