Abstract
For Kipling bereavement was the woe that never seemed to end, “the immortal woe.”1 Unquestionably one of the major causes of the Great Darkness in his life was the painful sense of loss that repeatedly afflicted him with rare intensity even from an early age. Angus Wilson argues that Kipling’s experience with the devastating impact of grief can be traced as far back as the death of a younger brother at birth in 1870 and to that of Captain Holloway in 1874. Of the former, Wilson comments: “It is hard to think that this unmentioned event and his parents’ grief would not have been a mysterious introduction to a terrible time. It was the first death of his life.”2 Captain Holloway, or “Uncle Harry,” had been the young Kipling’s only source of humane treatment while at Lorne Lodge; his death ushered in the boy’s bleakest period at Southsea. As time went on, the deaths of loved ones cast an ineradicable shadow over his life. Death was not the only cause of his painful sense of loss, however. Other forms of loss so worked on his emotions as to mimic closely the effects of bereavement. He must have felt something closely akin to bereavement, for example, when his parents left him at Lorne Lodge and for a time disappeared from his life.
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Notes
Without specifically defining its meaning, Kipling used the phrase “the immortal woe of life” in his poem “A Charm,” which was first published in Reward and Fairies (1910).
Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works ( New York: Viking, 1977 ), 34.
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1990–2005), 1: 133.
Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling ( New York: Random House, 1978 ), 76.
W. Somerset Maugham, Introduction, Maugham’s Choice of Kipling’s Best (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), xx.
Elliot L. Gilbert, The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1970), 36. Gilbert is referring specifically to Walter M. Hart, Kipling the Story-Writer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1918), 70, but a more famous reader of Kipling, T. S. Eliot, seems to have fallen into the same trap. While a student at Harvard University, Eliot wrote for one of his English classes an essay on Kipling that points out certain “defects” characteristic of the author but highly praises—largely for the wrong reasons—one story, “Without Benefit of Clergy.” Young Eliot found it “the best thing which Kipling has done” and called it “that Indian idyl.” He saw the story as “tender” and as “less ambitious” than most of Kipling’s tales. He lauded it for being in better “taste” than Kipling usually exhibited and thus more mature. Strangely, he felt that “no tremendous impression is intended,” but he concluded that “there exists in any language no more touching idyl of illicit love told with such ingenuous simplicity.” “The Defects of Kipling (1909),” Essays in Criticism, 51 (January 2001), 1–7.
A. W. Baldwin, The Macdonald Sisters ( London: Peter Davies, 1960 ), 134.
A. O. J. Cockshut, ed., Rudyard Kipling: Life’s Handicap ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 ), 309.
Gilbert states that the theme of the story is the “failure of ritual” (29). For a refutation of Gilbert on this point, see Philip Mason, Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow and The Fire (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), who points out that Kipling deeply believed in the efficaciousness of ritual (25).
Lloyd H. Chandler, A Summary of the Work of Rudyard Kipling ( New York: Grolier Club, 1930 ), 296.
Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1978 ), 204.
Quoted in Hilton Brown, Rudyard Kipling ( New York: Harper, 1945 ), 224.
Bonamy Dobrée, Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist ( London: Oxford University Press, 1967 ), 127.
Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1999 ), 174.
Leon Edel, “A Young Man from the Provinces,” in Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World, ed. John Gross (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972 ), 64.
Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 ), 3.
William James, “Review of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, by Frederic W. H. Myers (1903),” in Essays in Psychical Research ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986 ), 211–12.
Dorothy Adelson suggests that Alice Kipling, whom she characterizes as rather stern and cold-hearted, was to a large extent responsible for her daughter’s emotional problems. Notwithstanding those problems, “Trix inherited psychic abilities of more than amateur quality.” “Kipling’s Sister,” Kipling Journal, 44 (December 1977), 13.
See Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968 ), 246.
Alson J. Smith, “Ed. Note,” The Psychic Source Book ( New York: Creative Age, 1951 ), 180.
Haggard accepted “some external evidence which goes to support the doctrine of the continuance of the personality beyond the changes of death.” About spiritualism he wrote that “although many people, some of them of great intellect and high character, believe in it, and I know well that whatever it may be it is not all fraud, however much it may be mixed with fraud, I am by no means satisfied as to the real origin of its phenomena. Without expressing any definite opinion, at times I incline to the view that it also is but a device of the Devil, by specious apparitions and the exhibition of an uncanny knowledge which may be one of his attributes, to lead heart-sick mortals into regions they were not meant to travel and there infect them with the microbe of some alien, unknown sin.” H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, ed. C. J. Longman (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 2: 249–50.
Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling ( London: Methuen, 1959 ), 203.
In her annotations to “They,” Lisa Lewis points out that Trix claimed to have had the same power as Miss Florence of seeing internally colors that manifest emotions or make up a person’s aura. Mrs Bathurst and Other Stories, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 288. Daniel Karlin makes essentially the same observation in his annotations to Rudyard Kipling, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 609.
Albert G. Mackey, An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, PA: L. H. Everts, 1886 ), 241.
Albert Pike traces beliefs about the meaning of the Egg in various cultures, but does not indicate that it is a symbol associated with Freemasonry. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry ( Charleston SC: A. M. 5632, 1871 ).
Leslie Shepard, ed., Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 2nd ed. (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1984), 1: 392.
A. J. C. Tingey, “The Egg That It Is Given To Very Few Of Us To See,” Kipling Journal, 66 (July 1943), 5.
See entries for “Egg of Immortality” and “Eye of the Soul,” June G. Bletzer, The Donning International Encyclopedic Psychic Dictionary (Norfolk, VA: Donning, 1986), 190, 223.
James R. Lewis, Encyclopedia of Afterlife Beliefs and Phenomena ( Detroit, MI: Gale, 1994 ), 39.
Sandra Kemp astutely observes that to Kipling “writing is a kind of occult experience,” and she points out that he was preoccupied with the similarities between the writer and the psychic. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 47.
Meryl Macdonald’s The Long Trail: Kipling Round the World (Bristol: Tideway House, 1999) contains an excellent treatment of Kipling’s extended romance with the automobile including descriptions of the cars he owned and accounts of his various adventures in them.
John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature ( New York: Viking, 1976 ), 67.
According to George M. Burnell and Adrienne L. Burnell, one of “the most prominent emotion[s] expressed by parents is that of anger.” Clinical Management of Bereavement: A Handbook for Healthcare Professionals ( New York: Human Sciences Press, 1989 ), 125.
See Beverley Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 55, 116.
Nora Crook unequivocally states that “Mary is mad—I would say a great deal madder than has been supposed.” Kipling’s Myths ofLove and Death (London: Macmillan, 1989), 126.
Among critics who accept the airman as real, several have questioned whether he is actually a German. Seeing him as, say, French, is a step toward concluding that Kipling strongly condemned his heroine in the story. See, e.g., Bill Dower, “Did Mary Postgate Leave an Ally to Die?” Kipling Journal, 76 (March 2002), 42–47: “If it can be established that the airman in ‘Mary Postgate’ may not be an enemy but in fact an ally, then Mary is not only a cruel and vengeful person, but one who has robbed her country of one of its defenders” (47).
Recent criticism in particular tends to stress the theory that Kipling portrays Mary as experiencing sexual pleasure as she watches the German die. John Bayley writes that Mary is a closet sado-masochist who is, without knowing it, in love with Wynn and whose “secret thrill” in seeing the German die is a “sexual response,” in fact, the “source of acute sexual pleasure” (The Short Story, 89). In his brief commentary on the story, Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), refers to Mary’s “perverted sexual joy” (452). Harry Ricketts goes much further in stating: “Kipling made it quite clear that she had an orgasm” while she excitedly observed the airman expire (319).
“Brander Matthews on ‘Kipling’s Deeper Note,’” in Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 341.
Edmund Wilson, “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature ( Boston, MA: Houghton, 1941 ), 180.
Peter Keating, Kipling the Poet ( London: Secker and Warburg, 1994 ), 213.
Daniel Karlin, “Kipling and the Limits of Healing,” Essays in Criticism, 48 (October 1998), 332.
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© 2005 William B. Dillingham
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Dillingham, W.B. (2005). The Immortal Woe of Life: Bereavement. In: Rudyard Kipling. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-7868-4_3
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