The Prophet of an Empire’s End

When Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling both received honorary degrees from Oxford in 1907, the aptness of the pairing went far beyond their internationally famous mustaches. Both pioneered the use of the vernacular, created adolescent adventure stories that have fascinated the adult world ever since and combined popular success with critical adulation. Each produced writing of genius and compassion, yet one figure is blessed by his consistency with contemporary left-liberal political values and the other damned by the absence of it. Ignored or derided by critics, banished from university syllabuses, Kipling suffers from what critic Edward Rothstein calls a “permanently sullied” reputation.

Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling had an early life of radical departures: five years of bliss with his parents, followed by five years of misery in an English boardinghouse and a similar span at a public school in Devon, then back to India for a newspaper job in Lahore. The bombardment of influences, complemented by his artistic gifts, was bound to produce one of the world’s most idiosyncratic literary personalities.

At 16, Kipling was squinting through his plate-glass spectacles at soldiers and civil servants of the Empire, mingling freely with Indians and recording all the voices in his head; at 22, he had published “Departmental Ditties” and “Plain Tales From the Hills” and essentially invented what came to be known as Anglo-Indian literature, a subgenre that includes works by E.M. Forster, W. Somerset Maugham, Paul Scott, J.R. Ackerley and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Moving on to London and later to Brattleboro, Vt., he triumphed again with “Barrack-Room Ballads,” melodious Cockney poems with Sousa-like rhythms that made him the “soldier’s poet,” and both volumes of “The Jungle Book,” a rich fable re-imagining his own culturally divided boyhood. Critics enthused; James, Hardy and Tennyson were all impressed and Conrad was jealous. When at age 41 Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, he was--and still is--the youngest recipient ever as well as the first English winner. As if this weren’t enough, he had a flawless ear and is the most prolific English phrasemaker since Pope, possibly even since Shakespeare.

None of this, however, could prevent the erosion of his critical stature that started after 1902, the result in large measure to his rabidly Tory politics but also of his increasing remoteness from modernist aesthetics, both as a poet and as a fiction writer. And yet, in some quarters, scholarly interest in the “bard of Empire” persists. Of the 50-plus books written about him since 1900, at least nine appeared in the last dozen years, and already we have another, “The Long Recessional” by David Gilmour, a versatile Scottish historian whose previous subjects include Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Lord Curzon.

Gilmour describes his book as “the first volume to chronicle Kipling’s political life,” aligning it with the rise and decline of the Empire which Kipling had come to epitomize. Of his many predecessors, Gilmour asserts, “Most of their work has concentrated on the prose ... a little on the poetry, and virtually none” on Kipling’s “public role.”

This overstates the case. Recent works by Harry Ricketts (“The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling”) and Andrew Lycett (“Rudyard Kipling”) quite adequately acquaint the reader with Kipling’s numerous polemical poems, topical parables, editorials disguised as short stories and pro-imperialist or war-related public activities. Nor does either biographer slight Kipling’s nonpolitical ballads and resonant hymns.

As promised, Gilmour examines Kipling’s work methodically, promoting his master theme that imperialism and conservatism were the seedbed of the poet’s imagination, that “his politics could not be disentangled from his work.” Unfortunately, Gilmour’s readings, although sensible, are fairly pedestrian. His conclusions about “The Man Who Would Be King” (“a parable of Empire”), “The Ballad of East and West” (“two men of similar courage and ability ... can be equals” despite racial differences) and “The Jungle Book” (“the wolf pack is strong ... so long as it retains ... obedience to the Law”) add little to received wisdom on these works.

But if Gilmour does not excel as a textual analyst, he is superb as a historian and biographer. His research encompasses 55 manuscript collections, dozens of books and articles on Kipling, histories of the Raj, memoirs of all the key players in Kipling’s life and, seemingly, every word his subject ever wrote.

Although Kipling is whisked rather perfunctorily through his first 16 years, once Gilmour gets him back to India and his position on the Civil and Military Gazette, the narrative glistens with color. For the teenage journalist, mornings began with his fox terrier “waking him to share ... breakfast and the inside of the day’s post,” quickly gave way to sweltering 10-hour days as “50 percent of the editorial staff” of the Gazette and were often succeeded by nights in “opium dens and gambling haunts” or “strolling with Indians or listening to the ‘long yarns’ they spun in ... their homes.” No wonder Kipling declared in his poem “The Two-Sided Man” that “Allah ... gave me two / Separate sides of my head.”

The scenes in London, where Kipling achieves literary glory while residing in “a centre of music-halls, prostitution and crime” and where the editor W.E. Henley is so elated by the poem “Danny Deever” that he dances on his wooden leg, are uniformly vivid. Once Kipling is married and living in Vermont, which had been little more than a stop in the United States during his honeymoon, Gilmour’s interest seems to flag, but after the bard is comfortably resettled in Sussex for the rest of his life, a literary man doubling as a country squire, the writing regains its vigor. We encounter him “crouched at his desk or pacing up and down the room”; later, clad in “Trilby or shabby cap,” he “slashed at nettles and other weeds” and “fished for trout in his unpredictable river.”

The great “apologist” for British colonialism, Kipling is too often championed by people who become apologists for him. Not so Gilmour, who meticulously exposes his subject’s anti-Semitism and belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, along with his conviction that England’s subject peoples were all “like children” and incapable of self-government. A man of limitless antipathies, he volleyed and thundered against the Indian National Congress, Irish Home Rule, Free Trade, free verse, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and every Liberal (or liberal) on Earth.

Gilmour is so scrupulously impartial, he has earned our full confidence when he turns to Kipling’s defense. Some of his arguments, while valid, have become the boilerplate of Kipling reappraisals: that Kipling is redeemed by the love of India (a “rich frieze of varied and happy life”) he reveals in “Kim” and his other best work; that, for him, imperialism was only justified by a spirit of duty and self-sacrifice, that he deplored the behavior of “white men” governing “races whose cherished customs they outrage.”

Kipling’s imperial ideals, however politically unfashionable, were not hypocritical or fanciful. Gilmour documents the historical reality of an Indian Civil Service that provided Hindus and Muslims alike with “peace and justice, quinine and canals, railways and vaccinations.” But these passages would be more compelling if Kipling (or Gilmour, for that matter) ever acknowledged the economic apparatus of colonialism--all those cotton, tea and rubber plantations that enriched the crown.

Like other biographers, Gilmour evokes sympathy for Kipling by simply reporting his personal tragedies, the loss of his young daughter Josephine to illness and his son John to the slaughter of World War I. As memorials, he created literary masterpieces for each, the tender ghost story “They” and the mystical, post-apocalyptic “The Gardener.” Gilmour also introduces a Kipling previously unknown to most of us: the outspoken proponent of women’s rights. Although he opposed feminism in England, as a young Anglo-Indian journalist, Kipling made war on child matrimony, the odious Hindu custom of marrying off girls of 10 or 11 to old men. He also defended the right of Indian women to modern medical aid and denounced the prototypical Brahmin for not being “educated ... up to the level of recognizing his wife as his equal.”

“Prophet of Empire” is another of Kipling’s nicknames, and Gilmour rightly places him in the highest rank of soothsayers. He didn’t need tea leaves or chicken entrails, only his own grim intuitions, to handicap four wars (the Boer conflict, World Wars I and II and the Indian-Pakistani bloodbath of 1947), the maelstrom of Nazism and apartheid.

Gilmour’s book was written before the tragedy of Sept. 11. Should we then ignore relevant parallels in Kipling’s work, using his deplorable prejudices as our excuse? Among his frequent themes are Islam’s warrior traditions, the religious intolerance and despotism of the East and an appetite for mutilation and other Taliban-like brutalities. When an Afghan character in “Kim” mutters “God’s curse on all unbelievers,” only the language is archaic.

At the end of this short but formidable study, Gilmour leaves Kipling the prophet on stage rather than Kipling the artist, as we might have preferred. In his approving citation of another scholar’s epitaph on Kipling--a “dead Classic”--he makes himself sound as pessimistic as his subject, who, at his death in 1936, despaired of his country and his civilization. But if, as Gilmour proudly notes, England has survived, so has Kipling. With more than a hundred books in print and popular culture continuing to recycle his work, “dead” isn’t the word for Kipling. “Deathless” is more apt.