Word: kiplingisms
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There was, to be sure, a morbid Kipling, the bitter recluse who lost a son (in World War I) and a daughter, and until his death in 1936 retreated more and more into the confines of his Sussex home, "a grey stone, lichened house-A.D. 1654 over the door...
As he aged, this misanthropic Kipling-hardly at his best in writing about people-gave up complex characters for stock types, and then stock types for animals, ghosts and pure demonic forces. Thus the stereotype of the bluff chap with the pipe and the dog was replaced by a hypochondriac...
Did Wilson, like other literary revisionists, overreact? Philip Mason thinks so. A veteran of 20 years in the Indian civil service, Mason is neither a first-rate biographer nor a first-rate critic. Still, stolidly and finally convincingly, he builds a case for a Kipling who stands between the old...
Putting together these parts, Mason has Kipling come out a little like a 19th century British Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Kipling prided himself on an almost tactile knowledge of his craft, as if he were more artisan than writer. Like Hemingway, he approached the world as a no-nonsense man of...
Kipling, both Mason and Wilson agree, was a superb writer who, again like Hemingway, could make textures and smells-the very rhythms of life-leap off the page. Why, then, did he come closer to success in his short stories (for instance, The Man Who Would Be King) than in...