117 Years Ago

You don’t have to agree with George Orwell to wonder about Hollywood’s long love affair with Rudyard Kipling. “A jingo imperialist,” “morally insensitive,” “aesthetically disgusting” and possessing “a definite strain of sadism” were among Orwell’s descriptions of him. On the other hand, “The Jungle Book,” whose stars are mostly animals, is at least somewhat inoculated against not only Kipling’s harshest critics but also the range of views about him that have emerged over the last century.

And so here we are with yet another adaptation of “The Jungle Book,” a live-action feature from Disney based on its 1967 animated classic, set to open next week, and Warner Bros. has its own version in the pipeline. It’s hard to keep track of all the film adaptations, but they date back to 1942, with one starring Sabu.

An essay in The New York Times in 1899, when Kipling was still in his prime, predicted his sticking power, and seemed in particular to get to the heart of how he would secure his place in the firmament of childhood. The essay, in what was The Saturday Review of Books and Art, was headlined “Kipling’s Claim on Posterity” and began like this:

“At the age of thirty-three Rudyard Kipling has attained the dignity of being a classic. In other words, he has achieved immortality.”

The essay went on to examine all aspects of Kipling’s work to see how they might be remembered, if it all. “The work of Kipling is, as a whole, of such high order that one hesitates to pronounce any of it ephemeral,” the article said.