How reputations rise and fall in the fickle literary world!
Kipling's "Permanent Contradictions"
On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although one of England's most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man's-burden racism; to the modernist writers and the literati he was a mere tale-teller, a balladeer, a journalist. Unsurprisingly, the literary world that had flocked to Thomas Hardy's interment in Westminster Abbey eight years earlier stayed away in droves when Kipling was placed beside him. Jorge Luis Borges was a Kipling fan, and thought his work "more complex than the ideas they are supposed to illustrate." Kipling certainly thought that he had given his late stories multiple levels of meaning or "patina." |
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