Patrick Kurp praises Rudyard Kipling, the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature:
Few writers have known as much as Kipling about life – and books. He was not a university man, never grimly bookish or canon-enslaved, but we still read his translations of Horace. He was no snob, but a democrat of literature. He read like a writer, for sustenance, and he wrote for the reader, to give pleasure. He remains the finest writer of stories in English, and Kim is one of the last century’s best novels by an Englishman, more readable than anything by Virginia Woolf. Kipling’s reading was wide, unsystematic and fruitful. He read like an intelligent boy, not a schoolmaster. … One of the few works of criticism in Kipling’s personal library was Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, which he claimed to read for the stories, not the critical judgments. In his address to the boys at Wellington [College, in 1912], Kipling says:
“A certain knowledge of the classics is worth having, because it makes you realise that all the world is not like ourselves in all respects, and yet in matters that really touch the inside life of a man, neither the standards nor the game have changed.”
To inhabit lives not our own, to think and feel with another’s sensibility, is bracing, healthy-minded and democratic, and is Kipling’s unspoken assumption as a writer. He befriends his readers, as he does his characters, and doesn’t presume to know what’s best for them.
Kipling’s talk, The Uses of Reading, can be read here.
(Hat tip: Books, Inq)
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