Chekhov's Mistress

Considering the Classics: re Kipling

by Jeffrey Frank

We all have our favorite books, and not a few of us are probably influenced by those we read when we were children. But often when we go back and look again, they’re disappointing; we see their tricks and the manipulations of an author.

Some of those books, though, were remarkably able to touch both children and adults, and for me, there is nothing quite like Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” published in 1894, which affected me as a child and still has a hold on me. I particularly mean the first one (he published “The Second Jungle Book” a year later) and its three stories about Mowgli, the wolf-boy, although it’s hard not to love “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” which records the life-saving battle between a loyal mongoose and a particularly nasty cobra.

You read these stories today and you say, “Wow!” Mowgli is a far more interesting character than his epigone, Tarzan, even if he has power approaching those of a superhero. (He can speak bird and snake and tiger, and so on; and, when the time comes, learns human speech.) Kipling doesn’t anthropomorphize, or not much, but Mowgli’s friendships with Bagheera, the gentle, deadly black panther, and Baloo, the professorial bear, and the wolves who reared him, are touching and realized. Kaa, the rock python, and the loathsome Bandar-log – the amoral monkey tribe – are grand fictional characters.

Kipling was such an accomplished stylist, too; in the 1890s – in the time after Dickens and before Arnold Bennett – he wrote clean, elegant sentences that leapt beyond the stilted prose his place and time. Hemingway might have written this from “Tiger-Tiger,” the third Mowgli story: “At one end stood a little village, and at the other the thick jungle came down in a sweep to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been cut off with a hoe.” In that story, Kipling does something that I never understood when I was a kid: He writes from Mowgli’s point of view, but also through the eyes of Indian villagers, who are startled by this boy (by now about twelve or thirteen) who can’t communicate and appears to have bites all over his body. And Kipling being Kipling, he stage-manages a fine adventure in which Mowgli finally confronts Shere Khan, the vengeful tiger who has stalked him since he was a baby, left in the jungle and adopted by the wolf pack.

posted November 05, 2007

Jeffrey Frank is the author of four novels, most recently Trudy Hopedale, and co-author, with his wife Diana, of The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen:… (more)

comments

I learned to read at a very early age, thanks to Kipling’s Jungle Book. My father would read a chapter every night to my older brother and sister, with me, only two years of age, curled up in the crook of his arm. As he read, he moved his finger along the words for my benefit and, by the time I was three, I was reading for myself. I have remarkably strong memories of the scene - my brother and sister sprawled on the rug in front of the fire, the book itself, an ivory coloured hardback, and the black and white illustrations. In our house, the book was called the Mowgli stories, and it remained a favourite bed-time read for many years.

    – Tessa Ryan-Lipp (11/09  at  03:39 PM)


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