Kipling

Many years ago, in a discussion on radio, I heard a group of intellectuals discussing what they thought was the greatest short story ever written. Some years before a similar discussion had taken place (if memory serves me well, this was on "The Brains Trust") and the general consensus of opinion was that Edgar Alan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" was the tops; now it was Rudyard Kipling's "The Man who would be King". I don't think there could be so great a gap of style, plot, theme or setting than between these two stories than any other two: the first is set in America, the second in India; the first is a sort of horror story, the second a bit of history; the first has two characters who know each other but one of whom hates the other, the second has two English rogues out to deceive a tribe of Afghans into believing they are of royal blood; the first is a study of  hatred (though no reason is given for it), the second is knockabout humour with tragic consequences.
I never have been able to get past the first few pages of the Kipling story until this week when I put "The Stories of Kipling" on Google and started reading it again. I find it's very good; so good, in fact, that I find myself hesitating in rushing the pleasure of reading it - like good wine you want to take it slowly, savouring every tiny drop.
Apparently John Huston wanted to make a film of this story and for twenty years tried to put it together; eventually, when he was ready production-wise to do so, he approached Paul Newman having in mind Newman and Robert Redford for the part of the two rogues, after their success in "Butch Cassidy and the Sun-Dance Kid". Paul Newman tossed the script back to Huston and said "you want Sean Connery and Michael Caine for the parts". So Huston made the film with those two but it wasn't a great success. I can't say I liked what little I saw of it but that was during the period that the short story itself hadn't appealed to me. I shall now try it again.
This week I was approached by a young man who was working on the guttering of a neighbour's roof. He asked me if I'd like the same for my roof. It certainly needed doing but I had just had two new windows for over a thousand pounds fitted and felt I didn't want more expense. But the young man was insistent and dropped his price by two hundred pounds from £600 odd to £400 odd. I still said no. The next day he saw me again, said he had some material left over from the other job and I could have the job done for £270. He was a brilliant salesman. As Raymond Chandler put it about a rogue in one of his novels "he looked at me with the innocent eyes of used car salesman". This guy did too. It was like being in the power of the ancient mariner. No, not the ancient mariner but one of the rogues in "The Man who would be King". The young fellow could hardly write my name or address - I had to spell every word out for him and he wrote each letter carefully and with difficulty. But he had a certain roguish charm that they don't teach in schools. He also diddled me out of a tenner. I had to smile.

Criminals

Bernard Shaw said that "all men mean well". I don't believe it. Take the TV play from Sicily called "Inspector Montalban": the first installment featured some very shady dealings in which young boys were shipped from North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia etc. to Sicily in order that they, according to an investigating reporter, were to be sold off to various people to beg on the streets and to be "owned" by paedophiles. Now, this is a piece of fiction and might not actually represent reality, but I hardly think that the author of the books on which the TV series is based would make this up for sheer entertainment. No, it must be true that this sort of thing happens. And it's pretty obvious that the men involved in this nefarious activity do not "mean well"; they do it for money with little or no thought of morality or humanity involved. Just as the slave trade ran for centuries with so called "respectable" people greedily helping themselves to the profits. They didn't "mean well".
Another play on TV recently in the series "Silent Witness" involved young Asian men in the north of England grooming young white girls and drugging them in order to sell them for profit to older men who paid for sex with them. This, of course, went on in reality. One could hardly believe it, that there were such men that had no regard for the feelings of the young girls. They didn't "mean well".
Shaw believed poverty to be a crime and that it led to other crimes. Maybe some crimes could be explained or excused by people's poverty as in, for example, Les Miserables where the man is deemed to be a criminal because he stole - was it loaf of bread? - to feed his starving family; but not the two kinds mentioned above that the two TV plays bravely and brilliantly highlighted.
I say "bravely" because, in the case of the Asian youths, there is a reluctance to draw attention to what is thought to be by some the "cultural differences" between "us and them". And it being the BBC that produced the "Silent Witness" episode mentioned above, I have to admit that I was rather surprised that they produced it since there is, to my mind, a reluctance in the BBC to bring certain matters relating to cultural differences to the fore lest someone's feelings are hurt.