2/27/2024 0 Comments Folio society kipling![]() They took him seriously, and so should we. Many other points could be made about Kipling, but the variety and accomplishment on display in these eleven books certainly negate any facile attempts to denigrate him as some kind of also-ran writer, inferior in subtlety to contemporaries such as Conrad or James. Kipling's late work does not really resemble theirs either in tone or content, but it certainly rivals it in depth and seriousness. The last three of these collections constitute a kind of sub-group, dominated by the shadow of the Great War, which added the final ingredient of horror and despair at the waste of a civilisation which we tend to associate with modernists such as Eliot and Woolf. The extreme obliquity of their technique, the obsessive use of the recondite jargon of trades, and of multiple levels of narration, certainly place him among the more technically accomplished - not to mention tirelessly innovative - masters of the short story in English. These later stories are probably now Kipling's main claim to fame as a writer - as anything but an historical curiosity, that is. The story's other settings include Cape Town and a London train station, in keeping with its themes of human loyalty versus cosmopolitan, machine-made division and alienation. It's a story of particular interest to New Zealanders, given the fact that the bar Mrs Bathurst keeps is in "Hauraki," a (fictional) small town just outside Auckland. ![]() ![]() Just what is the point of " Mrs Bathurst," from Traffics and Discoveries, for instance? Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Theroux debated it during the latter's visit to the former in Buenos Aires (according to Theroux's 1979 travel book The Old Patagonian Express, at any rate). Their style is more oblique and self-consciously "experimental" - sometimes to the point of extreme obscurity and even (presumably deliberate) bafflement. Most of the stories are preceded or followed by poems which make veiled and far-from-straightforward comments on their themes and contents. These collections are marked by an intermixture of verse and prose. For the most part, however, they maintain the immediacy of his Indian work, and are seen by many as the summit of his achievement in the form.Īfter this we move to (so-called) "late Kipling": The stories here are becoming longer and more ingenious, and include a number of experiments in different voices, both animate ("The Children of the Zodiac," "A Walking Delegate") and inanimate (".007," "The Ship that Found Herself"). Next we come to the later Indian and transitional stories, published throughout the 1890s, though with a gradually increasing admixture of American and British settings, dictated by his various places of residence during that decade. Contemporary readers appear to have been most struck by the Maupassant-influenced Plain Tales from the Hills, but probably modern readers will find the insights into race relations in the small collection In Black and White of more enduring interest, and certainly far from the cliché of blind and jingoistic imperialism he's now unfortunately (though not, alas, entirely unjustifiably) identified with. The extraordinary variety and accomplishment of these stories literally - and almost unprecedentedly - put him on the world literary map. "Kipling," as we know him, started with the remarkable spurt of stories created and published in India, then collected in a set of seven small Indian Railway paperbacks there in 1888: The stories divide fairly readily into a few well-defined groups. ![]() Rudyard Kipling: Sussex Edition (35 volumes: 1937-39)
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