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Rudyard Kipling
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS Paperback: 356 pages Cornell University Library. 2009. ISBN-10: 111234909X Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 07/09/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? yes. * * * * * review: Rudyard Kipling was 32 when his first collection of short stories, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, was published in 1888. He had first (1886-7) issued 28 of them in the pages of his Anglo-Indian employer, The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India. The 40 short stories are of high quality and soon won for the young author a readership in India, Britain and America that propelled him to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Most of the characters displayed are British (including Irish) men, women and children. The men are often young Lieutenants (Subalterns) or enlisted men just assigned to a British or Native regiment in Queen Victoria's India. Less often the men are in business or are civil servants, married or not, assigned to running a district of several hundred thousand natives or advising the rulers of Princely States. Romance is a major theme. Thus the tale, "The Strength of a Likeness," begins: "Next to
a requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young
man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an
unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and businesslike,
and blase, and cynical."
A couple of pages later: "Open
and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to any
sort of woman."
From April to October things are so hot in India's Plains that the officers and civilians send their womenfolk and children to cool Hill Stations at 6,000 feet or higher. Thus, Simla, in the Himalayan foothills, became the summer capital of British India. Kipling's newspaper sent him there to file reports. And he observed the going ons of Viceroys, Commanders in Chief, older women who delighted in wrapping subalterns around their fingers and natives interacting with their white rulers. PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS contain more than one excellent ghost story, premonitions of death, the trials of boredom, ill health (especially the threat of cholera and typhoid), career frustrations, barely understood relations with the Hindus and Muslims being ruled and miitary and spying adventures in Burma and Afghanistan. In my own reading experience and judgment, a dozen or more of the PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS deserve appearing in any anthology of the world's finest short stories. Read a few and see if you agree! -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/372432014.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 07/10/2011 Title of Review: Who but Rudyard Kipling could have published at age 22 PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS? by qigongbear Reviewer's rating: * * * * * Review: Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, British India in December 1865. His parents sent him at age five to be educated in England, but could not afford to send him to a university. Later a job was arranged for him to go out to in Lahore, Punjab, British India, as Assistant Editor of the Civilian and Military Gazette, whose readers in the Punjab were mainly British expatriates (military, civil servants, businessmen) resident in Queen Victoria's Indian Raj. So at age 16, young Rudyard sailed back from England to the land of his birth and became a journalist, a very good one. For the next five years "Ruddy" lived with his mother and father, both talented writers, in Lahore. Young Rudyard Kipling was soon contributing witty, satirical verses to the Gazette. Assigned for six months to the Indian hill station summer capital of Simila, Kipling proved a keen observer of the social scene and drew heavily on the sometimes peculiar mores of Anglo-Indians at work and play. In 1887 he went to work for another Anglo-Indian newspaper, The Pioneer, which was circulated throughout all of India. For The Pioneer Kipling wrote more verses and short stories. In 1888, when Kipling was only 22, forty of his short stories were collected and published in book form as PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS. These and later writings cleared the way for him to become the first Briton to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. In my opinion, a dozen or so of PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS should appear in any anthology of greatest English short stories. The PLAIN TALES are much about young men in love for the first time (often with older worldly married women). They include ghost stories and tales of wars in Burma and Afghanistan. There is much grappling with boredom in men's professions, the trials of men and women confronting poor sanitation and early death due to cholera, tuberculosis or typhoid. Let me mention three stories at random.
-- (1) The first PLAIN TALE is entitled "Lispeth." Readers of Kipling's great spy and religious novel of 1900, KIM, will find a hill woman much like Lispeth -- the Woman of Shamlegh. Both women were educated in good Christian mission schools and spoke flawless English. Both were jilted by handsome young Englishmen whom they had saved from death and nursed back to health. Both Lispeth and the later Woman of Shamlegh reject their English, Christian education and return in anger to primitive living in the Himalayas. Of Lispeth, the Chaplain's wife said: "'There
is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the heathen ..
and I believe that Lispeth was always at heart an infidel.' Seeing
she had been taken into the Church of England at the mature age of five
weeks, this statement does not do credit to the Chaplain's wife."
-- (2) "Beyond the Pale" begins thus: "A man should, whatever happens,
keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White
and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the
ordinary course of things -- neither sudden, alien nor unexpected."
By tale's end white man Christopher Trajago, had dallied for weeks with a 15-year old Hindu widow named Bisesa who prayed day and night for a lover. But Bisesa grew jealous of Trajago's attention to a white memsahib. She sent him away after saying: " ...'it
is not good that I should have made you dearer than my own heart to me,
Sahib. You are an Englishman. I am only a black girl' -- she
was fairer than bar-gold in the Mint --
'and the widow of a black man.'"
Weeks later a disguised Trajago returned to Bisesa's seclued cul de sac. He knocked at her grating and it was opened. "From the black dark, Bisesa held out her
arms into the moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and
the stumps were nearly healed."
Bisesa would never again be "able to knead her own bread." -- (3) In "Tod's Amendment" Tods "was an utterly fearless young
Pagan, about six years old, and the only baby who ever broke the holy
calm of the Supreme Legislative Council."
This PLAIN TALE FROM THE HILLS is set in 7,200 feet high Simla, summer capital of the Indian Raj. Tod's parents are well placed Anglo-Indians. At tale's beginning, Tods's pet goat has run off into the Viceroy's garden, dragging Tods through the flower-beds. The Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and other dignitaries happily rescued Tods and his kid. Later Tods would return the favor in a clever cross-cutural way. Speaking several native languages better than English, Tods discovered widespread Indian discontent with a pending Bill to regulate land tenure. He explained during dessert at his parents's home to the Viceroy's Council's Legal Member why Indian farmers were discontent. "'You don't speak my talk, do you,
Councillor Sahib?'
'No, I am sorry to say I do not,' said the Legal Member. 'Very well,' said Tods, 'I must fink (think) in English.'" The Legal Member then did his own in-depth polling of native opinion and found that Tods had been right. The Bill was quietly amended and passed in a form that proved popular to Indian farmers. "In the Legal Member's private-paper box
still lies the rough draft of the Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwary Revised
Enactment; and opposite the twenty-second clause pencilled in blue
chalk, and signed by the Legal Member, are the words 'Tods'
Amendment.'"
Read PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS to bring back the bygone days of the British Raj in its heyday. The English men, women and children who formed its ruling class, had huge responsibilities and often discharged them with considerable success. All this despite an enervating climate, isolation, illnesses and chronic boredom. Enjoy! -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Rudyard _Kipling_PLAIN_TALES_FROM_THE_HILLS-74- 1749942-210137-Who_but_Rudyard_Kipling_could_have _published_at.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 07/10/2011 title of review: "When a man begins to sink in India ... he falls very low" rating: * * * * * review: "When a man begins to sink in India, and
is not sent Home by his friends as soon as may be, he falls very low
from a respectable point of view."
To demonstrate the truth of that sentiment is the task of a short story called "To Be FIled For Reference." It appears as 40th and last of PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, published in book form in 1888 by 22-year old Rudyard Kipling. The narrator, meant very likely to be Kipling himself, runs across 35-year old loafer and drunkard Briton MacIntosh Jellaludin. A learned product of Oxford University, and drunken babbler in classical Greek and German, McIntosh spends his nights in a native flat just off the ancient Sultan Caravanserai. He looks more 50 than 35. McIntosh has lived affectionately with a native woman for the past three years. He tells his narrator friend: "I
require neither your money, your food, nor your cast-off raiment. I am
that rare animal, a self-supporting drunkard."
Dying of pneumonia McIntosh Jellaludin passes reverently to his only English friend a massive manuscript containing all his wisdom. "The papers were in a hopeless muddle." In another PLAIN TALE, Gabral Misquitta, a half-caste friend of Kipling, tells how five years ago he became addicted to opium smoking, after first experimenting with Black Smoke at his home in Calcutta. An old Chinaman, Fung-Tching, collects Misquitta's inheritance from an aunt, 30 rupees per month, and for that gives Misquitta good opium to smoke, sufficient food to eat and a place to sleep in colorful quarters. Misquitta told Kipling: "I
should like to die ... on a clean, cool mat and with a cool pipe of
good stuff between my lips."
In "The Taking of Lungtungpen," Kipling's great chum, Private Terence Mulvaney, an Irishman, recalls how he inspired young Lieutenant Brazenose and 24 raw recruits to swim the Irrawaddy river and capture the bandit-ridden town of Lungtungpen. This the British do storming in stark naked (their clothes having been kept dry on tree trunks pushed across the stream) against their almost completely surprised enemies. The town's Headman asked later (as phrased in Mulvaney's Irish English: "'Av
the English fight like that wid their clo'es off, what in the wurruld
do they do with their clo'es on?'"
To Mulvaney the answer is clear enough: "'They
tuk Lungtunpen nakid; an' they'd take St. Petherburg in their dhrawers!
Begad, they would that!'"
And so they go: 40 PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS. These are stories of a relative handful of English, Scots and other Britons ruling, as the Paramount Power in India, millions of Hindu, Muslim and other subjects, speaking dozens of major languages. These men are bored, their health is often shattered, they drink too much, they fall in love with the wrong women. And very young Rudyard Kipling watched them do it. PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS: a brilliant early work by a future Nobel Prize winner. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Richard Holmes - SAHIB: THE BRITISH SOLDIER IN INDIA. -- Rudyard Kipling - BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS, KIM. -- Philip Mason - THE MEN WHO RULED INDIA. http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review .aspx?reviewid=1738896 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 07/10/2011 title of review: "a few kisses are better and save time" rating: * * * * * review: His story is briefly told in "Wressley of the Foreign Office." Know that in Queen Victoria's Indian Empire, if you worked for "the Foreign Office," your job related you one way or another to native Rajahs enjoying various degrees of independence from "the Paramount Power" represented by the Queen-Empress's Viceroy. Wressley was once such man: middle-aged, omni-competent bureaucrat. The common belief was: "Wressley knows more about the Central Indian States than any living man." When an old Rajah lay dying, whoever Wressley judged the rightful heir inevitably became the ruling monarch, no matter how complex the pros and cons. He was fine so long as he immersed himself in his work by day and by night. But one day, "Without reason, against prudence, and at
a moment's notice, he fell in love with a frivolous, golden-haired girl
... Tillie Venner."
Wressley wooed Miss Venner in the only way he knew how: he tried to make her understand and love his work. And she either did so or pretended to. Wressley judged
"that the best work of a man's career should be laid reverently at (a
girl's) feet. ...but in ordinary life a few kisses are better and save
time."
He promised Tillie a great gift if she would only wait for it a year. He then took a leave of absence and laboriously produced his magnum opus, NATIVE RULE IN CENTRAL ASIA. He had many copies made and excitedly presented one to TIllie. "I give her (lisping) review verbatim:
'Oh, your book? It's all about those howwid Wajahs. I didn't understand
it.'" "Miss Venner did not know what magnum opus meant; but she knew
that Captain Kerrington had won three races at the last Gymkhana."
Wressley didn't press her to wait for him a day longer. Wressley then went sadly back to his old job and never again did it one fourth as well as he did before he fell in love. Years later young Rudyard Kipling read the sole surviving copy. And admired it. Said Wressley, "Now, how in the world did I come to write
such damned good suff as that?" He added: "Take it and keep it. Write
one of your penny-farthing yarns about its birth. Perhaps -- perhaps --
the whole business may have been ordained to that end."
Does this make you want to read "Wressley of the Foreign Office?" There are 39 more stories as good or better about Queen Victoria's India in 22-year old Rudyard Kipling's 1888 published collection of short stories called PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS. Several are about young officers or civil servants falling in love with unsuitable older women. Others, like "Wressley of the Foreign Office" describe old men enamored of empty-headed girls. There are PLAIN TALES of martial derring-do in Afghanistan and Burma, or of ghosts or of tricks played by bored young men on one another or on their superiors or of Anglo-Indian men and women confronting cholera or typhus. PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLs draws on Kipling's first few intensely busy years as a junior journalist and editor in Lahore and Abbottabad. He spent months in the hot season writing and observing in 7,000 foot high Simla, India's summer capital, the doings of the rulers of India, their memsahibs and their daughters and the young men who spent their leaves in hill stations in search of love. It is a grand canvas, filled with unforgettable characters by one of Earth's greatest short story writers. -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Tales-Hills-Rudyard-Kipling/ product-reviews/111234909X/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie= UTF8&showViewpoints=1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 07/10/2011 Title of this review: Rudyard Kipling's First Masterpiece was published when he was 22 years old. Product Rating: ***** Pros: 40 of the world's best short stories. Queen Victoria's Indian Raj in its heyday. Cons: "The white man's burden" and the British men and women who shouldered it in India. The Bottom Line: If you know of 22-year olds writing better short stories than Rudyard Kipling's PLAIN TALES OF THE HILLS, please let us know. Enjoy one and devour the remaining 39. aohcapablanca's Full Review: I begin this review of Rudyard Kipling's 1888 collection of 40 short stories, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, fresh from admiring and belatedly participating in a spirited exchange of views at amazon.com. Read there for yourselves and enjoy the review of PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS by Robert S. Newman and the comments exchanged in December 2010 with Newman's critic, James M. Rawley. As fine and enlightening and well reasoned set of opposing views of the same book as anything I have read anywhere on line. Newman dislikes Kipling because his characters are superficial and because Kipling seems a racist when it comes to portraying native peoples, particularly sub-Continent Indians. Rawley disagrees and suggests that Newman could say much the same of Shakespeare and Dante. Much material for deep thinking! That dispute puts me in mind of something I heard my father say many times: "There is only one difference between a
man we call our friend and a man we call our enemy. We willingly
overlook the faults of our friend; we magnify the faults of our enemy."
I find very much to admire in 22-year old Rudyard Kipling's first published book, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS (Calcutta, 1888). Since age 16 young "Ruddy" had labored like a dog as journalist and assistant editor of two related Anglo-Indian newspapers: THE CIVIL AND MILITARY GAZETTE of Lahore and latterly THE PIONEER of Abbottabad. Interspersed with his straight reporting over six years the pages of those two sub-Continent journals also printed some of Kipling's earliest published verses and short stories. Kipling's fiction grew out the young writer's acute observations of the passing human parade in Northern India, including months he spent on assigment in the Raj's summer capital, 7,000 foot high Simla. The 40 PLAIN TALES tell of homesick young British subalterns (Lieutenants), civil servants and businessmen, of their bouts with depression, a host of tropical illnesses, a horribly hot climate, boredom and loneliness. Young men fall in love with unsuitable older women, who wear their admirers as trophies to be displayed. Wise, achieving older men fall in love with empty-headed unappreciative young girls. -- A six year old white boy named Tods,
thanks to his fluency in several native languages, unintentionally
persuades the Viceroy's top law officer, to amend a land redistribution
law along lines sought by Tods's Hindu and Muslim farmer friends.
-- A hill country woman converted to Christianity and baptized Lispeth returns in anger to her people and their gods after being jilted by a young Englishman whose life she had saved. -- Bisesa, a 15-year old Hindu widow, has her hands severed by her uncle after she falls in love with a young white sahib. -- One sahib takes protracted but effective psychological revenge on a Sub-Commissioner who had sold him a horse wilder than he had bargained for. -- Private Mulvaney tells of the time he and 24 raw recruits under Lieutenant Brazenose stormed and captured a bandit stronglhold in Burma, all naked as they came from their mother's wombs. Irishman Mulvaney's conclusion from the episode: "'They
tuk Lungtunpen nakid; an' they'd take St. Petherburg in their dhrawers!
Begad, they would that!'"
-- Soldiers and the wives that attend them sicken and die of cholera. -- A charming toddler named Muhammad Din wins the heart of his father's white employer, only to sicken silently and die. Less than two decades after PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS and even less time after BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS, KIM and THE JUNGLE BOOKS, Rudyard Kipling became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. After PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, Kipling's literary future was assured. -OOO- Recommended: Yes. http://www.epinions.com/review/Book_Plain_Tales_from_the_Hills_ Rudyard_Kipling_2047674155/content_556806082180 --=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/kipling_plain.html file: kipling_plain |