SOMETHING OF MYSELF by Rudyard Kipling,...

SOMETHING OF MYSELF by Rudyard Kipling, edited by Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University/Canto: $10.95). After quoting the irreverent reviewer who suggested Kipling’s autobiography should have been called “Hardly Anything About Myself,” editor Thomas Pinney concedes that not only is the book “thin on the facts about Kipling’s life, it often had them wrong as well.” Although he died in 1935, Kipling described his life with an Edwardian reticence that seems pallid in an era of scurrilous biographies and unexpurgated confessions. The author recounted his childhood more fully in the poignant story, “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” In 1871, five-year-old Rudyard and his three-year-old sister Alice were sent from their parent’s home in India to school in England: They spent five and a half unhappy years in a Portsmouth boarding house, which he later referred to as “The House of Desolation.” Kipling never forgave its proprietor for her cruelty, and chronicled her abusive treatment in this thinly veiled account. Pinney’s copious notes correct and supplement the writer’s often erratic memory.