Kipling & His Pessimism

Book Reviews Kipling & His Pessimism William B. Dillingham. Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xii + 383 pp. $69.95 IF ONE BOOK can alter our understanding of a major author, this one may. Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism presents Kipling not only as a craftsman but a person with important messages about the human condition. Dillingham divides his book in half, each with three chapters and each based on a premise. First, Kipling's life included numerous traumas that generated pessimism: unhappy years as a foster child, as a journalist in India, as a bereft parent with two dead children and as a chronically ill man. He found James Thomson's "The City of Dreadful Night" and Zola's naturalistic fiction appealing. In India and during his Far Eastern and North American travels (1889), he seemed drawn to slums. He decided the world was a "hellish" place; when internalized , this created an inner sense of grief, despair and bereavement—confirmed dramatically by the First World War. His fiction and verse often express an abiding anguish and sorrow that Dillingham analyzes in hallucinatory tales such as "The Phantom Rickshaw" (1885), "They" (1904) and "Mary Postgate" (1915). He proposes a radical revaluation of "The Gardener" (1926), claiming Helen Turrell had no son. "From the seedbed of pessimism," Kipling sought a compensatory creed to counter despair and found it in a combination of work, ritual, self-sacrifice and courage. For the second half of his book, Dillingham 's key text is "The Children of the Zodiac" (1891), a mythical tale that puzzles many readers but is "fundamental to an understanding of its author's most cherished ideas." The Children are junior-grade immortals whom Fate consigned to life and therefore to death. Their role on earth is to serve mankind, to toil, even to compose songs and poems to uplift melancholy mortals. Indeed, it is words (magical, if you will) that act as "a bulkhead 'twix Despair and the Edge of Nothing" and that are repositories of the past and therefore humanity's heroic challenge to oblivion. This insight leads to Dillingham's surprising conclusion that "The Jungle Book is principally a book of and about words and their intimate connection with what Kipling thought of as a hero." It is filled with "talk," and Mowgli must master formulaic language 439 ELT 49 : 4 2006 to survive. After noting the affinity between Freemasonry's insistence on ritual or true Master Words, Dillingham then rescues Captains Courageous from the charge of superficiality by insisting that its hero, Harvey Cheyne, is in training to become a child of the zodiac, a consecrated servant of his fellow men. If life is only a "dirty trick" that Fate plays on humanity, then the effort to turn the tables on Fate may include trickery, mischievousness, playacting (i.e., artifice). And this, according to Dillingham's audacious reading, is exactly the point of Stalky & Co, a book full of gags and laughter that negate life's Darkness and prepare boys for unselfish adulthood. The three student-heroes constitute an Inner Ring whose bizarre performances aim at rectifying injustices. The book is emphatically not a manual for the mistreatment of colonized subjects. The next step is Dillingham's claim that "Kim is not about the glory of the British Empire but about the glory of the human spirit of heroism ." For all the surface realism of Kim and Kipling's insistence on getting his facts right, there is no more literal reality in the novel than in Stalky & Co. Dillingham calls it an "ode." It is an intensified version of "Stalkyism" played out in the imperial "Great Game." The British Secret Service is transformed into a brotherhood whose mission is protecting people from disorder and meaninglessness. Artifice (playacting, disguises, costumes) continues its role. Like a child of the zodiac, Kim knows "all evil" yet finds joy in living. He, like his mentor, the Lama, has two sides to his head that should be interpreted as complementary, not divisive. He, like the Lama, is passionate and action prone but devoted to self-conquest. Overt passion linked with self-discipline is a bridging concept that suits Kipling's creed of moral heroism...