Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  I am very conscious of what the novelist Martin Amis has called the ‘biographical fallacy’ – the misapprehension that an author’s creation either as a character or as the narrator of a story is a reflection of himself or herself. However, all writers draw from their own experience to a greater or lesser degree, even if they afterwards reshape that experience within their own imagination. With Kipling it is a case of the greater degree. He himself was happy to admit that he had ‘a cold-blooded trick of turning most things and experiences into print’1 and it would be no exaggeration to describe him as one of the great magpies of English literature – although the mynah bird would be a more appropriate comparison, since he was as much a mimic as a borrower.

  Exploring and illuminating the sources of Kipling’s literary output and the degree to which he placed himself within his writing is central to our understanding of the man and his work. For example, returning from Simla to Allahabad in late July 1888 at the height of the Rains, Kipling found the River Gugger in flood and had to kick his heels until the waters had abated. He passed the time talking to the crossing-keeper who lived in a shack beside the ford. Kipling the journalist turned the experience into a complaint about the wretched state of the Umballa–Kalka road, published in the Pioneer a few days later on 28 July. A bridge had stood at the crossing point but had been washed away in a flood many years previously, and part of his complaint was that it was high time a new bridge was raised. Kipling the writer then developed the same experience into a short story, ‘In Flood-Time’, which he placed in the Week’s News on 11 August. The form he used was one which he had made his own: a dramatic monologue from the crossing-keeper as he makes his guest comfortable, set within a framework provided by the listening journalist-sahib, the tale gaining verisimilitude by appearing to be jotted down word for word exactly as recounted.

  The old man has a story to tell from his youth, which turns out to be a reworking of the classical tale of Hero and Leander. In this Indian version Leander is the Muslim crossing-keeper and his Hero a Hindu widow whom he visits illicitly at night by swimming across the river. Desperate to see her one night, he sets out when the river is in full spate and discovers too late that he has been caught up in ‘the Great Flood about which men talk still’ which has brought down the local bridge. But unlike Leander, the crossing-keeper does not drown. Instead, the author adds his own ‘Kiplingesque’ touch, for as the crossing-keeper is about to be swallowed up by the waters his fingers grasp the knotted hair of his rival in love: ‘He had been dead full two days, for he rode high, wallowing, and was an aid to me. I laughed then, knowing for a surety that I should yet see Her and take no harm; and I twisted my fingers in the hair of the man, for I was far spent, and together we went down the stream – he the dead and I the living.’ Ever the recycler, Kipling hangs on to his crossing-keeper and serves him up again as Gobind, the one-eyed story-teller who provides the Preface to Life’s Handicap. Some years on, the Great Flood reappears as a wrathful manifestation of Mother Ganges in ‘The Bridge-Builders’ – that compelling parable of the old, Gods-fearing Asia pitted against the modern, practical West.

  Unlike his friends Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Rider Haggard, Kipling was incapable of compartmentalising his life and his work. Taking this as my cue, I have resisted the temptation to deal with him in segments. Everything is set down here in strict chronological order. The disadvantage of this method is that it becomes a juggling act; the huge advantage, that it gives a truer picture of how it came about that the myopic, clumsy school runt ‘Gigger’ was transformed within the space of six and a half years into ‘Ruddy’, the literary prodigy; of how the same Ruddy then became within a second span of six and a half years England’s best-beloved man of letters; and of how Ruddy lost and found and lost again his Daemon and became Kipling, spokesman of Empire, all but done for at thirty-five. To emphasise the difference between these two Kiplings I refer to the younger man as ‘Ruddy’, while the man he became at thirty-five is always ‘Kipling’.

  I make no apologies for quoting directly from original sources more liberally than is usual in a biography. Perhaps this comes from having learned my trade as an oral historian, but it seems only proper that the words of a biographer’s subject should always take precedence over his own, particularly in dealing with a man whose entire adult life was built around what he wrote. Young Ruddy stands alongside Byron as one of the great letter-writers of the nineteenth century, besides being far more versatile in his literary output, and my aim has been to let this writing speak for itself as far as possible.

  Finally, I have included Anglo-Indian argot wherever appropriate. A number of Anglo-Indian words, such as the Station, the Club, the Rains, the Hills, the Hot Weather, the Cold Weather, Society, Home, Civilians, Natives and Season (as in Simla Season), had their own local meaning, and were always spoken as if written with a capital letter, although not always set down that way. To avoid confusion I have followed suit. A glossary is attached.

  Charles Allen,

  Spring 2007,

  Somerset

  Introduction: ‘Seek not to question’

  And for the little, little span

  The dead are borne in mind,

  Seek not to question other than

  The books I leave behind.

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Appeal’, set down at the end of his final revision of his collected poetry, published posthumously as the Sussex Edition, 1937–9

  It is hard to grasp the extent to which Rudyard Kipling dominated the popular imagination of the English-speaking world just over a century ago. It can best be judged by reading what his literary contemporaries thought of him. ‘I’m getting just a wee bit tired of Mr Kipling,’ declared the humorist Jerome K. Jerome in the Sun on 7 May 1900:

  He appears to have dominated the universe to the exclusion of all other beliefs. Kipling day by day has grown into a sort of nightmare. ‘Kipling and the Queen’, ‘Kipling and the German Emperor’, ‘Kipling and Tommy Atkins’, ‘Kipling in the Hospital’, ‘Kipling in the train that’s going to the Hospital’, ‘Kipling before he got into the train that went to the Hospital’, ‘Kipling on the Boers’, ‘Kipling on People who dare to express an Opinion on the Boers’, etc.

  A more thoughtful account of the phenomenon was given by the socialist writer H. G. Wells, as set down in his novel The New Machiavelli. ‘It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period,’ Wells has the novel’s hero explain:

  The prevailing force of my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism … Never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with … its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire … became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations … he coloured the very idiom of our conversation … He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our times failed to express.

  Throughout the 1890s the editors of middlebrow monthly journals in Britain and America such as Macmillan’s Magazine, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, McClure’s Magazine, Century Magazine, Ladies Home Journal and St Nicholas Magazine for Children had competed to publish the latest story from Kipling’s pen. His finest work of fiction, Kim, first appeared in serialised form in McClure’s Magazine, beginning at Christmas 1900. Having begun his writing career as a journalist, he continued to use the popular press as his preferred first outlet. In September 1895 Kipling offered The Times some verses in support of the Royal Navy, and such was the popular response that its editor was happy to publish thereafter whatever Kipling sent him. In the following year, after much badgering for something to mark the Queen’s Jubilee, Kipling wrote the five stanzas that came to be known as ‘The Recessional�
�. From that time onwards the other national dailies joined The Times and the monthlies in the queue, happy to clear a space for whatever Mr Kipling had to offer.

  An outpouring of trenchant polemical verses followed, each of which hit the public nerve square on, whether it was a call for America to join Britain as the world’s lawgiver in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ or a reminder of the nation’s duty to look after its soldiery – ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ raising the then enormous sum of a quarter of a million pounds for the Daily Mail’s Absent-Minded Beggar Fund. In 1897 Kipling was formally enrolled as a member of the British Establishment when he was elected to the Athenaeum Club, its youngest member at thirty-one. Although he declined the Poet Laureateship and a knighthood, everyone knew that Kipling spoke for England and was Laureate of Empire in all but name.

  In February 1899 disaster struck the Kiplings in New York, and the English-speaking world held its collective breath. First their beloved eldest daughter, six-year-old Josephine, died of whooping-cough, then the writer himself developed pneumonia in both lungs. Over ten days of crisis in early March, with Kipling unconscious or in delirium, the newspapers carried daily bulletins charting his progress. Crowds gathered outside his hotel, to stand in silence or kneel in prayer. His illness coincided with that of Pope Leo XIII, so that the news-stands carried the joint banner ‘KIPLING and POPE’. ‘Two nations have watched, by proxy, beside the sick-bed of the man that has so endeared himself to all Anglo-Saxon hearts,’ wrote a contemporary. ‘Knowledge of his fight with Death is the property of the public. He does not belong to himself, as do you and I; he is part of the Country … It is indisputable that, had Rudyard Kipling died, the hearts of millions of men would have ached with an agony of loss … There are thousands that do write; there are dozens that can write; but there is only one Rudyard Kipling.’1 The Times devoted a leader to him, crediting Kipling with having enabled the West to understand the East as never before, and declaring him ‘a patriot poet’ who had ‘sung the pride of Empire’ while also preaching its obligations. The Morning Post paid its own tribute by printing, centre-page across three columns, a facsimile of the manuscript of Kipling’s ‘The English Flag’.2

  Never had a writer been accorded such public affection, and when his recovery was known to be certain, telegrams and messages of goodwill poured in from every corner of the globe, their senders ranging from world leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm and Lord Curzon to the Sergeants’ Mess of the Suffolk Regiment and the Soldiers’ Institute at Allahabad. Nevertheless, with the death of his eldest and ‘best-beloved’ the blinds were lowered on the outside world. ‘Much of the beloved Cousin Ruddy of our childhood died with Josephine,’ wrote his niece Angela Thirkell, ‘and I feel I have never seen him as a real person since that year.’3

  Soon afterwards Kipling became the first celebrity to acquire a stalker. When he sailed to South Africa to winter there with his family in December 1901, he was tracked by a lunatic armed with a revolver who gained entry to the house in Cape Town lent Kipling by his admirer Cecil Rhodes. Only by administering copious draughts of whisky to the would-be assassin did Britain’s most famous writer avert an untimely death at the age of thirtyfive.4

  Had Rudyard Kipling died in December 1901 in South Africa, instead of living on for another thirty-five years, our image of him would have been very different. This book is an account of that first half of his life: from his birth in Bombay on the evening of 30 December 1865 to the completion in 1900 of Kim, his greatest work and his last word on India. By the time Kim appeared in book form in October 1901 Kipling’s extraordinary powers of imagination were already on the wane. The craftsmanship stayed with him for the rest of his life, particularly in his verse, but the spark of genius that gave his writing its sharp, dangerous crackle was almost gone, along with the desire to jolt that had made the best of his early work so electrifying to his Victorian readership.

  More importantly, the seams he had mined so thoroughly for the best of his writing were all but exhausted. Long before his death in January 1936 Kipling’s reputation was in eclipse. To liberals and literary figures alike he had become a hate-figure, in George Orwell’s ugly phrasing, the ‘morally insensitive … aesthetically disgusting … gutter patriot’, the very embodiment of Little England jingoism. When his ashes were immured in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner not a single important literary figure troubled to attend. He might almost have been, in the words of the title of his own flawed early novel, The Light that Failed.

  And yet today the name of Rudyard Kipling is stuck as firmly in the public mind as that of any of the literary greats of his age, from Tennyson and Hardy at one end of the time frame to T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence at the other, even if part of that familiarity comes second-hand from the Disneyfication of The Jungle Book and the dozens of turns of phrase or memorable lines that are now part of everyday speech: ‘East is East and West is West’, ‘Good hunting’, ‘’satiable curtiosity’, ‘The White Man’s burden’, ‘Steady the Buffs’, ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone’, ‘As immutable as the hills’, ‘The most ancient profession in the world’, ‘The female of the species is deadlier than the male’, ‘The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins’, ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke’, ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’, ‘Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind’, ‘A soldier known only to God’, ‘Lest we forget’ and, above all, the opening lines of what is consistently voted Britain’s most popular poem: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’

  The last of the half-dozen generations reared on the Just So Stories, The Jungle Book, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Kim and the collections of short stories that appeared under such titles as Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides are now either dead or fast entering their dotage – the present writer among them. Yet, from the steady stream of biographies, critical studies, Kipling anthologies and reprints that continue to be published, it is clear that both the man and his work continue to command an audience.

  What made Kipling so hugely popular in the 1890s was his seemingly unerring instinct for saying, not exactly what the public wanted to hear but what most needed to be said, and for saying it directly and in a way that was instantly quotable, if not singable. Among his contemporaries he was the most accessible of writers in what he wrote but, equally, the most private in his personal life, demanding to be judged by his writing alone. ‘When I have anything to say, I write it down and sell it. My brains are my own,’ he once declared to an American newspaper reporter. When he first became a public figure in 1891 he reacted to any perceived breach of his privacy with a hostility that bordered on paranoia, and that distrust grew more pointed with each passing year. The thought of his life and the lives of those closest to him coming under the scrutiny of biographers filled him with horror. In 1934 he was visited at Bateman’s, his home in East Sussex, by his old friend and publisher Frank Doubleday, who found him shovelling piles of his papers on to an open fire. When asked why, he declared that no one was going to make a monkey out of him after his death.

  This was only the culmination of a process of covering his tracks which had begun in the 1890s when his old school friends and a fellow journalist from his India days started writing about him. In 1896 his one-time editor from Lahore, Kay Robinson, had written with his grudging approval a series of articles about their early days together in India. But then, when Kipling suffered his double pneumonia in February–March 1899 and seemed at death’s door, Robinson wrote a follow-up, quoting extensively from an early letter in which Kipling had spoken frankly about his future hopes as a writer. Once recovered, Kipling made it plain that he regarded Robinson’s behaviour as a breach of trust, paid him £50 for the return of his letter and never spoke to his old friend again. At much the same time he wrote to his old chum George Beresford (‘M’Turk’ in the Stalky stories), who had been writing articles ab
out the background to the Stalky tales, imploring him to abandon a projected autobiographical account of his schooldays with Kipling: ‘If you love me don’t publish them.’

  Rudyard’s sister Trix was the next to be approached, being warned by letter to be careful what she said about him: ‘When they sound you out about my views, you must not repeat any of the things I told you.’ According to Trix, ‘Ruddy passed through a phase of almost morbid desire to throw veils over his perfectly respectable past. It used to sadden our parents a little – for after all he was not a bastard brought up in a gutter. I think it was the result of living in America and being badgered by the journalists.’5 Whatever the cause, the urge to seek and destroy continued, and in the years that followed Kipling made strenuous efforts to recover his early letters and manuscripts and to warn off anyone who wanted to write about him. In this he was greatly assisted by his wife Carrie, staunchest of proctors.

  In May 1910 the death occurred of ‘Uncle Crom’ Price, who had been the boy Ruddy’s mentor and in loco parentis at United Services College in Devon. Six months later his mother, Alice, died, swiftly followed by the complete mental collapse of his sister Trix and then, two months later, the death of his beloved father, John Lockwood Kipling. Mother, father and only sister had made up three of the four corners of what the Kiplings had always called the ‘Family Square’, and the combination of tragedies had an effect scarcely less devastating than the loss of little Josephine a decade earlier. Rudyard Kipling tore up his parents’ wills, broke off all communications with his mother’s surviving sisters, and with the help of his wife Carrie set about burning his parents’ papers over a three-day period – including all his letters to them and theirs to him.