Kipling Biography

Rudyard Kipling celebrated his 35th birthday in December 1900. That same month the first chapter of his prose masterpiece KIM was published in the USA by McClure's Magazine. KIM and its immediate popular and critical success are where Charles Allen breaks off his compelling 2009 biography KIPLING SAHIB: INDIA AND THE MAKING OF RUDYARD KIPLING. *** According to Allen, Kipling continued for another three decades to grind out works of no little technical merit. A few later poems remain in the memory: "If," "The Smugglers" and "My Son Jack." Some later prose works for children endure: "Just So Stories" (published virtually simultaneously with KIM), "Puck of Pook's Hill," but not much else. Charles Allen's narrative ends: "With KIM he had said it all." *** The fictional boy Kim reflects, according to Allen, Kipling's own psyche: a rational, masculine side devoted to law and order and all things British and a passionate, anarchic feminine side increasingly admiring of Asia. In the novel Kim is pulled toward obedience to the great British Raj in India by Afghan horse trader Mahboob Ali, but toward mysticism, love of God and neighbor by the Red Lama. Which way Kim will go is left explicitly undecided by Kipling. Most scholars and writers of later KIM pastiches, take it for granted that Kim will opt for the Raj and a career as a spy. Not so Allen: the Lama has won. Kim is a devoted Buddhist, basking in sudden, eleventh-hour illumination. *** Allen's focus are the thirteen or so years that Rudyard Kipling spent as baby and boy and later as a very young man and journalist in Bombay, Lahore, Simla and Allahabad. India made the 1907 future Nobel Prize winner -- far more than did England -- according to the biographer. Kipling was writing memorable verse and prose at age 18. Charles Allen makes a good case for his thesis. Much, it seems to me, is, however, Allen's personal interpretation (how much time did Kipling really spend in India with prostitutes and opium?). But this merely means that it will take more than the four or five Kipling biographies now in print to give us Rudyard Kipling in the round. KIPLING SAHIB abounds in photographs and drawings. It has useful maps, ample endnotes, an up to date bibliography and a chronology of Kipling's works. A very, very appealing and useful read! --OOO--