Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (92 page)

A Book of Words
(1928) was a volume of collected speeches delivered between 1906 and 1927, while
Thy Servant a Dog
(1930) contained a series of tales ‘Told by Boots’, about a family living in an English country house as observed from the viewpoint of their dogs.

The Kiplings visited the West Indies in 1930 and were forced to stay for three months in Bermuda, due to Caroline’s illness.

Kipling’s final original story collection,
Limits and Renewals
,appeared in 1932. It contained ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ a tale concerning literary forgery that contained some scathing comments on the relationships between authors and critics.

‘It must be nice to inspire affection at short notice,’ Kipling had once written to H. Rider Haggard. ‘I haven’t the gift. Like olives and caviar and asafoetida, I’m an acquired taste stealing slowly on the senses.’

The largely autobiographical
Souvenirs of France
the following year covered Kipling’s first visit to France in 1878, when his father took him to the Paris Exhibition.

Although it was initially thought to be gastritis, Kipling’s gastric ulcer was finally diagnosed correctly in 1933.

Three years later he collapsed when his ulcer perforated. Kipling died in London on January 18, 1936 at the age of seventy-one. Although his death came two days before that of his friend and reigning sovereign, King George V, the country no doubt thought it had lost a far more representative Englishman with Kipling’s passing. He was buried in Poets’ Corner at London’s Westminster Abbey.

Kipling’s reticent autobiography,
Something of Myself for MyFriends Known and Unknown
, written in the last year of his life, was posthumously published in 1937. It was edited by his widow with help from Lord Webb-Johnson, Kipling’s surgeon and friend. The book ended somewhat abruptly with the prophetic line ‘… which were well in use before my death’.

Over the next three years, the complete Sussex Editions of Kipling’s works were published. Although they included the author’s final revisions, they still had to be completed by others.

Following Kipling’s death, Hollywood finally recognised the popularity of the author’s tales of adventure, romance and selfless heroism.

Spencer Tracy gave an Oscar-winning performance as the Portuguese fisherman who rescued Freddie Bartholomew’s spoiled brat in
Captains Courageous
(1937), ably supported by Melvyn Douglas, Lionel Barrymore, Mickey Rooney and John Carradine.

Ronald Coleman’s artist was determined to finish Ida Lupino’s portrait before he went blind in
The Light That Failed
(1939), and Shirley Temple was the cute little moppet befriended by Victor McLaglen’s soft-hearted sergeant in John Ford’s
Wee Willie Winkie
(1937).

McLaglen, Gary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. played the three soldier comrades saved by Sam Jaffe’s water boy in
Gunga Din
(1939), Errol Flynn befriended a young Dean Stockwell in
Kim
(1950), while Stuart Granger, Walter Pidgeon and David Niven were the
Soldiers Three
(1951).

Sean Connery and Michael Caine played the two loveable rogues who sought the hidden treasure of a lost empire in John Huston’s
The Man Who Would Be King
(1975), which also featured Christopher Plummer as Kipling himself.

‘They’ was updated into a 1993 made-for-television movie starring Patrick Bergin and Vanessa Redgrave, while ‘The Mark of the Beast’ was adapted for a low budget anthology movie entitled
Things 3: Old Things
(1998).

Inspired by his cousin Philip Burne-Jones’ 1897 painting of the same name, Kipling’s poem ‘The Vampire’ was first filmed in 1910. It also formed the basis for a 1915 film starring Theda

Bara (the screen’s first ‘vamp’) and a 1922 version, both retitled
A Fool There Was
(the first line of the verse).

The Jungle Book
has, of course, been filmed several times, most notably in live-action with Sabu (1942) and Jason Scott Lee (1994), and by Walt Disney in 1967 as an animated musical that probably had the author spinning in his grave.

Caroline Kipling died in 1939. She bequeathed their home in Sussex to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and it is preserved as a memorial to Kipling’s memory.

In 1976, Mrs Elsie Bambridge, Kipling’s sole surviving child, died without an heir. His copyrights were bequeathed by her to the National Trust and lasted until 2006.

Although he fell out of favour with the public after the First World War and with the waning of British Imperialism, there are currently signs that a critical revaluation of Rudyard Kipling’s work is underway.

Today it is difficult to imagine just how extraordinarily popular Kipling’s fiction and verse was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During his lifetime, he published around 550 poems (with at least as many again remaining unpublished), and seven million copies of his books were sold in Britain alone, with another eight million in the United States.

Despite his often jingoistic and imperialist views, his early tales conjure up the atmosphere of a colonial and often exotic India, while his verse precisely captures the colloquial speech of the common man.

‘As of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India,’ said George Orwell, ‘… it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have.’

It is hoped that this extensive collection of the author’s fantastical tales will introduce his stories of a bygone era in British history to a whole new generation of readers.

Stephen Jones

London, England