Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [12]
Kipling (punning on “vice”) reveals Lurgan’s true feelings and demonstrates the danger to Kim when Lurgan tests him with hypnosis: “Lurgan Sahib laid one hand gently on the nape of his neck, stroked it twice or thrice.... The light touch held him as in a vice, and his blood tingled pleasantly through him.... Another wave of prickling fire raced down his neck, as Lurgan Sahib moved his hand” (p. 150). Unlike the Hindu boy, Kim resists Lurgan’s hypnotic attempt to seduce him and (since the adventurous hero must remain asexual) proves himself worthy of the Secret Service. But the insidiously vicious character of Lurgan hints at the treachery and evil at the heart of the Great Game.18
Kipling was admired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and had a strong influence on authors as varied as the Russian Isaak Babel, the German Bertolt Brecht, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and the American Ernest Hemingway.19 Kim has been universally praised by many great writers for its sympathetic understanding of Indians and for its translation of their idiom into measured and dignified English. Edmund Wilson called it “an enchanting, almost a first-rate book.”20 T. S. Eliot thought it was Kipling’s “maturest work on India, and his greatest book.”21 Somerset Maugham believed it was “his masterpiece.”22 Just after the novel was published, Kipling’s older contemporary Henry James admired the richness of the characters and liveliness of their journey, and explained why the novel was such a joy to read:
The beauty, the quantity, the prodigality, the Ganges-flood, leave me simply gaping as your procession passes.... I find the boy himself a dazzling conception, but I find the Lama more yet—a thing damnably and splendidly done.... The whole idea, the great many-coloured poem of their relation and their wild Odyssey—[is] void of a false note and swarming with felicities that you can count much better than I. You make the general picture live and sound and shine, all by a myriad touches.23
Jeffrey Meyers, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, George Orwell, Errol and Sean Flynn, and Somerset Maugham.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), pp. 3-4.
2. Rudyard Kipling, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” In The Writings in Prose and Verse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), vol. 6, p. 368.
3. Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 17.
4. Rudyard Kipling, Letters, 4 vols., edited by Thomas Pinney (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990-1999), vol. 1, p. 70.
5. Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King,” Writings, vol. 5, p. 50.
6. Oscar Wilde, “The True Function and Value of Criticism,” in Kipling and the Critics, edited by Elliott Gilbert (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 7.
7. Kipling, Letters, vol. 2, p. 9.
8. Kipling, Letters, vol. 2, p. 335.
9. David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 214.
10. W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Prose (London: Macmillan, 1952), p. v.
11. Kipling, Letters, vol. 1, p. 98.
12. T. S. Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” in A Choice of Kipling