Making Connections

This is a bit odd. Yesterday I made reference to Dickens in relation to my on-going reading of Kipling's short stories with regard to what I think is something of a gap in the weight of achievement between the two writers. But the reference was also made with a sense of their similarities. Then today, when reading RK's The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat, a crackingly exuberant farce, reminiscent of Dickens on absolutely top comic form, I came across an overt reference to the 'senior' writer: 'I don't dive after Dickens,' said Ollyet to Bat and me by the window, 'but every time I get into a row I notice that the police court always fills up with his characters'. As is often the case in his tales Kipling here is very much self-aware in his literariness, and it's interesting to see him overtly name his great precursor in this overtly Dickensian tale.

I find I can devise a literary triangle with RK and CD at two of the corners. The third corner of my triangle is the rather more modern English novelist Angus Wilson, who has written on both of them. Wilson's introduction to Dickens in Penguin's The World of Charles Dickens is possibly my all time favourite general volume to any major writer - a lovely book, and one that hugely excited me when I embarked on reading Dickens. And I'm now excited about getting my hands on Wilson's The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, his highly rated account of Kipling's life in relation to his writing. I'm hoping it might make some sense of the many contradictions in Kipling's work and explain why for all his brilliance he falls short of real greatness in the final analysis.

But this will have to wait, I'm afraid. This is not a year in which I'll be expanding my library.