In Allah's Name

SOMETHING OF MYSELF--Rudyard Kipling--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Rudyard Kipling lies a-mouldering in his grave, but last week his words were again on the march. Crowds gathered, as always, to watch the parade go by, to stiffen with small-boy excitement at the drums and tramplings of the military band. Kipling's last parade petered out before the finish, for death had halted it; but there were enough of his veterans in the march-past to give the cheering crowds the old thrill. Even his many enemies watched curiously as the late great Rudyard Kipling, eyes right, steel pen at the salute as always, passed himself in review.

For 32-c-, Manhattanites had already read in the New York Times a condensed version of his autobiography, run in 16 installments. The newspaper version omitted many a literary anecdote, many a bludgeoning blow against Americans and such "lesser breeds without the Law." And much was omitted from the book; eclectic rather than exhaustive, it was well titled Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown. Kipling was no digger of his own dust, and his book was intended as a monument, not an exhibition. But friends and enemies alike found in it something of both.

Born in India (1865), where his father was director of the Bombay Art School, little Rudyard was sent "home" to be educated. For nearly six unhappy, browbeaten years of his childhood he boarded with the family of a retired naval officer. Every year he escaped for a month into the happy company of his cousins, the Burne-Joneses, whose house was loud with jolly artistic atmosphere, portentous with such figures as William Morris and Robert Browning in the offing. When Kipling's family discovered what kind of treatment he had been getting at Portsmouth (his mother visited him, went up to his room to say goodnight, and "I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff I had been trained to expect"), they immediately rescued him, took him off to a country cottage. There he met his cousin, one Stanley Baldwin. At 11 Rudyard was sent to boarding school, at Westward Ho!, a new school mainly for boys from Army families, memorialized in Stalky & Co. After graduation, instead of going on to a university, Kipling sailed back to India and his first job, on the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. He was not yet 17.

The "seven years hard" that Kipling worked as a journalist in India gave him all his training, most of his material, laid the foundations of a success that would resound in any day. He was 50% of his paper's white staff, and since his married chief dined at home and he at the club, heard daily what his readers thought of him. The manifold duties of his job, the consciousness of being an English sahib, matured Kipling precociously. He was green, but not for long. "My Chief took me in hand and for three years or so I loathed him. He had to break me in, and I knew nothing." He lived with his family, but often had the house to himself when they were away in the Hills; he had his own servant, his own rig, all that went with it. "Till I was in my 24th year, I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door. . . . And--luxury of which I dream still--I was shaved before I was awake!" Even when he dined alone, he always dressed for dinner.

When fillers were needed for the paper, Kipling wrote them: verse (Departmental Ditties) or prose (Plain Tales from the Hills). Other Indian papers began to buy his stuff; soon there were half a dozen paperbacked books signed Kipling on Indian railway bookstalls. By now Kipling had some money saved up. He turned his back on India and apprenticeship, returned to England to dip his fiery pen into the Thames. Almost immediately the Thames took fire. At 24 Kipling was the literary man of the hour. He cannily steered clear of cliques, ran foul of no colleagues. "I have never directly or indirectly criticized any fellow-craftsman's output, or encouraged any man or woman to do so." He walked into success like a happy somnambulist: "That period was all, as I have said, a dream, in which it seemed that I could push down walls, walk through ramparts and stride across rivers." Kipling's parents; who lived till he was 45, remained his most sympathetic and helpful critics. He credits his mother with one of his best-known lines: "What do they know of England who only England know?" His father helped him plan Kim, illustrated his son's collected works.

Many a U. S. schoolboy knows that Kipling looked like a big-browed, jut-jawed Groucho Marx; but few people anywhere would recognize a picture of his wife. Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Balestier, but readers of Something of Myself are led to infer that she could hardly be considered American. (Kipling does not mention his brother-in-law, Wolcott Balestier, who collaborated with him on the Naulahka, and with whom he quarreled.) The U. S. where he spent four years after his marriage, he mentions often, always in the same tone. "Reporters came from papers in Boston which I presume believed itself to be civilized and demanded interviews. I told them I had nothing to say. 'If ye hevn't, guess we'll make ye say something.' So they went away and lied copiously. . . ." He speaks of the U. S.'s "obedient and instructed Press," of the "overwhelming vacuity of the national life," of the U. S.-Canadian border: "And always the marvel--to which the Canadians seemed insensible--was that on one side of an imaginary line should be Safety, Law, Honor and Obedience, and on the other, frank brutal decivilization." But Theodore Roosevelt he liked.

Kipling was in South Africa when the Boer War began, and he stayed through it, enjoyed himself hugely. Very popular with the troops, he raised quarter of a million pounds for them from the royalties of some popular verses (The Absent-Minded Beggar). Very British about the Boers, he recalls that De Wet with 250 men, Smuts with 500, were handy fighters; "but, beyond that, got muddled." After the war he took a house for his family at Cape Town, next to Cecil Rhodes's, wintered there for seven years. Kipling's best-known poem, If,* which has been translated into 27 languages, was based on the character of Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, of Jameson Raid fame. Much of his patriotic verse (including Recessional) was given to newspapers free. "It does not much matter what people think of a man after his death, but I should not like the people whose good opinion I valued to believe that I took money for verses on Joseph Chamberlain, Rhodes, Lord Milner or any of my South African verse in The Times."

To Kipling at 70, looking back over his career, it seemed that every card in it "had been dealt me in such a manner that I had but to play it as it came." True, he had wanted to write a big novel--something "worthy to lie alongside The Cloister and the Hearth"--but that had not been vouchsafed him. On the other hand he had written some books that he knew were good: "My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw." Friends will add to that list; critics may subtract. In Something of Myself, Kipling's Daemon was not with him; he had long vanished over the horizon. But Kipling still followed, marching as to war, helmeted with the crescent of Islam, armored in Congregationalist thunder, proudly knapsacked with the White Man's burden.

*The famed but unpublishable ballad, The Bastard King of England, generally credited to Kipling, is supposed to have cost him the post of Poet Laureate.

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