Two on Kipling

30:3, Reviews Shaw's aborted affair with Stella and his despair over the war at first drained his playwriting energies but then bred three plays, including two of his best: Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Saint Joan. The letters help explain this development. Like Captain Shotover (Shaw-over, one whose shots are over, one who overshoots), Shaw eyes youth and romance with a spark of nostalgia but castigates both when they translate into social and political folly. Beyond the old captain, his spirit extends to the life-force Ancients of Back to Methuselah, but then goes on to assert the redemptive vigor of Joan. Overall, age and vitality coalesce in the letters, characterizing a writer who charges rather than retires into his seventies. Aside from this cohesive strain, Shavian fireworks and biographical details in this volume should offer fodder to critics and scholars for years to come. Likely to stir classicists is a blast at Sophocles as one who had "the brains of a ram, the theatrical technique of an agricultural laborer, the reverence for tradition of a bee," a judgment Shaw develops in a rollicking parody of Oedipus Rex. Likely to titillate Freudians is his subsequent admission that were he to discover that his wife was his mother his affection for her "would be not only intensified but elevated" (14-18). The human being beneath the famous mask emerges elsewhere in his foolish vulnerability with Stella, his concurrent attachment to his wife, his pride in being Irish, his motorbike escapades, his good humor in parrying vitriolic attacks, his bluntness in rejecting some who appealed for money while financing others on the sly, his generous counsel, his adroit tact in consoling the wounded and the bereft. Long letters to a would-be biographer, Thomas O'Bolger, provide a mine of biographical information. Once again Dan Laurence has proven himself a careful, discriminating editor. His selections offer a representative view of Shaw's correspondence during these years; his annotations are detailed and pertinent. A few scholars might wish for even more subject entries in the index, but as it is the index runs to 69 pages, no small sign of Laurence's diligence. In sum, while these letters are but flares from an epistolary volcano, they arc tellingly, shedding a lot of light. Charles A. Berst ____________________________________U.C.L.A._________________________ TWO ON KIPLING Thomas Pinney, ed. Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-88. London: Macmillan, 1986. $22.00 Andrew Rutherford, ed. Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879-1889. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. $34.50 These are exciting times for students of Kipling: there is perhaps no other classic author of his stature the canon of whose significant work is growing so 338 30:3, Reviews rapidly. Kipling's combination of precocity and huge talent was spotted very early; now, in these volumes, the generalisation is given what Henry James (one of those who was deeply impressed by the young Anglo-Indian) would have called solidity of specification. At sixteen Kipling was "fifty percent of the 'editorial staff" of the only daily paper in the Punjab, and the early writings that Thomas Pinney has selected and reprinted are part of the large output, much of it no longer identifiable, produced for the OViV & Military Gazette under enormous pressure and in climactic conditions that were often near-intolerable. An account of his daily work as a journalist dated 17 November 1882, which Pinney includes in his excellent introduction, has the vigour, self-confidence and bravura that we associate with the mature Kipling; and indeed it is surprising to discover how early some of his central ideas, and many of his idiosyncratic features of style, manifested themselves. The extent of these early writings has always been a bibliographical puzzle. Kipling was not eager to have them resurrected, and wrote in 1924 that "a man does not like his boy-hood's play work (for that is what it comes to) being given to the public after nearly forty years." Since the death of his last surviving child in 1976, however, four books of cuttings have come to light and yielded evidence of his authorship of 830 previously unattributed pieces. Other sources...