Rudyard Kipling: An Entertainer/Celebrity: One of the First

English poet and novelist, Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936. A "new hour had struck in the history"1 of the Bahá’í Faith. A new stage was set synchronizing with the deepening gloom in the world. That stage was the devising, the inauguration, of a plan for the systematic spread of the Faith in the United States beginning in May 1936. The prosecution of that Plan began in April/May 1937. In March 1937 Kipling's autobiography Something Of Myself was published. The extent to which Kipling’s description of his life failed to match what actually happened is extraordinary.

In the first sentence of his autobiography Kipling said he had to play the cards in his life "as they came." I could very well have opened my own autobiography published sixty-six years later with that same line. In the last chapter of his book he said that writing to him had always been "a physical pleasure."2 Writing became that to me by degrees, sensibly and insensibly. A preamble stage existed in the years of my childhood and adolescence. From 1962/3 to 1972/3 I now see as stage 1; 1972/3-1982/3 as stage 2; 1982/3-1992/3 as stage 3 and 1992/3-2002/3 as stage 4 and 2002/3 to the present as stage 5. That sense of physical pleasure did not enter my sensory emporium until stage 2.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Shoghi Effendi, "Cablegram October 26, 1935," Messages To America, Wilmeete, 1947, p.5. and 2Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Macmillan, London, 1937.

I came to the ink, by degrees and with pleasure 36 years after you had left this mortal coil, but it served to keep me inside myself as it did you those many years—you with your daemon and me the leaven of that Divine Educator.

We both enjoyed our trade tools—books—Petrarch’s friendly society found in a convenient chamber in a humble corner of our habitation and taking delight in retirement’s tranquility and me by this river not far from this sea.

I was just getting going when you were slowing the pace, 1 but for both of us writing was inseparable from our social, political and religious views.

1 Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, to the age of 65/6