Volume 25, Number 3 · March 9, 1978
A Gentle-Violent Man
By V.S. Pritchett
The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works
by Angus Wilson
Viking, 370 pp., $15.00
The title of Angus Wilson's longawaited exploration of Kipling's life and works is well chosen by an author who himself is a novelist, a searching critic, and an intelligent traveler who knows India and has his own early 'colonial' connection with South Africa. Kipling's 'ride' was indeed an exotic one, not only because of a childhood and youth passed between India and England, his sojourns in the United States, South Africa, and, later on, his habit of wintering in Cape Town and in France; but because of the restlessness of his eye and temper. As with many Victorian Englishmen, his mind was the explorer's: in his middle years it also opened outposts in history, in Roman Britain and Christian Antioch, but also in his clinical studies of illness—illness itself being an inexorable country we are bound to know: its scenery was psychosomatic. Like many of the colonizing kind he became more gaudily English than the English in the sense that Englishness became an extra conscience and a personal cause. That cause was Kim's, whose passionate cry 'Who is Kim?' indicates Kipling's similar search for an identity within a caste.
Review, 3778 words
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