Volume 23, Number 6 · April 15, 1976
Paleface
By John Bayley
Rudyard Kipling and His World
by Kingsley Amis
Scribner's, 128 pp., $8.95
Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire
by Philip Mason
Harper & Row, 334 pp., $8.95
What would Kipling have 'done' in one of the insoluble local crises of our time, like that of Palestine or in Lebanon or in Northern Ireland? A story called 'As Easy as ABC,' written in 1912, imagines a kind of super United Nations peace-keeping force, which is called out by a report of 'rioting and crowd-making' in Northern Illinois. Crowd-making constitutes 'invasion of privacy,' the worst possible crime in the society of the future—2065 AD—which Kipling is inventing. Invasion of privacy was what Kipling chiefly complained of in American life—that and casual violence. He had tried to sue his brother-in-law Beatty Balestier for threatening violence when he was living in Vermont. Edmund Wilson made much of that episode in The Wound and the Bow, and it is certainly true that Kipling follows the classic pattern of revenging himself in fantasy for the hurt committed in life.
Review, 3506 words
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