Covert Criticism

Slyly, in passing, Guy Davenport once wrote that Rudyard Kipling was the finest writer of stories in the language, a judgment many of us grew up knowing intuitively, as did Borges, Orwell and Randall Jarrell, among other readers. In another essay, “On Reading,” Davenport elaborated: “I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself.”

Consider, among Kipling’s stories, “Lispeth,” “The Story of Mohammed Din,” “Wireless,” “The Gardener,” “Mary Postgate” and “The Wish House.” Was there ever so “natural” a writer, one who knew what readers wanted and delivered it with great style, without pandering? Especially early in the 20th century, Kipling was supremely popular among common readers, rivaling Dickens in the loyalty and affection he inspired. This probably remains true for those works marketed as children’s literature – The Jungle Book and Just So Stories – which all three of my sons have loved. To this day I thrill to the sound of “the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River.” But how often do adults read Kim, “The Man Who Would Be King” (made by John Huston into a great movie with Sean Connery and Michael Caine) and Stalky & Co.?

Davenport also wrote, “What got Kipling a bad name among Liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.” I’m guessing that Davenport is correct, and that Kipling has been done in by politics, real and imagined, though this is hardly a recent development. Time, Auden was compelled to write, “Pardons Kipling and his views,” and that was in 1939. Again, politics undoes pleasure.

I was thinking about Kipling because I have been browsing in a collection of his “criticism,” Writings on Writing, edited by Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis (“Former Chairman of The Kipling Society”), published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. Kipling was no theorist, seldom wrote reviews and was pathologically averse to criticizing other writers, but Kemp and Lewis collect a miscellany of essays, speeches, letters and poems that reflect his literary preferences. They call it “Kipling’s covert criticism.” Consider this excerpt from a speech Kipling delivered in 1912 to 50 boys, including his son, at Wellington College. In this edition, it is 11 pages long. Imagine the thrill these kids must has felt, to have the author of Captains Courageous, who five years earlier had been the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, speak to them so intimately:

“We have times and moods and tenses of black depression and despair and general mental discomfort which, for convenience sake, we call liver or sulks. But so far as my experience goes, that is just the time when a man is peculiarly accessible to the influence of a book, as he is to any other outside influence; and, moreover, that is just the time when he naturally and instinctively does not want anything of a mid-taxing soul-stirring nature. Then is the time to fall back on books that neither pretend to be nor are accepted as masterpieces, but books whose tone and temper soothe your trouble for the time being. A man who knows you and your life may be able to recommend such books. Ask him.”

I love that tone of bluff, fatherly advice, delivered without condescension. And read this, from Kipling’s preface to Just So Stories:

“Some stories are meant to be read quietly and some stories are meant to be told aloud. Some stories are only proper for rainy mornings, and some for long, hot afternoons when one is lying in the open, and some stories are bedtime stories.”

The choice is tough, because I want to reread Kim, which Randall Jarrell said he did every year, but I think for tonight my bedtime story will be “Wireless.”