Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [157]
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
There is a fine antidote to all manner of morbidness in the brilliant pages of Kim. Mr. Kipling’s last work is ... his best, and not easily comparable with the work of any other man; for it is of its own kind and of a novel kind, and fairly amazes one by the proof it affords of the author’s magnificent versatility.
—December 1901
DYLAN THOMAS
Mr. Kipling ... stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.
—from a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson
(December 25, 1933)
QUESTIONS
1.One critic observes that “it is to the vagrant instinct, never extinguished by civilization, that the tale of the rogue and the road for ever appeals, always recognized as old and always as good as new.” What is this “vagrant instinct”? Is it a kind of playing hooky from responsibility and respectability? Do you agree that an imaginative indulgence in this “instinct” is what Kim appeals to?
2.Whether or not you have any knowledge of India, does Kim feel realistic to you? How does Kipling achieve the effect of realism? Or why does he fail?
3.Does Kipling look down on the Indians? Does it ever feel as though Kipling was slumming and inviting the reader to do the same?
4.How do you feel about Kim’s becoming a spy?
5.Would the novel work as well if Kim were, say, twenty years old? Is the absence of adult concerns such as sex, love, and romance crucial?
For Further Reading
Amis, Kingsley. Rudyard Kipling and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. Perceptive introduction, with many good photographs.
Auden, W. H. “The Poet of the Encirclement (Rudyard Kipling).” 1943. In Literary Opinion in America, edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel. Third edition, revised. New York: Harper and Row, 1962, pp. 259-264. From this review of T. S. Eliot’s edition of Kipling’s verse: “His early experiences of India gave him a sense of the danger of Nature which it is hard for a European to realize.”
Bayley, John. “The Puzzles of Kipling.” The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature. New York: Viking, 1976, pp. 51-81. “The India of Kim ... is like a vast and well-equipped nursery full of benevolent mothers and fathers, who are all regarded as belonging to the gang.”
Chaudhuri, Nirad. “The Finest Story about India—in English [Kim].” In The Age of Kipling : The Man, His Work, and His World, edited by John Gross. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, pp. 28-35. “It is the product of Kipling’s vision of a much bigger India, a vision whose profundity we Indians would be hard put to it to match even in an Indian language.”
Eliot, T. S. “Rudyard Kipling.” In A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. 1941. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1962, pp. 7-40. Kipling has “an immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight.”
Gilbert, Elliott, ed. Kipling and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Valuable collection of essays by Henry James, Bonamy Dobrée, Boris Ford, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, J. M. S. Tompkins, Randall Jarrell, and others.
Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.”
Graves, Robert. “Rudyard Kipling.” 1928. In The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922-1949. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949, pp. 213-223. An appreciative early survey of Kipling’s works. “He is ordinary-minded though emotionally eccentric, the subject for mass admiration, and no more to be argued away than the design of a postage stamp.”
Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia. London: John Murray, 1990. Thorough account of historical background.
Howe, Irving. Introduction to The Portable Kipling. New York: Penguin, 1982, pp. ix-xxxix; pp. xix-xxiii on Kim. Sensitive