-------------Forwarded Message-----------------
From: Peter Lewis, 106066.2074
To: "Paul V", INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
Date: 4/19/00 8:23 PM
RE: Kipling
Dear Paul V,
Andrew Lycett calls me a Kipling expert in the acknowledgements to
his recent biography. I served on the Council of the Kipling Society for
15 years in various capacities, but mostly as organiser of its meetings,
which meant I had to listen to over 50 papers on Kipling subjects - an
education in itself. I have made a special study of the manuscripts, and
am acknowledged by Barbara Rosenbaum in the Index of English Literary
Manuscripts, the volume that includes Kipling. I am currently a Vice
President of the Society. I have edited an edition of Just So Stories for
Oxford Classics, and co-edited the volume Mrs Bathurst and other Stories in
the same series, and Rudyard Kipling: Writings on Writing for Cambridge
University Press (both the last two titles are out of print). I have
published articles in the American periodical English Literature in
Transition 1880-1920 on links between the stories in Debits and Credits, on
Kipling and Jane Austen and on Kipling and Virginia Woolf. So I hope I
qualify!
Now for your questions.
1. Edward Said in Orientalism says that Kipling was '"of" India' as most
imperialist writers were not, because he was born there and spent his first
six years there (not to mention most of his adolescence). But as Said
points out in his introduction to Kim (reprinted almost verbatim in Culture
and Imperialism), 'Kipling could no more have questioned [racial]
difference, and the right of the white Europeans to rule, than he would
have argued with the Himalayas.' Kipling was a rootless man. He never
lived in Yorkshire, his father's family home. His mother's family were
part Scottish, part Irish, part Welsh and part English, but seem to have
seen themselves as Scottish; he never lived in Scotland either. He tried
to settle in London, Vermont, and different parts of Sussex, but was always
an incomer in all those places. India was the nearest he had to a home,
but it was the Indian Raj; Indian India was alien to him. So if India
became independent, his last roots would have gone.
2. I think a most important stage in his writings was the moment in 1890
when, the Kipling boom having started, he felt able to cut his connection
with the Indian newspapers and became entirely self-employed. Since he
derived much of his income from magazines, he still had to write what they
would accept: but he was now so famous that he could include other
material in his collected volumes. For instance, in Many Inventions he
includes 'Love o' Women,' a story about soldiers and venereal disease,
which the magazines of the time would have never have allowed. Then in
1899 came the death of his older daughter and the outbreak of the BoerWar.
Kipling became identified with the imperial cause and from that time on
was close to Conservative politicians. Another stage in his writing came
with World War I, the death of his son and the growing up of his surviving
daughter. I notice that from that time he is more interested in women's
lives and problems.
3. His major themes. India of course, characters on the margin of
society, but also the ways in which society organizes itself. He always
feared anarchism: 'A stone's throw out on either hand /From that
well-ordered road we treat / And all the world is wild and strange...' He
was fascinated and terrified by what lay beyond that road.
4. For the influence of the House of Desolation, Harry Ricketts'
biography The Unforgiving Minute (1999) is very sound.
5 and 6. Kipling's best/worst work. From time to time the Kipling
Society have asked their members to list Kipling's ten best or ten worst
poems or stories. Every list comes out different, one reader's best being
another reader's worst. He himself indicates in Something of Myself the
works he felt had been inspired. In my own opinion, one might count The
Jungle Books, Kim, Just So Stories and some of the late stories like 'Mary
Postgate', 'Regulus', 'The Gardener' and so on. In general I think men
and women have different tastes in Kipling's work, women tending to prefer
the late work and men the earlier work. His 'worst' work, for me, is his
political writing, when he is forcing his inspiration to work for the
imperial cause instead of letting it run free; but sopme of his politicl
poems are very fine in themselves - Graham Greene thought he wrote 'the
finest political poetry in the language since Dryden.'.
7. Kipling's characterization. There are quite a few 'lost boys' in his
work - Mowgli, Kim, Pharaoh Lee. Women are often either mothers or
frustrated mothers. He had a tremendous gift for hearing and reproducing
voices, which allows him to give his characters a certain realism. But
they also have symbolic force. There's been some recent work on the Irish
dialect of his soldier Mulvaney, suggesting that (contrary to earlier
critics) there is a lot of genuine Irish in the stories Mulvaney narrates.
But in 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd', the Kipling/narrator comments that
much of the empire's 'might, majesty, dominion and power' depends on
Mulvaney's feet. Again, Kim moves and talks like a naughty little boy let
loose on the streets of Lahore, and many people have suggested different
models for him. But none of them could plausibly be seen as leading the
life he leads in the novel. It seems to me that he represents a little
Ruddy who wasn't sent home to England but managed to stay among his Indian
friends.
8. Kipling was influenced by many writers - Poe, Scott, Browning and so
on. See (if you can find it) Ann M. Weygandt, Kipling's Reading and its
Influence on his Poetry (1939). I don't think he belonged to a particular
school, although Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1980)
suggests that to some extent he did. Since he was a hugely popular
children's writer in the 1890s, he could hardly escape having an effect on
the writers of the next fifty years, though a lot of them reacted against
him. (Brecht, Hemingway and Borges have all been suggested as influenced
by him, and E.M.Forster is also a possible.) His family's artistic
background certainly had an enormous effect on him: you have only to look
at his descriptions of the process of writing in Something of Myself.
They were also interested in the appearance of books, and once he was
famous enough to assert himself Kipling had a strong influence on his
publishers' choice of typeface, paper and bindings. The leather-bound
pocket editions are a pleasure to feel and to see as well as to read. The
first edition of Just So Stories asserts its magic on children still, even
though the pictures aren't in colour (I've watched it happen).
9. Kipling's mother claimed to have second sight, and his sister became
involved with spiritualism and had a brief but well-known career as the
medium 'Mrs Holland'. (See Andrew Lycett). He himself claimed to have
had an episode of precognition (see Something of Myself). But also he
just liked ghost stories, and India was a useful source.
10. I think Kipling's best writing (apart from some of the poems) is to
be found in his short stories. They are enormously subtle and
interconnect in all sorts of ways. My first venture into Kipling
criticism was to trace some such interconnections in the collection Debits
and Credits. The article was reprinted in a collection by Harold Orel,
who commented tha t it 'broke new ground' and needed doing for the other
storybooks. I did try and write a book about this, but no publisher was
interested! Kim is wonderful, but you can argue that it is really a set
of three short stories that have been wound closely together.
13. Settings. Kipling is a genius at evoking places. Many Kipling
readers have had the experience of going for the first time to a scene he
has described and having a feeling of deja vu. You might also like to
look at the way he uses the setting of Bateman's and the surrounding
countryside in Puck of Pook's Hill. The children are under parental
supervision in the first story, but they start to explore through the
agency of Puck and Old Hobden, finding out more and more of local history
for themselves. See also 'Friendly Brook' where the country people have
an almost superstitious closeness to their surroundings.
I hope some of this will be of help. Yours sincerely, Lisa Lewis
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