Remembering Rudyard Kipling
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.23.06 | 11:02 PM ET
Seventy years after Rudyard Kipling’s death, novelist and poet Jay Parini donned a dark suit and tie and journeyed to Burwash, England to attend a church service to remember and celebrate the author of “The Jungle Book” and other works. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Parini recounts the experience and reflects on Kipling’s life and legacy.
“Kipling has lost favor as an apologist for empire, forever associated with his stories of British rule in India, poems like ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ and his friendship with Cecil Rhodes,” he writes. “But last month the church was packed with Kipling fans, most of them elderly, who had come from near and far. The local townspeople had turned out as well, to honor their favorite son.”
After the service, he had tea with members of the Kipling Society at the town hall near the church.
Everyone seemed to have a favorite strain in Kipling’s work. I most admire the very early stories, of India, and the very late tales, with their occult aura. Someone else preferred the school stories, as in Stalky & Co. Still another spoke up for novels like The Light That Failed. An elderly woman said that she rereads Kipling’s vivid autobiography, Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, at regular intervals, always with appreciation. I also put in a good word for the poems, which T.S. Eliot admired greatly and edited. Everyone agreed that Kipling had deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1907. There were laments that he is not still widely read.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
