A letter by the author has surfaced in which he writes that 'it is extremely possible I have helped myself promiscuously'
A letter in which Rudyard Kipling admits that "it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously" from other stories when writing The Jungle Book has been put up for sale.
The one-page letter, written and signed by Kipling in around 1895, sees the author writing to an unknown correspondent following an inquiry about "The Law of the Jungle" – the rules of life in the jungle taught by Baloo to Mowgli in The Jungle Book, and later turned into a poem by Kipling in The Second Jungle Book.
"Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky; / And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die," writes Kipling in his poem. "The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must eat where it lies; / And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or he dies."
The letter, acquired by Adam Andrusier, director of Adam Andrusier Autographs, at the New York Antiquarian book fair last month from a fellow UK manuscript dealer, sees Kipling acknowledging that parts of the hierarchical jungle code may have been borrowed from other sources.
"I am afraid that all that code in its outlines has been manufactured to meet 'the necessities of the case': though a little of it is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils," Kipling wrote in the letter. "In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen."
Andrusier is selling the letter for £2,500, and says that "letters by Kipling that mention his most enduring work are extremely rare".
"A letter that casts new light on an author's celebrated work tends to capture the imagination of the collector," said Andrusier. "Personally, I rather like his candidness about the possibility of his plagiarism in The Jungle Book; I think people tend to have a misapprehension about writing needing to be unswervingly original, when so much literature is either consciously or unconsciously borrowed."
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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