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  RUDYARD KIPLING, A LIFE

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  RUDYARD KIPLING, A LIFE

  Born to cultured Anglo-Indian parents, Rudyard Kipling went from a pampered infancy in India to a Dickensian childhood with cruel foster-parents in England, and on to a classic British boarding school complete with curmudgeonly masters and bullying classmates. He came through scarred but toughened, worked as a journalist in India, and began churning out the works that would make him a household name around the world - poems like “If” and “Gunga Din,” stories like “The Elephant’s Child” and “The Man Who Would Be King,” and his masterpiece, the novel Kim.

  Like many colonials, Kipling never felt he truly belonged anywhere in the world. But he had the gift of seeing with other people’s eyes and crossing over into others’ lives. He heard how people really talked. He told unforgettable stories, and lines from his poems are forever imprinted in our minds.

  Let’s look at the real man - and the real work.

  In the “House of Desolation”

  As Rudyard Kipling himself told it, the foundation of his literary career was laid at Lorne Lodge, the dank house in Portsmouth where his mother left him and his sister Alice to be raised by strangers. He was then five, and called Ruddy; Alice, called Trix, was three. They would not see their parents again for six years. Their foster father, an ex-seaman known as Captain Holloway, was not unkind to Kipling. But Holloway’s wife disliked the boy from the start, though she doted on Trix. And after the Captain died, Sarah Holloway and her son Harry, six years Ruddy’s senior, made Kipling’s life a living hell.

  It was a combination of bullying and mental abuse. A committed evangelical Christian, Mrs. Holloway made Kipling memorize the Bible and religious tracts as punishment for any number of sins, most of them involving supposed lies detected and reported by Harry. Once, Kipling wrote in his autobiography, he was sent to school with the placard “Liar” hanging on his back. The boys shared a bedroom, and as Kipling noted years later, “If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture - religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.”

  Often locked into a moldy-smelling basement “playroom” to ponder his sins, Kipling concocted a fantasy life, using charms and magic spells to fence off a space of his own. He and Trix developed a secret language evolved from the Hindi they had learned from the servants in their Bombay home. Sent to what he called a “terrible little day school,” Kipling was slow to learn to read. But when he found the knack, books and magazines became his chief escape route from Lorne Lodge. He devoured the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books, and James Greenwood’s King Lion, later to be a source for Kipling’s own Jungle Books. In a copy of Aunt Judy’s magazine he found a story about Anglo-Indian children sent to be raised in England. He said later, “I owe more in circuitous ways to that tale than I can tell.” They would all be grist for the Kipling mill.

  A Question of Custom

  Were Kipling’s parents monsters to leave their children in the care of abusive strangers for six years? The short answer is, not at all. John Lockwood Kipling was a talented intellectual, an artist-craftsman who was to become principal of the Mayo College of Art and curator of the Museum in Lahore, India (now Pakistan). Lockwood’s wife Alice was one of the four remarkable MacDonald sisters, Victorian beauties known for their charm, wit, and intellect. One of them, Georgiana, was married to the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and another, Agnes, was the wife of the painter Edward Poynter. Alice herself lit up the Anglo-Indian social scene. As a Viceroy of India was to say, “Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room.” Nor were Alice and Lockwood lax or uncaring parents. In their first years, Ruddy and Trix lived the luxurious life of Anglo-Indian colonials, with squads of servants catering to their every desire. When at last the family was reunited in India, the four lived happily and lovingly together, with a rich shared life of books, conversation, and games.

  It was simply the accepted custom that English children in India were sent “Home” to be brought up. Kept in India, children tended to “go native,” failing to develop proper British manners and customs. They must be indoctrinated early in English life, the conventional wisdom dictated, and the boys must go on to “public” schools and then to college or military academies to prepare them for their careers.

  In any case, Alice was hardly abandoning her children. Her sisters were in England and often had Ruddy and Trix as house guests for extended visits. Kipling was to later say that his annual month over Christmas with Aunt Georgie and Burne-Jones at their London home, The Grange, was “a paradise which I verily believe saved me.” The Grange was a house pulsing with activity, ideas, and a constant flow of visitors, including such luminaries as the designer and writer William Morris and the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For Kipling, those visits were interludes of laughter, games, adult attention, and roaming privileges in a well-stocked library. Why didn’t he complain about the way he was treated at Lorne Lodge? “Children tell little more than animals,” Kipling wrote later, “for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”

  When Georgiana finally perceived Kipling’s deep unhappiness at Lorne Lodge during his Christmas visit in 1876, she wrote Alice to come at once and rescue him. By the time Alice arrived, her son’s eyesight was failing (it was to trouble him all his life), and he was having a kind of nervous breakdown, the first of several over the years. That began to wane when Alice whisked the children off on what became a nine-month vacation, visiting relatives and then settling in for a long stay at a family-friendly farm, where Ruddy and Trix were joined by their older cousin Stanley Baldwin (later to be Prime Minister). It was an idyll that ended with Alice staying with her sister, Trix going back to Lorne Lodge and then to new lodgings with three genteel elderly sisters, and Ruddy heading off to boarding school.

  For Kipling, what he always called “the House of Desolation” was now in the past. But it stayed in his head and heart and lived on in his work. He always said his life there had cured him of hatred, but hatred and its consequences were central to many of his stories; and he told what had happened to him in fictionalized form in his story, “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

  Three Musketeers at School

  In his novel Stalky & Co., the United States Services College that was Kipling’s next place of torment came off as an ordinary British public school - a boarding school meant to prepare well-born boys for Oxford or Cambridge. In fact, it was a new kind of prep school, intended to pave the way to the military academies Sandhurst (for army officers) or Woolwich (naval cadets). For Alice and Lockwood, the school’s main attractions were its relatively low fees and the fact that the headmaster, Cormell Price, was a schoolmate of Alice’s brother and a member of the intellectual, artistic pre-Raphaelite set. Price promised to keep an avuncular eye on young Rudyard, and it was with him that Kipling took the train to Devonshire to join the school.

  Like most public schools of the day, United Services had a tradition of bullying, justified as a way to build character. New boys were often dangled out of windows by their ankles or hung down stairwells on
a rope. For his first term, Kipling was lonely and miserable, writing to Alice - sometimes four letters a day - to complain about the school, his classmates, and the strict, demanding masters. But then he meshed with his two soul mates in the high-spirited trio he would immortalize as Stalky & Co., and his school life took a marked turn for the better.

  The first friend was George Beresford, an Irish boy who shared Kipling’s love of literature and had an ingenious sense of mischief. The second was Lionel Dunsterville, whose daring and sense of cunning (“stalkiness,” the boys called it) had already won him a reputation as an outlaw at the school. As a team, the three - clever, cheeky, and independent - rebelled against a regimen of discipline, team sports, and conformity that Kipling would later decry as the fount of complacency and stuffiness in the English army, government, and society at large.

  Dunsterville in particular had a knack for stunts that left no fingerprints. Often, for instance, he ducked out of the Sunday Chapel procession just as it reached the church door; later, as the boys filed out of the service, he would rejoin the line, carrying a prayer book and wearing his top hat, gloves, and pious expression. During an exam, Dunsterville would ostentatiously hide a piece of paper in his lap. Challenged by the proctor, he would hold it up innocently to show that it was blank.

  In the stories that became Stalky & Co., Kipling cast Dunsterville as the undisputed leader (Stalky), with himself (Beetle) and Beresford (McTurk) as sidekicks. In life, the three seem to have been more like equals. If Dunsterville had presence, good looks, and daring, Beresford had ideas and the judgment to know what the three could get away with, and Kipling, for all his short stature and think glasses, was a born leader. “Beresford and I had our fair share of brains,” Dunsterville wrote years later, “but Kipling had a great deal more than his fair share, and added to it the enormous asset of knowledge - intuitive and acquired.”

  An Early, Daunting Talent

  All through his school years, Kipling had also been writing poems, and sending copies to his mother, who had them privately printed as Schoolboy Lyrics. Some of these poems, wrote Kipling’s biographer Harry Ricketts, himself a poet and critic, were “dauntingly good for a 15-year-old.” Kipling wrote with a maturity beyond his years, showing irony, empathy, and a surprising sense of varied characters.

  In real life the school’s headmaster, “Uncle Crom” Price, was a far more benign figure than the “Prooshan Bates” of the Stalky stories. True to his word, Price had been keeping an eye on Kipling, and had seen that the boy wasn’t cut out for a military career, if only because of his weak eyes. Even if his parents could have sent him to Oxford or Cambridge, Kipling’s Latin was too shaky to get him in. Journalism, however, might fit the boy’s talents. So Bates revived the school’s dormant magazine and made Kipling editor under his aegis. Kipling produced seven issues in less than a year, writing most of the contents himself, including reports on school events, poems, and humorous sketches of school life. Price made their editorial conferences an extended seminar. Their chats ranged over all of literature, and Kipling had the run of Price’s own library. Kipling’s father, hearing from Price that the boy might try journalism, began sounding out well-placed friends about a job for his son on one of India’s English-language papers. And so it happened that Rudyard Kipling finally went back to India. At the age of 16, he was to be the entire staff, under editor Stephen Wheeler, of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore.

  Swallowing India Whole

  That was the beginning of a truly astonishing burst of creative activity - six years of intense work, nonstop learning, and an endless stream of articles, poems, and short stories. He was finding his several voices, and already he was making a dent in his world.

  For openers, he was one of just two people writing and editing a newspaper that came out six days a week, served the Anglo-Indian community in Punjab province, and required an Indian labor force of 160 to produce and distribute. Kipling was responsible for the whole Gazette except the first two pages, and his duties included writing reports and reviews, cannibalizing news from Indian papers, preparing local notes, gathering data on coming events, editing reports from distant correspondents, and proof-reading the finished product. He hadn’t been on the job for a month when Wheeler fell off his horse, sustained a concussion, and had to take a week off. With the help of his parents, Kipling got out the paper single-handed - a feat that didn’t wholly endear him to his editor, who rewarded him by piling on more work and being ever more critical. But the paper’s owner, his father’s friend James Walker, repeatedly raised Kipling’s pay. After Kipling again ran the paper alone for several weeks when Wheeler came down with fever, Walker granted Kipling a month’s leave in the hot season and invited him to stay with Walker’s own family in Simla. There, in the foothills of the Himalayas, the elite of Anglo-India established the unofficial seat of government for nearly half the year, networking, socializing, and carrying on dalliances at picnics, dances and theatricals. Simla would be the scene of many of Kipling’s stories and poems.

  Kipling was still just 17 years old, with a formidable energy and appetite for life. He managed to do all his work at the paper, study the Hindustani language Urdu, write poems and stories, and play whist and tennis at the English club in Lahore. His work exposed him to the whole gamut of the Anglo-Indian society, from the Viceroy (a close friend of his parents) to the “tommies” in the army barracks, and he was a quick study of all of their character traits and habits of speech. On the hot nights when he wasn’t hobnobbing with the swells in Shimla, he took to exploring the ancient walled Mohammedan city at the heart of Lahore, wandering through bazaars, gambling and opium dens, outdoor dances and puppet shows, and the densely crowded streets. “One would come home, just as the light broke, in some night-hawk of a hired carriage which stank of hookah-fumes, jasmine-flowers, and sandalwood,” Kipling wrote in his autobiography, “and if the driver were moved to talk, he told one a good deal. Much of real Indian life goes on in the hot weather nights.”

  Kipling also kept up a lively correspondence, with “Uncle Crom,” selected masters and school friends, and his relatives in England. Both at school and in India, he carried on a four-year-long, mostly epistolary romance with Flo Garrard, briefly a resident with Trix at Lorne Lodge. While his feelings for Flo were undoubtedly real and he considered himself engaged to her, signs are that the relationship served also as an excuse to avoid other emotional entanglements. When Flo formally broke off the understanding in 1884, Kipling confided to his aunt that he had taken to 16-hour workdays to cure “the blue devils.”

  Birth of a Literary Brand

  Trix had rejoined the family from England late in 1883, and she and her brother were soon collaborating in a series of poems parodying such masters as Browning, Longfellow, and Tennyson. Published in a slim volume as Echoes, By Two Writers, they got little notice; but Kipling revisited and revised some of them for his later collections. He published other poems under pseudonyms, mostly in the Gazette, which also carried his first bona-fide Indian story, “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.” It was the tale of an opium addict, and already it had Kipling’s distinctive voice. The impersonal narrator relayed the strange story of “My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste,” told “between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died.”

  Kipling followed up with other exotic tales of Indian life, as well as stories reflecting the Anglo-Indian experience intersecting or colliding with the Subcontinent’s realities. He began work on a novel and pursued it sporadically for several years before destroying the manuscript. A set of light-hearted poems on Anglo-Indian life in the Gazette was so popular that Kipling published it as a collection, Departmental Ditties, which sold out its first edition of 500 copies in a month. Kipling was beginning to be a literary brand in India. The Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, complimented his friend Lockwood Kipling on his son’s “infallible ear for rhythm and cadence” and his “uncommon combination of satire with grace and delicacy.”

>   Kipling suffered another of his nervous breakdowns in 1885, ascribed to overwork, but it didn’t hinder him long. A new editor at the Gazette, Kay Robinson, gave him more leeway and set out to put some “sparkle into the paper” with 2,000-word fictional pieces of topical interest. Of the 39 unsigned stories published as “Plain Tales from the Hills,” eight were probably written by Trix; the rest were Kipling’s. He collected his own favorites, with three earlier stories and eight new ones, in a book of 40 stories under the same title.

  Plain Tales from the Hills presented a blend of milieus - the high spirits and intrigues of Simla, the stresses and machinations of bureaucratic life “on Station,” farcical tales of army life, and poignant, sometimes desperate, stories of the Hindus, Muslims, and Eurasians all but invisible to their English overlords. The memorable characters included Mrs. Hauksbee, a witty society widow modeled partly on Alice Kipling; Lispeth, a Himalayan hill-girl tricked into believing that an Englishman would return and marry her; and the inimitable army privates Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris, an Irishman, a Yorkshireman, and a Cockney, each with his own distinctive personality and dialect. The stories were linked by Kipling’s arresting voice, opening each tale with a teasing, ironic or mock-pedantic - but always masterly - touch. “The Rescue of Pfuffles,” for instance, begins: “Mrs. Hauksbee was sometimes nice to her own sex. Here is a story to prove this; and you can believe just as much as ever you please.”