Rudyard Kipling - Classic or Dud?

Edward Arlington Robinson could've written it.

I'm fascinated by Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, as well; such a strange genre, and yet it works so well: the self-contained but interlinked short stories, each with its framing narrative, each introduced and set off by verses that don't have an explicit connection to the story but somehow set the tone. And then the sudden jump in depth, complexity and darkness from "Puck of Pook's Hill" to its sequel, "Rewards and Fairies," and the way he threads all the stories of RaF together not with repeated characters or settings but with the line "what else could I have done?" - it's a bit forced in some places but a brilliant idea imo.

Kim is really really good. If I’d only read his poetry, I wouldn’t have cared about his writing at all, and his personal politics were very... complex? However, I’ve read The Jungle Book approximately a million times and the breadth and ease with which he writes about the various people of India in Kim is really great. The train to Benares is full of this detail.

He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of the Buddha’s life. The gentle, tolerant folk looked on reverently. All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.

“Um!” said the soldier of the Ludhiana Sikhs. “There was a Mohammedan regiment lay next to us at the Pirzai Kotal, and a priest of theirs—he was, as I remember, a naik—when the fit was on him, spake prophecies. But the mad all are in God’s keeping. His officers overlooked much in that man.”

The lama fell back on Urdu, remembering that he was in a strange land. “Hear the tale of the Arrow which our Lord loosed from the bow,” he said.
This was much more to their taste, and they listened curiously while he told it. “Now, O people of Hind, I go to seek that River. Know ye aught that may guide me, for we be all men and women in evil case.”

Along similar lines, here's a passage from "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," which starts with a successful Indian politician giving up his position to become a wandering holy man:

He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,—though he had never carried a weapon in his life,—and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the ground—behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended; and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi—a houseless, wandering mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so long as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eaten even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute master of millions of money. Even when he was being lionised in London he had held before him his dream of peace and quiet—the long, white, dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their evening meal.

And here is another passage I love, from the very end of the story, describing a landslide:

There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.

More Kipling! This passage from the end of Kim astonishes me every time. Has anyone else ever described dissociation so beautifully?

He tried to think of the lama—to wonder why he had tumbled into a brook—but the bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked thought aside. Then he looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops—looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things—stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings—a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated house behind—squabbles, orders, and reproofs—hit on dead ears.

“I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” His soul repeated it again and again.

He did not want to cry—had never felt less like crying in his life—but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor less.

A couple more passages, and then I'll stop, I promise.

Here's one from "Without Benefit of Clergy," in which an interracial couple in a secret marriage have lost their only child and have to grieve in secret. Victorian sentimentality, sure, but beautifully done imo.

The first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk pinch. The wrecked body does not send in its protest to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later. Holden realised his pain slowly, exactly as he had realised his happiness, and with the same imperious necessity for hiding all trace of it. In the beginning he only felt that there had been a loss, and that Ameera needed comforting, where she sat with her head on her knees shivering as Mian Mittu from the house-top called, Tota! Tota! Tota! Later all his world and the daily life of it rose up to hurt him. It was an outrage that any one of the children at the band-stand in the evening should be alive and clamorous, when his own child lay dead. It was more than mere pain when one of them touched him, and stories told by over-fond fathers of their children's latest performances cut him to the quick. He could not declare his pain. He had neither help, comfort, nor sympathy; and Ameera at the end of each weary day would lead him through the hell of self-questioning reproach which is reserved for those who have lost a child, and believe ​that with a little—just a little more care—it might have been saved.

That was when Kipling was 25 or so. Here he is writing about something similar in "The Gardener," decades later, when his writing has gotten much leaner and more spare:

Once, on one of Michael’s leaves, he had taken her over a munitions factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. It struck her at the time that the wretched thing was never left alone for a single second; and ‘I’m being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin,’ she told herself, as she prepared her documents.

my new favorite thread

As noted in the "second thought" thread, the Just So Stories have inscribed on my brain from birth. I hear them in first my grandmother's voice, and then with my mother's superimposed on top. The very particular rhythms of "O Best Beloved" and "nay nay, not so, but far otherwise" will never leave me.

Oddly I'm not even all that interested in other Kipling, or Kipling as a whole. And of course can't defend the racist/imperialist shit.

But when I draw my last breath I will likely remember the cadence of the name "Tegumai Bopsulai." I will be able to quote that bit about the Parsee-man's hat, "from which the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour." Or "he had his mummy's leave to paddle else he would not have done so."

When all else has faded I will retain that toothy language. I don't know if that's good or bad but it is a truth.

oddly enough i started reading “the man who would be king” for the first time ever a couple hours ago! (slow work day.) will report back.

I hear them in first my grandmother's voice, and then with my mother's superimposed on top.

same, except instead of my grandmother it’s my mom and instead of my mom it’s jack nicholson

and the great, gray-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees

Yes! Graciously waving her tail.

Kipling's short stories are marvelous: taut and without condescending to children.

Nabokov called Conrad "adventure books for boys." As an insult. And I'm like fuck you, Vlad, if it were so easy you could do it too. But you didn't, because you can't.

xp The ones in Puck of Pook's Hill and especially in Rewards and Fairies are so brilliantly layered, too, so that they can be read by kids and gradually reveal more as the child grows up.

A few short story recommendations for anyone who's interested, off the top of my head (not including any from Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies, the Jungle Books or Stalky &Co. which are closer to novels than short story collections.) There are a lot of other good ones, but this is what pops into my head at the moment.

"Lispeth" - one of his best early stories imo
"The Courting of Dinah Shadd" - good if you can get past the Irish accents
"Without Benefit of Clergy"
"The Bridge-Builders"
"Mrs. Bathurst" - written in 1904, very Modernist, very very confusing.
"They"
"The House Surgeon"
"Friendly Brook"
"Regulus" - this is one of the Stalky stories, but a late addition
"The Wish House" - one of Kipling's great stories about women
"Mary Postgate" - Kipling's most fucked-up, disturbing story. Pretty good!
"The Janeites"
"A Madonna of the Trenches"
"On the Gate" - Too cheesy to really be a good story, but rather sweet in a Powell and Pressburger kind of way.
"The Eye of Allah"
"The Gardener" - Kipling's best story imo. One of several stories he wrote about ppl who are closeted in some way.
"Dayspring Mishandled" - I love this one.
"Uncovenanted Mercies"

Nabokov I don't really get beyond the novels. I don't regard him as a model for prose styling or whatever. An argument beyond another thread.

xp to myself: I forgot to put "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" on the list. Very painful autobiographical story about his childhood; his parents sent him away from their home in India to live with strangers in England for six years, and the household they chose turned out to be intensely religious and abusive.

Lord Alfred, I think there's a VVN thread somewhere. Only brought him and Conrad up in support of your point: that it's hard to write good prose for children in a way that isn't condescending and that rewards repeated reading into adulthood.

I do sort of think of Nabokov's prose in connection with Kipling's, actually - they both strike me as people who are extraordinarily and naturally good with language on a sentence level, but I've read a lot less Nabokov than I have Kipling.

minor thoughts at freaky trigger, written up in passing during my 2011 soup-to-nuts reread of RK's short stories (including kim but not the poems obv and also i didn't bother with the light that failed based on my gran telling me it was rubbish when i was a teenager lol)

Grew up having read te Just So stories asa child, not much else. Did see teh Disney cartoon of Jungle Book.
Then saw The Man Who Would be King and some other stuff. 40s films with Errol Flynn etc

Did get an omnibus collection of his work a couple of years ago and read the first couple of chapters of the JUngle Book but not much else.
THink i want to correct that but am aware of his epistemology not being exactly current. But he's not the only one taht's true of interesting to see H.P.Lovecraft get new takes on and Jack london seems to have been allowed to gather respect despite being an avowed white supremacist probably a number of others too. Do wonder if people of avowed prejudice should be able to retain prestige or is the context one writes in including one's prejudices just external trappings to what makes the work worthwhile or is it part and parcel so everything needs to be thrown out together. I think I'm still reading Celine if not currently and think Knut Hamsun had some dodgy foibles too didn't he?

ipling’s worldview was of course unremittingly racialised, but it was never exterminationist: if anything, he was aggressively multicultural, believing (correctly) that the jostle and tumult of difference was good for everyone; that gated communities are always stupid and boring communities. Anyway, that’s enough wtf and er non-commentary for now.

this is otm. I'd add: he wanted to oversee the jostle and tumult.

not oversee himself but he was excited journo pals with the ppl he felt should be doing this ("strickland" and "stalky" are some of the fictionalised versions: sadly cecil fkn rhodes was mid-life the IRL model)

india when young is where his contradictions can seem redeemable, south africa is where they start to rot

I just ordered a freshy copy of The Jungle Book.

I read this a couple years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/rudyard-kipling-in-america

No one's mentioned The Finest Story In The World yet. Narrator finds a rather dull bank clerck who dreams about past lives in his sleep and tries to exploit this.

not oversee himself but he was excited journo pals with the ppl he felt should be doing this ("strickland" and "stalky" are some of the fictionalised versions: sadly cecil fkn rhodes was mid-life the IRL model)

india when young is where his contradictions can seem redeemable, south africa is where they start to rot

I'd agree with that. With India, I think a big part of the apparent contradiction comes from his fragmented Indian identity; he was born in India, spoke both English and Hindi during his early childhood, and then, as usually happened to Anglo-Indian kids at the time, was sent to England at the age of 6 to live with people he didn't know and wasn't related to, who turned out to be abusive. He was pulled out of the abusive household after six years and sent to school, but he didn't make it back to India until he was sixteen and going out there to work. So he was separated from his parents and from India at the same time, and he really felt the cultural loss as well as the personal one; there's a lot of wish-fulfillment in Kim, with this white kid who has (by virtue of being an orphan) been allowed to grow up culturally Indian and choose his own family. And I think it's pretty key that the India Kipling grew up in, missed, identified with, and wanted other people to appreciate was very specifically India under British rule; any other version of India wouldn't have had a place for him. So there's a definite wish to see colonialism as merely adding to that jostle and tumult you talk about without taking anything away; the paternalism in Kim is there but it's modified by the belief that to be effectively paternalistic you have to be willing to respect the culture of the place, learn from it, and leave it intact, which Strickland and Creighton are and the chaplain, for instance, is not.

When he starts to try to extend this to countries he doesn't know as well as India, he loses the nuance and the respect that's in his Indian fiction, and doubles down on his worship of these macho British colonizer dudes. Everything he wrote about South Africa is pretty indefensible, but (not coincidentally), it also sucks, so it's easy to avert your eyes from it if you care to.

Just nodding along really - it's been a few years since my last big Kipling read but it's a great list of stories so far & I'll throw on the The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes

My favorite ILE thread already.

I don't know, I've never kippled

(old joke, sorry)

my dad's #1 favorite joke of all time, good one

Oh yes, "The Strange Ride" is a really cool one. Amazing that he wrote it when he was 19.

So good they named a lot of cakes after him.

https://marketingweek.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/03/16151723/Mr-Kipling-French-Fancies-body-image.jpg

Great posts, Lily. I should get a copy of Kim.

Yay! This thread is making me so happy, you guys have no idea.

it's a good thread! kipling is fascinating. quick list of my favourites:

The Eye of Allah: Science and a paradigm shift in the doctrinal structure of the cosmos, and in the background, glancingly, intensely so... love and tragedy. And of course travel. Kipling's are great stories of travel and what we retrieve from places we travel to, and what we take with us when we go and when we leave. I think it's often fair to say that the sense of 'home' is absent - home is almost the state of travel, of moving between states (in as wide a sense of the word as possible).

The Disturber of the Traffic: i was reminded of this story when I was reading Junji Ito's Uzumaki recently. A wonderful piece of civic structure deranged by the scattering of a person's mind. Oh and ofc i forgot that one of the great things about many of Kipling's stories is that they are stories told by other people in the story.

which brings me on to...

Dymchurch Flit: My favourite out of Puck of Pook's Hill, though what a fabric of tales and poetry and history for a book. i love the atmosphere of place created by the story. place and timelessness.

They: Often cited, perhaps too often, but the elements of it are persistent in my imagination - the cadences of motorised movement, the sense of uncanniness (quite like Walter de la Mare), and absence, a weightless sense of loss.

Without Benefit of Clergy: One of his very best, wrenchingly painful, Kipling's very good at the tragedies at the centre of stern morals. It's not clear that he's necessarily on the side of the moral rules, and more very aware of the pain that can exist outside the moral and proverbial structures we create for our mental and spiritual safety.

The End of the Passage: Wrote about it elsewhere, but a really good example of Kipling's rare ability of understanding in detail and from inside the nature of technology such that it fits with the nature of humankind and spiritual or religious thought. It's an astonishing achievement, repeated regularly and in unique ways across his stories.

In fact, apologies for the indulgence, but i'll put what i wrote elsewhere, as i haven't put it up in the new space, so can't link to it (excerpted from the middle of a piece on ghost stories):

----

I said that ghosts do not like the light. This is because, although they have a fondness for apparition and animation, they do not like being seen. The eye is the sense organ of light, and is the vehicle of that reason that comes from observation, which we call science, and is the symbol of the movement that promotes that reason, the Enlightenment.

Ghosts never appear in well-lit laboratories, are notoriously chary of experimental conditions, in the light of science they become ‘phenomena’, their trappings bed sheets, paste-board masks, projections of psychological megrims and disorder. They may look unconvincing or gimcrack, even becoming subjects not of fear but (disastrously for their ability to frighten) of mockery, laughter and scorn.

The eye is also the most sedulously duplicitous of the sense organs, its world so detailed and convincing, so seemingly incapable of modification, that we call its representations reality. This is the world we exist in, and its light is the light by which we read. In order to have a successful ghost story, the ineluctable modality of the visual must be eluded, the rules of reason modified.

Or you can do what Rudyard Kipling did in The End of the Passage – take the very instruments of observational rationalism, the camera and the eye, and make them the vessels of the terror that they are supposed to dissolve, producing an ocular ghost story.

‘T’isn’t in medical science.’

‘What?’

‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’

Only a writer of Kipling’s genius could do this. He has the short-story writer’s knack of economy – suggesting experience and knowledge beyond what is described on the page.

His expertise in this area was honed by his early newspaper writing. His early stories, collected in Plain Tales from the Hills, inferred entire tales from scraps of society gossip, snatched market overhearings, cryptic glimpses of everyday Anglo-Indian life, and fitted them to a column-and-a-half of newsprint.

In a sense, The End of the Passage isn’t a ghost story at all – the only apparition is of someone still living;

Hummil turned on his heel to face the echoing desolation of his bungalow, and the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself.

Kipling implies (without ever describing or explaining) what Hummil sees in his mind, or I should say what he sees in his eye. A terrifying supernatural force is suggested without ever being described, in fact it is sealed within the organ of description itself.

The background is a cholera epidemic – and in a wonderful opening (he was superb at atmospherics) Kipling sets the scene –

Four men, each entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked – for them – one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon, – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

Despite being an expert at the framing device (think of The Man Who Would Be King, or The Disturber of the Traffic) Kipling uses none here. Possibly because, as he suggests at the beginning of another excellent supernatural story The Mark of the Beast,

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

The laws that govern spirits of the West do not hold true for the East. He has also, as can be seen in the opening paragraph, already cut the four men off from the light and laws of the outer world.

After the whist party has broken up, one of the group, Hummil, confesses to another, a doctor, Spurstow, that he is losing his mind. Spurstow medicates him with morphine, which seems to help, and goes to attend to an outbreak of cholera in another district. That is the point at which Hummil turns to see the apparition of himself.

When they come back the following week they find Hummil in his bed.

The body lay on its back, hands clinched by the side, as Spurstow had seen it lying seven nights previously. In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen.

Spurstow asks another of the men, Mottram, to look into Hummil’s eyes.

Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

‘I see nothing except some gray blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.’

Despite Mottram’s insistence, Spurstow decides to take a photograph of the eyes with a Kodak camera, but destroys the pictures without showing them to anyone else.

‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’

‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’

The eye is no longer the vessel of reason, and has become like the sarcophagus that contains Count Magnus, a vessel of mortal fear, unopenable, and sealed by more than padlocks.

Awesome post, Fizzles!

"The Eye of Allah" - and also this is one of Kipling's stories of repressed or closeted grief, where the loss cannot be spoken about even thought about in words, either because it's tied to an illicit relationship or just because it's too painful, and so it just becomes a kind of elision, an empty place at the heart of the story.

The same with "They," of course, and I agree about the sense of weightlessness and the way it's tied to the presence of the car in the story; the whole premise is that he's compulsively driving to this house again and again, and yet the compulsion seems pleasant and harmless, dreamlike; there's a sense that he's not quite a whole person, he doesn't have a home or responsibilities, he's just a kind of disembodied observer floating free of everything, letting the car take him where it wants to. And it's not until the end - so expert is Kipling's misdirection - that you realize where this disembodied quality comes from; that this is a whole person after all, but a person walled off from himself by a loss too big and too central to his identity for him to think about directly.

Kipling's narrators are so fascinating, the way they both are and aren't him. The narrator in "They" is about as close to actual Kipling as you get, I think, but in his middle period there's also this kind of alt-version of him who seems to be some kind of journalist, not famous, not married or with kids, with just a house and a car and some dogs and a lot of freedom to roam around and talk to people.

"At the End of the Passage" - yes! The nightmarish atmosphere is so good. That image of the blind face that cries and can't wipe its eyes is one that Kipling seems to have drawn from his own nightmares and returned to several times; it comes into the poem "Nuit Blanche" and I think you can see it in the portrait of the dying undersea dinosaur in "A Matter of Fact," which I'll go ahead and quote because I think it's really cool:

From that wideringed trouble a Thing came up—a gray and red Thing with a neck—a Thing that bellowed and writhed in pain. Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of the ship’s name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as though they had been type badly set. Then he said with a little cluck in his throat, ‘Ah me! It is blind. Hur illa! That thing is blind,’ and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back, and poured away in sluices. The blind white head flung back and battered the wounds, and the body in its torment rose clear of the red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as the hairless, maneless, blind, toothless head. Afterwards, came a dot on the horizon and the sound of a shrill scream, and it was as though a shuttle shot all across the sea in one breath, and a second head and neck tore through the levels, driving a whispering wall of water to right and left. The two Things met—the one untouched and the other in its death-throe—male and female, we said, the female coming to the male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her neck across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared under water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony while the blood ran. Once the entire head and neck shot clear of the water and stiffened, and I heard Keller saying, as though he was watching a street accident, ‘Give him air. For God’s sake, give him air.’ Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime. The sun was clear, there was no wind, and we watched, the whole crew, stokers and all, in wonder and pity, but chiefly pity. The Thing was so helpless, and, save for his mate, so alone. No human eye should have beheld him; it was monstrous and indecent to exhibit him there in trade waters between atlas degrees of latitude. He had been spewed up, mangled and dying, from his rest on the sea-floor, where he might have lived till the Judgment Day, and we saw the tides of his life go from him as an angry tide goes out across rocks in the teeth of a landward gale.

"cannot be spoken about or even thought about," I meant to say.

A couple more passages that stick in my mind:

From "The Children of the Zodiac"

At last he came to that very dark House where Cancer the Crab lies so still that you might think he was asleep if you did not see the ceaseless play and winnowing motion of the feathery branches round his mouth. That movement never ceases. It is like the eating of a smothered fire into rotten timber in that it is noiseless and without haste.

From "The House Surgeon"

Now as soon as the lovely day was broken, I fell into the most terrible of all dreams—that joyous one in which all past evil has not only been wiped out of our lives, but has never been committed; and in the very bliss of our assured innocence, before our loves shriek and change countenance, we wake to the day we have earned.

I realize I'm quoting a lot of the more ornate passages because they're very quotable, but they're not all like that - the writing gets a lot more spare over time.

Was talking to my housemate the other day about Kipling's obsession with revenge and the difference between him and someone like Tarantino, that while there's definitely a part of Kipling that enjoys revenge fantasies for their own sake, there's also an empathetic side to it; it's part of a larger obsession with trauma, PTSD, and the way people cope with losses or injuries that they have no healthy way to process. Kipling deals in characters whose normal coping mechanisms, capacity for forgiveness or at least forgetting, etc., are fundamentally broken, whose only way out of a feedback loop of grief and anger is through these perfectly tailored revenges. And there's a sense of satisfaction w/the perfection of the revenge mechanism but also a quality of horror, both at the vastness of the anger that's driving it and at the constant threat that it will get away from its creator.

I particularly love the late story "Dayspring Mishandled," the story of a years-long revenge-plot that never comes off; it sort of stirs together a lot of ideas about art-as-revenge, revenge-as-art, the way we narrate our own stories and the roles we cast ourselves in; it's also got a storyline embedded in it that recalls the Dorothea/Casaubon marriage in Middlemarch, but in which Dorothea has never escaped the marriage and has been permanently warped by it; and there's a Rebecca-like technique of never naming the women whose experiences are on some level driving the story (the woman who is supposedly being avenged is referred to only as "the mother of Vidal Benazaquen," Vidal being a character in an entirely different story), and the story is filtered through multiple male narrators, one of whom is unreliable, so there's a lot about gender and the way men cast women in the stories they tell. It's a very off-center, off-kilter story; I can't possibly do its weirdness justice here, but I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a sense of what very late Kipling is like.

typo - Vidal Benzaquen

I find this passage from "Without Benefit of Clergy" totally stunning - a sad, steadily-paced story focusing almost entirely on the lives and interactions of a few characters, and then:

Two months later, as the Deputy had foretold, Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil. On the heels of the spring-reapings came a cry for bread, and the Government, which had decreed that no man should die of want, sent wheat. Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass. It struck a pilgrim-gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine. Many died at the feet of their god; the others broke and ran over the face of the land carrying the pestilence with them. It smote a walled city and killed two hundred a day. The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out the dead and the dying. They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Englishmen shied at the corpses in the grass. The rains did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man should escape death by hiding in her.

Thinking about "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat," about a successful viral campaign to humiliate an entire village, and "Dayspring Mishandled," about a literary hoax (also successful in a way, though the creator of the hoax never pulls the trigger on the public-humiliation part of it). There's a line in "Dayspring Mishandled" that you hear from two of the characters: "If you save people the trouble of thinking, you can do anything with them." And it strikes me that one of the really interesting/disturbing things about Kipling is that he has this deep interest not just in revenge but also in how to manipulate people; he's interested in the mental weak points that can make people vulnerable to something like, say, QAnon, but he also has some sympathy with (or at least understanding of) the mindset that would deliberately set something like QAnon in motion.

And he's a writer with a really deep capacity for empathy, which I think you can see in a lot of the passages that have been quoted in this thread, but there's also this sort of clinical, journalistic detachment that comes out when he describes people doing violent or cruel things. You're often in the POV of an observer, and that observer may feel a sense of horror or shock at what they're seeing/hearing/being told about, but there's rarely a sense of condemnation that goes along with it; it's an amoral, nonjudgmental horror, if that makes sense. (Where there is always instant and complete condemnation, otoh, is at the idea of anything cruel, thoughtless or neglectful being done to children.)

If you are looking for a really good short story to read over Easter weekend, let me recommend "The Gardener."

https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/DebtsandCredits/gardener.html

Been thinking about "Thrown Away", partly because it's so vividly drawn and partly because the nihilism at the heart of the story has started to gnaw at me. The important thing is that everyone just carry on, his parents needn't know the truth, let's just hide the body as quickly as possible. This is also connected in my mind to the setting, we're out at the edge of civilization (so they believe), what happens here is in some sense not real.

Great thread. Turns out I didn't know shit about Kipling. I've just found a good copy of Debits and Credits, where should I go next (essays, short stories, memoirs)?

Have you read Debits and Credits yet, or would you like a guide to which stories in it are worth reading? The first few stories are not essential reading imo; you could probably start at "The Wish House" and just keep going from there.

After Debits and Credits - hmm. There are a lot of good individual stories mentioned in this thread, but if you want another collection to read, I would suggest Rewards and Fairies. It's the sequel to Puck of Pook's Hill, which is also worth reading, but Puck is more or less for kids, while Rewards and Fairies is much darker and more adult.

My copy of Debits and Credits came today - will give "The Wish House" a go. I'll get Rewards and Fairies at some point - thanks for the heads up.

Okay! Discussion for people who have read "The Gardener" starts here. Kipling has three stories about, essentially, the burden of socially enforced secrecy. The first two are the very early story "In the Pride of his Youth" and the slightly later and much more complex story "Without Benefit of Clergy." The first two focus a lot on the burden of grieving in secret; in particular, "Without Benefit of Clergy," which is about a secret interracial marriage between an Englishman and a Muslim girl, shows us someone going through a series of essential life experiences - marriage, the birth of a child, the child's death, and ultimately his wife's death as well - without being able to tell anyone outside of his tiny family circle. And so when his wife dies, there is a sense that he has lost more than his family; that a whole part of his identity has been wiped away as if it had never been.

(It's not just about grief, either; there are all these little details throughout the story about the compounding burdens attached to a relationship that cannot be recognized by society. A man working at another station gets leave when his wife is sick; Holden, whose wife is just about to give birth, is sent to relieve him, with a little aside from his superior about how lucky he is to be a bachelor. That sort of thing.)

"The Gardener" picks up this theme of enforced secrecy years later, but with a narrower focus. Because the emphasis now is not on grieving in secret - we have one character, Mrs. Scarsworth, to represent that experience, but Helen herself is allowed to grieve openly - but rather on the subtler psychic cost of lying every day about something you care about. Helen has managed her fiction about Michael in such a way that she gets essentially everything she would have as his mother. She gets to raise him and mourn him and visit his grave with the full sympathy and approval of the village. The one thing she can't do is say that she's his mother. And that burden alone - the burden of having to open her mouth, day after day, and say "Lieutenant Michael Turrell, my nephew" about someone she gave birth to - is enough that the story ultimately grants her a miracle to rescue her from it.

So yeah, I think Kipling has what seems like a lifelong interest in secret/illicit/unrecognized relationships and the way grief and secrecy intersect. (You see it briefly in "The Eye of Allah" as well, with the Christian artist who has had an affair with a Jewish woman on his travels and has lost both her and their child, and the only lasting trace is a particularly Jewish-looking Madonna and child that he painted before her death.) But "The Gardener" is the one where he really isolates it down to the burden of secrecy itself, absent any practical considerations that would make secrecy difficult or exposure a genuine worry.

Oh no I screwed up the spoiler tags HELP

Mods can you fix this? The whole thing is supposed to be spoiler tagged. DO NOT READ if you haven't read "The Gardener."

I read it yesterday, and then the notes at the kipling society site: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_gardener1.htm.

I'm not *certain* that she's meant to be his mother. Most reviewers seem to think that's the case but there's one dissenting opinion at the bottom of that page. I suppose the idea is that the whole 'passage of the child from bombay' is a fiction and the 'lung trouble which had driven her to the south of france' is a cover for her confinement (to use the old fashioned term). It's plausible - otherwise why have the part about the lung trouble and the dismissal of the nurse at all - but as that reviewer says it does require Helen to slander her brother, which goes against her character so carefully built up throughout the rest of the story. And you could read the gardener as still seeing into her secret heart, what she emotionally believes (having raised him entirely herself) even if it's not factually correct. On balance though... yeah you're probably right.

Incidentally the biblical reference in the last line would have entirely passed me by were it not for the footnotes. Probably less of an issue back in those days.

That's one of the difficult but potentially rewarding things about kipling, his stories require very close reading. Even the part with the 'large Lancashire woman', and the last bit with Mrs Scarsworth, have me wondering what exactly is he getting at? And the general air of mystery in the colonial setting (not in this story so much), things like the Stations with a capital S, suggestive of something more than a simply railway station. This mystery no doubt increased by the passage of time but surely still present for a British readership of the time, thousands of miles away and largely ignorant of what was going on over there.

Who exactly she is to Michael didn't even occur to me!

Me neither!

This was my second reading of the story and I still didn't get it, though it's right there in the text. Kipling's intent is clear from the diary entries quoted on the Kipling Society page.

The Lancashire woman has no secrets or repressed emotions; she lacks Helen Turrell's well-organized history, proper papers signed by the right people, and correctly typewritten grave number, but she is present to her own grief in ways Helen can't be and can't bear to see.

Later Helen can't understand why Mrs. Scarsworth discloses her secret, so similar to her own, or why her awkward, conventional, sentimental sympathy is rejected:

‘My God!’ said she. ‘Is that how you take it!’

By 'it' Mrs. Scarsworth isn't referring to her own loss, but to Helen's.

One of the ambiguities of the ending is whether or not Helen has found a different way to take it; in the final sentences it's not plain that she has.

Disclaimer: I'm just barely recovered from Covid and my brain feels like it's coated in treacle. Sorry if my writing's a little off right now.

Mrs. Scarsworth's reaction to Helen's sympathy is so puzzling, and I'm not sure what to make of it. It often gets read as what you describe - Helen offering a conventional gesture and Mrs. Scarsworth rejecting it as not good enough - but given that Mrs. Scarsworth has no idea that Helen is carrying around a similar secret, I don't know what more she could possibly expect. And I don't really think Helen's response is all that conventional. Her gesture of sympathy is inarticulate, almost wordless, but it reads as heartfelt to me, even intimate. I think it's equally likely that Mrs. Scarsworth is primed for rejection, expecting to confess and be condemned, and has no idea how to react to genuine sympathy when it arrives.

I think Helen does very much understand why Mrs. Scarsworth tells her secret; I think Mrs. Scarsworth is essentially speaking for Helen here, articulating thoughts that we cannot get from Helen's narration because she has so completely barred herself from that part of her own mind. Notice the question she immediately asks, when Mrs. Scarsworth talks about her years of lying, is "how many years?" But for all her similarity to Mrs. Scarsworth, she is trapped in a way that Mrs. Scarsworth is not, because she cannot bring herself to confess to another person - not even one who has just confessed to her. There's a moment at the end of that scene where Kipling writes "Helen could not speak" - not "did not speak," but "could not." And I think this is literally true. This is where you realize that Helen has so thoroughly trapped herself in a prison of her own making that there is no way out for her except by a miracle.

i’m glad i skipped the spoilers til after i read it twice and made a lot of maybe(?) bad assumptions about what happened there.

i appreciate kipling’s sorta— intensity in presentation, as i perceive it. i fear i’ve shown i don’t perceive so sharply, i guess.

i’m checking out _stalky and co._. ha it was free. anyhow, it’s not very relatable for me, but reading about how it was received is kinda great.

i can imagine how he was bringing dimensions of social and societal pressures re public school that people both of it and from outside it were not quite prepared for- it turns over some rocks. i feel like we’re properly after that era has lost its swagger— i’m mostly familiar with sagas of hierarchy, dominance, power, and cruel exploitation. _stalky_ looks at all that from the side, with tales of non-conformity, and the desperate amusement underneath that.

My favorite Stalky story is one that he wrote later than the rest, "Regulus." It's partly about King the Latin teacher trying to teach a lesson, and partly about a kid who's earnest and conscientious and very different from Stalky & Co., and it has a generosity to it that you don't see in the rest of Stalky.

Re: "The Gardener," it's interesting to see how obscure the religious reference is these days, when we're not all raised on Bible verses. I don't think it's meant to be, though. The poem that accompanies the story is pretty straightforward about the metaphor we're working with: one grave to me was given, one watch till Judgement Day, and God looked down from heaven, and rolled the stone away.

I think we are supposed to read the end of the story, get the reference, understand that Helen has had an encounter with Jesus in a military cemetery at Easter Week, and go straight back to the start to read the story again, seeing everything we missed the first time: the misdirection where we are told what the village knows but not whether the village is right, the narration that slides seamlessly from the stuffy voice of the village into Helen's own rigidly controlled mind, and the recurring motif of concealment: the soldier with two names, Mrs. Scarsworth with her outburst about having to lie every day, even the false front on the teashop.

side note: I was listening to the Dylan song "Red River Shore" today, and for the first time thought of that last verse in connection with "The Gardener" - this idea that when we lose someone who is the guardian of a particular part of our identity, a part of us dies with them. The person who needs resurrecting in the Dylan song is not the Girl but the speaker; the grave that Helen guards is her own.

Now I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring him on back to life
Well I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
’Cept the girl from the Red River shore

I read Stalky & Co. in my 20s and while I liked it I'm sure much of it went over my head. I'll have to reread Regulus with your posts in mind.

The first Kipling I ever read was Rewards and Fairies, which doesn't tend to come up a lot in discussions of his work but I think it was a great place to start. Those 15 or so years when he wrote for kids are really peak Kipling.

I read The Gardener because of this thread and liked it so much I linked to it in our weekend newsletter — a fitting story for Memorial Day, in lots of ways. Thanks, Lily. I was a big Kipling fan as a kid but haven't read much beyond his kid lit.

It's certainly not true that all these stories directly condemn colonialism & patriarchy. Some people in them suffer for passions which would be problematic in any society, e.g. in A Wayside Comedy, and some people suffer for seemingly no reason. But still there's the overall *vibe* that something is deeply wrong in this society, and it taints all relations.

This has obviously been percolating in my subconscious as I woke the other morning with this thought at the front of my mind, it's re: A Wayside Comedy, which I think was the story that most put my hackles up, though I couldn't really put my finger on why. Now I can. We're told right from the start that the story concerns 'the European population' / 'the English people' of the Station of Kashima. That in itself is not necessarily a problem, but the rest of the story acts as if there is no-one else in the Station. There are only 'two women in (the) Station', one of them is 'the only other woman in the Station', 'every one' can drop on 'every one else', the characters are called 'all hands', 'all Kashima', 'Kashima'. The only hint of a non european population is a single mention of a sais (groom) - aside from that the native population is completely erased. Of course there must be one (why else is there a Station), it must outnumber the Europeans, but we're told nothing of it. Can the subaltern speak? The subaltern's existence isn't even acknowledged! Perhaps the oddest part is when we're told 'there are no strangers in Kashima' - so the native population aren't even allowed to be strangers! This sense that there is a hidden population is quite discomfiting and though the love tangle at the heart of the story is, as it were, perfectly normal, as I said above it's tainted by the implicit racism (which itself is made more explicity by phrases like the 'rat hole' of Kashima, and that putting flowers in a vase adds to 'a pretence of civilisation' - so the hidden population are of course uncivilised.

It's obvious from Kipling's many writings about India that he was well aware of the existence of the native population and his views of them included a large measure of admiration. I'd say he knew they were racist, smug, and provincial and his readers are supposed to pick up on that. It wasn't the point of the story, but their strict and self-imposed isolation was knit into the fabric of their lives and a necessary element.

they were racist, smug etc.

"they" meaning his characters. sorry for the vague pronoun referent.

Yeah that makes sense. I gather than when it comes to his attitudes to race and more particularly colonialism "it's complicated". He is undoubtedly an incredibly gifted writer and though I can't say I loved many of the early stories that I read it's an instinctive recoil from the unpleasant situations and characters. I should read more - Kim certainly, later short stories, maybe some biographical stuff.

Happy 160th birthday to Rudyard Kipling!

: )

I'll post properly on the WAYR reading thread, but i had occasion to read Kim again and once again i found it very well written and very boring. anyway, his short stories remain one of the pinnacles of writing for me, and I think I will read one today in celebration. Maybe The Eye of Allah or Wireless.