Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [6]
He settled in Rottingdean, on the Sussex coast, in 1897; that year the couple’s son, John, was born, and Kipling published the novel Captains Courageous. Two years later, on an ill-fated trip to New York, Kipling suffered a near-fatal bout of pneumonia and the sudden death of the six-year-old Josephine. Yet in 1899 he also brought out Stalky Co. and his restless travel book From Sea to Sea. From 1898 to 1907, during the Boer War (1899-1902) and afterward, he spent winters in South Africa. He formed a close friendship with Cecil Rhodes, who provided a house on his estate and who seemed to embody his own energetic imperialism. South Africa, Kipling enthusiastically wrote, is “nothing less than a new nation in the throes of birth—a nation with resources behind it of which it hardly dreams now.”8
Despite his literary fulminations, Kipling was a tame and docile husband, completely under the thumb of his dreadnought of a wife. One friend described his married life as “one of complete surrender. He had handed himself over bodily, financially and spiritually to his spouse,” obeying her commands without “any signs of murmuring or even of incipient mutiny.”9 Caroline, a cross between a possessive nanny and a prison matron, would interrupt him, finish his stories and, when he became too excited after a few bottles of wine, order him to an early bed.
In 1901 Kipling brought out Kim, his last and greatest novel, and the following year moved permanently to the rather gloomy Jacobean house called Bateman’s, in Burwash, Sussex, and hardened into a national monument. He published the famous children’s books Just So Stories in 1902 and Puck of Pook’s Hill in 1906, and in 1907 became the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The last tragic turning point in his life took place in 1915, when his son John was killed in the Great War, after which Kipling continually suffered from duodenal ulcers. He refused offers of a knighthood and the rare honor of the Order of Merit and began to write more complex and troubling stories that dealt with grief, shell shock, and neurotic states. Kipling died in 1936; his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey.
In 1901, the year Kim appeared, Queen Victoria died and Edward VII became king; President William McKinley was assassinated and was succeeded by Kipling’s friend Teddy Roosevelt. The Boer War, which began in 1899 and which Kipling reported in South Africa, continued until the British defeat in 1902. The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first wireless messages (Kipling later wrote a story called “Wireless”), and the Trans-Siberian Railway reached Port Arthur in Manchuria. The German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann published Buddenbrooks, Swedish playwright August Strindberg The Dance of Death, and American novelist Frank Norris The Octopus. The Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi and French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died; the French novelist and critic André Malraux and American movie producer and animated-film pioneer Walt Disney were born. The twentieth century had begun.
In Kim, Kipling creates an exotic atmosphere, full of vivid characters and incidents, and immediately draws the reader into his strange world. The novel concerns a religious quest and a quest for identity, and includes both enlightenment and espionage, tranquillity and violence. It combines social, cultural, and political history with the hardships and goal of a travel book. Like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922), Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944), and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea (1978), it is one of the rare European novels with a Buddhist theme. Kim and the lama, Dharma Bums on the Road, foreshadow the sprawling works of Jack Kerouac. Maugham, a great admirer of Kipling, wrote that he gives you “the tang of the East, the smell of the bazaars, the torpor of the rains, the heat of the sun-scorched earth, the rough life of the barracks.”10
Kipling achieved his brilliant effects by combining his two great themes, childhood and India, and by creating a bountiful array of characters, subtle modulations of style and speech, and a carefully wrought structure that controls the series of fortuitous encounters and picaresque adventures. Kim, the orphaned son of a drunken Irish sergeant and a nursemaid mother, has been brought up by a Eurasian opium eater, given free run of the narrow streets and back alleys of Lahore, and become completely assimilated to Indian life. The rainbow coalition of indigenous teachers, who lead him to his true identity and real vocation, are increasingly Europeanized; his English teachers, who train him as a spy, are increasingly sophisticated and significant.