Rudyard Kipling

• 1. Introduction

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  Rudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry James called "the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English-language writer to do so, and at 41 the youngest recipient to that date. He was also sounded out for the Poet Laureateship and a knighthood, and declined them both. His ashes now lie at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, beside the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Yet Kipling's reputation has never quite settled. The literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote that Kipling "is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled." What shaped this man who could move so many and offend so many at the same time? The answers begin in a Bombay nursery, where a small boy learned to speak English only after translating his thoughts out of the vernacular he dreamed in.

• 2. A Bombay Boyhood

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  John Lockwood Kipling was a sculptor and pottery designer who had taken the position of Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay. He and his wife Alice, one of the four noted MacDonald sisters, had met in 1863 and courted beside Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire; they named their first son after that lake. Alice was celebrated for her wit. Lord Dufferin would remark that "dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room." The household Kipling grew up in was Anglo-Indian in the 19th-century sense: British by heritage, Indian by daily life. His nanny, a Portuguese ayah, and his bearer Meeta filled his afternoons with Indian stories and nursery songs, and he thought and dreamed in the vernacular. When the children were sent to the dining room, the caution followed them: "Speak English now to Papa and Mamma." Kipling later wrote that he spoke English "haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom." Two of his mother's sisters had married artists. Georgiana married the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and Agnes married Edward Poynter. A third sister's son was Stanley Baldwin, who would serve as British prime minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s. The child who would one day sit at that family's table spent his earliest years soaking up a world of layered languages and loyalties that would fuel his fiction for the rest of his life.

• 3. The House of Desolation

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  When Kipling was five, his days of "strong light and darkness" in Bombay came to an end. As was the custom for British families in India, he and his three-year-old sister Alice, known as Trix, were sent to Southsea, Portsmouth, to board with a couple named Captain Pryse Agar Holloway and Sarah Holloway at their house, Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road. Kipling called the place "the House of Desolation." He lived there from October 1871 to April 1877, six formative years in which Mrs Holloway's cruelty shaped him in ways he would spend decades unpicking. In his autobiography, published 65 years after the fact, he recalled how contradictions wrung from a tired child were catalogued as lies and recited at breakfast. He wrote: "I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture. 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." Trix fared better; Mrs Holloway apparently hoped she would one day marry the Holloways' son. The one relief each year was a month at Christmas with their aunt Georgiana and Edward Burne-Jones at The Grange in Fulham, London, which Kipling called "a paradise which I verily believe saved me." In January 1878, once his mother had finally retrieved the children, Kipling was admitted to the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, a school set up to prepare boys for the army. It was rough at first, but it produced lasting friendships and, eventually, his schoolboy collection Stalky and Co., published in 1899. It was also there that he fell in love for the first time, with Florence Garrard, who would become the model for Maisie in his first novel, The Light That Failed.

• 4. Lahore and the Making of a Writer

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  On the 20th of September 1882 Kipling sailed for India, landing in Bombay on the 18th of October. He was sixteen years and nine months old, and he described the moment as stepping back into a world of smells and sights that made him deliver sentences in the vernacular whose meaning he no longer fully knew. His father, now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum, had secured him a post as assistant editor at the Civil and Military Gazette. Kipling called the paper his "mistress and most true love." It appeared six days a week, pausing only for Christmas and Easter. The editor Stephen Wheeler drove him hard. In 1886 a new editor, Kay Robinson, gave him more room to write fiction, and that same year Kipling published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. A colleague at the time recalled that Kipling "revelled in" ink, filling his pen and flinging the contents around the office until he resembled, in the hot weather, "a Dalmatian dog more than a human being." The annual escape to Simla, summer capital of British India, refreshed him. Between 1885 and 1888 he returned there each year on leave, and the hill station featured in many of his Gazette stories. In January 1888, a month after his twenty-second birthday, his first prose collection, Plain Tales from the Hills, was published in Calcutta. That same year he produced six more collections containing 41 stories in total: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie. He sold the rights to the six volumes for two hundred pounds and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for fifty pounds, then set out for London.

• 5. America, Vermont, and the Jungle Books

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  Kipling reached London in October 1889, travelling via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and a long traverse of North America. Japan charmed him deeply. He later wrote that he had "lost his heart" to a geisha he called O-Toyo, and the Nobel Prize committee in 1907 specifically cited his writing on Japanese manners and customs. Crossing North America, he passed through Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Medicine Hat, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City, Omaha, and Chicago before reaching Elmira, New York, where he arrived unannounced at the home of Mark Twain. Twain welcomed him and the two talked for two hours about Anglo-American literature and a possible sequel to Tom Sawyer. Twain's parting literary advice was to "get your facts first and then you can distort 'em as much as you please." Twain would later write of their meeting: "Between us, we cover all knowledge; he covers all that can be known and I cover the rest." After marrying Caroline Starr Balestier in London on the 18th of January 1892, with Henry James giving away the bride, Kipling and his new wife settled in Vermont. Their bank failed in Japan on the honeymoon; undaunted, they rented a cottage near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month. Their first child, Josephine, was born there in three feet of snow on the night of the 29th of December 1892. In a workroom seven feet by eight, Kipling began writing about a boy raised by wolves. Those first ideas, shaped by a remembered phrase in Haggard's Nada the Lily and by the winter stillness, grew into The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book. He bought ten acres on a rocky hillside from his wife's brother Beatty Balestier, built a house he named Naulakha, and in four years there produced, alongside the Jungle Books, the novel Captains Courageous, a book of short stories, and a volume of poetry.

• 6. Empire, Poetry, and Controversy

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  "Recessional," published in 1897, warned that all pomp might pass like Nineveh and Tyre. "The White Man's Burden," from 1899, was read simultaneously as a call to duty and a defence of conquest. The poems made Kipling a central, contested voice of the late Victorian imperial moment. His 1890 poems "Mandalay" and "Gunga Din" had already given him a popular audience, and "If," published in 1910 in the collection Rewards and Fairies, would in a 1995 BBC opinion poll be voted the United Kingdom's favourite poem. When the Nobel Prize came in 1907, nominated by Charles Oman, professor at the University of Oxford, the prize citation praised "the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration." At the ceremony in Stockholm on the 10th of December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Carl David af Wirsén, called Kipling "the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times." His reach extended into politics. On the 7th of September 1911 the Montreal Daily Star published a front-page appeal by Kipling urging Canadians to reject a reciprocity treaty with the United States, warning that Canada was risking "its own soul." The appeal was reprinted in every English newspaper in Canada and is credited with helping turn public opinion against the Liberal government. Kipling also worked in an entirely different register. His two science fiction stories, "With the Night Mail" from 1905 and "As Easy As A.B.C." from 1912, set in the 21st century, introduced what would later be called indirect exposition, a technique Robert Heinlein would make his own.

• 7. War, Loss, and the Weight of Words

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  At the outbreak of the First World War, Kipling wrote propaganda at the government's request and published pamphlets glorifying the British military while cataloguing German atrocities. He was one of 53 British authors, alongside H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy, who signed the Authors' Declaration condemning the German invasion of Belgium. His son John, who had twice been rejected for military service because of poor eyesight, was accepted into the Irish Guards through his father's friendship with Lord Roberts, former commander-in-chief of the British Army. John was sent to Loos two days into the battle in September 1915, at age 18. He was last seen stumbling through the mud, possibly with a facial injury. A body was found in 1992; in 2015 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission confirmed the identification and recorded his date of death as the 27th of September 1915. He is buried at St Mary's A.D.S. Cemetery, Haisnes. In the poem "Epitaphs of the War," Kipling wrote: "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied." Critics have read those words as self-accusation; Professor Tracy Bilsing has argued they referred instead to British leaders who had failed to learn from the Boer War. In response to his son's death, Kipling joined the Imperial War Graves Commission under Sir Fabian Ware. He chose the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" for the Stones of Remembrance in the larger cemeteries, and suggested "Known unto God" for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also chose "The Glorious Dead" for the Cenotaph on Whitehall, and wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, published in 1923, regarded as one of the finest examples of regimental history.

• 8. A Legacy That Would Not Settle

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  Kipling moved permanently to Bateman's in 1902, a house built in 1634 in rural Burwash, East Sussex, bought for nine thousand three hundred pounds. It had no bathroom, no running water upstairs, and no electricity. He loved it. He lived there until his death from a perforated duodenal ulcer at Middlesex Hospital in London on the 18th of January 1936, at age 70. His estate was valued at one hundred and sixty-eight thousand, one hundred and forty-one pounds. His cousin Stanley Baldwin, then prime minister, was among the pallbearers. When a magazine had prematurely announced his death, Kipling had written to them: "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers." The debate over his legacy was no lighter than the debate over his politics. T. S. Eliot edited a selection of his verse in 1941, calling him a writer "impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle." George Orwell, writing in 1942, called him morally insensitive but acknowledged that "nine-tenths" of those who despised him were already forgotten. W. H. Auden, in an elegy written in 1939, wrote that time "pardons Kipling and his views" because it pardons everyone "for writing well." In 1922 Kipling produced "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer" at the request of a University of Toronto professor; engineering graduates across Canada still receive an iron ring at that ceremony today. More than 50 unpublished poems, discovered by the scholar Thomas Pinney, were released in March 2013, nearly eight decades after the man who wrote them left the world wondering exactly what to make of him.