Rudyard Kipling, A Life Read online

  The book was published in January, 1888, a month after Kipling’s twenty-second birthday. By then, he had been promoted to the Gazette’s bigger sister paper, The Pioneer, based in Allahabad, becoming its special correspondent in the Rajputana region. He was writing at a frantic pace. In the next year he published six collections of stories, mostly new, including Soldiers Three, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie. His dispatches for The Pioneer were later collected as Letters of Marque.

  These stories show a marked development of style and technique. Kipling framed many of his tales, unfolding a narrative within a situation where the teller and his listeners are waiting for something to happen. He experimented with the Indian vernacular and with phonetic renditions of children’s speech. The best of the stories are Kipling at his prime.

  By now, Kipling was thinking seriously of trying his luck in London, then the center of the literary universe. When The Pioneer tried to reassign him, he settled for six months’ pay in lieu of notice and agreed to write a series of travel articles (later collected as From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel) to pay his fare to London by way of the Far East and North America. The journey took nine months, and he suffered another brief nervous breakdown in Canton. His travel sketches show him in turn enchanted by the exotic beauty of Burma, filled with racist disgust at the Chinese, enthralled by the exquisite refinement of Japan, and supercilious at the boorish vulgarity of America.

  “Here’s Literature at Last!”

  He arrived in London in 1889, already a rising star. His books had preceded him from India, and The Spectator had published a glowing review of Soldiers Three. Another prestigious weekly, St. James’s Gazette, had said it would keep “our eye on this young man.” Kipling promised himself to move slowly, to concentrate on serious novels that would cement his reputation, and not to be distracted by short-form magazine work. But then Mowbray Morris, editor of the highbrow Macmillan’s Magazine, offered him a retainer of 300 pounds a year to furnish a steady stream of short stories and poems, and editor Sidney Low of St. James’s Gazette offered to print anything Kipling would supply. Soon he was churning out a river of short fiction and verse, including “The Ballad of East and West” and more of his popular tales of Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd. Kipling was the talk of literary circles, and his charm and conversational talent made him an instant celebrity at the Savile Club, the haunt of such famous writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and H. Rider Haggard.

  Soon, however, Kipling became disillusioned with the “long-haired literati” and ambivalent about living in England itself, which seemed complacent and effete in contrast to the vigor and purpose of the colonies. But he kept spinning out stories and poems. His Barrack-Room Ballads, including “Danny Deever,” “Gunga Din,” and “Mandalay,” were critical and popular successes. When “Danny Deever,” the chilling story of a regimental hanging, first appeared in the Scots Observer, professor David Masson of Edinburgh University strode into class brandishing a copy and announced, “Here’s Literature! Here’s Literature at last!”

  A Courtship that Failed

  Early in 1890, Kipling had another of his mysterious breakdowns. He had run by chance into his old flame, Flo Garrard, who was now an aspiring painter and was instantly smitten again. But according to Trix, Flo refused him at least twice. Whether or not his breakdown had anything to do with the failed romance, this attack, he wrote to a friend, “is the completest . . . I am physically in perfect health but I can neither work nor think nor read.”

  Kipling shook himself out of his funk by finding a new publisher, William Henley, a passionate, strong-willed literary enthusiast whose authors included such notable names as Stephenson, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Barrie, and H.G. Wells. Kipling called him “a jewel of an editor, with the gift of fetching the very best out of his cattle,” and it was Henley who helped shape what Mark Twain would call “Kipling’s far-reaching bugle note” of populist imperialism.

  That summer, Kipling made one last attempt to win Flo Garrard, visiting her in Paris. When she turned him down again, he went back to London and in two furious months wrote the novel The Light that Failed was a thinly veiled depiction of Kipling’s romance with Flo, and it was a popular and critical failure. It demanded pity for the hapless wooer, Dick, and depicted his heartless Maisie as capricious and selfish. Kipling had hoped to impress the literati with his tragic tale, but no such luck. The mandarin Henry James, who had once hailed Kipling as a possible “English Balzac,” now wrote a colleague: “The talent enormous, but the brutality even deeper-seated.”

  Honeymoon, Interrupted

  Kipling had formed a sudden, intense friendship with Wolcott Balestier, a young American who had published three novels and was now the London agent for the New York publishing house of Lovell. Balestier’s charm and energy made a deep impression in London, and soon he and Kipling were collaborating on what was to be a full-length adventure romance, with scenes ranging from Colorado to Rajputana in India. The Naulahka (named, but misspelled, after a seventeenth-century marble pavilion in Lahore) was a jaunty melodrama, written purely for fun in a two-month burst. Friends described the collaboration as a celebration, with Kipling pacing the room and Balestier pounding a typewriter as they shouted lines at each other. The two men called each other “brother,” and before long Kipling was engaged to Balestier’s sister, Caroline.

  His ceaseless work had created more strain, and his doctors, fearing another nervous breakdown, sent him off on a cruise to South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. He had planned to spend Christmas in 1891 with his parents in Lahore, but left for London on Christmas Eve when a telegram arrived from Caroline: WOLCOTT DEAD. COME BACK TO ME. Balestier had been in poor health all summer, and a bout of typhoid took his life. When Kipling arrived, a month after the funeral, Carrie was waiting for him; eight days later they were married, and planning a year’s honeymoon cruising around the world.

  The first stop was the United States, where the couple visited Carrie’s family in Vermont. Kipling fell in love with the Green Mountains and decided to settle there. They bought a 10-acre plot from Carrie’s brother Beatty, using funds from the advance Kipling had received for The Naulahka. They traveled by train to Vancouver, with Kipling writing travel letters to The Times of London alternately disparaging the grit and greed of the big cities and heaping praise on the generosity and tidiness of small-town and rural America.

  Kipling and Carrie steamed off to Japan aboard the Empress of India (an “auspicious name,” Kipling crowed). They spent several months in Yokohama, with side trips to Tokyo and Nikko, but then calamity struck: Their Japanese bank failed, wiping out their entire savings of 2,000 pounds. Luckily, the local branch of Thomas Cook refunded their unused tickets for the rest of the cruise. Giving up on the honeymoon, they went back to Vermont and a new life in America.

  The American Idyll

  Kipling’s four years in the United States can be seen as an effort to find a home for a man who was truly comfortable nowhere. He and Carrie lived in a rented house, Bliss Cottage, while they built their own large and comfortable home, called Naulakha (the correct spelling this time) in memory of Wolcott, on the plot they had already bought. Their first daughter, Josephine, was born; a second, Elsie, would follow four years later.

  Josephine at Naulakha

  Friends said Kipling was developing an American accent. He joined the Association of American Authors, traveled to New York and Washington, and befriended Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and the vernacular rhymester James Whitcomb Riley, whom Kipling saw as an authentic American poet.

  Carrie was becoming the ideal wife for an author - practical, his business agent, the organizer of their travels, and fiercely protective when reporters came begging for interviews. Her diary said he felt “a feeling of great strength” after they moved into the new house, and his moods that year and the next were generally exuberant. In his annual addendum to Carrie’s diary, he
signed off on 1893: “Another perfect year ended. The Lord has been very good to us. All well in this House. Amen.”

  His work, too, went well. The Barrack-Room Ballads, published individually in 1890, were collected in a book in 1892, and sold triumphantly on both sides of the Atlantic. Kipling published another collection of poetry, The Seven Seas, and a book of stories, The Day’s Work. It was in Vermont that he began work on his novel Kim and on the Just-So Stories, and he produced both volumes of his Jungle Books, with the unforgettable Mowgli re-enacting Kipling’s own history in an enchanted Indian jungle. Raised by wolves, the boy is befriended by splendid beasts including Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear and Kaa the python, who help defend him from Shere Khan the evil lame tiger (a stand-in for Mrs. Holloway?) and Tabaqui the jackal (her son Harry”).

  The Jungle Books interspersed tales of Mowgli with stories of other animals, including the fearless mongoose “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and Kotick, “The White Seal,” another outsider who saves his people from ruthless hunters by leading them to an island where men never come. And in these stories, as in the earlier ones, Kipling, not yet 30 years old, was advancing his art. If anything, the second Jungle Book was deeper and richer than the first, with stronger characterization and more complex plot lines. The book ends with Mowgli, cast out by the wolves, beginning a new life in the world of men.

  Kipling in his study at Naulakha

  Now Kipling wanted to try an American book, and the result was Captains Courageous. It’s the story of a teen-age British aristocrat, spoiled and selfish, who falls off an ocean liner and is hauled aboard a fishing boat on the Grand Banks. The rough-hewn fishermen teach him manners and adult values, and he goes home a man. The story is perhaps a bit thin, but the book is fascinating for its lore about boats, fishing, and life at sea - a wealth of detail that Kipling owed to a Vermont neighbor, Dr. James Conland, who showed him around the harbors of Boston and Gloucester and tutored him in the fishing trade. “I reveled in profligate abundance of detail,” Kipling wrote years later, “not necessarily for publication but for the joy of it.”

  But the American idyll was coming to a close. London and Washington were close to going to war in a long-forgotten boundary dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela, and as an Englishman in America, Kipling felt a sudden hostility - as if, he wrote, he “had been aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.” Even worse was the deteriorating relationship with Carrie’s brother Beatty, a shiftless farmer and heavy drinker who resented his dependency on Kipling. After the two came near blows early in 1896, Kipling had Beatty arrested and charged with assault. The press seized gleefully on the trial, with Kipling being berated in a two-hour cross-examination. He won the battle, with Beatty placed under bond to keep the peace, but lost the war. The English celebrity had been humiliated, and before long he and Carrie were packing up to leave Naulakha for good.

  A Jingoist with Fingertips

  They settled in Torquay, on the coast of Devon, well away from the claustrophobic literary cliques of London. Kipling now saw his writing as aimed at “Greater Britain,” the strong emerging empire rather than the effete mother country. His American years had given him another outsider’s perspective on England - “We are a rummy bunch,” he wrote a friend - and he had returned just in time for the bombastic self-congratulation of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the run-up to the Second Boer War in South Africa.

  Kipling’s image as a die-hard imperialist was about to harden into concrete. From the outset, however, he was far more than a flag-waving jingoist. A man of his time, he saw the English (and to some extent, other civilized Westerners) as undeniably superior to the “lesser breeds without the Law,” and destined to rule over them. By today’s standards, this attitude is at best patronizing and at worst racist. But Kipling’s work clearly shows that he could see and empathize with the people beneath the stereotypes. Moreover, he saw colonial rule not as a privilege to exploit the benighted, but a heavy responsibility to raise them up and improve their lot. In a poem that would become notorious for its title, he admonished:

  Take up the White Man’s burden-

  Send forth the best ye breed-

  Go, bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

  To wait, in heavy harness,

  On fluttered folk and wild-

  Your new-caught sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.

  When Kipling set out to write a poem celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee Day, he wanted it to counteract the overweening pride and self-confidence that was sweeping the nation. The result was “Recessional,” a hymn warning that glory wouldn’t endure and that a little humility was in order. The key stanzas:

  The tumult and the shouting dies;

  The Captains and the Kings depart:

  Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

  An humble and a contrite heart.

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

  Far-called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget - lest we forget!

  A Crumbling Empire?

  These were also the years in which Kipling wrote Stalky & Co., hailing the blessings of irreverence and fresh thinking over the conformity, rigid hierarchy, and smugness that he saw sapping the strength of the empire. But the message was not appreciated. One critic labeled the book “the most vulgar & bestial production of our times.” Another called the heroes “hooligans,” concluding: “And the moral of the book - for, like all such banalities, it professes to have a moral - is that out of materials like these is fashioned the humanity which is to ennoble and preserve our Anglo-Saxon empire!”

  Kipling himself was stoic under the brickbats, writing to a friend that “there is bound to be a sharp and savage reaction against any man who has had the luck that I’ve had.” But from that time on, his image was fixed, and people tended to read only what they wanted to see in his stories and poems. “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” is still taken by many to define Rudyard Kipling and his racist, jingoist philosophy. Few recall the end of that stanza:

  But there is neither East nor West, Border,

  nor Breed, nor Birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face, tho’

  they come from the ends of the earth.

  The first battles of the Boer War bore out Kipling’s forebodings about the empire’s weaknesses, with the colonists handing the British one defeat after another. But Kipling was always a patriot, and he backed the war without reservation - writing a poem (set to music by Arthur Sullivan) promoting a fund for the wives and children of soldiers, and going himself to South Africa to visit hospitals and write letters for the wounded.

  The majestic uber-colonist Cecil Rhodes made the Kiplings welcome in a guest-house on his own estate. Kipling helped Rhodes write speeches and articles, and lent a hand when his old friend Lord Frederick Roberts, now in charge of the British expeditionary force, wanted to set up a newspaper for the troops. Kipling himself briefly came under fire in a skirmish, and nonchalantly called it “about as merry a day as I ever spent.” But he remained caustic about the British tactics: “The Boers hit us just as hard and just as often as they knew how; and we advanced against ‘em as if they were street-rioters that we didn’t want to hurt.”

  Back in England, Kipling used his fame to promote the cause, advocating universal conscription for home defense and writing stories about the war that were thinly veiled propaganda. But they also reflected his exasperation at the smug old-boyism of the British officers, and played up the contrast between the lax British troops and the enterprise and initiative of colonial units from Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The Australians especially impressed him: “A cleaner,
simpler, saner, more adequate gang of men I’ve never met up with.” Anti-war liberals angrily put Kipling down as a dangerous reactionary and even worse, a bore. But he stuck to his guns until the English pulled out a nominal victory in 1902.

  “The Rest is Humbug. Ask the Lama “

  By now, London’s literary lights had about given up on Kipling. In their eyes, his early promise had faded in a succession of increasingly trivial and juvenile works, marred by violence and imperial hubris. But he was idolized in America, France, and Germany. And in truth, Kipling was still growing as a writer, and some of his best work was done in this period of critical eclipse. Even Henry James offered a tribute in 1901, when Kipling published Kim, his finest and most complete book.

  Kim was the story of the son of an English soldier, orphaned and living as a street urchin in India. The boy becomes the disciple of an otherworldly Tibetan lama and joins him on his quest for enlightenment, roaming across northern India and mixing with the country’s rich diversity of peoples. Kim’s quick wits catch the attention of an English spy, a master of the “Great Game” being played against Russia for control of central Asia, and Kim becomes one of a network of agents as he and his lama “dive into the happy Asiatic disorder” of the Grand Trunk Road across India. Like Kipling himself, the boy is a chameleon, a crosser of boundaries. He cares for and protects his lama while remaining in awe of the priest’s spirituality, and he melds happily and easily into the kaleidoscope of scenes and people he finds on his wanderings.