The Kipling Debate

...A lot of the masters were...

...After Rudyard's mother rescued him from what he called "The House of Desolation," he was sent to the school he was to make legendary 20 years later in Stalky & Co...

...Others, who loved Kipling in their youth, reject him for more serious reasons...

...When I put it forward as an example of evil in English literature in the Northcliffe lectures," Wilson recalls, "the late Bonamy Dobree rightly sprang to Kipling's defense, but wrongly insisted that it could be seen entirely as a . . . portrait . . . of a repressed woman under the impact of war...

...It is possible," Wilson writes, "that most of the parents did not know of [Price's] political extremism...

...His argument is hardly new...

...Moreover, he dislikes their "clever" patronizing of the ordinary schoolboy cricketers and footballers, even though he himself "suffered from a games-worshipping family...

...He shows us that the lonely AngloIndian child exiled from his parents, had been a familiar figure in England and that the decision to send children off at such an early age was governed by the exigencies of colonial life...

...What is unusual is the effort to communicate Kipling's "uniqueness" to a wider audience, many of whom may be interested in the life but are indifferent to the art, even resistant to the idea that it is art...

...T. S. Eliot's praise of Kipling as "a great verse-writer"—and the resemblances that suddenly became apparent in their use of music-hall rhythms and themes of nameless horror and despair—were proof for Trilling that "time had done its usual but always dramatic work of eroding our clear notions of cultural antagonisms...

...Of course, Price did not influence Kipling's politics, but he did introduce him to the Jacobean dramatists and the metaphysical poets, as well as to translations of Pushkin and—perhaps more important for his later development-of Lermontov, that writer on "the dangers and pleasures of an Empire's frontiers...

...This personal ethic seems to me not very different from other, less crude versions of the "Law"—the rigid social rule that shields the individual from anxiety and permits young men to simultaneously mock and respect authority...

...He questions the use of "compassion" and "maturity" as criteria for fictional greatness, and focuses on a trio of war stories, the most famous of which is "Mary Postgate"—about an English spinster who hears with satisfaction the death rattle of a German airman in her backyard...

...Although Wilson is indebted to C. E. Carrington's definitive Life of Rudyard Kipling (1955), he has done extensive independent research...

...But it is fitting that it should be Rudyard Kipling, up to his old tricks, stirring up another debate on those healed questions: Can propaganda be art...

...it differs markedly from his earlier work on Dickens, and from others in the genre that I've read...

...It was, Wilson tells us, an "anomaly" in its time...

...For his account of much of Kipling's later life, Wilson cannot, needless to say, consult his own background...

...It occurred to me," he wrote in 1970, "that what was conceived and carried out by a young man of genius might modestly be attempted by a man on the borders of old age who knows his craft...

...Kipling spent his first six years as a "little Sahib" in Bombay, his last 30 in Sussex...

...but he so charged his demonstration with hatred and contempt, with rancor and class feeling . . . that he simply could not be listened to or believed . .. only reacted against...

...Indeed, Wilson finds most of Kipling's politics repugnant...

...True, Angus, whose brother was headmaster of the boarding school he attended, never knew anything like the agony of the six years at Southsea, where Rudyard lived in the home of a woman who beat him, threatened him with eternal damnation and neglected his failing sight...

...And while some of the liberals' hostility had lessened too, as their opinions of Wells shifted, Kipling remained, Trilling held, one of liberalism's "major intellectual disasters"—an unworthy enemy...

...And without underestimating Kipling's suffering, he can set it in a wider context...

...Again finding parallels in his own experience, he notes that when he was at Westminster a lot of the masters professed Socialism...

...To Wilson, the code is repulsive, and he thinks the Stalky stories urge it too loudly, too insistently...

...Wilson was born in Sussex, and lived from the ages of seven to 11 as a "little Baas" in Durban...

...Kipling's very popularity in his day means that all those taglines-You're a better man than I am, Gunda Din," "The female of the species is deadlier than the male," "East is East and West is West"—are still floating around, getting in the way of his reputation as a serious writer...

...inner fears and desperate hopes that were the source of his art...

...A boy in a large New York high school," Lionel Trilling wrote in 1943, "could find a blessed release from the school's offensive pieties about 'service' and 'character' in the scornful individualism of Stalky & Co...

...This "very minor...

...The author charges his fellow critics with a naive refusal to see that the power of a story can lie precisely in its cruelty and hatred, and to recognize "the possibility that a fine and subtle work of art can also be propaganda written in a spirit that we find repulsive...

...Both boys were sent back to England for schooling...

...Is there an esthetics of brutality...

...A gentle and humane man, the headmaster was probably not a source of the code, spelled out in the often brutal Stalky stories, and described by Wilson as seeking "to give the fullest rein to individual skills, energies and cunning for the evasion of minor rules and the outwitting of lesser authorities, while always upholding a strong sense of the need for a higher law or social cohesion to which the individual must submit himself in total self-discipline and responsibility...

...He could have spoken for Toryism at its best, made clear "what the difficulties of governing really are...

...Claims for the poems must reckon as well with middle-aged readers for whom "Man-dalay" will always be the Baritone's Revenge at dreary concerts, and "If," "L'Envoi" and "Recessional" the singsong "memory gems" of gradeschool...

...But H.G.Wells broke the spell, "made one see how much callousness, arrogance and brutality one had been willing to accept...

...It is in his treatment of the late stories (1912-36) that the fur begins to fly and we get a glimpse of passionate debate and dramatic conflict on the Kipling lecture circuit...

...Wilson finds "pretension and muddle" in some of the pieces where others discover "depth and weight...

...Wilson argues that "any final consideration of [Kipling's] stature as a writer . . . must stand or fall by his fictional India"—all the short stories of native and Anglo-Indian life, the Barrack Room Ballads, Naulahka, the two Jungle Books and "his masterpiece, Kim...

...its "anomalous" headmaster, Crom Price, was a friend of the pre-Raphaelites and shared not only the literary but also the pacifist and anti-Imperialist views of William Morris and of Kipling's uncle, the painter Edward Burne-Jones...

...concentrated, more complete" than it was ever to be again...

...This hell is powerfully described in Kipling's one autobiographical story, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep...

...The biographer does mention that some critics disagree with his assessment of the early writings, but there is nothing particularly defensive or combative about his discussion...

...Yet he illuminates many episodes with small flashes of remembered family talk about the Boer War, Belgian atrocities and the dangers of spiritualism...

...The author's father was an exact contemporary of Kipling, "to a month...

...17.50) is both a vivid evocation of a controversial and contradictory man and a challenging study of a literary imagination...

...His Durban childhood also seems to give him an acute awareness of the man's "blinkers," as when he observes that during nine winters in South Africa (seven of them in a house provided by Cecil Rhodes), Kipling "simply did not see the Africans, the people of the country...

...The art itself, the "genius," the "daemon"—that is Wilson's real quarry...

...To begin with, despite the fact that he was born almost 50 years later, Wilson is able to enter his subject's past and establish a sympathetic presence there that adds greatly to our understanding...

...Gladstone followers...

...But new material does not account for the book's originality, and it is not enough to say that as a novelist and short-story writer Wilson has a particular understanding of creative problems...

...Moreover, his knowledge of caste and class lets him demonstrate the inevitability of tension when a "young Sahib" is entrusted, as Kipling was, to a family that is declining socially and financially...

...rumpty-foo" institution had recently been founded by retired Army officers to prepare their sons for the military academies...

...His critical analysis may not be remarkable in university circles (although Wilson believes that academic critics are too preoccupied with Kipling's themes "to illumine the strange and powerful quality" of his imagination...

...Yet it is part of his purpose to show that the social views and the artistry are related: In Rhodes' "wild imperial dreams," and in the extreme "Right Radicalism" of Joseph Chamberlain and Bonar Law, Kipling "found a program of activity that accorded with those deep...

...There is something altogether special about this critical biography...

...Nevertheless, Wilson can draw on his own memory of classmates forced to spend forlorn vacations at school if relatives did not claim them...

...Wilson's case, for the short stories at least, is supported by Jorge Luis Borges...

...In those early works, he maintains, Kipling's particular vision is more...