Artist of empire: Kipling and Kim

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Park, Clara Clairborne

I arrived in Karachi in 1990, en route to Lahore to check out Kim's Gun, and to see if the great collection of Greco-Buddhist sculpture so knowledgeably described in the first chapter of Kipling's novel was as he had said. It was a Friday, and accordingly Dawn, Pakistan's premier English-language paper, was providing its readers the equivalent of a Sunday supplement. There was much to linger over-enthralling ads, an encouraging advice column (girls shouldn't marry too young, but they shouldn't wait too long either), a crossword puzzle, a children's page. It was the children's page that riveted my attention. Kipling had brought me to Pakistan, Kipling, author of "Recessional" and "The White Man's Burden," imperial Kipling, source of so many guilty pleasures, "horrible old Kipling," as Auden had jokingly called him (New Year Letter, 1940). And the children's page was all Kipling. Kiplings, rather. For it was not the author of The Jungle Book who held pride of place (evidently the children already knew about him), but his father, John Lockwood Kipling, first curator of Kim's Wonder House, the very museum I was heading for, the "sahib with a white beard" his son honored in the book that is his finest achievement.

Rudyard was there too. Filling the rest of the page, marred only slightly by the misprints normal to foreign-language typesetting, appeared-"If-," Woodrow Wilson's favorite poem (the king of Siam put it into Thai), what David Gilmour calls "that brilliant but unintended parody of public-school reverence for the stiff upper-lip," here displayed for the innocent edification of the English-speaking children of Pakistan. I

Kipling's account is still unsettled.

-Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co (1961)

In 1907, when Kipling became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, his critical reputation was already in decline. George Orwell, the strongest anti-imperialist voice of his generation, summed up the paradox in 1942: "During five literary generations, every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there." But in what sense? Edward Said reads Kim as "belonging to the world's great literature,"' "rich, absolutely fascinating," "a work of great aesthetic merit." Yet he finds it "profoundly embarrassing" as well. Salman Rushdie struggles with conflicting emotions of "anger and delight," reading stories which possess "the power simultaneously to infuriate and entrance." Scarcely one of the proliferating studies of "Orientalism" leaves Kim undiscussed, and every newspaper reminds us that India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are nearer than we thought. Kim is up for reappraisal; Zohreh T. Sullivan's Critical Edition (which I'll discuss later) is long overdue.

In fact Orwell was exaggerating. Auden had already written that Time had pardoned Kipling "for writing well." Edmund Wilson had published "The Kipling That Nobody Read," calling him (with other less attractive adjectives) "the old great man" (The Wound and the Bow). Eliot had collected his Choice of Kipling's Verse. Lionel Trilling, reviewing it, had recorded the usual mixed feelings; Kipling was "unloved and unlovable," his imperialism "puny and mindless," yet capable in "Recessional" of "a remarkable and perhaps a great national poem." (Twenty years later, when his brief essay was collected, he asked the editor to note that he now viewed Kipling "less censoriously and with more affectionate admiration.") Auden too revised his 1940 joke; "If today [ 1943] the war makes people discover that Kipling is good, it will be an excellent thing." Ahead was Randall Jarrell, calling Kipling "a great genius," "one of the most skillful writers who have ever existed." "If Kipling had written instructions on how to make a bed with hospital corners ... I could read them with pleasure." In short he was "one of the immortals," who, he noted, "oversay everything-a characteristic from which only we mortals are free." In 1959 Noel Annan insisted on the "mindless" Kipling's place in the history of ideas; in 1977 Irving Howe wrote on "this incomparable book." And Said, flanked by squads of postcolonialists, is still to come.

And there are the biographies. Though Kipling damned the whole "biography and reminiscence business" as "the Higher Cannibalism" (he tried to discourage his old friend Dunsterville, the "Stalky" of Stalky & Co., from starting the Kipling Society-"dam [sic] society," "unutterably repugnant"), cannibals were not deterred. Charles Carrington's Life and Work, the authorized biography, begun while many who knew Kipling were still alive, came out in 1955. Though the family obsession with privacy required that much be left out, Carrington had done the essential spadework, and all subsequent biographers are indebted to him. He was followed in the seventies by Lord Birkenhead and Angus Wilson. Yet another Life, by Martin Seymour-Smith, appeared in 1989. Now all these are out of print (though Carrington went through several editions, the last in 1986), and publishers, evidently, think we are ready for more. Harry Ricketts' Rudyard Kipling came out in 2000. And here is David Gilmour's The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.2