'To Slide Toward Another Possible World'

I resist any effort to proselytize me, whether in matters religious, political or literary, and so refuse to proselytize others. More than once I have declined to read a book I was told I “had to read.” To me, that feels like being ordered to love someone. It’s unnatural, and can’t be done. The closest I come to proselytizing is to share my enthusiasm for a book or writer, though even such gentle cheerleading is generally doomed to failure. How I wish people would read The Man Who Loved Children, Rasselas, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, The Noise of Time, Realms of Being, And Even Now, and Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. But that’s out of my hands.

I place Kim in the same category. Kipling’s novel is the most eminently rereadable book I know. I could pick it up any time and have another go, and I’m pleased to learn that the late Irving Howe shared my pleasure. Art, Politics, and Will (1977) is a collection of essays written in honor of Lionel Trilling, who had died in 1975. Howe’s contribution is “The Pleasures of Kim.” In his introduction, Howe reports that he and Trilling loved Kipling’s novel and maintained a friendly competition over who would be the first to write about it:

“Now that he is no longer here to read what I have written and then make one of his characteristic jokes, I can only hope his friends will share my feeling that to speak in praise of Kipling’s book is a way of recalling Lionel’s presence, the love he felt for this book, indeed, the love he felt for good and beautiful books.”

That’s the perfect way to “proselytize” for a book – and to remember a friend. I’ll resist the temptation to quote Howe’s essay at length and transcribe only this:

“Kim is at ease with the world, that unregenerate place which is the only one most of us know, and because at ease, it can allow itself to slide toward another possible world, one that some of us may yet come to know.”