Just So

“East is east and West is west,”, “the white man’s burden,” “Lest We Forget,” “The Road to Mandalay,” “the light that failed,” “Gunga Din”: People often call upon the phraseology and imagery of Rudyard Kipling without being fully aware that they are doing so. Most of the above invocations are imperial or military, but he also gave us Mowgli and Shere Khan and “the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River.” Thanks in part to Walt Disney, Kipling has a real presence in our lives as a poet and balladeer of childhood. “Kim” is a fabulous tale of childhood and of empire. And as if to round out the picture, Kipling, the bard of imperialism, lost in the Great Imperial War the son for whom he had composed the “Just So” stories and “The Jungle Book.”

The paradoxes of this man’s life and work have engaged many literary biographers--Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis both took him on as a subject--and many literary critics, too. (Edmund Wilson was scornful; George Orwell was admiring, in spite of himself.) On one side of his family he was related to the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a bluff man of commerce; on the other to the Burne-Joneses, who were leading lights of the pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic movements. Devoted to Britain and the British, he very nearly became an American and felt more at home in India. Committed to traditional manly virtues, he is thought by many to have been a tortured homosexual. His own memoirs--which were rather archly entitled “Something of Myself”--do not mention the deaths of his son, nor of his daughter, nor of his probable male love. Reviewing that weirdly reticent autobiography, E.M. Forster wrote, “There are at least two Kiplings. One of them is Kim, the Little Friend of all the World; the other is also a boy, but sneering and cocky.” His diagnosis was that “an immature person” could also be a great writer.

Arrested development of some sort is an easy hypothesis. Kipling’s childhood was an instance of that peculiar awfulness that the British colonial middle class used to inflict on its children. Without warning, his apparently affectionate parents sailed for India and left him in the custody of a thoroughly sadistic couple who--among innumerable other failings--failed to notice that the kid was going blind. Somehow surviving this, he was removed from what he called “The House of Desolation” and sent to an extremely brutal and philistine boarding school. But he contrived to make literature out of both experiences. “Baa Baa Black Sheep” is one of the most harrowing narratives of child abuse ever penned; it’s a story that can be quite unbearable to read, while “Stalky and Co.” takes the spartan school-day motif and converts it into a (now rather dated and jocular) classic of male bonding in adversity.

These formative passages explain Kipling’s lifelong sympathy for the young and also the undeniable and often shocking streak of sadism that sometimes breaks the surface in his work. Harry Ricketts belongs, I would say, to the school of biography that doesn’t emphasize the psychic element too much. On the question of Kipling’s possible romance with, or romantic feeling for, his dynamic and charming publisher Wolcott Balestier, he keeps a rather heartily open mind and declines to examine the writing and reminiscence of contemporary friends who had the very strong impression that Kipling got married to the deceased Wolcott’s sister very much “on the rebound.” On the pointless destruction of Kipling’s son John on the western front, he is at some pains to argue that the father didn’t press the boy to enlist in the Army. This is literally true but not morally true; father-son letters show Rudyard urging John very strongly to join the Navy (and this in spite of the fact, which is painfully ironic in view of “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” that the lad was obviously myopic and as unsuited as his patriarch to any sort of martial calling). However, Ricketts does agree with the majority of scholars that the combination of war fever and bereavement drove Kipling halfway to lunacy and that it gave rise to some truly alarming and incendiary and bigoted writing, much of it best forgotten from the literary point of view. The short story “Mary Postgate,” which was actually written while young John was still alive in the trenches but published after his death, is a breathtaking piece of sexually motivated cruelty and racism, rightly described even by some of Kipling’s own family as “wicked.”

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And yet and yet. . . . The man who wrote hideous things about Germans and Irishmen and other “lesser breeds without the law” was also capable of great tenderness and wit and crossed the United States (landing in California from India and making his way east, just to be different) in the hope of a meeting with his beloved Mark Twain. He composed jingo and chauvinist verse that made people wince even then (and wrote “The White Man’s Burden” as an incitement for the U.S. Senate to annex the Philippines, which it did). But, having written that Irish fighters for independence were no better than a bestial “murder gang” incited by an evil Rome, he wrote a fine history of his dead son’s regiment--the Irish Guards--in which no hint of anti-Irish or anti-Catholic emotion can be found. And his poem “Recessional,” from which the line about “lesser breeds” is extracted, is actually one of the sterner warnings against imperial hubris ever composed and contains a premonition of the end of Empire itself: “Far-called, our navies melt away/On dune and headland sinks the fire/Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.”

He also managed, as one of the first international literary celebrities, to preserve his privacy and integrity. When he was believed to be dying in a New York hotel near the turn of the century, traffic stopped and hushed crowds gathered while newspapers around the world ran every bulletin. (This was during the attack of fever that actually did carry off his eldest daughter.) Yet though he was generous to young unknowns who wanted his advice, he tended to stay in the countryside and not play to the gallery. Nor was he ostentatiously pious. Unlike many of his companions in the “civilising mission,” who regarded the spread of empire and trade and the propagation of the Bible to the heathen as being identical with one another, he remained highly skeptical of the claims of religion. I was impressed to learn from this book that he rejected all offers from the then-fashionable spiritualist movement to “contact” his dead son.

Indeed, he appears to have gotten through life with the assistance of a very bleak stoicism (and perhaps no little repression and sublimation). His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of “King Solomon’s Mines,” wrote in his diary the following intense conversation:

“I happened to remark that I thought this world was one of the hells. [Kipling] replied that he did not think, he was certain of it. He went on to show that it had every attribute of a hell--doubt, fear, pain, struggle, bereavement, almost irresistible temptations springing from the nature with which we are clothed; physical and mental suffering, etc., etc., ending in the worst fate that man can devise for man, Execution!” Keep that by you for the next time you feel blue.

World War I saw Kipling at his grandest and most pathetic: rallying the troops and exhorting his old friend Teddy Roosevelt to denounce American neutrality while writing patriotic drivel, wracked with grief and guilt about his boy. From then on, he limped gallantly forward, declining a knighthood but accepting the Nobel Prize and evolving into an institution. He became more and more crusty and misanthropic, writing quite literally that Mussolini made the trains run on time and fulminating against the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. It is probably a mercy that he died when he did in 1936, before he could say any worse. Two odd coincidences marked his passing. As his funeral cortege entered the cemetery, it encountered the mourners at the cremation of Beram Saklatvala, the first Communist ever elected to the House of Commons and an Indian to boot. The strains of the “Internationale” were still echoing. Thus Kipling’s friends had to pick their way through wogs and red flags to consign the laureate of the Raj to the flames. Two days later, King George V died and much of the grandeur of British monarchy with him; the whole Anglo-Saxon “International” had been shorn and bereft by this double-barreled loss.

Kipling’s poem “If” occupies just that position of popularity and esteem that lies between the Hallmark card and the achievement of near-immortal verse. It’s husky and sentimental, but it has fiber and it stays in the mind. Kipling was a confidante of grand figures like Cecil Rhodes and Field Marshal Earl Roberts and King George, but he was a vulnerable child at heart and was proudest of his popularity in the ranks: the admonition to the boy in “If” is, after all “to walk with kings” while not losing “the common touch.” *