Judge Of Their Surprise

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30419, 18 April 1964, Page 4

Judge Of Their Surprise

[A Fourth Leader in “The Times”]

A chorus of suprised praise coming from all directions is audible. The highbrow critics have just discovered Kipling. Put on to the scent by a wellchosen collection of essays and a Danish professor’s study, they have found, in the words of one of them, that “this awkward, unpopular writer” deserves their patronage to “restore the balance of Kipling’s reputation.” He has, they reflect with just a tinge of a blush, been left out too long in the cold. It was fashionable, one of them recalls, to speak of Kipling as a fascist, and another shakes his head at the thought that he inspired at best, even in his heyday, only a grudging respect among literary people. So we are urged to be grateful to Mr Edmund Wilson and George Orwell for helping us to see the light that had failed. Now average readers of Kipling in Britain have never heard of Mr Wilson, stimulating critic though he is, and they know Orwell best for other than his splendid excursions into literary criticism. They have just gone on reading—and buying—Kipling in blind ignorance of the ups and downs of taste in the higher

circles of appreciation. Last year 120,000 copies of Kipling’s prose works in stiff covers and paperbacks, were sold inside the Commonwealth. Best-sellers among these should, surely, have been shunned. “Kim” a (sinister preview of 007 in an ugly imperial setting), “Stalky and Co.” (the old school tie, sadism, militarism, addiction to Latin), “The Jungle Books” and “Just So Stories (ugh! what a nauseating brew of whimsy and anthropomorphic attitude to animals), “Puck of Pook’s Hill” (history in the worst top-nat-ion tradition that “1066 and All That” killed for all rightminded people)—the list is too long, too large in its sales, and too painful for exposure to highbrow eyes. And there is worse to come. Plans are afoot for televising a Kipling Indian story a week. What is behind it all? Does the secret of success lie in the simple fact that Kipling could tell supremely good stories? At any rate, writers who can do that are at the moment in short supply. Ideological up-to-dateness, sound views on social and international affairs, even daring treatment of sex are not always substitutes for the too nearly lost art of story-telling.