Kipling Considered. PHILLIP MALLETT Lecturer in English University of St Andrews. Palgrave Macmillan. Edited by

Transcription

1 KIPLING CONSIDERED

2 Kipling Considered Edited by PHILLIP MALLETT Lecturer in English University of St Andrews Palgrave Macmillan

3 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Phillip Mallett 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kipling considered / edited by Phillip Mallett. p. em. Includes index. ISBN Kipling, Rudyard, Criticism and interpretation. I. Mallett, Phillip, PR4857.K '.809-dc CIP

4 Contents Preface vii List of Abbreviations X Notes on the Contributors xi 1 Plain Tales? Danny Karlin 1 2 Stalky & Co.: Revising the Code Robin Gilmour 19 3 Kim and Orientalism Pahick Williams 33 4 Kipling's England: the Edwardian Years 56 David Trotter 5 'Mrs Bathurst': Indeterminacy in Modem Narrative 71 David Lodge 6 Limits and Renewals: the Meaning of Form in the Stories of Rudyard Kipling Clare Hanson 85 7 Kipling and the Hoax Phillip Mallett 8 Half-Written Tales: Kipling and Conrad John Lyon 9 Kipling's Upper Case Adrian Poole Index v

5 Preface It is just over fifty years since Kipling's death, and one hundred since the appearance of his first volume of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills. In 1888 he was preparing for his assault on London, characteristically making his way back from India (to which he was never to return) via Singapore, Hong Kong and San Francisco. Within months of his arrival in October 1889 he was a literary celebrity. The Times applauded his work in a leading article; Henry James described him in a letter to his brother William as 'the most complete man of genius' he had known. Kipling's telegram to his parents, inviting them to visit him in England, simply cited Genesis xlv.9: 'Thus saith thy son Joseph, God hath made me lord of all Egypt: come down unto me; tarry not.' At the time of his death, in 1936, he was still a celebrity, but apparently no longer of much account in the literary world. Despite his Nobel Prize for Literature, and the activities of the young Kipling Society, the pall-bearers at his funeral in Westminster Abbey included an Admiral, a General and a Prime Minister, but no writers. Literature, it seemed, had done with Kipling. In fact the critical debate about his work was just getting under way. In 1941 T. S. Eliot brought out his Choice of Kipling's Verse, with a long introductory essay touching on the stories as well as the poems, and on the value of his 'pagan vision'. Eliot's essay prompted a reply from George Orwell, arguing that criticism of Kipling had to begin with the admission that he was 'morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting'; but it was also true that he 'at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like', which gave his early work especially a seriousness too often missing from that of his detractors. Meanwhile Edmund Wilson published in America his brilliant piece of speculative biography, 'The Kipling that Nobody Read', drawing attention to the later and more elliptical stories: the 'fragments', as it seemed to Wilson, of a writer 'disintegrated' by the Great War, an ill man at last 'losing his hatred'. In 1943 W. H. Auden wrote of Kipling and 'The Poetry of Encirclement'; in the same year Lionel Trilling, less sympathetically, wrote of him as a curiosity, a figure of the past, who had demeaned the toryism he espoused and in the process vii

6 viii Preface weakened the liberalism which opposed it. In 1948 C. S. Lewis, for all his reservations, concluded that Kipling was 'a very great writer'. That critics of such distinction should have felt drawn to discuss Kipling's work, even while acknowledging that his popularity and influence had waned, is, perhaps, a measure of his stature. Academic studies began to appear, too: Charles Carrington's Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work in 1955; J. M. S. Tompkins's admirable The Art of Rudyard Kipling in 1959; an invaluable collection of essays on Kipling's Mind and Art, edited by Andrew Rutherford, in Yet Noel Annan, one of the contributors to that volume, opened his essay with the claim that 'criticism has not yet come to terms with Kipling'. That was, and is, a fair claim, and it is the justification for the present volume. Kipling's work resists consensus, much as the man himself resisted the efforts of those who sought to lionise and appropriate him. 'The Story of Muhammad Din' in his first collection is very nearly as good as anything he wrote; 'The Tie', in his last, is very nearly as offensive. 'The Wish House', 'hard and obscure' according to Eliot but arguably Kipling's finest story, is immediately followed in Debits and Credits by 'The Janeites', which C. S. Lewis rightly described as 'hardly forgivable'. Appropriately, then, none of the essays in this volume sets out to decide, as Orwell and Trilling sought to do, the question of Kipling's stature, though they continually push up against it: does Kipling belong on the margins, alongside, say, Wells or Meredith? Or is his presence, as Martin Green has recently argued, still powerful in the English novel in the twentieth century? Eliot found him 'a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle': the essays included here seek neither to belittle nor to aggrandise, but to sharpen our understanding, and help criticism 'come to terms' with Kipling. The essay by David Lodge was originally presented as a paper at a conference of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, and was previously published in a slightly different form in The Journal of English Language and Literature (Korea), val. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1983). The other essays were written for this volume, and appear here for the first time. While this book was in preparation the death was announced of Miss J. M.S. Tompkins,

7 Preface ix author of The Art of Rudyard Kipling (1959). The editor should like to acknowledge, on behalf of many admirers of her work, the impetus she has given to studies of Kipling. P.M.

8 List of Abbreviations The following abbreviations have been used: ADC AR DC DD DW JSS LH LR MI PPH PTH RF sc SM TD TLTF www A Diversity of Creatures Actions and Reactions Debits and Credits Departmental Ditties The Day's Work Just So Stories for Little Children Life's Handicap Limits and Renewals Many Inventions Puck ofpook's Hill Plain Tales from the Hills Rewards and Fairies Stalky & Co. Something of Myself Traffics and Discoveries The Light that Failed Wee Willie Winkie References are to the Sussex Edition of Kipling's Works, 35 volumes (London: Macmillan, ). X

9 Notes on the Contributors Robin Gilmour is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. His publications include The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel and The Novel in the Victorian Age. Clare Hanson lectures in English at the College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham. She is the author of Short Stories and Short Fictions, and (with Andrew Gurr) a study of Katherine Mansfield. She is also the editor of The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield and, forthcoming, Re-Reading the Short Story. Danny Karlin is Lecturer in English at University College, London, and the author of The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. He has recently edited the two volumes of Kipling's Jungle Books. David Lodge is Professor of English at Birmingham University. Among his critical publications are Language of Fiction, Working with Structuralism and The Modes of Modern Writing; his novels include Changing Places, How Far Can You Go? and Small World. John Lyon lectures in English at the University of Bristol. He is the author of a full-length study of The Merchant of Venice, and editor of Kipling's The Light that Failed. Phillip Mallett is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. He has written on Shakespeare and Donne as well as on Victorian topics, and is the editor of Kipling's Limits and Renewals. Adrian Poole is Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of Gissing in Context and Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example. David Trotter is Reader in English at University College, London. He is the author of The Poetry of Abraham Cowley, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and xi

10 xii Notes on the Contributors Irish Poetry, and of Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economics of the Novel, and the editor with (H. R. Woudhuysen) of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills. Patrick Williams has mainly taught abroad, most recently at the University of Marrakesh, and is currently director of the Scottish Universities' International Summer School. He researches and writes on colonial discourse and contemporary fiction.