Volume 25, Number 19 · December 7, 1978
Contradictory Kipling
By V.S. Pritchett
Rudyard Kipling
by Lord Birkenhead
Random House, 421 pp., $15.00
The late Lord Birkenhead's life of Kipling has had a wretched history. It had been written very much under the stern supervision of Kipling's daughter, Mrs. Bambridge, and under a contract that can only be called ferociously possessive of her interests and startlingly indifferent to the author's. She rejected his work entirely; for thirty years it has been unpublished, and the unfortunate biographer died in 1975, a year before his dragon. Naturally it was supposed the book contained scandals that had upset her, but now that we have the text it is plain there were none; indeed Kipling's self-punishing habit of shutting the door on himself, as we now see, would guarantee that.
Review, 1527 words
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