Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

Rudyard Kipling, who died in 1937, is incontrovertibly one of the most renowned writers of the early 20th century. Paradoxically, despite his name’s irrepressible familiarity, he is also among the most eclipsed. There may still be imaginatively wise children who prefer the enchantments of any page of “Just So Stories” (adorned with Kipling’s own magical illustrations and whimsical verses) to the crude smatterings of the film cartoons--but Kipling is vastly more than a children’s treasure. All the same, serious readers long ago relinquished him: Who now speaks of Kipling? The reason is partly contemporary political condemnation--enlightened post-colonial disdain-- and partly contemporary literary prejudice. Together with Joseph Conrad, Kipling carries the opprobrium of empire, “the white man’s burden,” though his lavish Indian stories are often sympathetically and vividly understanding of both Hindu and Muslim. And he is ignored on the literary side because in the period of Joyce’s blooming, Kipling’s prose declined to be tricked out with the obvious involutions of modernism. Unlike Joyce, James and Woolf, he gets at the interiors of his characters by boring inward from the rind. Yet he writes the most inventive, the most idiosyncratic, the most scrupulously surreal English sentences of the century (next to which Woolf’s are commonplace).

Kipling’s late stories--”The Wish House” (in ingenious dialect), “Dayspring Mishandled,” “Mary Postgate,” “The Gardener,” “The Eye of Allah,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep” (an autobiographical revelation), “Mrs. Bathhurst” and others--form a compact body of some of the strongest fiction of the last hundred years. Kipling’s wizardry for setting language on its ear, his insight into every variety of humanity, his zest for science, for ghosts, for crowds, for countryside, cast him as the century’s master of what we nowadays call “diversity”; no strand of civilization escapes his worldly genius. Certainly the neglect of these sly, penetrating, ironically turned tales diminishes our legacy of Story.