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Mowgli Man

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0286

1543-3374

Charles L. DeFanti,

Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity

Mowgli Man Charles L. DeFanti (bio) Rudyard Kipling: A Biography, by Martin Seymour-Smith. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Kipling: Storyteller of East and West, by Gloria Kamen. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Since biography has emerged as the darling genre of the last few decades, it is no surprise that studying the lives of children's book authors has become embedded in school curricula. Books are assigned, students "become" the authors for a day, and their lives and works are discussed-perhaps as guides to worthy forms of behavior, surely to gain a greater understanding of the artist and his or her times. In his recent review of Jeffrey Meyers's biography of D. H. Lawrence (The New York Review of Books, January 27, 1991), Noel Annan reminds us of Sainte-Beuve 's belief that to understand an artist's work you must know his life, and vice versa. Proust, on the other hand, disagreed, insisting that the writer becomes a different person the moment he begins to write: "While he writes out of his experience, his characters are never taken solely from one person and are heightened, altered, and enlarged in the course of creation" (12). Never mind that the New Critics later sided with Proust (as did Lawrence): "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." We remain obsessed with biography, flawed and subjective as the form might be. From Dr. Johnson, whose Enlightenment sensibility decided it was proper to concern ourselves with the details of individual existences, until the appearance of Lytton Strachey, originator of the debunking biography, the seamier sides of writers' characters were left unremarked. However, psychoanalytic techniques, with us for now more than a century, coupled with newer research technologies, have added teeth to Oscar Wilde's dictum "Biography lends to death a new terror." Gentle creatures such as A. A. Milne wither under the scholar's glare, while macho magnificos such as Rudyard [End Page 180] Kipling and Ernest Hemingway suffer humiliating reappraisals under the weight of evidence gleaned in the computer age. Kipling, whose grotesque and unthinking imperialism seems more quaint than horrifying nowadays, survives in reputation mainly as a children's writer and a master of the short story. Few children who enjoy the luxury of being read to miss knowing about Kim, or Mowgli in The Jungle Book, so curiosity about the man who was once England's most popular author must begin soon after the cradle. Gloria Kamen's Kipling: Storyteller of East and West, written several years before Martin Seymour-Smith's definitive life, is an attractively produced juvenile biography, with charming and unmawkish sepia ink-wash drawings that resemble snapshot montages. The text should engage, though not overwhelm, younger readers with the well-known "authorized" material about Kipling, whose reputation was shielded for decades after his death by Elsie, his one surviving daughter. As had long been suspected, she pushed many significant skeletons deep into the Kipling closet, items that one might like to clean up or discard before presenting this author to children. After his magical early childhood in India, the most famous episode in Kipling's life concerned his "abandonment" by his parents with a Southsea couple, "Uncle" Harry and "Aunty" Rosa Holloway, who had advertised as caretakers in a newspaper. Alice and Lockwood Kipling simply departed, leaving Kipling and his sister, Trix, without informing them. Now elevated to the status of myth, this betrayal was the "shock" from which Kipling never recovered. This myth is largely accepted by Kamen, who echoes Kipling's account, largely by paraphrasing and quoting "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" regarding the neglect and cruelty suffered by Kipling at the hands of the narrow Holloways and their sadistic son (especially after the early death of the eccentric Uncle Harry). The story that Ruddy was punished by being forced to read the Bible—until they learned that he enjoyed it—is well known. But "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" is clearly a revenge story, as are later accounts in The Light That Failed and Something of Myself. Unquestionably, he suffered considerable punishment at the hands of Mrs. Holloway and her son, "the devil boy." But Kipling was a brilliant, hyperactive, and uncontrollably...