RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE FICTION OF ADOLESCENCE

By the same author

KARLOFF AND COMPANY: The Horror Film CHARLIE CHAPLIN JUDGE HORTON AND THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS (with Barbara Bauer)

RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE FICTION OF ADOLESCENCE

Robert F. Moss

© Robert F. Moss 1982 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without permission

First published 1982 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives

throughout the world

ISBN 978-1-349-05711-5 ISBN 978-1-349-05709-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05709-2

To My Mother and Father

"It's not brutality," murmured little Hartopp, as though answering a question no one had asked. "It's boy; only boy."

Stalky & Co.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

1 The Foundations 2 The Adolescent Strain 3 Kipling's Schoolroom:

The Evolution of a Training Process 4 Kipling's Philosophy

of Education in Its Final Form 5 Clash of Loyalties:

Kipling's Men in Conflict 6 Between Two Worlds:

The Divided Self in Kipling's Adolescents

7 Kipling's Triumph: The Double Boyhood of Kimball O'Hara

Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

lX

Xl

1 34

58

75

91

107

128

142 148 151 158 161

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professors Louis Cornell and Carl Woodring, under whose patient and discerning supervision an earlier version of this work - my doctoral dis­sertation at Columbia Univeristy - was written. I am also very grateful to my good friend Barbara Bauer for her generous assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.

The author and publishers acknowledge with thanks the co­operation of Charles Scribner's Sons, Doubleday & Co. Inc. and A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the National Trust for permission to quote extracts from the works and autobiography of Rudyard Kipling.

IX

Introduction

"Time that with this strange excuse," wrote W.H. Auden, "Pardons Kipling and his views .... "Forty years after this poem was written, Kipling is still one of the most controversial and enduringly popular authors, with a full complement of advocates and detractors fiercely squared off against each other.

The first thing the student of Kipling learns is that his subject has been the victim of critical neglect; the second is that this "neglect" occupies two or three shelves in the library and that essays, biographies, and full-length studies of Kipling (in four different languages) are there in abundance. It is the abiding paradox of Kipling scholarship that while his reputation stopped growing about 1902, the literature about him did not. Of course this curious situation may in part be attributed to Kipling's on­going popular success ("He had always had his audience," John Beecroft points out in The Best of Kipling); he is simply too durable to be ignored. But it must also be remembered that extra-literary factors in Kipling's work have played a role; as the foremost spokesman for Tory imperialism, he inevitably drew a good deal of attention (both favourable and unfavourable) for his political views.

The job of categorizing the rather extensive body of critical writing on Kipling has been undertaken by Elliot Gilbert in the introduction to his Kipling and the Critics, a collection of essays by different critics. Gilbert perceives three major traditions in Kipling scholarship: (1) those who damn Kipling for his right­wing politics; (2) those who praise him for the same reason (and, more significantly, those who defend, without necessarily excusing, his political convictions); and (3) those who focus on the aesthetic aspects of Kipling's work. In Gilbert's schema, Richard Le Galliene's Rudyard Kzpling: A Criticism, Robert Buchanan's essay "The Voice of the Hooligan" and W .J. Peddicord's Rudyard Reviewed would belong in the first category; Walter Besant's reply to Buchanan (which appeared along with the Buchanan

XI

xu Introduction

article in book form under the title The Voice of the 'Hooligan') and R. Thurston Hopkins' Rudyard Kzpling's World would fall into the second; Bonamy Dobree's Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist, Louis Cornell's Kipling in India, J.M.S. Tompkins' The Art of Rudyard Kipling and most of the essays in Gilbert and in Andrew Rutherford's Kipling's Mind and Art would be consigned to the third.

Gilbert's suggestions are useful in establishing general guide­lines for a discussion of Kipling's scholarship, but the haziness of their boundaries must be recognized. For one thing, an extra category would be required immediately for the official Kipling biography, Charles Carrington's The Life of Rudyard Kzpling and two recent critical biographies, Philip Mason's Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire and Angus Wilson's The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling. All of these studies effectively straddle the three rubrics Gilbert has proposed. Then, too, even the earliest disquisitions on Kipling, which adopt a heavily political tone, are not devoid of aesthetic commentary (for instance, the Hopkins study and W.M. Hart's Kipling the Story- Writer). In addition, it should be noted that hatred of Kipling's politics is a prime generative force behind the aesthetically-oriented essays of Lionel Trilling, George Orwell and Boris Ford; the Orwell and the Trilling appear in both Rutherford and Gilbert, the Ford is included only in Gilbert. Then, too, it is misleading to speak, as Gilbert does, of Bonamy Dobree as a pioneer in the Kipling-as­artist approach. Certainly Hart and George Moore (in Avowals) give much attention to Kipling's art, though their critiques may not be particularly illuminating.

Part of the difficulty is that our sense of meaningful literary criticism is firmly rooted in the techniques of New Criticism; much of the pre-Dobree work on Kipling is not sufficiently analytical to fit current notions of good critical writing. Moreover, it must be admitted that there is an undiscriminating quality to much of the early pro-Kipling literature that makes it easier to depreciate the particular work. Unfortunately, this is true as well of Tompkins' book, the most comprehensive of the recent aesthetically-based works on Kipling.

Fundamentally, the same overview is applicable to the many Indian writers who have examined Kipling's work. During the First World War, A. R. Sarath-Roy and an anonymous Indian student writing in Lippincott's Magazine arraigned Kipling

Introduction Xlll

angrily for what they regarded as his misrepresentations and distortions of their homeland. Both essays appeared in 1914 and both were more interested in Kipling's political philosophy than in his art. Twenty years later Indian hostility to Kipling had not abated much, judging by Bhupal Singh's A Survey of Anglo­IndianFiction (1934) and M.M. Bhattacharjee's article "Rudyard Kipling", though the latter dwelt more on Kipling's fictional techniques than his attitudes toward India.

In the last ten years at least four full-length studies of Kipling have emerged from India - K. Bhaskara Rao's Rudyard Kipling's India, Vasant A. Shahane's Rudyard Kipling: Activist and Artist, K. Jamiluddin's The Tropic Sun, and Shamsul Islam's Kipling's 'Law': A Study of His Philosophy of Life. All four works are sophisticated exercises in modern scholarship, judicious and detached, mixing aesthetic, political, and historical ingredients into their considerations of Kipling's oeuvre.

Even Kipling's most vehement antagonists would agree that both in terms of craft and content his range was bewilderingly vast. Not counting the colonial stories for which he is most famous, this range included the comedy of manners, the fable, satire, naturalism, historical and biblical fiction, and works of psychological realism that would be ranked with the best contemporary writing, if anyone bothered to read them.

This enormity of scope is the reader's delight and the scholar's despair. There is no convenient way of organizing the gigantic sprawl of Kipling's work, no critical umbrella under which to group it all. Significantly, two recent students of Kipling - Carl Bodelsen (Aspects of Kzpling's Art) and Gilbert (The Good Kzpling) - seem to throw up their hands in the face of this problem. In place of the central focus we would normally expect in a critical study, we encounter a fairly random selection of personal preferences. There has been no full-scale attempt at mapping the role of adolescence in Kipling, either in book-length studies or in the many essays he has evoked. The goals of this book will be to delineate the common pattern in Kipling's many works on boyhood - which should be understood in this study as synonymous with adolescence; to determine how frequently this pattern shaped Kipling's vision of youth, from the relatively coarse Soldiers Three to the subtle and affecting Kim; and to use the general discussion of adolescent elements in Kipling as a framework within which to assess his artistic growth between

XlV Introduction

Soldiers Three and Kim. In addition, the purely critical investigation has been broadened to include relevant biographical data.

The detection of adolescent elements in a book or story nominally dealing with adults raises certain questions. If the author appears unaware of the discrepancy between the characters' adult status and their adolescent behaviour, he leaves himself open to a charge of immaturity. Many students of Kipling's work have made this very charge, though generally only in passing. Since the present study is the first thoroughgoing exploration of the adolescent subject-matter in Kipling, it seems prudent to offer a compilation of textbook views on adolescence by various psychologists (see Appendix). Although critics of Kipling's work from Buchanan to Angus Wilson appear to have taken it for granted that similarities in conduct and temperament between Kipling's juveniles and his men are, ipso facto, proof of an immature strain in the author, the authoritative sub­stantiation I have supplied is, I feel, useful addition to Kipling scholarship. Beyond its function as substantiating evidence, it can be used to measure the accuracy of Kipling's own conception of boyhood.

It should be noted that this study will not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of adolescent elements in Kipling. Rather we will be limited to those extended* treatments of adolescent experience that Kipling produced between 1888, the year in which Soldiers Three was published, and 1901, when Kim appeared. The works of this period can be studied very advanta­geously as an organic phase in Kipling's career; indeed, there are compelling reasons for doing so. Not only do these works share an abundance of common attitudes, characterizations and motifs, but they are further linked by a discernible, though uneven, maturational process in which Kipling's command of his materials, initially shaky and unsatisfying, grew impressively, reaching a distinct pinnacle in Kim.

*In the context of Kipling's fiction, the term "extended" is used to denote novels and collections of stories which comprise a single unit. Thus, we will be concerned with Soldiers Three, the Mowgli stories (1894) and Stalky & Co. (1899), but not, for example, "The Bold 'Prentice" or the late Stalky stories (published many years after the original volume). We will only deal with Kipling's poetry incidentally.