Flashman, Kipling and Testosterone Poisoning

Henry at Crooked Timber has an interesting post up remembering George Macdonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman novels (link). Henry's point is that "good old Flashman" was actually a rather nasty piece of business, and that one shoudn't be too casual about indulging a taste for his general thuggishness.

Here's an afterthought: I did read a couple of the Flash books when I was young and found them falling-out-of-bed funny. I read another (Flashman and the Great Game) just a few years back and found it tedious, hard to finish. Great Game is, if I count right, only fourth in the series; the others must have been even earlier. So all of these are part of the earlier, allegedly nastier, Flashman, not the later, more sanitized and allegedly more boring vintage.

I can't say for certain what caused my change of view, but here is a possibility: decline of testosterone poisoning. I never was a particularly laddish lad, but I was moreso then than I am now, and I suspect that I did indeed laugh heartily at some stuff then that would make me feel sheepish today.

I also share Henry's taste for Kipling, but I don't think he needs to apologize for that one: as I think I'[ve said before, on that one he has cover from Orwell on that one (link). But Henry is welcome, if he likes, to explain away this one:

Then we was shifted to Neemuch
(Or I might ha' been keepin' 'er now),
An' I took with a shiny she-devil,
The wife of a nigger at Mhow;
'Taught me the gipsy-folks' bolee;
Kind o' volcano she were,
For she knifed me one night 'cause I wished she was white,
And I learned about women from 'er!

That's from an item called "The Ladies," where Kipling also counsels that

[T]he things you will learn form the Yellow an' Brown,
They'll 'elp you a lot with the White!

Flashman, if he learned anything at all, probably believed that he had learned that.

Update: Fraser has the last word, and the word is "unrepentant" (link). H/T Books Inq.