Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Your Ruddy.4

  In the weeks that followed Ruddy wrote to both sisters, but his long, chatty letters to Edmonia were in marked contrast to those he sent Carrie, which were short and stilted, for all his protestations of undying love. One letter stands out, written to Carrie on 9 December apparently in response to a request from her father that he clarify his religious beliefs. In it Ruddy set out his credo:

  Chiefly I believe in the existence of a personal God to whom we are personally responsible for wrong doing … I disbelieve directly in eternal punishment … I disbelieve in an eternal reward. As regards the mystery of the Trinity and the Doctrine of Redemption I regard them most reverently but cannot give them implicit belief … Summarized it comes to I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of Heaven and Earth and in one filled with His spirit who did voluntarily die in the belief that the human race would be spiritually bettered thereby … I believe[,] having seen and studied eight or nine creeds[,] in Justification by work rather than faith, and most assuredly do I believe in retribution both here and hereafter for wrong doing, as I believe in a reward, here and hereafter for obedience to the Law. There! You have got from me what no living soul has ever done before.5

  Not even for her ‘sweet sake’, Ruddy told Carrie, would he perjure himself on the question of his faith, and as if to emphasise how differently he thought from her Ruddy then went on to declare that there was something else that worried him even more than her questioning his beliefs: ‘You wrote, Mademoiselle, some stuff – not to put too fine a point upon it – some ABJECT DRIVELLING ROT – LUNACY – BOSH –! on the subject of All in a Garden Fair and your views about poets and sympathy, culled from the pages of Walter Besant. You fear and then again, you didn’t know as to how and so forth …’ It was a none-too-kind way of saying that the two of them were incompatible.

  This was Ruddy’s penultimate letter to Carrie Taylor and almost the last of his many letters to Edmonia Hill. With his letter of 9 December Ruddy had effectively sabotaged his relationship with Carrie Taylor and, in doing so, his relationship with Edmonia Hill.

  Embankment Chambers had the inestimable advantage of being directly opposite Gatti’s Musical Hall, built into the foundations of Charing Cross Railway Station, and it had Harris the ‘Sausage King’ on the ground floor, where he could dine on quantities of sausage and mash for tuppence. This became Ruddy’s home for the next twenty-two months; a period when success came to him ‘as a flood’ and which he afterwards looked back upon as ‘a dream, in which it seemed that I could push down walls, walk through ramparts and stride across rivers’.6

  Entrance to Gatti’s was to be had for fourpence, to include a pewter tankard of beer or porter, and Ruddy became a music hall regular, enjoying ‘the smoke, the roar and the good fellowship of relaxed humanity’, often in the company of ‘an elderly but upright barmaid … deeply and dispassionately versed in all knowledge of evil as she had watched it across the zinc she was always swabbing off’. After the staid entertainments of the Gaiety Theatre, Benmore and Montgomery Hall, the vibrancy and the sheer vulgarity of London’s music halls were a revelation, and Ruddy plunged deep into what he saw as their ‘basic and basaltic truths’ which ‘opened a new world to me and filled me with fresh thoughts’. After one such visit on 15 November he lay in bed all morning ruminating before rising to set down a very personal account of the music hall for his Anglo-Indian readers. It ended:

  That night, as I looked across the sea of tossing billycocks and rocking bonnets – as I heard them give tongue, not once, but four times, their eyes sparkling, their mouths twisted with the taste of pleasure – I felt I had secured Perfect Felicity … The chorus bubbled up again and again throughout the evening, and a Red-coat in the gallery insisted on singing solos about ‘a swine in the poultry line’ … and the pewters began to fly, and afterwards the dark street was vocal with various versions of what the girl had really told the soldier, and I went to bed murmuring: ‘I have found my Destiny’.7

  The outcome was ‘the first of some verses called Barrack-Room Ballads, which I showed to Henley of the Scots, later National Observer, who wanted more’. As Kipling tells it in Something of Myself, W. E. Henley, a flamboyant, larger-than-life character with a wooden leg who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirate ‘Long John Silver’, was the man who first brought his work to public attention in London. But that was not quite how it happened, for if any single person deserved that accolade it was Ruddy’s former bête noire, the ‘Amber Toad’.

  Unknown to Ruddy, his letter to Stephen Wheeler written the previous December asking him to promote his Indian Railway Library volumes in the St James’s Gazette had paid off, for the editor, Stephen Low, had been so struck by Soldiers Three that he had talked of a new talent which had ‘dawned on the eastern horizon’, as great as Charles Dickens and possibly greater. ‘I got Wheeler to put me in touch with Kipling on his arrival in London,’ wrote Low some years later,

  and one morning there walked into my office a short, dark, young man with a bowler hat, a rather shabby tweed overcoat, an emphatic voice, a charming smile, and behind the spectacles the brightest eyes I had ever seen. He told me that he had to make his way in English literature, and intended to do it … I suggested that he might like to keep his pot boiling by writing sketches and short stories for the St James’s, which suggestion he willingly accepted.

  Low took the twenty-three-year-old out to lunch in Fleet Street and encouraged him to talk – ‘and he talked in those days with the same abandon and energy as he wrote. One after another of the lunchers laid down knife and fork to listen to him, and presently he had half the room for his audience.’ The outcome was an offer of ‘permanent engagement’ on the St James’s Gazette which Ruddy turned down, politely and in verse. It was agreed instead that he would contribute fiction and verse to Low’s newspaper on a freelance basis. ‘A day or two later he sent me a contribution,’ wrote Low, ‘the first piece from Kipling’s pen published in England.’8 Kipling afterwards repudiated the self-referential poem ‘The Comet of the Season’, published on 21 November 1889, but the style is unmistakably his.

  Hard on the heels of this first piece of luck came a second, also with an Indian connection, in the person of Mowbray Morris, painter and art critic. Morris had briefly worked for the Pioneer in Allahabad as an art editor before returning to London to become editor of Macmillan’s Magazine, a monthly linked to the publishing house of Macmillan. At George Allen’s request, Morris invited Ruddy to call on him on his arrival in London and was astonished to learn he was not yet twenty-four. ‘He took from me,’ wrote Kipling, ‘an Indian tale and some verses, which latter he wisely edited a little. They were both published in the same number of the Magazine – one signed by my name and the other “Yussuf” [Joseph, Kipling’s other Christian name].’9

  The verses were ‘The Ballad of the King’s Mercy’, a lilting tale of Afghan cruelty as exercised by the same ruler whose reception by the Viceroy in Rawalpindi Ruddy had witnessed as a cub reporter: ‘Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told. / His mercy fills the Khyber hills – his grace is manifold.’ The short story was ‘The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney’, twelfth of the eighteen Soldiers Three stories, in which a drunken Mulvaney is carried insensible in a decorated palanquin into a temple in Benares, where he revives to find himself being worshipped as a Hindu god. Morris thought Mulvaney ‘too drunk’ for his readers’ conservative tastes and asked for some thirty lines to be cut, and as the two discussed the changes over a cigar in Macmillan’s offices in Covent Garden, Ruddy produced a second ‘border ballad’, which he claimed to have finished that morning at breakfast. This was ‘The Ballad of East and West’, with its famously misread opening couplet: ‘Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall never meet, / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat.’ The poem was pronounced by Mowbray Morris to be ‘dee [damned] fine’, and when it appeared in the December issue of Macmillan�
��s Magazine the public response confirmed the accuracy of his judgement. A third border ballad, coming hard on the heels of the first two, made it abundantly clear that here was no flash in the pan. This was ‘The Ballad of the King’s Jest’, with its jingling account of the laden kafilas or camel caravans crossing into India:

  When spring-time flushes the desert grass

  Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.

  Lean are the camels but fat the frails,

  Light are the purses but heavy the bales,

  As the snowbound trade of the North comes down

  To the market square of Peshawur town.

  No less phenomenal was the speed with which Ruddy was welcomed into London’s literary fold. Heading the list of eminent men of letters eager to make his acquaintance was the Scot Andrew Lang, the most prolific writer of his generation as poet, novelist, critic, anthropologist, historian, folklorist and much more besides. Lang had been following Ruddy’s writing ever since being introduced to his early work by Vereker Hamilton, the artist brother of Ruddy’s military friend Ian Hamilton, and soon after his arrival in London he took him to the Savile Club – a meeting place for writers, editors and publishers. Here Ruddy dined in the company of Thomas Hardy and his hero Walter Besant. Lang subsequently persuaded the publishing house of Sampson Low to buy the English rights to the six volumes of Wheeler’s Indian Railway Library, and Besant introduced Ruddy to his literary agent, Alexander (A. P.) Watt, who took him on at once and urged him to ‘Hurry up your novel and become rich’.10 Watt’s acumen, particularly in handling his authors’ syndication rights, transformed Ruddy’s financial position – so much so that within nine months Lockwood Kipling was marvelling at his son’s popularity: ‘Owing to the recent development & organising of journalism, syndicates & what not, each new book is more portentous, more widespread and more voluminous in print than the last and it will literally be true that in one year this youngster will have had more said about his work, over a wider extent of the world’s surface, than some of the greatest of England’s writers in their whole lives.’11

  Through membership of the Savile Ruddy came to know virtually every established writer of the day, of whom only one, Henry Rider Haggard, proved sufficiently like-minded for them to remain close friends into old age. Although Ruddy afterwards wrote of the ‘kindness and toleration’ shown to him at the Savile, he was no more at ease there than he had been at the Allahabad Club – and for the same reason: that he did not feel himself to be one of their number. ‘London is a vile place,’ he wrote to Edmonia Hill in early November. ‘Anstey [Thomas Anstey Guthrie, humorist] and Haggard and Lang and Co. are pressing on me the wisdom of identifying myself with some “set”, while the longhaired literati of the Savile Club are swearing that I “invented” my soldier talk in Soldiers Three. Seeing that not one of these critters has been within earshot of a barrack, I am naturally wrath. But this is only the beginning of the lark. You’ll see some savage criticisms of my work before spring.’12

  Advised by Besant to ‘keep out of the dog fight’, Ruddy did just that. ‘It seemed best to stand clear of it all,’ he wrote of his refusal to integrate with his fellow writers, adding that in consequence, ‘My acquaintance with my contemporaries [in literature] has from first to last been very limited.’13 He had expected to find London’s men of letters as committed to their craft as he was, and was profoundly disappointed by what he saw as their lack of professionalism: ‘Had they been newspaper men in a hurry, I should have understood; but the gentlemen were presented to me as Priests and Pontiffs. And the generality of them seemed to have followed other trades – in banks or offices – before coming to the Ink; whereas I was free born. It was pure snobbism on my part, but it served to keep me inside myself.’14 Kipling’s use of the terms ‘Priests and Pontiffs’ is revealing. He viewed his literary contemporaries as the English equivalent of India’s Brahmins, the Hindu high caste of priests and intellectuals. It was not a caste he could identify with.

  Given Ruddy’s fondness for older women, it comes as no surprise to find him neglecting the Savile in favour of the salon of the romantic novelist, hostess and forty-three-year-old widow Mrs Lucy Clifford. Ruddy’s sister Trix was later to describe Mrs Clifford as ‘a warm-hearted widow with thick lips’, but she was just the sort of matronly type with whom Ruddy felt most at ease and he admired her practical, no-nonsense attitude to her work. She gave him sound professional advice and he became a frequent visitor to her house in Paddington. The friendship led to an introduction to Mrs Clifford’s publishers, Macmillan, and an invitation to dine with George Macmillan, the junior partner in the family firm, that ended badly when Mrs Macmillan told Ruddy that ‘India was fit to govern itself and that “we in England” (the ultra liberal idiots always speak of “we”) are very much in earnest about putting things right there.’ This was red-rag stuff, and Ruddy responded with what he termed ‘engaging frankness’ by telling Mrs Macmillan that she was suffering from hysteria because ‘you haven’t got enough to divert your mind’.15 The encounter helped fuel a growing suspicion in Ruddy’s mind that publishers were bent on enriching themselves at the expense of their authors, and he became as wary of them as he was of his literary peers. Nevertheless, he came to an accommodation with Macmillan and it was they who afterwards became the publishers of his collected fiction and verse in Britain, just as Macmillan’s Magazine became the leading British outlet for his short stories.

  Before November was out a stream of editors and publishers were knocking uninvited on his door. An extended letter to Edmonia Hill in the form of a journal with daily entries from 3 to 25 December tells its own story. ‘A business day,’ begins part of the entry for 23 December,

  first with Thacker Spink about P.T.s [Plain Tales from the Hills] and royalties … Sampson Low and Co. were republishing Soldiers Three and the work w’d be in the market after ten days. As the 4th edition of the D. D. [Departmental Ditties] (£50 worth of new poems added) will be out in a fortnight I shall begin the new year a little better than I had hoped … The provincial papers including the Manchester Courier are beginning to ask “Who is Mr Rudyard Kipling?”… I received a letter from one journal – no you shan’t know the name; it made me blush – asking for an interview. I said NO awful loud and strong. Monday also brought me a letter from James Payne [editor of the Cornhill Magazine] demanding short stories for the Cornhill. I sent the chit on to my agents who will settle the terms. My system is simple – the shorter the yarn the longer the price. And I get it. Wah! Wah!

  This immediate recognition gave Ruddy the confidence to believe that he could ‘smash Arnold [author of the best-selling Light of Asia] into his own lights of Asia yet’, and that his means of doing so would be the great Indian novel. He wrote to his parents in Lahore asking them to send him the manuscript of Mother Maturin, and in the meantime he set about revising and adding to the trunkload of unpublished material and unfinished scraps that had accompanied him on his travels. These included a number of soldier songs and verses which he had tried and failed to sell to Thacker, Spink and Co. a year earlier under the title of Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses. Now a new format for these military verses began to take shape in his mind, arising out of his discovery of the London music hall, and he set about reworking them by giving them the voice of the cockney in uniform, Tommy Atkins.

  Determined to strike out on his own, Ruddy kept his aunts and his cousins at a distance. He would have been welcome at The Grange, but chose to spend his first Christmas back in London alone in his chambers. ‘There are five million people in London this night,’ he ended his Christmas letter to Edmonia Hill, ‘and saving those who starve I don’t think there is one more heartsick or thoroughly wretched than that “rising young author” known to you as – Ruddy.’16 No doubt part of the reason for his heartsickness came from his spurning of Carrie Taylor, but he was also becoming increasingly disillusioned with the consequences of his sudden rise to fame. On his twenty-fourth birthday, 30 D
ecember, he was invited to tea by a society hostess and found himself being ‘shown off to a lot of people’, including three titled personages who backed him into a corner ‘and stood over me pouring melted compliments into my throat, one after the other. And through it all I kept thinking to myself: “Unless it happened that I was the fashion of the moment – to be treated like a purple monkey on a yellow stick for just as long as I amuse you, you’d let me die of want on your doorsteps.” So they would, but now, it’s “O dear Mr Kipling please come as often as you can and we’ll talk”.’17 His alienation found expression in the verses of ‘In Partibus’, promptly dispatched to both Lahore and Allahabad, in which he bemoaned the fact that he was now forced to

  Consort with long-haired things

  In velvet collar-rolls,

  Who talk about the Aims of Art,

  And ‘theories’ and ‘goals’,

  And moo and coo with womenfolk

  About their blessed souls.18

  Isolated, disillusioned and almost as much oppressed by London’s winter fogs as he had been by Lahore’s summer heat, Ruddy sank into another of his depressions. ‘I have broken up,’ was how he put it to Edmonia Hill in a letter overflowing with self-pity. ‘My head has given out and I am forbidden work and I am to go away somewhere. This is the third time it has happened … but this time is the completest. I do not want, even if I deserved, your pity. I must go on alone now till the end of time. I can do nothing to save myself from breaking up now and again … I am physically in perfect health but I can neither work nor think nor read.’19

  Written at the end of January 1890, this was the last intimate letter Ruddy ever sent to Edmonia Hill.20 Both it and his last letter to Carrie Taylor on 2 January 1890 are incomplete, suggesting that Mrs Hill found the offending sections too painful or too private for further scrutiny. Since Rudyard Kipling and his wife between them subsequently destroyed every letter that Edmonia Hill wrote to him in his youth, we can hardly begin to know what she thought or felt about him apart from what can gathered from his surviving letters. It seems extremely unlikely that she ever let her feelings go to the extent of becoming Ruddy’s lover, but it is obvious that for the space of two years they were very close. After the rupture Edmonia continued to follow his career, and of course she kept Ruddy’s letters until after his death.