Straightforward Treatment of a Major Theme in Kipling's Life and Work

BOOK REVIEWS 1. STRAIGHTFORWARD TREATMENT OF A MAJOR THEME IN KIPLING'S LIFE AND WORK Robert Moss. Rudyard Kipling and the Fiction of Adolescence. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. $22.50 Robert Moss, who has written on horror films, Charlie Chaplin, and the Scottsboro case, here makes a brave entry into Kipling studies with a respectably-scaled book on a very large subject. Despite the similarity between titles, Moss's work is not a reconsideration of the arguments pursued in R. Lancelyn Green's Kipling and the Children (1965), and indeed, as an updated doctoral dissertation, it operates within narrower limits than Green's groundbreaking investigation. Moss is not concerned with any poems that express adolescent attitudes. He devotes an entire chapter to "men in conflict," to the major characters of Soldiers Three and The Light that Failed; they may grow in maturity, Moss believes, but they do not learn to cope as adults with the problems of India, London, and "the East." He has practically nothing to say about Plain Tales from the Hills, and he uses adolescence as an interchangeable term for "boyhood " (p. xiii). The time limits of the study run from 1888 to 1901, the year in which Kim was published; hence, there is no consideration of Puck of Pook's Hill, of the later additions to Stalky & Co., or of the adolescents who masquerade as grown men in any number of short stories written during this century. The critical thesis (once we have adjusted, with some disappointment, to the boundaries Moss has established around his subject matter) is both simple and simply stated: Kipling's growth as an artist is directly related to his learning how to handle materials and emotional attitudes drawn from his own childhood and adolescence. Although as much may be said of many creative artists (Joyce, after all, never fictionalized any event that took place in Ireland after he reached the age of twenty), Kipling, despite a concern for personal privacy that developed during his Brattleboro years Into an obsession, was much more autobiographical in his art during the 1890s than in any subsequent decade. He did have, as Moss points out, great difficulty for many years in establishing a sufficient distance between himself and his subject matter. Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris of Soldiers Three are rebellious against authority, swagger boisterously, seek excitement passionately, and have "frequent fits of hysterical giggling" (p. 142). These traits, Moss believes, are the same as those identified by scientific treatises as "adolescent." (A note in passing: Moss's conceptual framework is weak, inadequately documented, and somewhat dated. The Appendix, which cites only four sources, refers to an article entitled "Child Psychology" in the 1968 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, misspells the name of the reference work, and neglects to record the name of the author of the article. We are treated to statements like "The Britannica is quite explicit about this . . ." when Moss might easily have cited his authority as Helen Lois Koch, or for that matter gone to the 15th edition of the Britannica and a more modern treatment of the same subject.) Because these soldiers three revel in their state of arrested development, Dick Heldar, of The Light that Failed, represents an important forward step. Dick 52 seeks to establish a firmer sense of his own identity; and although his "flamboyant death, fully endorsed by Kipling," represents for Moss "a refusal to leave boyhood" (p. 143), the novel represents an experiment in the dramatization of unresolved tensions. Mowgli, in The Jungle Books, has problems deciding whether he belongs to the jungle or to the man pack; he stands on the threshold of growing up, and Kipling is beginning to put in order the rich experiences of his "lands." Captains Courageous also deals with a boy, Harvey Cheyne, though Moss is correct in perceiving that Harvey's conversion to a recognition of the values of Gloucester fishing ways takes place too suddenly to be genuinely interesting. The true conflict lies elsewhere, between the codes of behavior of Eastern and Western America, and is more complex inasmuch as the American West has three separate layers. The book is, as Moss says, Kipling's ode...