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A DIVIDED WRITER
Rudyard Kipling is a writer whose works have always elicited passionately conflicting responses in his readers, including myself. I cannot agree with those who see him simply as a genius of storytelling – ‘But what about Kipling's right-wing politics? His racist stereotyping of Indians, Irish, Jews and those “lesser breeds without the Law” in “Recessional”? His support of General Dyer after the 1919 Amritsar massacre of Indians?’ Neither can I side with those who dismiss him as a right-wing racist stereotyper of Indians, Irish, Jews and lesser breeds – ‘But what about Kipling's magical storytelling? The fantasy and sheer verbal pleasure of the Just-So Stories? The delight taken in cultural differences in the novel Kim?’ The object of this book is not to reconcile these contradictions, because I don't think this can be done without falsification. I fully agree with the out-andout admirers that any good criticism of Kipling must start with the many-sided pleasures of his verbal energy, but when Orwell writes that ‘Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him wear so badly’, or Randall Jarrell that ‘Kipling was a great genius; and a great neurotic; and a great professional’, their ambivalence seems to me more helpful than unqualified adulation could ever be. This book attempts both to introduce readers to the scope and qualities of Kipling's genius and to clarify its contradictions; not only the contradictions in his writing but in the ways he can be read.
This project is complicated by the bewildering diversity of Kipling's œuvre. Besides Kim (1901), Kipling produced three long prose fictions, The Light That Failed (1890), The Naulahka (with Wolcott Balestier, 1892), Captains Courageous (1896); eleven booklength collections of stories, beginning with Plain Tales from the Hills, (1888) and ending with Limits and Renewals, (1932); not counting the seven books of children's stories – the two Jungle Books (1894, 1895), The Just-So Stories (1902), Stalky & Co. (1899, followed by four later ‘Stalky’ stories),3 the two ‘Puck’ Books (1906, 1910) and Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923).
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