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Charles
Allen
KIPLING SAHIB: INDIA AND THE MAKING OF RUDYARD KIPLING 448 pages Publisher: Pegasus (May 5, 2010) ISBN-10: 9781605980904 Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 04/12/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? YES! * * * * * review: Rudyard Kipling celebrated his 35th birthday in December 1900. That same month the first chapter of his prose masterpiece KIM was published in the USA by McClure's Magazine. KIM and its immediate popular and critical success are where Charles Allen breaks off his compelling 2009 biography KIPLING SAHIB: INDIA AND THE MAKING OF RUDYARD KIPLING. According to Allen, Kipling continued for another three decades to grind out works of no little technical merit. A few later poems remain in the memory: "If," "The Smugglers" and "My Son Jack." Some later prose works for children endure: "Just So Stories" (published virtually simultaneously with KIM), "Puck of Pook's Hill," but not much else. Charles Allen's narrative ends: "With KIM he had said it all." The fictional boy Kim reflects, according to Allen, Kipling's own psyche: a rational, masculine side devoted to law and order and all things British and a passionate, anarchic feminine side increasingly admiring of Asia. In the novel Kim is pulled toward obedience to the great British Raj in India by Afghan horse trader Mahboob Ali, but toward mysticism, love of God and neighbor by the Red Lama. Which way Kim will go is left explicitly undecided by Kipling. Most scholars and writers of later KIM pastiches, take it for granted that Kim will opt for the Raj and a career as a spy. Not so Allen: the Lama has won. Kim is a devoted Buddhist, basking in sudden, eleventh-hour illumination. Allen's focus are the thirteen or so years that Rudyard Kipling spent as baby and boy and later as a very young man and journalist in Bombay, Lahore, Simla and Allahabad. India made the 1907 future Nobel Prize winner -- far more than did England -- according to the biographer. Kipling was writing memorable verse and prose at age 18. Charles Allen makes a good case for his thesis. Much, it seems to me, is, however, Allen's personal interpretation (how much time did Kipling really spend in India with prostitutes and opium?). But this merely means that it will take more than the four or five Kipling biographies now in print to give us Rudyard Kipling in the round. KIPLING SAHIB abounds in photographs and drawings. It has useful maps, ample endnotes, an up to date bibliography and a chronology of Kipling's works. A very, very appealing and useful read! --OOO-- http://www.biblio.com/books/327578668.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 04/14/2011 name of review: What Did Rudyard Kipling Believe About God and When Did He Believe it? rating: ***** review: If you are looking for a recent, unusually good biography of 1907 Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling, then Charles Allen's 2009 KIPLING SAHIB: INDIA AND THE MAKING OF RUDYARD KIPLING IS FOR YOU. It is not comprehensive, focusing as it does on the 13 years Kipling spent as boy and man in India. Thus it downplays its hero's trip across the USA in 1889 en route to England after his years as a very young newspaperman in Lahore and Allahabad. And the tale essentially ends in 1900 with the publication of Kipling's prose masterpiece KIM and shortly thereafter the JUST SO STORIES for children. In author Allen's opinion, Kipling had peaked by age 35. When his India inspiration left him, all that remained was his craft as a writer and story-teller. India had made Kipling and when the inspiration from India departed, Kipling had said almost everything important he wanted to say. Still to come, however, were his verses, "If" and "My Son John." And, by the way, his 1907 Nobel Prize for literature. There are fascinating facts (some merely plausible and inferences from hidden comments in letters by Kipling or others) in KIPLING SAHIB. He was in and out of crushes and romances several times. He hung out with prostitutes in India and England. He took opium. Very young Ruddy and younger sister Trix spent several horribly miserable, homesick years emotionally abandoned in a boarding house on the coast of England with no visits by their parents back in India. One unifying, albeit relatively slight, thread in KIPLING SAHIB is young "Ruddy's" evolving ideas of religion. Grandfathers both paternal and maternal had been ardent Methodists, direct disciples of the great Charles Wesley. Rudyard's parents were both raised Methodists, but Methodism "took" with neither father nor mother. Ruddy and Trix grew up in a family essentially indifferent to practicing any religion, except perhaps Freemasonry for John Lockhart. In India the family attended Anglican church services. Nonetheless, John Lockhart Kipling, a teacher of applied arts and curator of the Lahore Museum, thoroughly studied and wrote about Indian religions, especially Buddhism, and shared much of his knowledge with son Rudyard, notably during their collaboration on the spy novel KIM. As a toddler in Bombay, Ruddy had a Roman Catholic ayah from Goa who told him many traditional animal tales, which evidently stuck in memory. A male Hindu servant used to take him to Bombay temples. As he grew up, young Kipling admired Indian Muslims, and looked down on Hindus, especially Westernizing Hindus, satirized in KIM by in the figure of the fat baboo spy. Here are a couple of illustrative details of Kipling's religious evolution. In 1889, 23 year old Ruddy doted on two sisters, the married one more than the other. December 9th he wrote to the younger, Carrie Taylor, to clarify his then Christian-flavored religious beliefs. The biographer speculates that Carrie's father asked for this clarification. Kipling wrote: "Chiefly, I believe
in the existence of a personal God to whom we are personally
responsible for wrong doing. ... (Regarding the mystery of the
Trinity) I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of Heaven and Earth
and in one filled with His spirit who did voluntarily die in the belief
that the human race would be spiritually bettered thereby. ... I
believe, having seen and studied eight or nine creeds, in Justification
by work rather than faith, and most assuredly do I believe in
retribution both here and hereafter for wrong doing, as I believe in a
reward, here and hereafter for obedience to the Law. There! You have
got from me what no living soul has ever done before" (Ch 11).
Rudyard Kipling was an active Freemason and drew on that cult for his novella THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. In KIM he has his teen age Irish hero born and bred in India sent to the best Catholic boarding school for young sahibs in the country at the expense of a wandering Tibetan lama. Either Kipling knew very little of Catholicism or none of it stuck with Kim. But Charles Allen offers a rare among critics interpretation of the novel's ending: Kim has just experienced Buddhist enlightenment and will remain Buddhist for life. Most critics see Kim following his beloved Afghan horse trader friend Mahboob Ali in permanent service to the British Raj as a spy. Kipling himself left Kim's future open. According to his biographer, Rudyard had been persuaded over the decades by his pro-Indian father John Lockhart to see good things in both Hinduism and especially Buddhism. KIPLING SAHIB is an unusually compelling biography. It is supported by a large collections of photos and drawings, maps, an excellent index and up-to-date bibliography. If you love Rudyard Kipling, this book is must reading. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Charles_Allen_KIPLING_SAHIB _INDIA_AND_THE_MAKING_OF_RUDYARD_KIPLING-74-1727715-205897- What_Did_Rudyard_Kipling_Believe_About_God_and.html#rid_205897 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 04/14/2011 title of review: "I was born to write this book" reviewer's rating of KIPLING SAHIB * * * * * review One Kipling biography cannot possibly be enough. The man lived too long, had too complex a personality, flirted with too many women, took too much opium, wrote too many masterpieces for any one book to wrap it arms around him. Nonetheless, Charles Allen's 2009 biography KIPLING SAHIB is a fine stand alone portrait of the winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for literature. My copy has more than 364 pages of narrative, maps and photographs, followed by 61 pages of end notes, a nearly exhaustive Glossary of Indian and Anglo-Indian Words, up-to-the-minute Select Bibliogaphy and one of the most useful indexes I have ever read. What sets KIPLING SAHIB apart from other Kipling biographies is author Allen's showcasing of India, where Rudyard was born in 1865, spending his first five years being raised by servants in Bombay, and to which he returned to work as a journalist 1882 - 1889. After a leisurely trip across the Pacific, the USA and the north Atlantic, Rudyard Kipling landed in Liverpool and moved on to London to continue his already begun career as poet and prose writer. In short order Kipling became the object of frenzied reading public adulation. *** In the judgment of biographer Charles Allen, almost all Kipling's best work had been written by 1900 - 1901, where his narrative essentially ends with the creation of his masterpiece, the novel KIM. In Allen's view, Kipling was always at his best when writing about the India he knew and loved: expatriate British officials, journalists, adventurers and businessmen as well as Afghan horse traders, native spies working to keep the Russian Bear at bay, prostitutes, opium dens, and the quintessential British fighting man, Tommy Atkins. The biography's first words are: "Immodest as it sounds, I was born to write this book" (Preface). One of several reasons for that boast is the fact that in India both the biographer's great-grandfather and grandfather had given journalistic employment to Rudyard Kipling, or at least to his father John Lockwood Kipling. KIPLING SAHIB is anything but dull. Perhaps because the author speculates more than more cautious historians and students of psychology might do, e.g. about the extent of Rudyard's dabbling with Indian prostitutes or inhaling opium fumes. I rate this unusually fine book 4.7 stars, rounding up to 5.0. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Arthur R. Ankers - THE PATER - JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND TIMES 1837 - 1911 -- Peter Hopkirk - QUEST FOR KIM -- Rudyard Kipling - KIM http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/reviews.aspx?reviewid=1622719# =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 04/14/2011 title of review: How Charles Allen Came to Write KIPLING SAHIB rating: * * * * * review: Charles Allen's 2009 KIPLING SAHIB: INDIA AND THE MAKING OF RUDYARD KIPLING is so uniquely good that it needs no commending by me. Every trapping you want in a great biography is there: maps of the subject's movements in India, a packed Index, End Notes to the horizon, contemporary photos and drawings and the best little "Glossary of Indian and Anglo-Words" since the legendary but oceanically longer HOBSON-JOBSON, The Anglo-Indian Dictionary. And oh, yes, an up-to-the-minute Select Bibliography as well. The author puts 90 % of his emphasis on Kipling's India and India-related experiences (including Rudyard's and his younger sister Trix's miserable years stranded in an English boarding house while parents went back to India without them -- an abandonment the reason for which Charles Allen makes the first plausible explanation of I have ever read). Rudyard (Ruddy, Rud) Kipling spent only 13 years on the ground in India but those years made him. He was born in Bombay in 1865, became bi-lingual in the hands of a Goanese ayah and a Hindu bearer, and showed more observer than one great promise as a major writer during his newspapering years in Lahore and Allahabad. In the view of Allen, Rudyard was essentially written out at age 35 in 1900 - 1901 with publication of KIM and JUST SO STORIES. This is a brilliantly conceived foreshortened biography, admirably and convincingly presented. Perhaps after six or seven equally good specially focused similar biographies (e.g. the South Africa years, the Vermont years, World War One), we may say, "At last, we now have about all of the 1907 Nobel Prize winner that we are likely to get. But no one book can do justice to a man by turns dark and light, loving and vengeful, masculine and feminine, sceptical, Freemason, pro-Muslim and anti-Hindu, nationalist, imperialist and unabashed exhorter of the rising USA to "take up the white man's burden." I am particularly fascinated by Charles Allen's "Preface: Blowing the Family Trumpet" (21 pp. long in my 2009 paperback edition). Its first words had me hooked: "Immodest as it sounds, I was born to write this book." I think that he was! He grew up in an India still part of the Raj. His father was a Collector in Assam. His great grandfather had first gone out to India and grown wealthy as newspaper owner and later industrialist. Charles Allen's grandfather had then continued some of his father's work in newspapering. Both grandfather and father had known or studied Rudyard Kipling. Their descendant's Preface bears reading again and again. Let me end by recommending two other books for Kipling lovers. The first is by Kipling biographer Charles Allen himself and draws from interviews with the last generation of British officials and businessmen in India before partition and independence in 1947. The second, by Judith Flanders, is about the five Macdonald sisters, the eldest, Alice, being Rudyard Kipling's vivacious mother. See PLAIN TALES FROM THE RAJ and A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, And Louisa Baldwin -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Kipling-Sahib-India-Making-Rudyard/ dp/1605980900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid= 1302336752&sr=8-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 04/15/2011 Review Title: Rudyard Kipling Did Not Make It Easy To Know and Understand Him Product Rating: * * * * * PROS: Maps of India. Glossary of Indian words. Controlled speculations about what made Kipling tick. Engrossing. CONS: Speculations may go too far about Kipling's split personality, use of opium, prostitutes, religious beliefs. BOTTOM LINE: Biographer Allen's great-grandfather and grandfather helped make Kipling the grand prober of all things Indian. KIPLING SAHIB breaks off when hero is only 35 years old, with originality exhausted. aohcapablanca's Full Review: Scholarly and reader interest in Rudard Kipling (1865 - 1936) is sustained, deep and creative. More so, it seems to me, than in Sir Walter Scott or in James Fenimore Cooper combined. And this despite Kipling's currently politically uncorrect views about the British Empire and "the white man's burden" that the USA faced in 1899 in the newly conquered Philippine Islands. Kipling the man is endlessly fascinating. Born in Bombay, all but abandoned with younger sister Trix for years in an English seaside boarding house, young Ruddy was taught to read and write by a paid English foster mother and beaten by her son whom the children saw as Puritan devils straight from hell. For the rest of his life, and in tales and verses, revenge for wrongs done is a recurring Kipling motif. Returned to India at age 16 and leaving it again at 23, Rudyard had the elements of good journalism pounded into him and departed the sub-Continent with a deserved reputation as a young comer poet and prose fiction writer. India made Rudyard Kipling. He was rarely as good when writing of non-Indian themes, e.g. of Atlantic fishermen in CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. Biographer Charles Allen sees the 1900 - 1901 novel KIM as Kipling's absolute masterpiece and lingers step by step over the making of the tale of young Irish orphan Kimball O'Hara. In Allen's interpretation (almost unique among KIM scholars) the boy Kim gives in to his feminine, mystical side and dedicates himself to a life as a Buddhist after a final chapter's "enlightenment. His master the Red Monk, Teshoo Lama, has won the battle for Kim's soul and identity. In so doing, he has overcome Kim's earlier masculine love for Afghan horse trader and philanderer Mahboob Ali and temptation into service as a spy to the mighty British Raj under shadowy intelligence chief Colonel Creighton. Although Allen does not spill as much ink on any other single work of Kipling's up to age 35 - 36 (1901 - 1902), his biography tells quite a lot of everything major and many works minor that Kipling wrote from his school days at Westward Ho! through JUST SO STORIES. Throughout a passing parade of friends, enemies, childhood servants and their animal tales told in a Bombay nursery, dalliances, the heat of Indian summers, the clear skies of Simla and the Himalayas: the impression forms that every experience that Rudyard Kipling ever had worked its way deep, deep into his marrow and nervous system and re-emerged in poems, newspaper articles, letters, short stories and novels, almost all the best involving India. KIPLING SAHIB proceeds chronologically and presents the evolution of Kipling the story teller and writer. The task of biography is made harder by quirks in Rudyard's personality. Over the years, his circle of friends narrowed. Henry James gave away Kipling's wife at their wedding but grew into anything but a friend. Rider Haggard and Cecil Rhodes remained close. But boyhood friends (fictionalized in STALKY & CO., his remembrance of school days) who dared to speak or write of Kipling without permission were cut. Both Rudyard and his American wife Carrie, at his command, consigned letters to the fire. The author suppressed or tried to suppress dozens of writings, published and unpublished. Rudyard wrote one autobiographical fragment not long before he died, SOMETHING OF MYSELF, but it veils many amours, night adventures in opium dens and brothels of Lahore and tensions within "the family square" of father, mother and sister Trix. Nor does it illumine, as does biographer Allen in KIPLING SAHIB, Kipling's religious evolution, within a family indifferent to inherited Methodism, through nominal Anglicanism, dislike of Hinduism, admiration of Islam and growing fascination with lamaistic Buddhism of Tibet, culminating in KIM. For all the difficulties Rudyard made for them, scholars delight in chasing down wily fox Kipling to his lair. Some have spent lifetimes unearthing letters to or from their hero or one "coded" journal from his Indian newspaper days. Biographer Allen hints that there are more Kipling writings "out there" be be discovered, rediscovered and shared with the rest of us. All this scholarship Charles Allen drew on to produce KIPLING SAHIB. The biographer need apologize to no man for his first-class maps of India, Glossary of Indian and Anglo-Indian Words, contemporary photographs, reproductions of drawings, select bibliogaphy (including dozens of Kipling works in chronological order) and Index. Charles Allen (b. 1940), like his father and grandfather before him, was a boy in British India. He inhaled the family lore of how two of his ancestors "made" the journalistic careers in India of Rudyard Kipling and his museum curator father John Lockwood Kipling. At his grandfather's house Charles Allen saw a vast collection of Kipling memorabilia, autographed first editions, all broken up and sold at grandfather's death in 1958. Like Rudyard Kipling, his latest biographer, Charles Allen, is a prodigious laborer in a cause that he loves. He travels anywhere and often in pursuit of the author of KIM. Another five or six such specialized biographies, and we may finally know as much of Kipling as it is possible to retrieve. I rate KIPLING SAHIB 4.7 Stars, rounding up to 5.0 Stars. -OOO- Recommended: Yes. http://www0.epinions.com/review/Book_Kipling_Sahib _India_and_the_Making_of_Rudyard_Kipling_1865_1900 _Charles_Allen/content_547575205508-= =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/allen_kipling.html |