The Light That Triumphed

By Melvin Maddocks

KIPLING: THE GLASS, THE SHADOW

by PHILIP MASON

334 pages. Harper & Row, $8.95.

Literary revisionists seem to retouch their portraits with the blackest of ink. Charles Dickens and Robert Frost are among those who have appeared as conspicuously darker souls to their later readers. Once upon a time Rudyard Kipling was adored as the bully-boy balladeer of the British Empire, a hearty fellow whose prose as well as his poetry thumped as cheerfully as a barroom song--when, that is, he wasn't spinning animal tales for children. Then, in a famous essay, The Kipling That Nobody Read, Edmund Wilson updated this naif into a modish vision of mid-20th century tragedy.

The Wilson Kipling even looked the part. Born in Bombay and brought up in India until six, he was "a swarthy boy with lank straight hair, who might almost pass for a Hindu." At that point his parents farmed him out to relatives in England, sadistic moralists after the Dickensian type who brutalized him until public school took over. The battered child became a lifelong hater who never quite managed to spit out all his venom.

As he aged, this misanthropic Kipling--hardly at his best in writing about people--gave up complex characters for stock types, and then stock types for animals, ghosts and pure demonic forces. Thus the stereotype of the bluff chap with the pipe and the dog was replaced by a hypochondriac brooding upon visions of cancer and insanity, obsessed with ultimate darkness.

Did Wilson, like other literary revisionists, overreact? Philip Mason thinks so. A veteran of 20 years in the Indian civil service, Mason is neither a first-rate biographer nor a first-rate critic. Still, stolidly and finally convincingly, he builds a case for a Kipling who stands between the old cliches and Wilson's anti-cliches--a Kipling rather magnificent in his contradictions.

There was, to be sure, a morbid Kipling, the bitter recluse who lost a son (in World War I) and a daughter, and until his death in 1936 retreated more and more into the confines of his Sussex home, "a grey stone, lichened house--A.D. 1654 over the door." But there was also Kipling the solid burgher of his middle years, who married an American woman and settled down as a country gentleman for four years in Brattleboro, Vt., who became a friend of Cecil Rhodes and the enemy of every Liberal Member of Parliament, regularly depicted in Kipling stories as grossly fat, loose-lipped and emitting sprays of saliva. And above all, there was Kipling the young star, who, after seven years as a journalist in India, dazzled London in 1890 at the age of 24. This is the Kipling who in one astounding year wrote most of his Barrack-Room Ballads, the novel The Light That Failed and seven short stories.

Putting together these parts, Mason has Kipling come out a little like a 19th century British Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Kipling prided himself on an almost tactile knowledge of his craft, as if he were more artisan than writer. Like Hemingway, he approached the world as a no-nonsense man of action, only to have it turn into a landscape of terrifying myths. Kipling's fundamental theme, like Hemingway's, was pain and its endurance.

Kipling, both Mason and Wilson agree, was a superb writer who, again like Hemingway, could make textures and smells--the very rhythms of life--leap off the page. Why, then, did he come closer to success in his short stories (for instance, The Man Who Would Be King) than in his novels (for instance, Captains Courageous)? Because, says Wilson, he could not conceal his true, tragic nature in the longer run. Mason concedes that Kipling's training and temperament put him into an almost impossible position as a writer: he was "an artist who must on no account betray his emotions." But he argues that Kipling struggled bravely and imaginatively to deliver himself whole to his reader, and that in fact his later, lesser-known stories-- such parables in anguish as The Gardener and Mary Postgate--were his masterpieces.

What Kipling possessed, perhaps, was a vitality too restless to organize for a long, sustained effort. It was a vitality that amounted to genius: the ancient, powerful magnetism of the oral storyteller. Wearing the mask of a Union Jack Englishman, Kipling may have been more of a native than a colonial all along.

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