Rudyard Kipling, A Life
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All told, the novel was a departure for Kipling. It had a spaciousness and relaxation unlike any of his earlier works. He described it as “a long leisurely Asiatic yarn in which there are hardly any Englishmen,” adding: “It has been a labour of great love and I think it is a bit more temperate and wise than much of my stuff.” The critics agreed, and Henry James wrote to Kipling, “I find the boy himself a dazzling conception but I find the Lama more yet - a thing damnably and splendidly done.” Give up politics and propaganda, James advised, and “stick to your canvas and your paint-box. There are as good colours in the tubes as ever were laid on, and there is the only truth. The rest is humbug. Ask the Lama.”
“Just So, but All Wrong”
Kipling scored another kind of success with the Just-So Stories the following year. This too was a labor of love, and a sad one; the stories are told to a child, “O Best Beloved,” who in real life was his daughter Josephine. But on a quick trip to New York in 1899, both Kipling and Josephine came down with pneumonia. He pulled through, but she died - just six years old. By then Elsie was four, and Kipling’s son John had been born the previous year. But Josephine had been old enough in 1897 and 1898 for Kipling to read her early versions of the stories, and in his mind she was always the child listener so present in the tales.
The Just-So Stories were unlike anything ever written for children - a fantasy world being made up on the spot, and invented outrageously wrong. Clearly, the elephant’s trunk was not the product of a tug-of-war with a crocodile on the banks of “the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees.” But the Elephant Child’s “satiable curtiosity” about what the crocodile has for dinner, and his struggle to avoid becoming that dinner, have entertained generations of Best Beloveds, who also relish the way the Elephant’s Child turns the tables on the grown-ups by using his new trunk to spank them instead of being spanked.
Kipling’s stories for grown-ups were also plowing new ground. In the elliptical tale of “Mrs. Bathurst,” he produced what later critics found to be the first modernist story in English, with all the key attributes of the genre: fragmentation, literary self-consciousness, lack of an authorial point of view, deliberate obliqueness, and absence of closure.
In “They,” Kipling invoked mysticism to deal with his grief for Josephine. In the story, his narrator tells of repeatedly visiting a country house in which a blind woman cares for several elusive children. Finally, the narrator realizes that the house is a place where grieving parents can contact their dead children. He understands this when he tries to play hide-and-seek with the children in the house, and suddenly “The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm - as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close.” It was the signal that the narrator’s own dead child had devised to catch his attention.
Patriotism was one of Kipling’s mainsprings, and he thought it was important that children should have a sense of history and English heritage. So he set out to provide that in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, a set of stories in which Shakespeare’s Puck introduces a pair of children to a series of characters from England’s past: a Roman centurion, a medieval craftsman, a Druid priest, Queen Elizabeth herself. The stories were vivid and human, and the modern children, Una and Dan, interacted with Puck and their visitors - explaining, for instance, the advantages of modern elastic over the twisted leather the centurion used in his catapult.
As in most of his books, Kipling interspersed the stories with appropriate poems. Many of them were meant to teach morals and build character, and Rewards and Fairies included what is undoubtedly Kipling’s most famous poem, “If.” It fast became a chestnut that has glazed teenagers’ eyes for generations, but its final stanza can still pack a punch:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!
A Foreboding of Decay
Nor was Kipling about to accept Henry James’s advice and give up his fixation with empire and the white man’s burden. In 1905 and again seven years later, he wrote two outright science fiction tales, set in the twenty-first century, in which a planet-ruling Aerial Board of Control flies to the world’s hot spots to enforce civilized law and morals when “the lesser breeds” try to break the rules.
In the real world, too, Kipling remained preoccupied with public affairs. As the twentieth century moved into its second decade, he used all his popularity and his many honors (including the Nobel Prize and honorary degrees from both Durham and Oxford universities) to promote the idea that “Mother England” should nurture and guide her imperial children. He continued his annual visits to South Africa, and at one point considered moving there. He played an active part in South African politics, even making electioneering speeches for the Progressive Party, only to be disappointed as the Liberals gained power and England’s victory in the Boer War was effectively reversed.
All this gave Kipling a foreboding of decay, fictionalized in the allegory “The Mother Hive.” In this apocalyptic story, England is a beehive so crowded and beset that it is overrun by wax-moths, a set of touchy-feely liberals who undermine the hive’s traditional structure, discipline, and code of values. One small band of healthy bees clings to the old ways and secretly raises a new queen. When the beekeeper comes to fumigate the spoiled hive, the new queen and her band have swarmed to a nearby tree, ready to reclaim their destiny.
A Public Patriot’s Private Grief
The rise of the liberals in English politics infuriated Kipling, who opposed all their causes, from suffrage for women to Irish home rule. He also warned of the danger posed by an increasingly militarized Germany, picturing England as threatened by civil war or German invasion - “destruction from within or destruction from without.”
The war declared in August 1914 was certainly not to Kipling’s liking. For one thing, he knew all too well how unprepared England and France were to take on Germany. He also knew that defeat or even a hard-won victory would weaken the bonds of empire. But he had a more personal problem: His son, John, was 17, and like his father a fervent patriot. When John was rejected for a commission because of his poor eyesight, Kipling saw no choice but to ask his old friend Lord Roberts to intervene. In September, John reported for duty. And just as he backed John, Kipling issued a call to arms:
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate! . . .
There is but one task for all -
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?
In truth, Kipling was in almost constant anxiety over his son. For nearly a week after John’s departure, Kipling had facial pains and a high fever. But the public Kipling was tireless in giving patriotic speeches, writing pamphlets, propagating rumors of German atrocities in Belgium, and trying to persuade his American friends that the United States should abandon its neutrality. He went to war himself as a correspondent, arriving at the front in August, 1915, to be shocked and dismayed by the devastation he witnessed, the stoicism of the French, and the inhumanity of the German enemy. John, too, went to the front a week later. After several weeks with a reserve force, he marched in a major attempt to break through the German lines in the Battle of Loos. On September 27, John was reported missing in action.
A Sad, Angry End Game
“Nothing matters much really when one has lost one’s only son,” Kipling wrote his old friend Dunsterville in 1919. “It wipes the meaning out of things.” He eulogized his son in
the poem, “My Boy Jack,” and he and Carrie spent years trying to find out exactly what had happened to John and where he was buried. They finally came to accept his death and take comfort in his comrades’ assurances that he had done his duty, and Kipling wrote an exhaustive history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission officially located John’s grave.
The war had left Kipling with an enduring hatred of Germany and a resentment of America for coming so late to the fight. In 1920 he was only 55 years old, but nearing the end of his prodigious literary production. His 1926 collection, Debits and Credits, was his first book in nine years, and it would be followed by just one more, Limits and Renewals, in 1932.
Kipling’s last years were full of sadness and anger. He was increasingly infected with the virus of anti-Semitism; he denounced liberals and “Bolshevism he watched the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany with anguished foreboding. He lobbied for rearmament, air-raid shelters and a stronger Navy. And in a brilliant speech on King George VI’s Silver Jubilee in 1935, Kipling warned that a vulnerable, oblivious England was in danger of joining the “submerged races of history.” “We have walked far enough along the road which is paved with good intentions,” he said, and only “the genius of our race” could prevent disaster. Still, most of his countrymen would not be persuaded until the bombs were actually falling.
Kipling’s writing in those years was still evolving. He was “layering” his stories, so that each of them operated on several levels, with misunderstandings and failed communications between the layers. The critical highlight of Limits and Renewals was “Dayspring Mishandled,” a dark story of aborted revenge, a kind of condensed novel that covered 30 years of several complex, entwined lives. Ironically, it was a work that would have thoroughly pleased Henry James, by now long dead - the writer who had lamented that Kipling’s great talent was being wasted on wolves, snakes, and mongooses.
Knowing he was near the end of his life, he began an autobiography, Something of Myself, in 1935. His health had been failing for years. He underwent a succession of treatments and special diets, he was finally found to have a duodenal ulcer. But it was too late for a cure, and he died of a massive hemorrhage in 1936.
It was a modern critic, Edmund Wilson, who put Kipling in perspective in the pantheon of English writers. Kipling, said Wilson, invented “the whole genre of vernacular stories” that convey a comedy or tragedy “through the half-obscuring veil of the special slang and technical vocabulary of the person who is telling it.” Kipling also had a ventriloquist’s mastery of dialects, class accents, and regional slang. In fact, Wilson said, Kipling was a modernist writer: “I cannot believe that James Joyce . . . would ever have written the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses, if he had never read Kipling.”
But by the time Wilson reached that conclusion, Rudyard Kipling had become, in the title of Wilson’s essay, “The Kipling that Nobody Read.” Today, he is being rediscovered, in all his brilliance, complexity, and subtlety. It’s about time.
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
“All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.”
“An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.”
“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.”
“A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.”
“He travels the fastest who travels alone.”
“Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.”
“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”
“I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.”
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
“It’s clever, but is it Art?”
“Never look backwards or you’ll fall down the stairs.”
“Borrow trouble for yourself, if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbors.”
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
“I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn’t explain away afterwards.”
“I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.”
“Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.”
“A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition”
COPYRIGHT
Published by New Word City, Inc., 2011
www.NewWordCity.com
© New Word City, Inc.
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ISBN 978-1-61230-216-4
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Table of Contents
RUDYARD KIPLING, A LIFE
QUOTATIONS
NEW WORD CITY
COPYRIGHT