“Kipling’s case is curious. For glory, but also as an insult, Kipling has been equated with the British Empire,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1941, and, some seventy years later, the curiosity of Kipling’s case still persists. On the one hand it’s tempting and safe to pigeon-hole him as the author of The Jungle Book for children and the poem “If — ,” that corny, beautiful, Buddha-like exhortation to stoicism and self-control. On the other, there are those who, like James Joyce, choose to condemn Kipling for “semi-fanatic” ideas about patriotism and race and consider him barely worth reading. An examination of two new paperback editions of Kipling’s shorter fiction reveals something infinitely more complex.
