Kipling Companion

BOOK REVIEWS 1. KIPLING COMPANION Norman Page. A Kipling Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1984. $16.95 Kiphng has been worshipfuUy and loyally, if not always adequately, served by compilers of indices, dictionaries, guides, bibliographies, and handbooks. For instance 1899 alone, at which point he was less than a third of the way into his career, saw Kiplingiana, Roberton's The Kipling Guide Book, and Knowles' A Kipling Primer (only the last of much value). His early fame (a weU-known story nicely refreshed for us by the deft summary in Norman Page's preface) made every scrap of information and anecdote of interest to the public almost from the beginning. And already by the turn of the century Kipling's unceasing production of short stories and short poems together with the bibliographical confusions resulting from publication of many of his early pieces m India before their appearance in England had created a need for guides to his rapidly growing oeuvre. The Kiphng canon has continued to receive devoted attention, and the fifty years since his death have produced a mass of bibliographical, biographical, and annotative information, much of it not in the relatively tidy form of scholarly books and articles but in the somewhat eccentricaUy organized pages of the Kipling Journal and the eight-volume Reader's Guide to Rudyard Kipling's Work. Both are fruits of the Kipling Society, the formation of which Kipling himself regarded with "gloomy distaste." He might have felt more oppressed had he known with what energy the shghtest allusions in his work would be pursued and the care with which information of quite indirect relevance to it would be made avaüable by the Society. Nevertheless, as knowledge about life in India under English rule becomes fainter for aU but the speciahst (even though fascination with that life has its periodic revivals), the overall value of the information gathered by his devotees grows. Anyone who has wished to be able quickly to foUow up a reference to some piece of Kipling's prose or verse not included in one of the coUected editions, or check the onginal publication dates of certain variously reprinted works, or find a vaguely remembered story, or get straight the years Kiphng was actually in India or the United States has recognized the usefulness of a well-done "guide" or "companion" to Kiphng. At the same time the excess of information to be boiled down that has made such a guide so desirable has equally made it difficult to do properly. Norman Page's A Kipling Companion meets the challenge admirably; each section of the volume testifies to Page's scholarly intelligence and understanding of what the average user needs. The seven-page "Kiphng Chronology" gives just the right amount of detail to sketch the course of the author s life. The succeeding "Kipling's World" is divided into brief sketches of Kipling's life in each of its major venues: India, England, the United States, and South Africa. Such a scheme strikes me as much more serviceable for the purposes of the Companion than the standard brief biographical summary: most users of this volume are likely to be wanting to relate particular works to particular aspects of the author's life. The section on the short stories provides publication details, explanations of background where necessary, and brief examples of the comments of reviewers, 91 important critics, and fellow authors for each collected volume. Alphabetically arranged commentaries on each story foUow. In treating the individual stories Page again apportions space efficiently—the critical disagreements around stories Tike "Day Spring Mishandled" or "Mary Postgate" are adequately sketched while well-known stories that require little more than a two-sentence summary are handled accordingly. General comments on the relation of a story to Kipling's life or work as a whole are incisively phrased: of "The Arrest of Lieutenant Gohghtly," "This is an early example of a type of story to which Kipling was to become addicted, involving the physical humiliation of the morally objectionable." Page's summaries are on the whole notably superior to those in A Kipling Dictionary, edited by Young and McGivering (1967), though the latter retains its usefulness...