John Batchelor - How the Just So Stories were made : the brilliance and tragedybehind Kiplings celebrated tales for little children

How the Just so Stories Were Made

By the same author

Mervyn Peake: A Biographical and Critical Exploration (1974)

The Edwardian Novelists (1982)

H.G. Wells (1985)

Joseph Conrads Lord Jim: A Study (1988)

Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (1992)

The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (1995)

John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life A Biography (2000)

Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2006)

Tennyson: To Strive, to Seek, to Find A Biography (2012)

As editor

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford Worlds Classics, 1983)

Joseph Conrad, Victory (Oxford Worlds Classics, 1986)

The Art of Literary Biography (1996)

Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in Honour of E.A.J. Honigmann (jointly with Tom Cain and Claire Lamont, 1997)

Victorian Literature (Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2, 2006)

From Decadent to Modernist: And Other Essays (Yearbook of English Studies, 37.1, 2007)

Copyright 2021 John Batchelor

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949868

ISBN 978-0-300-23718-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Henrietta and for our grandchildren, Elise Batchelor, Adele Batchelor, Tara Benton, Luke Benton and Henry Batchelor

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Unless otherwise stated, images are from Rudyard Kipling, The Just so Stories (London: Macmillan, 1902).

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rudyard Kipling was a man of astonishing talent and energy, protean, wayward, brilliant, elusive and unpredictable. After a magical infancy in India he was plunged into a hell on earth at the mercy of a sadistic guardian in England, and then rescued by parental connections and his own prodigious talent to embark on a career as a writer and journalist in India at the age of 16. The volume known as the Just so Stories is in one sense the most perfect of his works of art. It was entirely under his own control, all the stories and images were created by him, and all the parts of his text support and complement each other. There is no other childrens book quite like it.

I am very grateful to the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, for their hospitality, encouragement and support during the period that I have worked on this book, and also in particular I would to thank the Colleges librarian, Christopher Skelton-Foord, for his constant and reliable help. I would also like to thank the British Library for access to the manuscript of the Just so Stories, the archivist and staff in charge of the Kipling archive held by the University of Sussex, and the officers of the National Trust for permission to reproduce images held in that collection. I would like to extend similar acknowledgement and thanks to the Victoria and Albert Museum and to the Landmark Trust, Vermont.

I am very grateful to Leonee Ormond, Harry Ricketts and Tom Shippey for the expertise and professionalism with which they have considered this project and read and commented on my text, and to the editorial team at Yale headed by Julian Loose. Felicity Bryan, my literary agent who had represented all my books since 1988 and was wholly committed to this project, died a few months before it went to press. She is sadly missed by all who knew her.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Henrietta, who has encouraged and supported me through the writing of this and all my previous books.

Kidlington, Oxford, October 2020

HOW THE WHALE GOT HIS THROAT

In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth so! Till at last there was only one small fish left in all the sea, and he was a small Stute Fish, and he swam a little behind the Whales right ear, so as to be out of harms way.

The Whale then stood up on his tail and said Im hungry, and the Stute Fish responded to this cue with a seemingly innocuous question: Noble and generous Cetacean, have you ever tasted Man? No, said the Whale, What is it like? Nice, said the small Stute Fish. Nice but nubbly. Following directions from the Stute Fish the Whale swam and swam to latitude Fifty North, longitude Forty West, as fast as he could swim, and on a raft, in the middle of the sea, with nothing to wear except a pair of blue canvas breeches, a pair of suspenders [braces] (you must particularly remember the suspenders, Best Beloved), and a jack-knife, he found one single, solitary ship-wrecked Mariner, trailing his toes in the water. The story-teller here, addressing himself to his Best Beloved, echoes the narrator of E.W. Lanes Arabian Nights Entertainment (1883), of which the Kiplings had a copy. The speaker is on intimate terms with his audience, and announces himself to the Best Beloved as a genial father figure.

So the Whale swims to the white-cliffs-of-Albion and disgorges the Mariner. While inside the Whales stomach (the Whales warm, dark, inside cupboards) the Mariner has cut up his raft and made it into a wooden grill, or grating, to block the Whales throat. The grating is held together by his suspenders: now you know why you were not to forget the suspenders! with this announcement Kipling the conjuror reveals his methods; the rabbit comes out of the hat, so to speak. To crown his achievement the Mariner recites a sloka (the word refers to a verse form of the Sanskrit epics, here boiled down to two lines in an Irish accent):

By means of a grating

I have stopped your ating.

There is a fine image of the Whale swallowing the raft. The caption to this image begins: This is the picture of the Whale swallowing the Mariner with his infinite-resource-and-sagacity, and the raft and the jack-knife and his suspenders, which you must not forget.refined this in the printed text to tilted up sideways (emphasis added), hence the sharp diagonal of the raft and the uncomfortable positions of the Mariners right hand and right foot.

In the main narrative the Mariner is not named, but in the caption to this picture he and the Whale are both given names: The Whales name was Smiler, and the Mariner was called Mr Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B. The British Librarys unpublished manuscript of the story has a variant of this: The Whales name was Smiler, and the Mariner was called Mr OShea.

The Whales eye was drawn from life, observed by Kipling when he was crossing the Atlantic between England and Vermont. He and his wife lived in Vermont from 1892 to 1896, and during that period they made several crossings of the Atlantic: And we learned to loathe the cold North Atlantic more and more. On one trip our steamer came almost atop of a whale, who submerged just in time to clear us, and looked up into my face with an unforgettable little eye the size of a bullocks. [...] When I was illustrating the