The Demon and the Muse

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE STRANGE RIDE OF RUDYARD KIPLING by Angus Wilson; Viking; 370 pages; $17.50

The sand of the desert is sodden

red,--Red with the wreck of a square that

broke;--The Gatling's jammed and the

Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust

and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed his

banks, And England's far, and Honour a

name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies

the ranks:

'Play up! Play upland play the

game!'

Only one man could have written those bully lines, and it wasn't John Wayne.

Rudyard Kipling, the laureate of British imperialism, of the white man's burden, and the stiff upper libido now seems a literary fossil. His world began to wobble after 1918 and the war that took the life of his son. The colonial India where he was born in 1865 lives on in Monty Python skits. In America, Kipling's credit lines followed those of Gary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Gunga Din, Errol Flynn and Dean Stockwell in Kim, Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King and, of course, Sabu, star of Hollywood's The Jungle Book.

Yet critics and children never seem to get enough of Kipling. Psychologists are forever picking at the locks of his complex personality, while kids pass effortlessly through to enter the artist's realm of enchantment and adventure. British Novelist and Critic Angus Wilson is the latest in a long literary line to attempt to penetrate the inner Kipling. As Wilson puts it, he seeks "the interrelation of the real world and the imagined in his art." The problem is that Kipling's perceptions of the world were often confused and inconsistent; his art was not. Thus he could praise advances that England brought to India, and just as quickly decry anything that altered authentic Indian culture. He especially disliked Western-educated Indians who adopted British manners.

Perhaps they reminded the author of his own emotional and cultural wrenchings. Wilson seems to think so. He writes that "even when they appear most impersonal, his political and imperial concepts spring from his own agonising sense of personal isolation." When Baa, Baa, Black Sheep first appeared in 1888, readers were not aware that this story of a boy separated from his parents was largely autobiographical. Until he was nearly six, Kipling lived in India, where his father taught art and eventually became curator of a museum at Lahore. Even on a teacher's low pay the family lived in comfort and privilege. For Rudyard, there were servants to tell him exotic tales and treat him like a little prince.

But in 1871 Kipling and his three-year-old sister went to England to board with a Southsea family. It was not uncommon for parents in colonial service to send their children home for reasons of education and health. Less usual was the manner of the young Kiplings' exile.

To avoid tears the parents tucked the children into a strange bed without a word of explanation and disappeared back to India. Their mother returned six years later to find a daughter who didn't know her, and a son seething with anger. He had been torn from an idyllic world and plunged into the suffocating sphere of middle-class Victorian rectitude. His surrogate mother despised him for his precocity, and her older son was a bully. In addition, Rudyard's severe nearsightedness had gone undetected.

Kipling later wrote that this bleak period was a good preparation for his future as a writer: "It demanded constant wariness, the habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; an automatic suspicion of sudden favours." This partly explains Kipling's impregnable defense of his private life in later years. In an age when popular writers had international super-star status, he and his American wife kept their distance. Kipling was enthusiastic about London's music halls but found its literary salons airless and provincial. Likewise, he appreciated America's irreverent Western humorists but not its Eastern life of letters. His comments about the New York publishing scene have not dated: "They have an intensely literary society there --same old names cropping up week after week at the same old parties, same old gags; same old dishwater as it might be in any city we could name--allowing for local colour and the necessity of Creating the Great American Literature." He was far more comfortable living apart from those who heaped praise and riches on him--and who might disappear with their attentions as capriciously as his mother had. He was a restless and frequent traveler. His homes included Brattleboro, Vt, where he wrote all of the Mowgli stories, the English countryside in Sussex, and Cape Town, South Africa. Yet he was hardly reticent. As a correspondent during the Boer War he lavished pride and affection on the average British soldier and championed the rights of returning veterans. As a Tory, he wrote political verse like the poem that foretold a time when a new source of energy would be found to release England from the tyranny of the coal miners' union.

Throughout this critical biography, Wilson examines the texts of Kipling's work for "deep contradiction between the political theories he formulated and the nature of his romantic artistic powers."

He looks to Kipling's puritanical Methodist forebears and the sobering effects of Darwinism for insights into the author's character. He even suggests that Kipling suffered from a fear of self-knowledge.

There is some truth in Wilson's points, but it is critic's qualified truth. Why there should be a contradiction between political views and romanticism is never made clear. Surely Kipling's early psychological jolts were as important as the heritage of John Wesley and Charles Darwin. As to Kipling's lack of self-awareness, it might be noted that he saw himself as an old-fashioned craftsman, not a 20th century confessional artist. Certainly he under stood the magical relationship between his demon and his muse. Which is why there are many critics of Kipling, but only one Kipling.

&3151;R.Z Sheppard

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