Quite an interesting fellow, was our Mr. Kipling!
I studied literature and none of my professors ever mentioned him except maybe in passing as a minor writer of the British colonial era. I tend to think of him in Walt Disney terms - as the guy who wrote Jungle Book.
The real story is considerably more interesting. This is a guy who was born in India in 1865 but was sent back to England to an abusive boarding school when he was six. He did poorly in prep school and was considered to have such a poor intellect that he was unsuitable for college.
His father got him a job and at age 16 he was sent off alone to Lahore (in what is now Pakistan) to work as an assistant editor for a newspaper. He worked a variety of jobs and developed something of a reputation as a writer in India.
At age 23 he got fired and decided to take the long way home back to England, visiting San Francisco, Omaha, Chicago and Pennsylvania. He got to meet one of his idols, Mark Twain, in New York. He even went to Yellowstone National Park – remarkable, since it was the first park of its kind in the world, and had only been in existence for twenty years.
Kipling’s connections with America didn’t end with that trip. After becoming a significant literary figure in London and getting married, he ended up living in a cabin in Vermont. The young couple lived in rustic bliss and their first two children were born there. Kipling did some of his most prolific writing in Vermont, including both Jungle Books and “Captains Courageous.” Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) visited and got Kipling hooked on golf.
Politics and family squabbles sent the Kiplings back to England. They also established a yearly habit of wintering in South Africa. By this time, he was one of the most popular writers in the world. Henry James said of him "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known."[ He was the first English-writing recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1907) and is still the youngest writer to have ever received that honor.
In his lifetime, Kipling saw his fame slip away. Tastes changed. He was seen as a spokesman for the English Empire, with all the glory and arrogance associated with “Rule Britannia.” He wrote about “The White Man’s Burden” and some see his descriptions of other cultures racist. His poetry was strictly metered and rhymed and was falling out of fashion. World War I made it difficult to talk about glory and honor in the old ways – and Kipling experienced considerable guilt after pulling strings to get his son a commission in the Irish Guard only to see him killed in the Battle of Loos. He later wrote "If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied."
More recently, Kipling’s place in literature has been reassessed. He is now considered to have significantly contributed to the development of the modern short story, pioneering a style in which character and language and events carry the story rather than direct narration. In 1995 his poem “If –“ won a BBC poll as Britain’s favourite poem. He is even considered to have significantly affected the development of modern science fiction, especially through his influence on John Campbell and Robert Heinlein.
But Kipling is still best known for his works for children. The Jungle Books have remained popular, but one of his best collections is his “Just So Stories.” These are “pourquoi stories” - fables created for his children that explain the origins of things like “How the camel got his hump” and “How the rhinoceros got his skin.” The title comes out of a process every story-telling parent will understand. When you tell a story to your child, it takes on a life of its own. If you alter it when re-telling… change any details or even sometimes just a word… the child will complain that you are telling it wrong. You must tell it “just so.”
I don’t know if Paul Aden had Kipling in mind when he named H. ‘Just So’ in 1986. Maybe he meant to refer to the neatness of the leaves… that they are “just so.” Or maybe there is a missing word, like “this hosta is just so xxx.” I do know that if we were going to write a story “How The Hosta Got Its Popularity” we might write it about Paul Aden. Tony Avent describes Aden as “the king of commercial hostas.” He put together a listing of Aden introductions and some comments – you can find it at
http://www.plantdelights.com/Tony/aden.html
Just So is a member of a distinguished hosta family. The parent plant, Little Aurora, has proven to be a disappointment to most of us over the years. It has been a poor grower for me. But it has given us lots of interesting sports and seedlings. Little Sunspot is a sport of LA… and is also not much of a grower for me. Sultana, on the other hand, is a great green-centered, yellow-margined sport that grows well. Tattoo is another sport from this family and the object of lots of differences of opinion on how well it grows – it has done well for me, but not so much for many of us.
Aden registered Just So as “Aden 421 X ‘Little Aurora’” and Zillis likes it enough to give it its own page in the Handbook and remarks that it grows like a sport of LA. Some people seem to assume that it is a mini or a small hosta, but it actually makes an attractive medium-sized clump given enough time. My clump, left undisturbed, is about 30” in diameter. One of the “errors” I would describe in Zillis book is that he gives Little Aurora a diameter of 40”, then in two places describes how much Just So resembles the growth pattern of LA – then gives a maximum diameter for JS of 23”.
You can tell that I’m not the only one making the connection between Kipling and this hosta – Zillis named two Just So sports ‘Puck’ and ‘Shere Khan’ – both Kipling characters.
