KIPLING’S EARLY DAYS

Evening Star, Issue 22106, 13 August 1935, Page 3

KIPLING’S EARLY DAYS

FILES OF HIS OLD PAPER There were great men before Agamemnon and notable writers on the Allahabad ‘ Pioneer ’ before Iludyard Kipling, But it is his name and contributions that have made the paper famous and set its files—whole rows and years of them —among tho treasures that are dear ~to the collector’s heart and pocket. Yet when young Kipling started his career as a “ newspaper man ’’ ho was still in his ’teens, and by the time he was 25 he had forsaken journalism for literature and its laurels. It is the interval from 1882 to 1890 that gave him an ardent apprenticeship, and the records are to figure at Sotheby’s (says the London ‘Sunday Times’). They consist in tho main of 72 tall volumes—or cases, rather—of the ‘ Pioneer,’ dated in order from 1885 to .1890, and containing 1,832 daily issues, or practically a complete set. Instead of being bound into tight and bulky volumes, each month has a crimson buckram caso to itself, and all the issues are separate and well preserved. Nearly 200 contain Kipling’s _ early writings, some of them extending to five or six columns at a stretch. Besides tho travel letters which reappear in ‘ From Sea to Sea,’ there are many ‘ Bungalow Ballads,’ poems, and prose sketches or stories, some of which, like ‘ Pagett, M.P.,’ are as familiar and incisive as anything ho ever wrote.

REVELATIONS OF GENIUS

In order not to flourish his signature too much, he seems to have made or observed a rule to sign only one contribution when several were appearing in tho same issue, and here there are more unsigned than acknowledged because of this reserve. But any question about their authenticity, apart from the individuality of style, has been settled by close recourse to the office account books of the period, and these show what an amazing, output camo from this youngster of genius in those flowering days. The fact has already been revealed in the Kipling biographies of Captain Martindell and Miss Livingston, but these files of broad and handsome pages, packed with' his writings, are a revelation of his fertility. The proportion of signed and unsigned pieces is still more marked on the side of modesty in the case of ‘ The Week’s News.’ This was a weekly paper of the same dimensions, which* served to republish the best of the week’s contributions, and there are four tall cases, uniform with the other set, containing the complete file of the paper for the four years it lasted. One issue contains half a dozen Kipling contributions, including ‘ A Wayside Comedy ’ (it appears in ‘ Under the Deodars’), prose pieces reprinted in other books, and ‘ The Border Cattle Thief,’ a 12-verse poem. Catalogues have been prepared to go with the cases, and these embody valuable information for the bibliographer, as well as corrections of mistakes already made in standard works of reference. WRITING LIKE A WHIRLWIND. As in the case of the ‘ Pioneer ’ file, these four years of ‘ The Week’s News ’ are decorated with the work that went to- fill many a famous volume in the paper-covered railway library of Wheeler and Co., and now are enshrined in many a standard edition in the well-known scarlet covers, Ono may instance ‘ Plain Tales From the Hills,’ * Soldiers Three,’ The City of Dreadful Night,’ ‘ Life’s Handicap,’ and many more. As for the poems that appear here for the first and last time and have never been reprinted—well, as the author’s own phrase goes, that is another story. He has told us in a rivid chapter of autobiography about the atmosphere of ink and perspiration in which so many of these things were written, and in those days, as Archibald Forbes said of his war messages, he “ wrote like a whirlwind.” The world has been the gainer since, and is not likely to let the harvest die; but it is interesting to turn over tho yellowing pages and to wonder whether the files of any other newspaper have been treasured and_ encased like this, all because a precocious and spectacled junior of genius laboured in its service in years when the last century was closing down.