SOMETHING OF MYSELF—Rudyard Kipling—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).
Rudyard Kipling lies a-mouldering in his grave, but last week his words were again on the march. Crowds gathered, as always, to watch the parade go by, to stiffen with small-boy excitement at the drums and tramplings of the military band. Kipling's last parade petered out before the finish, for death had halted it; but there were enough of his veterans in the march-past to give the cheering crowds the old thrill. Even his many enemies watched curiously as the late great Rudyard Kipling, eyes right, steel pen at the salute as always, passed himself in review.
For 32¢, Manhattanites had already read in the New York Times a condensed version of his autobiography, run in 16 installments. The newspaper version omitted many a literary anecdote, many a bludgeoning blow against Americans and such "lesser breeds without the Law." And much was omitted from the book; eclectic rather than exhaustive, it was well titled Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown. Kipling was no digger of his own dust, and his book was intended as a monument, not an exhibition. But friends and enemies alike found in it something of both.
Born in India (1865), where his father was director of the Bombay Art School, little Rudyard was sent "home" to be educated. For nearly six unhappy, browbeaten years of his childhood he boarded with the family of a retired naval officer. Every year he escaped for a month into the happy company of his cousins, the Burne-Joneses, whose house was loud with jolly artistic atmosphere, portentous with such figures as William Morris and Robert Browning in the offing. When Kipling's family discovered what kind of treatment he had been getting at Portsmouth (his mother visited him, went up to his room to say goodnight, and "I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff I had been trained to expect"), they immediately rescued him, took him off to a country cottage. There he met his cousin, one Stanley Baldwin. At 11 Rudyard was sent to boarding school, at Westward Ho!, a new school mainly for boys from Army families, memorialized in Stalky & Co. After graduation, instead of going on to a university, Kipling sailed back to India and his first job, on the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. He was not yet 17.
The "seven years hard" that Kipling worked as a journalist in India gave him all his training, most of his material, laid the foundations of a success that would resound in any day. He was 50% of his paper's white staff, and since his married chief dined at home and he at the club, heard daily what his readers thought of him. The manifold duties of his job, the consciousness of being an English sahib, matured Kipling precociously. He was green, but not for long. "My Chief took me in hand and for three years or so I loathed him. He had to break me in, and I knew nothing." He lived with his family, but often had the house to himself when they were away in the Hills; he had his own servant, his own rig, all that went with it. "Till I was in my 24th year, I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door. . . . And—luxury of which I dream still—I was shaved before I was awake!" Even when he dined alone, he always dressed for dinner.