An Introduction to Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was born of English parents in Bombay in 1865. He won the Nobel Prize in 1907 and was actually the first Englishman to be so honoured. There is a great deal of history to this national treasure and I think Josephine Hart’s introductory essay is the perfect way to find out more about this poet, novelist and short story writer!

The English, he believed, were slow to hate. If they need a master- class, Kipling’s their man. Seamus Heaney famously uses his pen ‘to dig with’. Kipling used his as a lethal weapon. He was a word warrior and he was well armed. The day of judgement may indeed have been round the corner but Kipling couldn’t wait that long. He took aim at what he saw as injustice and incompetence, dishonesty and disloyalty, vanity and villainy, targeting those responsible: criminally negligent generals, venal politicians, corrupt businessmen, brutal authority figures — most particularly those cruel to children, fired and gravely wounded them. If, as Eliot said, Kipling ‘is not only serious, he has a vocation’, it was that of literary marksman.

Like all good soldiers he was also a lookout scout. He had an uncanny sense of when and where trouble was brewing and the warn- ing note was swiftly sounded. M. M. Kaye’s introduction to the collected works quotes Mark Twain: ‘Kipling is the only living person not head of state whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark. The only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable.’ Americans, Kaye notes, revered Kipling and when, aged thirty-four, he almost died from pneumonia, ‘in the street outside his hotel in New York bark was spread to lessen the noise of passing traffic’. Yet he had no official position politically, economically or militarily. He was a passionate child of Empire, a fact as central to his life as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Communism was to his. He believed it quite simply to be a power for good. Unlike other passionate believers in a political world view (Msr. Sartre again springs to mind) Kipling exposed the fault lines in the system, ruthlessly.

Although ‘The White Man’s Burden’ in a sense became Kipling’s own, he was not a fascist. ‘He was further away from being a fascist as the most humane or the most progressive person is able to be,’ declared George Orwell, in his otherwise not uncritical essay on Kipling. Of ‘Gehazi’ (concerning the Marconi scandal of 1912), one of Kipling’s most notorious poems, Ian Gilmour states ‘that it is neither evil nor anti-semitic’. Kipling was undoubtedly capable of a Larkinesque mockery of national characteristics but he was democratic in his selection of his target. Few nations escaped, except, surprisingly, the French whom he seemed to love. He was always wholly unimpressed by rank, whether military or social. ‘English literature has no adequate account of the British soldier, what he thought of the night before battle, what he thought of his officers, between Henry V and Rudyard Kipling’: M. M. Kaye, again. Orwell agrees: ‘He had far more interest in the common soldier and far more anxiety that he get a fair deal than most liberals.’ Kipling also regularly expressed his contempt for ‘the flannelled fools at the wickets or the muddied oafs at the goals’.

Rudyard Kipling was a poet whose collected works run to just under seven hundred pages; a novelist — Kim is his masterpiece; a short story writer — his later ones, which Edmund Wilson called ‘The Kipling Whom Nobody Read’, are sublime, as are the children’s books, The Jungle Book and The Just So Stories. He was also a journalist and a pamphleteer. He was, said Henry James, ‘the most complete man of genius I have ever met’. In addition, Kipling was the first Englishman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature and was also its youngest recipient. Something of Myself is the apt title of his autobiography because something is all you get. Eliot said of him, he is ‘the most inscrutable of authors . . . a writer impossible wholly to under- stand and quite impossible to belittle’.

He was born in 1865 in Bombay. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, a ‘serene and tolerant man’ according to Kipling, taught at the school of art. His mother, née Alice MacDonald, was, he said, ‘all Celt and three parts fire’. Andrew Lycett in his perceptive biography quotes a family member as saying: ‘It was impossible to predict how she would react at any given point.’ She was also a talented musician from whom Kipling said he inherited no musical talent whatever, except what he described as ‘the brute instinct for the beat necessary for the manufacture of verse’. Rather romantically his mother and father named their first-born after Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where they had first met at a picnic. Up to the age of five Rudyard Kipling was, it would seem, thoroughly spoiled. If his tantrums were epic — M. M. Kaye tells us of the small boy who, on a visit to Sussex, stamps off to the village warning inhabitants to get out of the way as there was an angry Rudy coming — the cure was savage. The loving parents, in a stunning act of psychological cruelty, left him, aged five, with his sister Trix, aged three, in a boarding house in Bournemouth, the subject of the bitterly sad short story, ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. From this ‘House of Desolation’ as he called it in his memoirs, he and Trix attended a local school. It was to be five years before they saw their mother again and seven years before they saw their father. If an unhappy childhood is a great gift to a writer, then Kipling was truly blessed.

Eventually he was rescued and sent to boarding school. Although he was hugely clever, on being told that there was no money for university he returned to India and became a journalist in Lahore. He lived happily with his parents, whom he never seemed to have wished to wound, and when Trix returned Kaye points out that he referred contentedly to them as the ‘Family Square’. By the time he reached the age of twenty-three, his Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales From the Hills were sold at every railway station in India — where, incidentally, he actually lived for fewer than ten years of his adult life. With the publication of Barrack-Room Ballads in 1892, when he was twenty-seven, he became world famous.

All biographers refer to his genuine modesty. He regarded himself as a craftsman. He was not greedy for honours for himself, turning down a knighthood, the poet laureateship and the Order of Merit. Though he had little time for ‘the long-haired literati’, he refused to criticise any ‘fellow craftsman’s output’. He had respect for the work of others from sea captains to civil servants; C. S. Lewis called him ‘the poet of work’. ‘Writers’, he said, ‘must recognise the gulf that separates even the least of those who do things worthy of being written about from even the best of those who have written things worthy of being talked about.’ Not a universal attitude.

Few writers have travelled so much or have lived on so many continents. He witnessed national wars, world war and ‘the savage wars of peace’. He lived to see his beloved Empire all but disintegrate. In his own life he suffered the tragedy of the death of his children — his daughter Josephine, who died from pneumonia when aged six, and his only son John, who died in the war. Eliot once wrote of Yeats: ‘He was capable of experience,’ and pointed to the late poetic development that ensued. That does not seem to have happened with Kipling. Though as John Bayley points out he became wiser. His extraordinary diversity in form and in subject matter has at its core emotional, moral and philosophical consistency. There is also something else, an elemental force that is as disturbing as it is unforgettable. Eliot wrote of him, ‘There is always something alien about Kipling, as of a visitor from another planet . . . Kipling knew something of things which are beyond the frontier . . . a queer gift of second-sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that henceforth we are never quite sure when it is not present.’ Kipling on every level makes us uneasy, his ferocity often frightens us, his perverse naivety unnerves us, his imperialism embarrasses us, and yet he continues on, an Immortal.