Reading the 20th Century discussion
This topic is about
A Diversity of Creatures
Buddy Reads
>
A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling (August 2022)
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
The Kipling Society has links to all of the poems/stories in the collection (just scross down the page to 1917 and you will find it) which provides good background.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/book...
Mod
Orwell was wonderfully sniffy about him: 'Rudyard Kipling was the only popular English writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer. His popularity was, of course, essentially middle-class.' Ouch! Book snob!
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-...
Yes, Orwell was very sniffy about Kipling - he also described him as a good bad poet, for example, in his essay on Kipling (which is brilliant, of course, even though I disagree with a lot of it). https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kip...I'm convinced that a good deal of his contempt was due to the appropriation (and, in my view, often misinterpretation and distortion) of Kipling by those to whom Orwell was politically opposed.
I admire Orwell's writing very much, but we don't agree on everything.
I've read the first 4 so far. The first I felt a bit at a loss, the others I suppose, are more like a world I am used to.
Mod
There have been a couple of stories about playing pranks, which is interesting. It all seems quite juvenile now but reminds me of the Bright Young Things and their treasure hunting parties, etc. and parties where they dressed up. That kind of quite childish stuff.
Is anyone else reading this at all? (It's still available for free download on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Diversity-Cr... )I found it more mixed than I remembered, but the prose is absolutely magnificent throughout. (BTW, I thought the opening story, As Easy As A.B.C., was the least successful of all, so if you're unsure, I'd skip that one.)
I'd be very interested in anyone else's views - especially of Mary Postgate and The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat. My spoiler-free review is here, if interested:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Mod
I feel he is a little like W. Somerset Maugham, in that readers forget how huge and influential he was at the time.
There was also a lot about playing pranks, which probably seemed a bit odd now, but you can see those stories paving the way for all the treasure hunts of the Bright Young Things.
Yes - but Kipling's pranks are either vengeful or aimed at "correcting" someone's behaviour. It's a big theme in Kipling (Stalky & Co is almost entirely composed of such stories), probably due at least in part to the cruel treatment he experienced as a child when his parents were in India and left him in "The House Of Desolation" with "the Woman", as he invariably refers to them in his autobiography. For example:"It was an establishment run with the full vigour of the Evangelical as revealed to the Woman. I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors—I and whatever luckless little slavey might be in the house, whom severe rationing had led to steal food. Once I saw the Woman beat such a girl who picked up the kitchen poker and threatened retaliation. Myself I was regularly beaten. The Woman had an only son of twelve or thirteen as religious as she. I was a real joy to him, for when his mother had finished with me for the day he (we slept in the same room) took me on and roasted the other side."
It's hardy surprising that injustice rectified and cruelty revenged figured large in his later writing. There is often a satisfying sense of justice in the stories, but they do occasionally spill over into the unpleasantly cruel, I think.
If A.B.C. is part of a series, I'm unaware of it - and I've read quite a lot of Kipling in my time. I could well be wrong, though. Like all the best science fiction, it's a story which makes a lot of important, occasionally subtle, social and political points; for me it just didn't work all that well as a story, though.
For us, Kipling's reputation tends to be overshadowed by his self-identification with British colonial imperialists and he has become a largely 'unfashionable' author.
That said, he has been claimed by such opposing figures as Billy Bragg and Margaret Thatcher - the former in trying to establish a left-wing English nationalism, the latter in her warnings of European encroachment on British sovereignty.
He has also been described as 'poetry's Dickens' and, more negatively, if ambivalently, by George Orwell as a 'jingo imperialist... morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting' while admitting that 'every enlightened person has despised him... nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there' (1942).
So, a complicated author - and a chance to make up our own minds. Sounds like this will be an interesting discussion - all welcome - starting August.
A free Gutenberg edition is available here: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13085