Something of Myself: For My Friends, Known and Unknown

There must be as many ways to conceive and execute autobiographies as there are authors. Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling's SOMETHING OF MYSELF FOR MY FRIENDS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN (published 1937) is highly selective. It is relatively short and focuses on what made him the writer he became. It also speaks much of his travels with wife, children and servants to South Africa and elsewhere in search of a perfect home. That home turned out to be 17th Century Bateman's in Sussex. *** In SOMETHING OF MYSELF you can enjoy being a fly on the wall when Rudyard and his father John joyously collaborate in recollecting the facts behind the great novel of India KIM. Or see Rudyard helping his Capetown neighbor Cecil Rhodes find the right words for launching the Rhodes Scholarships. *** A favorite vignette of mine involves the baby lion that the Kiplings borrowed for a few months from Rhodes and raised at their nearby South African home, The Woolsack. They named the cub M'Slibaan, Matabele language for Sullivan. M'Slibaan came over from Rhodes with "a she-dog foster-mother," but the latter was dismissed by Mrs Kipling. She fed M'Slibaan via baby bottles. "When he was about the size of a large rabbit, he cut little pins of teeth, and made coughing noises which he was persuaded were genuine roars" (Ch 6, "South Africa"). *** If you like your Kipling straight, here it is. -OOO--