Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated), page 1003
I have told this at length because Institutions of idealistic tendencies sometimes wait till a man is dead, and then furnish their own evidence. Should this happen, try to believe that in the deepest trough of the War I did not step aside to play with The Times, Printing House Square, London, E.C.
In the come-and-go of family talk there was often discussion as to whether I could write a ‘real novel.’ The Father thought that the setting of my work and life would be against it, and Time justified him.
Now here is a curious thing. At the Paris Exhibition of 1878 I saw, and never forgot, a picture of the death of Marion Lescaut, and asked my Father many questions. I read that amazing ‘one book’ of the Abbé Prévost, in alternate slabs with Scarron’s Roman Comique, when I was about eighteen, and it brought up the picture. My theory is that a germ lay dormant till my change of life to London (though that is not Paris) woke it up, and that The Light that Failed was a sort of inverted, metagrobolised phantasmagoria based on Manon. I was confirmed in my belief when the French took to that conte with relish, and I always fancied that it walked better in translation than in the original. But it was only a conte — not a built book.
Kim, of course, was nakedly picaresque and plotless — a thing imposed from without.
Yet I dreamed for many years of building a veritable three-decker out of chosen and longstored timber-teak, green-heart, and ten-year-old oak knees — each curve melting deliciously into the next that the sea might nowhere meet resistance or weakness; the whole suggesting motion even when, her great sails for the moment furled, she lay in some needed haven — a vessel ballasted on ingots of pure research and knowledge, roomy, fitted with delicate cabinet-work below-decks, painted, carved, gilt and wreathed the length of her, from her blazing stern-galleries outlined by bronzy palm-trunks, to her rampant figure-head — an East Indiaman worthy to lie alongside The Cloister and the Hearth.
Not being able to do this, I dismissed the ambition as ‘beneath the thinking mind.’ So does a half-blind man dismiss shooting and golf.
Nor did I live to see the day when the new three-deckers should hoist themselves over the horizon, quivering to their own power, over-loaded with bars, ball-rooms, and insistent chromium plumbing; hellishly noisy from the sports’ deck to the barber’s shop; but serving their generation as the old craft served theirs. The young men were already laying down the lines of them, fondly believing that the old laws of design and construction were for them abrogated.
And with what tools did I work in my own mould-loft? I had always been choice, not to say coquettish in this respect. In Lahore for my Plain Tales I used a slim, octagonal-sided, agate penholder with a Waverley nib. It was a gift, and when in an evil hour it snapped I was much disturbed. Then followed a procession of impersonal hirelings each with a Waverley, and next a silver penholder with a quill-like curve, which promised well but did not perform. In Villiers Street I got me an outsize office pewter ink-pot, on which I would gouge the names of the tales and books I wrote out of it. But the housemaids of married life polished those titles away till they grew as faded as a palimpsest.
I then abandoned hand-dipped Waverleys — a nib I never changed — and for years wallowed in the pin-pointed ‘stylo’ and its successor the ‘fountain’ which for me meant geyser-pens. In later years I clung to a slim, smooth, black treasure (Jael was her office name) which I picked up in Jerusalem. I tried pump-pens with glass insides, but they were of ‘intolerable entrails.’
For my ink I demanded the blackest, and had I been in my Father’s house, as once I was, would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink. All ‘blue-blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon, and I never found a bottled vermilion fit to rubricate initials when one hung in the wind waiting.
My writing-blocks were built for me to an unchanged pattern of large, off-white, blue sheets, of which I was most wasteful. All this old-maiderie did not prevent me when abroad from buying and using blocks, and tackle, in any country.
With a lead pencil I ceased to express — probably because I had to use a pencil in reporting. I took very few notes except of names, dates, and addresses. If a thing didn’t stay in my memory, I argued it was hardly worth writing out. But each man has his own method. I rudely drew what I wanted to remember.
Like most men who ply one trade in one place for any while, I always kept certain gadgets on my work-table, which was ten feet long from North to South and badly congested. One was a long, lacquer, canoe-shaped pen-tray full of brushes and dead ‘fountains’; a wooden box held clips and bands; another, a tin one, pins; yet another, a bottle-slider, kept all manner of unneeded essentials from emery-paper to small screwdrivers; a paper-weight, said to have been Warren Hastings’ a tiny, weighted fur-seal and a leather crocodile sat on some of the papers; an inky foot-rule and a Father of Penwipers which a much-loved housemaid of ours presented yearly, made up the main-guard of these little fetishes.
My treatment of books, which I looked upon as tools of my trade, was popularly regarded as barbarian. Yet I economised on my multitudinous penknives, and it did no harm to my fore-finger. There were books which I respected, because they were put in locked cases. The others, all the house over, took their chances.
Left and right of the table were two big globes, on one of which a great airman had once outlined in white paint those air-routes to the East and Australia which were well in use before my death.
Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, London
Kipling’s plot in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
Table of Contents
The Jungle Book Stories
The Stalky Stories
The Novels
THE LIGHT THAT FAILED
THE NAULAHKA, A STORY OF WEST AND EAST
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS
KIM
The Shorter Fiction
THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
QUARTETTE
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS
SOLDIERS THREE AND OTHER STORIES
UNDER THE DEODARS
THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW AND OTHER EERIE TALES
WEE WILLIE WINKIE AND OTHER CHILD STORIES
LIFE’S HANDICAP
MANY INVENTIONS
THE JUNGLE BOOK
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
THE DAY’S WORK
STALKY & CO.
JUST SO STORIES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN
TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES
PUCK OF POOK’S HILL
ACTIONS AND REACTIONS
ABAFT THE FUNNEL
REWARDS AND FAIRIES
A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES
LAND AND SEA TALES FOR SCOUTS AND GUIDES
DEBITS AND CREDITS
THY SERVANT A DOG
LIMITS AND RENEWALS
TALES OF INDIA: THE WINDERMERE SERIES
THE COMPLETE STALKY & CO
The Short Stories
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES
The Travel Writing
FROM SEA TO SEA – LETTERS OF TRAVEL: 1887-1889
AMERICAN NOTES
LETTERS OF TRAVEL: 1892-1913
SOUVENIRS OF FRANCE
BRAZILIAN SKETCHES
The Poetry
LIST OF THE COMPLETE POETRY
The Non-Fiction
A FLEET IN BEING
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND
THE NEW ARMY IN TRAINING
FRANCE AT WAR
THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET
SEA WARFARE
THE WAR IN THE MOUNTAINS
THE GRAVES OF THE FALLEN
THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR
THE EYES OF ASIA
HOW SHAKSPERE CAME TO WRITE THE ‘TEMPEST’
The Speeches
THE BOOK OF WORDS
The Criticism
LIVING MASTERS — RUDYARD KIPLING by David Christie Murray
RUDYARD KIPLING - A CRITICISM by Richard Le Gallienne
RUDYARD KIPLING by John Palmer
ON MR. RUDYARD KIPLING AND MAKING THE WORLD SMALL by G.K. Chesterton
RUDYARD KIPLING by George Orwell
MR. KIPLING’S STORIES by Andrew Lang
THE LESS FAMILIAR KIPLING AND KIPLINGANA by G. F. Monkshood
The Biography
SOMETHING OF MYSELF
Rudyard Kipling, Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)
