Selected Stories

PENGUIN BOOKS

Rudyard Kipling: Selected Stories

Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the author and illustrator of
Beast and Man in India
, and his mother, Alice, was the sister of Lady Burne-Jones. In 1871 Kipling was brought home from India and spent five unhappy years with a foster family in Southsea, an experience he later drew on in
The Light that Failed
(1891). The years he spent at the United Services College, a school for officers' children, are depicted in
Stalky & Co
. (1899) and the character of Beetle is something of a self-portrait. It was during his time at the college that he began writing poetry and
Schoolboy Lyrics
was published privately in 1881. In the following year he started work as a journalist in India, and, while there, produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems – notably
Plain Tales from the Hills
(1888) – which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889.
Barrack-Room Ballads
(1892) contains some of his most popular pieces, including ‘Mandalay', ‘Gunga Din' and ‘Danny Deever'. In this collection Kipling experimented with form and dialect, notably the cockney accent of the soldier poems, but the influence of hymns, music-hall songs, ballads and public poetry can be found throughout his verse.

In 1892 he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and from 1892 to 1896 they lived in Vermont, where Kipling wrote
The Jungle Book
, published in 1894. In 1901 came
Kim
and in 1902 the
Just So Stories
. Tales of every kind – including historical and science fiction – continued to flow from his pen, but
Kim
is generally thought to be his greatest long work, putting him high among the chroniclers of British expansion.

From 1902 Kipling made his home in Sussex, but he continued to travel widely and caught his first glimpse of warfare in South Africa, where he wrote some excellent reportage on the Boer War. However, many of the views he expressed were rejected by anti-imperialists who accused him of jingoism and love of violence. Though rich and successful, he never again enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. With the onset of the Great War his work became a great deal more sombre. The stories he subsequently wrote,
A Diversity of Creatures
(1917),
Debits and Credits
(1926) and
Limits and Renewals
(1932), are now
thought by many to contain some of his finest writing. The death of his only son in 1915 also contributed to a new inwardness of vision.

Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936 and his autobiographical fragment
Something of Myself
was published the following year.

Andrew Rutherford was Regius Professor of English in the University of Aberdeen (1968–84), Warden of Goldsmiths' College, London (1984–92) and Vice-Chancellor of London University (1994–7). He was a well-known authority on Kipling and edited
Plain Tales from the Hills, Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1889, Kipling's Mind and Art
, and two volumes of Kipling's later stories for Penguin. He died in 1998.

Rudyard Kipling

EDITED
BY ANDREW RUTHERFORD

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This selection published in Penguin Books 1987
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2001
6

This selection copyright © Penguin Books, 1987
Introduction and notes copyright © Andrew Rutherford, 1987
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90999–8

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is beyond question the greatest short-story writer in the English language, and this collection illustrates the richness and variety of his achievement.

It opens with the first story he published as a young journalist in India – a dramatic monologue spoken by a Portuguese half-caste in an opium den in Lahore. Already we see here, in ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows', Kipling's eager interest in mankind in all its varieties and his willingness, as he himself once put it, ‘to think in another man's skin'. Gabral Misquitta is the first of a long series of Kipling narrators – Pathans, Sikhs, Hindus, Anglo-Indian officials, loafers, private soldiers, Scots engineers, English peasants, characters from past ages as well as from the present – who offer their unique perspectives on life to us in their own authentic idiom.

The collection ends with an acknowledged masterpiece, ‘The Gardener', written half a century later in the aftermath of the Great War, in which Kipling's only son had been killed on his first day in action. Helen Turrell's similar bereavement is treated in an impersonal, complex, elliptical mode of narration typical of the later Kipling: it controls intensities of grief and compassion, and shows him as a sophisticated artist combining, in Coleridge's phrase, ‘a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order'.

The stories of the years between show a remarkable range of subject-matter and technique. India, where Kipling had been born, where he had spent his early years and where he worked for seven years as a journalist between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, was a rich source of material and inspiration, even after he had left it for America and England. In the vulgar mind indeed he has been typecast as the spokesman for Anglo-India (in the sense of the British community in India) and the propagandist of Empire. The political views which he shared with many millions both before and after him should not, however, be made a stick with which to beat his literary reputation. Historically considered, British imperialism of the later nineteenth century was a complex phenomenon defying simplistic condemnation, and there are many Credit as well as Debit entries in the moral balance-sheet of British rule in India. Furthermore, Kipling's attitude to his material is
more varied than the stereotype would suggest. Anglo-Indian life, that strange mutation from Victorian norms, is described both sympathetically and satirically: its vices, vanities and follies are exposed, yet its achievements and its ethic of self-sacrifice and service are finely celebrated in stories which now stand as records of a vanished world. There were powerful pressures to conformism and to prejudice in that world, and to these Kipling sometimes yielded; but he also had impulses to rebellion – to the repudiation of its orthodoxies and taboos. ‘A stone's throw out from either hand/From that well-ordered road we tread /And all the world is wild and strange,' he wrote in the verse-heading to one of his earliest stories; and we find him passing from the narrower confines of Anglo-India to explore the tragic loves of Englishmen and Indian women in ‘Lispeth', ‘Beyond the Pale', ‘Without Benefit of Clergy'; and to enter into the minds of characters whose lives are lived on assumptions radically different from his own: the Afghan horse-dealer of ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee', racked by his obsessive thirst for vengeance; Little Tobrah, who kills his blind sister by pushing her down a well since ‘it is better to die than to starve'; and saintly mendicants, renouncers of the world, like Purun Baghat and Kim's Lama. This ability to project himself imaginatively into other minds, into representatives of what might seem alien humanity, is one of Kipling's great strengths as an artist.

He shows the same capacity for imaginative empathy in his treatment of animals and of machinery – in his rendering the game of polo in ‘The Maltese Cat' from the viewpoint of the polo ponies, or in his virtuosic presentation of the running-in of the
Dimbula
in ‘The Ship that Found Herself'. He found indeed new worlds to conquer when he turned, in that highly technological age, to machines and the men who work them, like the ships' engineers of ‘Bread upon the Waters' and ‘The Devil and the Deep Sea'. Early in his career he had deliberately crossed the boundaries of class in a revolutionary attempt to render the working-class speech, the attitudes and background, the loves and sorrows, of ordinary British soldiers, and some of his greatest successes in both verse and prose had been couched in a modified version of the language of the barrack-room. His interest extends, however, to many other types and examples of ‘people who
do
things': the Sons of Martha who carry out the work of the world, whether as soldiers, administrators, peasants, engine-drivers, deep-sea fishermen, engineers, farmers or builders, were always closer to his heart than the intellectuals he stigmatized as the Sons of Mary (see Luke 10:38–42); and he strove mightily in his fiction to commemorate their qualities and their achievements.

When he settled at Bateman's at Burwash in 1902 he found still
further challenges in the sheer unfamiliarity, the foreignness of England: the social and psychological discoveries of the protagonist in ‘My Son's Wife' make this an anthropological study as well as a moral fable. And Kipling brought to the Sussex countryside, its people and traditions, the same fascinated attention he had given earlier to life in the Punjab. He explores its past as well as its present in stories like ‘Marklake Witches' and ‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk', summoning up characters from history or pre-history and demonstrating not so much the differences as the continuity of their experience and values with our own.