Gilmour attempts the difficult task of distinguishing Kipling's (1865–1936) concepts of English patriotism and the civilizing mission of the British empire from those of his jingoistic contemporaries. This biography is liveliest when recounting Kipling's early successes as a chronicler of Anglo-Indian society in the short stories of Plain Tales from the Hills
and Soldiers Three.
In analyzing Kipling's work, Gilmour employs the efficacious strategy of looking first to the reactions of the writer's contemporaries, finding, for example, that the sentimental favorite "Mandalay" was initially excoriated by old Malay hands for its inaccuracies. While Gilmour (Curzon) gives convincing readings of such warhorses as the cautionary "Recessional," he can't meliorate the paternalism of "The White Man's Burden" (in passing, he dismisses "If" as an "unintended parody of public school" stoicism). The hortatory verses to which Kipling turned after settling permanently in England reached their apex in the Boer War fund-raising ditty "Absent-Minded Beggar," which Kipling himself thought awfu, though he was proud of its receipts for war widows and orphans. If Kipling warned against "the Hun" before the Great War, the bitterest irony of his last phase was that after the Tommy Atkinses he celebrated in Barrack-Room Ballads
had been wiped out in Flanders, as Gilmour keenly observes, Kipling's only lasting literary contribution to the war was the War Graves Commission's official epitaph for unknown soldiers. By the 1930s, Kipling's Germanophobia seemed prescient, but Gilmour builds his case for Kipling's pessimistic political insights into the future of Europe and the dissolution of the empire solely on Kipling's intuitions—which don't carry the same moral weight compared to his early meritocratic, optimistic "The Ballad of East and West." (May)
Forecast:Harry Ricketts's biography came out just two years ago (and is now out in paperback), but some review coverage should give an initial push to Gilmour.
