Birthday: Rudyard Kipling and the White Author's Burden

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Author

Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1907

Almost everything about Kipling’s life was out of The Boy’s Own Book of Victorian Stereotypes. His parents were exotic. Father Kipling taught art and sculpture at an Indian college. Mother was from a family of vivacious women (one admirer said, “Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room”).

His uncles included the artists Edward Bourne-Jones and Edwin Poynter; a cousin was Stanley Baldwin, three times prime minister of the empire.

Kipling and his sister were shipped off to England when Rudyard was five, and boarded with a horrific couple who took in colonial kids for money. It was a misery not unique to that time; interrogation and critique remained popular in the English-speaking world  well into the twentieth century), but Kipling found some value in it, after the fact:

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 and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt [with whom Kipling spent holidays] would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, 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.

At 12 he was rescued when his mother came home; after less than a year he was packed off to boarding school. When it became apparent he was not sharp enough to win an Oxford scholarship, and could not afford to go on family funds, his father had Rudyard shipped back to India, where he installed the lad - all of 17- as principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. An advanced case of facial hair- he maintained a Nietzschean moustache all his life- made him seem at least 22, he thought.

The job didn’t last long, and Kipling moved through a series of Indian and Pakistani newspapers. He hit his stride at an Indian Army gazette, where, no matter how much copy the editor demanded, Kipling produced more. Between November, 1886 and June, 1887 alone, he published 39 fictional tales alongside his regular reporting. He published a book of poems, then collected some of his stories for his first prose book, at the age of twenty-two.

He joined another paper, and got fired in 1889. By then he’d published six collections of stories; he sold the rights to a company that sold paperbacks in Indian rail stations, with the 250 pounds he got and a several from the paper, he returned to Britain by way of the Far East, America and Canada, arriving in London seven months later. The Indian paperbacks were great hits, building up a demand for new work by the time he reached England.

On the way, he called, unannounced, on Mark Twain, who not only let him in but liked him. Twain said between them they had the world of literature by the tail; Kipling wrote about everything there was to be known, and Twain covered the rest.

In London, Kipling wrote a novel with an American writer and literary agent called Balestier; published more stories, had a nervous collapse, and left to see South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand on the way back to India for a visit. Back in London in 1891, he fell in love with Balestier’s sister and married her in 1892. They honeymoon, a planned epic jaunt across America to Japan, was cut short when the bank they used in Tokyo failed; they returned to Brattleboro, Vermont and settled in near his wife’s family’s estate.

Kipling’s Vermont years were among his most productive. He produced The Jungle Books, a bale of short stories and poems, and Captains Courageous. Conan Doyle came for a visit, and addicted Kipling to golf- so much so, that Kipling took to dyeing his gutta percha balls red to be able to play in snow.

He’d have happily stayed there forever, but a growing anti-English sentiment over the clash of a European boundary dispute in South America with the Monroe Doctrine had both countries rattling sabers by 1895, and Kipling’s brother-in-law became an increasingly abusive, financially demanding drunk. The Kiplings moved back to England in 1896, living in various places before finding a 1634 manse in Sussex in 1902. There the Kiplings remained, in an increasingly formal- if reasonably happy- marriage, the rest of his life.

By now Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the English-speaking world. His work took a political tone; the poems “Recessional” and “The White Man’s Burden” marked the end of the storied Victorian Age.

From 1898 the Kiplings holidayed annually in South Africa, staying in a cottage on Cecil Rhodes’ estate. Kipling befriended Rhodes and the other English leaders in Cape Colony, and was a keen pamphleteer for the Empire in the Boer War. His influence was so great- in 1907 he became the first English writer, and youngest ever, to win the Nobel Prize- Kipling was invited by Max Aitken (the press baron who became Lord Beaverbrook and loomed large in UK life in the 1930s and ‘40s) to get involved in the 1911 Canadian parliamentary elections, with great effect. His poem, “If” dates from those highwater years, along with Kim and the Just-So Stories. He wrote several successful science fiction stories, demonstrating his dextrous imagination anew. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting movement, borrowed ideas from Kipling's books for his program.

When The Great War came Kipling was a keen war supporter; he pulled strings to get his short-sighted son into the Army and combat. The boy was missing for over a year before being confirmed as killed in action.

Sobered by the carnage and personal loss, he became an active member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, helping establish service cemeteries on the Continent. He suggested taking a line from Ecclesiastes- “Their names live for ever more” as the commemorative message in each field; he composed “Known Unto God” for the graves of unknowns, and “The Glorious Dead” for the Cenotaph in London. He wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards- his son’s regiment- that has been praised as one of the best of the genre.

KIpling’s star began to fade before he died in 1936. The times had changed. Orwell, in particular, walloped him in print as a jingo imperialist. As the colonies were divested, and India was set free, his work came under more critique for its racial attitudes and outdated dialect talk. Like his musical counterpart, Edward Elgar, he was a creature of a time best forgotten.

For all that, he remains popular to this day, 150 years past his birth. His narrative and poetic skills remain among the best in the language, and have lent themselves to endless retellings in film and television.

Kipling declined one glittering prize after another: a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the poet laureate’s post. After His death his ashes were placed in The Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

In 2010 a crater on the planet Mercury was named after Kipling.

What to make of Kipling today?

As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post last summer,

Earlier this summer I was on a panel at a literary conference where I happened to say that Rudyard Kipling was a wonderful writer. Immediately, a number of people in the audience began to boo and hiss. Two of my fellow panelists nearly shrieked that Kip­ling was utterly beyond the pale, being at once racist, misogynist and imperialist. Not entirely surprised by this reaction, but nonetheless flabbergasted by its vehemence, I made a flustered attempt to champion the author of “Plain Tales From the Hills,” “The Jungle Books” and “Kim.” I declared what many believe, that he is the greatest short-story writer in English. This only made things worse. Finally, with some desperation I blurted out: “How much Kipling have you actually read?”

...Today, more often than not, Kipling’s books serve mainly as quarries in which academics dig out instances of racial insensitivity, colonialist arrogance and anti-feminist caricature.

Neil Gaiman has defended Kipling in the past, noting,

It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. Kipling was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors.

To that Dirda added,

...the very point of reading fiction is to see through eyes other than one’s own. In time this leads to an enlargement of perspective and forestalls any rush to simplistic judgments. The sign of an educated person, it’s been said, is the ability to offer assent or dissent in nuanced, graduated terms.

And what of “The Jungle Books”? It was pure pleasure to revisit them. Still, I suspect many people know only of Mowgli and his foster-parents — Mother and Father Wolf, old Baloo the bear, Bagheera the black panther and the mighty python Kaa — through their jejune film representations. A pity. These stories, by turns thrilling, humorous and touching, need to be read: Kipling’s language is rhetorically thick, every sentence charged, yet the action fast-moving. As well as Mowgli’s adventures, “The Jungle Books” also present quieter, related tales such as “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” the life of a kind of Indian Saint Francis, beloved by animals.

While Kipling will doubtless continue to roil 21st-century readers, to simply dismiss his work with a boo or smirk of cultural superiority reveals little but cultural ignorance. Read “The Jungle Books,” the exquisite and ghostly “ ‘They’ ” and “Wireless” and a dozen other stories to discover for yourself their imaginative greatness. As I said at that conference, Kipling is a wonderful writer.

What to you think, Reader? How do we measure literary merit in parlous times?

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