Starting Life's Handicap
Jan. 28th, 2010 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI'm re-reading Kipling- as I do periodically. I'll be blogging my progress. Expect this to be the first such post of many.
Life's Handicap is an 1891 collection that contains some of the best of the Indian short stories. "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney" is a shockingly amoral farce with flashes of tenderness and beauty; really there's a whole world contained in its 30 odd pages. "The Courting of Dinah Shadd" is about love and sex and loyalty- male fecklessness and female singlemindedness- and if it doesn't quite deliver the punch it intends one has to remember that Kipling was only about 25 and romantically inexperienced- indeed possibly still a virgin- when he wrote it. Both stories deal with the life lived by British soldiers in India and- allowing for a heightening of incident and a toning down of language (sanguinary for bloody)- deal with it truthfully. No-one of talent had handled this material before. And no-one- certainly no Englishman- had written with such a focused, arts-and-craftsy attention to structure, detail and polish. Kipling is an English Zola, but also an English Flaubert- and finally- and this is what makes him uniquely great- a poet with a poet's instinctive knowledge of the inwardness and connectedness of things.
Life's Handicap is an 1891 collection that contains some of the best of the Indian short stories. "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney" is a shockingly amoral farce with flashes of tenderness and beauty; really there's a whole world contained in its 30 odd pages. "The Courting of Dinah Shadd" is about love and sex and loyalty- male fecklessness and female singlemindedness- and if it doesn't quite deliver the punch it intends one has to remember that Kipling was only about 25 and romantically inexperienced- indeed possibly still a virgin- when he wrote it. Both stories deal with the life lived by British soldiers in India and- allowing for a heightening of incident and a toning down of language (sanguinary for bloody)- deal with it truthfully. No-one of talent had handled this material before. And no-one- certainly no Englishman- had written with such a focused, arts-and-craftsy attention to structure, detail and polish. Kipling is an English Zola, but also an English Flaubert- and finally- and this is what makes him uniquely great- a poet with a poet's instinctive knowledge of the inwardness and connectedness of things.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 01:55 pm (UTC)It's a recurring theme- that our common humanity over-rides all the superficial differences of race, nationality, class and religion.
"The colonel's lady
And Judy O'Grady
Are sisters under the skin."
no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 03:20 pm (UTC)We'd all sit down and smoke
(We dursn't give no banquits,
Lest a Brother's caste were broke),
An' man on man got talkin'
Religion an' the rest,
An' every man comparin'
Of the God 'e knew the best.
So man on man got talkin',
An' not a Brother stirred
Till mornin' waked the parrots
An' that dam' brain-fever-bird;
We'd say 'twas 'ighly curious,
An' we'd all ride 'ome to bed,
With Mo'ammed, God, an' Shiva
Changin' pickets in our 'ead. "
no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 08:51 pm (UTC)