RUDYARD KIPLING IS INCONTROVERTIBLY ONE of the most renowned writers of the early twentieth century. Yet despite his name's irrepressible familiarity, he is also among the most disavowed. There may still be imaginatively wise children who prefer the enchantments of any page of Just So Stories (adorned with Kipling's own magical illustrations and ingenious verses) to the crude smatterings of the film cartoons—but Kipling is vastly more than a children's treasure. All the same, serious readers long ago relinquished him: who now speaks of Kipling?
The reason is partly contemporary political condemnation—enlightened postcolonial disdain—and partly contemporary literary prejudice. Together with Conrad, Kipling carries the opprobrium of empire, "the white man's burden," though his lavish Indian stories are often sympathetically and vividly understanding of both Hindu and Muslim. And he is ignored on the literary side because in the period of Joyce's blooming Kipling's prose declined to be tricked out with the obvious involutions of modernism. Unlike Joyce, James, and Woolf, he gets at the interiors of his characters by boring inward from the rind. Yet he writes the most inventive, the most idiosyncratic, the most scrupulously surreal English sentences of his century (next to which Woolf's are more predictably commonplace).
Kipling's late stories (he died in 1937)—"The Wish House" (in virtuoso dialect), "Dayspring Mishandled," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener," "The Eye of Allah," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" (an autobiographical revelation), "Mrs. Bathhurst," and so many others—form a compact body of some of the strongest fiction of the last hundred years: sly, penetrating, ironically turned. Kipling's wizardry for setting language on its ear, his insight into every variety of humanity, his zest for science, for ghosts, for crowds, for countryside, cast him as a master of kaleidoscopic narrative; no strand of civilization escapes his worldly genius. So even the most zealous proponents of postcolonial theory deserve—or at least ought not to eschew—the pleasurable rewards of Kipling.