Kipling Revisited

MAUGHAM'S CHOICE OF KIPLING'S BEST (324 pp.)--Doubleday ($3.95).

"The star of the hour," said Henry James in 1890, when Rudyard Kipling was only 24. "Too clever to live," said Robert Louis Stevenson. To Stevenson, painfully fighting ill health, to James, arduously tracking down man's most elusive footsteps, the sensationally successful debut of the "infant monster" (as James described Kipling) seemed almost unnatural and positively unfair. Wrote Stevenson to James: "Certainly Kipling has gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening; what will he do with them?"

The answer of later generations has been that what Kipling did with his gifts was too sentimental and jingoistic to be enduring. Author Somerset Maugham does not agree. In his opinion, the "infant monster" was England's "greatest [short] story writer."

The Heart of the Matter. Maugham's selection of 16 tales is made chiefly from Kipling's early works, which Maugham thought were his best. The most obvious things about them are their bouncing energy and the fact that they belong to an era when a writer's energy was not sicklied over with the pale cast of guilt, self-analysis and modern forms of social consciousness. "The self-sufficiency of [Kipling's Britons]," says Maugham, "is fearful to contemplate." They might crack under malaria, hot weather and even defective character, but never under the strain of worrying whether they had any right to be in India or to be a ruling class.

Author Maugham himself has covered much of Kipling's territory in his own stories, 30 years later, and while his Britons were still pretty self-sufficient, their gin & tonics were already embittered by self-doubt. Many of the stories in Kipling's Best suggest that yesterday's minor disturbance has today become the heart of the matter. In The Man Who Was, officers of a visiting polo team sit down to mess in North-West India with the "White Hussars." Only when they have finished eating does the Indian member of the visiting team join them at the table. "He could not, of course, eat with the mess," says Kipling briefly. This is but an interlude in a story about the menace of a Russian invasion of India. In the hands of many a present-day writer, the menace would appear much less important than the interlude, which most likely would be swollen into the inflamed nerve center of a whole novel.

Kipling's solid prejudices seep into the most unlikely places: even the relationship between the infant Mowgli and the wolves reads like a tract on how-to-be-snobbish-though-savage. Much that was chivalrously solemn when Kipling wrote it is now fitter for laughs, e.g., "Father Wolf . . . had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves." But Maugham believes that Kipling's art at its best far transcends his outlook at its worst. What is more, that outlook, blinkers and all, was surprisingly varied.

Years before Jung invented a "collective unconscious," Kipling was exploring, in Wireless, what he described as "the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all mankind." In The Brushwood Boy, he built a boy-meets-girl idyll around the notion that dreams may be shared though the dreamers be continents apart. In Love-o'-Women and On Greenhow Hill, he managed to rate love higher than etiquette; and in Without Benefit of Clergy he actually sang a tender hymn to miscegenation.

The Eye for Color. What no one will deny Kipling is his command of "color." "It made me crawl all up my backbone," says Sergeant Terence, recounting the welcome-home to Peshawar of returning troops, in Love-o'-Women--and so, too, does the reader's backbone crawl as the bagpipes scream in the dawn light and a cavalry band, "shinin' an' spic like angils," adds the rattle of its "silver kettle-dhrums" to the shrieks of the wives and the terrible notes of the Dead March, sounding gruesomely from a regiment whose colonel has been killed.

Are Kipling's "color" and energies enough to make him "our greatest [short] story writer"? Maugham admits that "the short story is not a form of fiction in which the English have on the whole excelled"--which is a way of saying that Kipling has not had much competition. But Maugham adds loyally, "I can't believe he will ever be equalled. I am sure he can never be excelled."

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