KIPLING, (Joseph) Rudyard

Nationality: English. Born: Bombay, India, 30 December 1865, of English parents; moved to England, 1872. Education: The United Services College, Westward Ho!, Devon, 1878-82. Family: Married Caroline Starr Balestier in 1892; two daughters and one son. Career: Assistant editor, Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore, 1882-87; assistant editor and overseas correspondent, Pioneer, Allahabad, 1887-89; full-time writer from 1889; lived in London, 1889-92, and Brattleboro, Vermont, 1892-96, then returned to England; settled in Burwash, Sussex, 1902; Rector, University of St. Andrews, Fife, 1922-25. Awards: Nobel prize for literature, 1907; Royal Society of Literature gold medal, 1926. LL.D.: McGill University, Montreal, 1907; D.Litt.: University of Durham, 1907; Oxford University, 1907; Cambridge University, 1907; University of Edinburgh, 1920; the Sorbonne, Paris, 1921; University of Strasbourg, 1921. D.Phil.: University of Athens, 1924. Honorary fellow, Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1932. Member: Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (associate member), 1933. Died: 18 January 1936.

Publications

Collections

Complete Works (Sussex Edition). 35 vols., 1937-39; as Collected Works (Burwash Edition), 28 vols., 1941.

Verse: Definitive Edition. 1940.

The Best Short Stories, edited by Randall Jarrell. 1961; as In the Vernacular: The English in India and The English in England, 2 vols., 1963.

Stories and Poems, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. 1970.

Short Stories, edited by Andrew Rutherford. 1971.

Selected Verse, edited by James Cochrane. 1977.

The Portable Kipling, edited by Irving Howe. 1982.

Selected Stories, edited by Sandra Kemp. 1987.

A Choice of Kipling's Prose, edited by Craig Raine. 1987.

Short Stories

Plain Tales from the Hills. 1888.

Soldiers Three: A Collection of Stories. 1888.

The Phantom "Rickshaw and Other Tales. 1888; revised edition, 1890.

Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories. 1888; revised edition, 1890.

The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories. 1890.

Indian Tales. 1890.

Life's Handicap, Being Stories from Mine Own People. 1891.

Soldier Tales. 1896; as Soldier Stories, 1896.

The Kipling Reader. 1900; revised edition, 1901; as Selected Stories, 1925.

Traffics and Discoveries. 1904.

Actions and Reactions. 1909.

A Diversity of Creatures. 1917.

Selected Stories, edited by William Lyon Phelps. 1921.

Land and Sea Tales. 1923.

Debits and Credits. 1926.

Selected Stories. 1929.

Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots. 1930; revised edition, as Thy Servant a Dog and Other Dog Stories, 1938.

Humorous Tales. 1931.

Limits and Renewals. 1932; edited by Phillip Mallett, 1989.

Animal Stories. 1932.

All the Mowgli Stories. 1933.

Collected Dog Stories. 1934.

More Selected Stories. 1940.

Twenty-One Tales. 1946.

Ten Stories. 1947.

A Choice of Kipling's Prose, edited by W. Somerset Maugham.1952; as Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best: Sixteen Stories, 1953.

A Treasury of Short Stories. 1957.

(Short Stories), edited by Edward Parone. 1960.

Kipling Stories: Twenty-Eight Exciting Tales. 1960.

Famous Tales of India, edited by B.W. Shir-Cliff. 1962.

Phantoms and Fantasies: 20 Tales. 1965.

Twenty-One Tales, edited by Tim Wilkinson. 1972.

Tales of East and West, edited by Bernard Bergonzi. 1973.

Kipling's Kingdom: Twenty-Five of Rudyard Kipling's Best Indian Stories, Known and Unknown, edited by Charles Allen. 1987.

Novels

The Story of the Gadsbys: A Tale Without a Plot. 1888.

In Black and White. 1888.

Under the Deodars. 1888; revised edition, 1890.

The Light That Failed. 1890.

Mine Own People. 1891.

The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, with Wolcott Balestier. 1892.

Many Inventions. 1893.

The Day's Work. 1898.

Abaft the Funnel. 1909.

Fiction (for children)

The Jungle Book. 1894.

The Second Jungle Book. 1895; revised edition, 1895.

Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks. 1897.

Stalky & Co. 1899; revised edition, as The Complete Stalky & Co., 1929.

Kim. 1901.

Just So Stories for Little Children, illustrated by Kipling. 1902.

Puck of Pook's Hill. 1906.

Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, edited by Mary E. Burt and W. T. Chapin. 1909.

Rewards and Fairies. 1910.

Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. 1923.

Ham and the Porcupine. 1935.

The Complete Just So Stories. 1995.

Play

The Harbour Watch (produced 1913; revised version, as Gow's Watch, produced 1924).

Poetry

Schoolboy Lyrics. 1881.

Echoes (published anonymously), with Alice Kipling. 1884.

Departmental Ditties and Other Verses. 1886; revised edition, 1890.

Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verse. 1890.

Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses. 1892; as Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, 1892.

The Seven Seas. 1896.

Recessional. 1897.

An Almanac of Twelve Sports. 1898.

Poems, edited by Wallace Rice. 1899.

Recessional and Other Poems. 1899.

The Absent-Minded Beggar. 1899.

With Number Three, Surgical and Medical, and New Poems. 1900.

Occasional Poems. 1900.

The Five Nations. 1903.

The Muse among the Motors. 1904.

Collected Verse. 1907.

A History of England (verse only), with C.R.L. Fletcher. 1911; revised edition, 1930.

Songs from Books. 1912.

Twenty Poems. 1918.

The Years Between. 1919.

Verse: Inclusive Edition 1885-1918. 3 vols., 1919; revised edition, 1921, 1927, 1933.

A Kipling Anthology: Verse. 1922.

Songs for Youth, from Collected Verse. 1924.

A Choice of Songs. 1925.

Sea and Sussex. 1926.

St. Andrew's, with Walter de la Mare. 1926.

Songs of the Sea. 1927.

Poems 1886-1929. 3 vols., 1929.

Selected Poems. 1931.

East of Suez, Being a Selection of Eastern Verses. 1931.

Sixty Poems. 1939.

So Shall Ye Reap: Poems for These Days. 1941.

A Choice of Kipling's Verse, edited by T.S. Eliot. 1941.

Sixty Poems. 1957.

A Kipling Anthology, edited by W.G. Bebbington. 1964.

The Complete Barrack-Room Ballads, edited by CharlesCarrington. 1973.

Kipling's English History: Poems, edited by Marghanita Laski. 1974.

Early Verse 1879-1889: Unpublished, Uncollected, and Rarely Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Rutherford. 1986.

Other

Quartette, with others. 1885.

The City of Dreadful Night and Other Sketches. 1890.

The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places. 1891.

The Smith Administration. 1891.

Letters of Marque. 1891; selections published 1891.

American Notes, with The Bottle Imp, by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1891.

Out of India: Things I Saw, and Failed to See, in Certain Days and Nights at Jeypore and Elsewhere. 1895.

The Kipling Birthday Book, edited by Joseph Finn. 1896.

A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips with the Channel Squadron. 1898.

From to Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel. 2 vols., 1899; as From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, 2 vols., 1900.

Works. 15 vols., 1899.

Letters to the Family (Notes on a Recent Trip to Canada). 1908.

The Kipling Reader (not same as 1900 collection of stories). 1912.

The New Army (6 pamphlets). 1914; as The New Army in Training, 1 vol., 1915.

France at War. 1915.

The Fringes of the Fleet. 1915.

Tales of The Trade. 1916.

Sea Warfare. 1916.

The War in the Mountains. 1917.

To Fighting Americans (speeches). 1918.

The Eyes of Asia. 1918.

The Graves of the Fallen. 1919.

Letters of Travel (1892-1913). 1920.

A Kipling Anthology: Prose. 1922.

Works. 26 vols., 1925-26.

A Book of Words: Selections from Speeches and Addresses Delivered Between 1906 and 1927. 1928.

The One Volume Kipling. 1928.

Souvenirs of France. 1933.

A Kipling Pageant. 1935.

Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown. 1937.

A Kipling Treasury: Stories and Poems. 1940.

Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems, edited by JohnBeecroft. 2 vols., 1956.

The Kipling Sampler, edited by Alexander Greendale. 1962.

Letters from Japan, edited by Donald Richie and YoshimoriHarashima. 1962.

Pearls from Kipling, edited by C. Donald Plomer. 1963.

Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, edited by Morton Cohen. 1965.

The Best of Kipling. 1968.

Kipling's Horace, edited by Charles Carrington. 1978.

American Notes: Kipling's West, edited by Arrell M. Gibson. 1981.

O Beloved Kids: Kipling's Letters to His Children, edited by ElliotL. Gilbert. 1983.

Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-1888, edited by Thomas Pinney. 1986.

The Illustrated Kipling, edited by Neil Philip. 1987.

Kipling's Japan, edited by Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb. 1988.

Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, edited by Thomas Pinney. 1990.

Letters, edited by Thomas Pinney. 1990—.

Editor, The Irish Guards in the Great War. 2 vols., 1923.

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Bibliography:

Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue by James McG. Stewart, edited by A. W. Keats, 1959; "Kipling: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him" by H. E. Gerber and E. Lauterbach, in English Fiction in Transition 3, 1960, and 8, 1965.

Critical Studies:

Kipling: His Life and Work by Charles Carrington, 1955, revised edition, 1978, as The Life of Rudyard Kipling, 1955; Kipling by Rosemary Sutcliff, 1960; The Readers' Guide to Kipling's Work, 1961, and Kipling: The Critical Heritage, 1971, both edited by Roger Lancelyn Green, and Kipling and the Children by Green, 1965; Kipling's Mind and Art edited by Andrew Rutherford, 1964; Kipling and the Critics edited by E. L. Gilbert, 1965; Kipling by J. I. M. Stewart, 1966; Kipling: Realist and Fabulist by Bonamy Dobrée, 1967; Kipling and His World by Kingsley Amis, 1975; Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow, and the Fire by Philip Mason, 1975; The Strange Ride of Kipling: His Life and Works by Angus Wilson, 1977; Kipling by Lord Birkenhead, 1978; Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction by John A. McClure, 1981; Kipling by James Harrison, 1982; Kipling and the Fiction of Adolescence by Robert F. Moss, 1982; The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling's India by Lewis D. Wurgaft, 1983; Kipling: Interviews and Recollections edited by Harold Orel, 2 vols., 1983, and A Kipling Chronology by Orel, 1990; A Kipling Companion by Norman Page, 1984; Kipling and Orientalism by B. J. Moore-Gilbert, 1986; From Palm to Pine: Kipling Abroad and at Home by Marghanita Laski, 1987; Kipling's Hidden Narratives by Sandra Kemp, 1988; Kipling by Martin Seymour-Smith, 1989; Kipling's Myths of Love and Death by Nora Crook, 1989; Kipling Considered by Phillip Mallett, 1989; Kipling's Indian Fiction by Mark Paffard, 1989; A New Pattern in a Shift of Light: A Study of Rudyard Kipling as a 20th-Century Writer by Philip R. Snider, 1993; Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling by Zohreh T. Sullivan, 1993; Read First, Criticize Afterwards: Reading and Its Pedagogic Value with Rudyard Kipling's Anglo-Indians as Subjects by Sudhakar Marathe, 1995; Kipling in Gloucester: The Writings of Captains Courageous by David C. McAveeney, 1996; Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk, 1997; The Day's Work: Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice by John Coates, 1997.

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In October 1889, after seven years as a journalist in India, Rudyard Kipling returned to England determined to take the literary world by storm, and he did just that. Six months later, in March 1890, he was the subject of a leading article in The Times: "The infant monster of a Kipling," Henry James called him. To his contemporaries, astonished at his precocity and his copiousness, the earlier stories seemed to derive from the journalism: smart, knowing, apparently realistic accounts of Anglo-Indian intrigues and flirtations, the many hardships and few pleasures of life in the barracks, and the exotic but threatening world of native Indians. What strikes the modern reader, however, is rather the instability of these stories, the way so many of them turn on disguise or on lost or mistaken identities. "The Story of Morrowbie Jukes," in which an English civil engineer describes his entrapment in a sand-dune village of the living dead, is only the extreme instance of a recurrent sense of anxiety, the shifting narrative modes of the story—part nightmare Gothic, part documentary—miming the fear of dissolution that is also its subject. The epigraph to "Beyond the Pale" begins, "Love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed." The first sentence of the story proper reads: "A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race, and breed." This disjunction prepares for the way the story itself points to the gulf between what is so confidently known and the impossibility of complete knowledge. The tension here between the apparent security of the narrative voice and the sense of an India said and felt to be unknowable in Anglo-Indian terms is one of the young Kipling's most powerful and unsettling effects. Where it is absent and other voices are drowned out by the narrator's confidence, the stories shrink into yarns or anecdotes, their function merely to confirm author and reader as part of the same social and political enclave.

But Kipling's contemporaries were right to value the more overtly realist elements in these earlier stories, especially in those dealing with life in the barracks. Eighteen of these involve Kipling's "Soldiers Three," Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd: respectively Irish (sometimes stage-Irish), Cockney, and Yorkshireman. However right-wing his politics, Kipling as an artist was not afraid of the working class. He wrote of working-class life as directly as Gissing (in "Love-o'-Women" the eponymous hero dies of syphilis) but without Gissing's evident aversion. His use of the demotic, like Hardy's of the Wessex dialect, marks his sympathy with his characters, but Kipling felt less need than Hardy to remind his readers of the literary tradition (Shakespeare, Wordsworth) that sanctioned its use. "On Greenhow Hill" plays Learoyd's story of the thwarted love that drove him into the army against Ortheris's determination to shoot a native deserter. The violence, the poignancy, and the sense of waste are all implicit in the end: Learoyd tossing aside the "scentless white violets" he had rooted up while recalling times past, and Ortheris staring across the valley at his victim, shot dead from seven hundred yards, "with the smile of the artist who looks on the completed work." That last sentence wonderfully keeps the story free from condescension and sentimentality. If the brash imperialist voice that so outraged Max Beerbohm is sometimes evident in these stories, so too is a pre-Raphaelite—or Joycean—meticulousness of detail and economy of means.

The Indian stories, diverse as they are, have a number of recurring themes: the importance of work to one's sense of identity, the need to understand the codes that regulate one's society, and the necessity for the young to undergo some kind of rites of passage. These are also the themes of Kipling's school stories, in Stalky & Co., and of "The Jungle Book" and "The Second Jungle Book." The former sets out to subvert those works descending from Tom Brown's Schooldays and its successors, written to celebrate the public-school ethos of cricket and the honor of the house. The members of Kipling's "stalky" trio mock every aspect of this ethos, break all its rules, but do so, we realize, in order to find the bedrock of an authority to which they can pay more than lip service. At the heart of the book lies a clever if ultimately unpalatable redefinition of the ideas of service and Empire. The Jungle Books explore the paradox of the human need to obey some law (but Kipling writes of "the Law," the upper case willing it into existence) and the pain such obedience inevitably exacts. These are partly fables of adolescence, partly allegories of the "white man's burden," but both fable and allegory, even to the adult reader, are subordinate to the extraordinary richness with which Kipling imagines the Seonee jungle.

"Puck of Pook's Hill" and "Rewards and Fairies," also written for children, similarly review the themes of the Imperialist fiction—particularly the relation between heroism and sacrifice, leadership and martyrdom; but the stories also celebrate the land of England—the healing power of a "clutch" of English earth—as Kipling began to root himself in Sussex. The best of these stories, such as "Cold Iron" and "Dymchurch Flit," shift disturbingly between the children's never-never land of old rural England, full of the smell of freshly baked bread, and the agonized obedience to the demands of personal integrity in the tales recounted to them by the various figures called up from the past.

The Sussex setting, even in the stories addressed to adults, occasionally tempts Kipling to nostalgia. The all too charming "An Habitation Enforced" shows Kipling intent on becoming, as he put it, "one of the gentry," an insider in Sussex. The South African stories of the same period are generally harsher in tone and in subject. In "A Sahibs' War," for example, the story of a Sikh who defers reluctantly to the Sahibs' code prohibiting acts of personal vengeance, Kipling's sympathies are clearly with the outsider. Notoriously, when he came to treat this theme again in the World War I story "Mary Postgate," he allowed Mary, unlike Umr Singh, to take her revenge and indeed to delight in it ("she closed her eyes and drank it in"). Yet both characters are moved to hatred by a vision of love—Umr Singh's for his Sahib, Mary's for her employer's nephew—and the power of the stories comes from the tension between the two kinds of impulse. One sees why T.S. Eliot wrote in the Athenaeum in 1919 that "the mind is not sufficiently curious, sufficiently brave to examine Mr. Kipling."

World War I (in which Kipling's son was killed in 1915) seems to have released a new creative energy in Kipling. He had often written of the supernatural—sorcery ("The Mark of the Beast"), metempsychosis ("The Finest Story in the World"), and spiritual possession ("The House Surgeon")—and in the later stories this is often associated with healing, both physical and emotional. The title character of "The Gardener," who appears to Helen Turrell as she searches for the grave of her son, is perhaps Christ; the farcical episode that restores Martin Ballart from shell shock is ascribed to Saint Jubanus; the doctors who save Mrs. Berners from death in the moving story "Unprofessional" have to rely on forces, or "tides," beyond the reach of scientific understanding. Edmund Wilson's view of the later Kipling as a man losing his hatred is overstated—the late revenge-farce "Beauty Spots" is an entirely unpleasant tale—but it is true that in the postwar stories Kipling's imaginative generosity appears in more startling forms. In "The Wish House," recounting the fiercely possessive yet utterly self-sacrificing love of Grace Ashcroft, her hope ("it do count, don't it—de pain?") demands our assent, as it does that of the author. In "Dayspring Mishandled" the apparent simplicities of revenge yield to a sense of the baffling complexity of human motivation, a compassionate awareness of character and destiny as "one long innuendo," endlessly defeating our attempts to explain and understand.

Kipling's more than 300 stories exhibit a remarkable diversity of themes and interests. They also show an extraordinary technical versatility. Constrained at the beginning of his writing career by a limit of 2, 000 words, he quickly developed the resources to extend his stories beyond their immediate meanings. In particular, he learned to use a prefatory epigraph (often, later, a poem of his own composition) or the frame surrounding the main body of the story to hint at other possible perspectives, imaginative routes not taken. In the later stories these devices serve to suggest that narrative can only partly order and control its material. The frame in "Mrs. Bathurst," by setting the narrators of a fragmented tale in a world of missed meetings and broken machinery, calls into question the reader's expectation of a single determinate explanation of events; similarly, the epigraph from Nodier used for "Dayspring Mishandled" hints at the destructive power of an obsessive love but leaves it to the reader to decide with which of the characters in the story Nodier's verse is to be associated.

Kipling has always made the literary establishment uneasy. "The most complete man of genius … I have known," wrote Henry James to his brother, adding, "As distinct from fine intelligence." The nature of the genius and the quality of the intelligence are, perhaps, questions with which criticism has not yet come to terms. It will have to do so: Kipling is our greatest storyteller.

—Phillip Mallett

See the essays on "The Man Who Would Be King," "Mrs. Bathurst," and "They."