Kipling and Buchan collaborate!
Tony Wilson from Belfast sent the Journal a copy of pages from a 1947 edition of the Strand Magazine, which comprised ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’, a little-known short story by Rudyard Kipling, and a page of background explanation.
‘This story was first published in the Stand Magazine in April 1934. It has never been reproduced except in the big Sussex Edition of Kipling’s Works (Macmillan 1937-39, 35 volumes, £2 10s. each). A number of Kipling’s stories first appeared in the Strand Magazine, but none has brought so many subsequent inquiries (they still come) as ‘Proof of Holy Writ’.
Hilton Brown, whose excellent biography Rudyard Kipling was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1945, has sent us an interesting note on the origins of the story:
"That erudite enthusiast on Kipling, Captain Martindell, writing in the Kipling Society’s Journal, quotes from the Winnipeg Free Press of February 1940 an account of the genesis of this story. It was given by John Buchan, by this time Lord Tweedsmuir and Governor General of Canada, to Mr Grant Dexter. At a lunch-club in Fleet Street, Buchan, Kipling and others were discussing the question of how the Authorised Version of the Bible, the 1611 version, came to be written in such magnificent English. The official revisers were no doubt outstanding scholars, but what evidence was there, other than the translation standing in their names, that they were outstanding masters of English? Surely, said John Buchan, there were hidden hands at work, the hands of the great literary geniuses of the age - Shakespeare’s, Ben Jonson’s. Kipling said to Buchan, ‘That’s an idea,’ and away he went to turn it over.
"The fruit of that idea follows in a story which Buchan ranked as ‘the best Kipling ever wrote.’ It is certainly a vintage specimen of the final Kipling period." ’
originally published in JBJ 23 / Autumn 2000
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