Without Benefit Of Clergy

by Rudyard Kipling

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Paperback

Published June 17, 2004

About the author

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist.

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Man's Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 41, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. On the night of 12 January 1936, Kipling suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died less than a week later on 18 January 1936 at the age of 70 of a perforated duodenal ulcer. Kipling's death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."

Reviews

[Zoeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a re-read and one that I needed right now to make some sense, to find some familiarity that one yearns when one is surrounded by misery and unhappiness. Four years ago, in those relatively happier times, when the spectre of death and disease did not lie just outside our homes, I had read "Without Benefit Of Clergy" for the first time and had admired it as a rare story from the poet of the Empire where even as East is East and West is West, the twain do meet in love and marriage, even as a dark, catastrophic fate awaits both. Back then, what had impressed me the most, even about its climax, is how this tale of an English soldier, married secretly to an Indian woman, promised, at first, an idyllic future with his family and then robbed of the first reads essentially as a mature spin on Kipling's own "The Jungle Book". Holden is as alien to this country and its capacity for both creating and wrecking dreams as Mowgli was to the jungle. Both India and the jungle hold, for these foreigners, the same allure that they cannot shrug off and yet, tragically, it is destined that both would have to return to the world to which they had belonged originally.

But this year, it seemed to be some particularly of haunting resonance. In the last six months, there have been catastrophic incidents unfolding in front of my eyes and there have been entire families that I have known that have fallen apart and crumbled like some old dilapidated house in a heavy downpour of rain. The pandemic struck home, if one can use the well-worn phrase to describe it, and even as my loved ones living with me escaped its sinister designs by some stroke of miracle, they did have to bear the devastating loss of their own parents and brothers and sisters and also witness the houses and the lives of past that they knew crumbling to dust in these unforgiving times.

And that is when a line from this story struck me home - "Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil". Kipling's story is thus his most realistic and believable tale of horror, primarily because here there are no ghosts or spectres, no supernatural phenomena or sinister creatures, to threaten and even destroy the life of an English subaltern, of a foreigner in this strange, beautiful but equally dangerous country, to smithereens. Rather, the nemesis in this story is Mother Nature herself, carrying out its blood-splattered audit with both clinical precision and devilish randomness, just as this infernal germ in the air is claiming lives with the same repulsive resilience.

Writing his introduction for a R. K Narayan novel, Graham Greene (who else?) remarked astutely that "Without Benefit Of Clergy" was Kipling's finest story, one that moved him to tears and yet the tears did not actually fall. Nothing could be truer than that. For all his compassion for Holden, Ameera, little Tota and for all his wistful lamentations over first the happiness and then the destruction that wrecks their lives, this is Kipling also at his most brilliantly ruthless and horrifyingly cynical. For indeed, as the sad, inevitable, disquieting denouement proves, we are all vulnerable, whether we are from East or West and when Nature audits her accounts, it can be assumed that even our days might be numbered. Beware.

[Nicole ✨Reading Engineer✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though this short story has themes of not mixing with other cultures because of the time period it was written, I have to say I enjoyed this story, besides the themes it presents. I really started to fell for the main character, Holden, as tragedy after tragedy happens. This was hard to read but it made me ache for Holden and what happened to him.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another very good Kipling book seeing a British Officer marry a local who ends up having a child. The book goes through many emotions with people marrying from vastly different backgrounds, marrying into the army, working to over come obstacles and how everything turns out. Yet again, Kipling keeps surprising me. Once I put him down as a mediocre writer who comes in and out of fashion, to then having a work like this.

[David Highton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sad tale

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't normally like these sad short stories, especially if I had to read them for a class, but something about "Without Benefit of Clergy" appealed to me. Maybe the detailed description, or maybe it was just that I am familiarized with the setting from all the Bollywood movies I watch... But I liked it.

Also, I feel like if the man had left the woman for a white English lady as she was always saying he would, we'd have an India-based Madame Butterfly.

[Infamous Ginger]

A terrific piece of work. Considering the time it was written, a tremendously brave and sensitive story of love.