Kipling, Rudyard

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KIPLING, RUDYARD

early years
early writing
south africa and england
later years
bibliography

KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865–1936), English writer.

Arguably the dominant figure in English literature of the 1890s, when he published more than two hundred works of poetry and prose to almost unbroken acclaim, Rudyard Kipling's unswerving imperialism, and apparent indifference to literary modernism, caused a downturn in his reputation in the years following World War I; Kipling is one of the few English writers to have aligned himself with the politico-military establishment rather than against it. Yet Kipling has always attracted admirers—among them T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), W. H. Auden (1907–1973), Randall Jarrell (1914–1965), and Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)—and his status as one of the greatest English writers of the short story is by now widely acknowledged.

early years

Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of Lockwood Kipling, who was in India to teach architectural sculpture, and Alice Macdonald, through whose sisters he was connected by marriage to the worlds of art and politics; the painter Edward Burne-Jones was his uncle, and Stanley Baldwin, the future prime minister, a cousin. His childhood was idyllic until in 1871 he and his younger sister Trix were taken "home" to England and left as the boarders of a Mrs. Holloway. Here, withdrawn and unhappy, he learned to observe moods and tempers, and consoled himself by reading; his story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (1888) is a fictional record of his experiences. In January 1878 he was sent to the United Services College, an impoverished public school for the sons of army officers, and the setting for the stories in Stalky & Co. (1899). Excused from games because of his poor eyesight, he was given the run of the library and encouraged to write. In 1882 he left school to work as a journalist in India, at first in Lahore, and later in Allahabad, where his duties shifted gradually from journalism proper to the supply of poems and stories. In 1889 he returned to England, to take literary London by storm.

To his contemporaries, the early stories, beginning with the collections Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1890), seemed to derive from journalism: smart, knowing accounts of Anglo-Indian intrigues, the pleasures and hardships of barracks life, the exotic but threatening world of the native population. That much of this material was new to a London audience no doubt contributed to its popularity. What strikes the twenty-first-century reader is rather the instability of the stories, figured in the way so many of them turn on lost or mistaken identities. "India" in Kipling's work is both a land to be governed for the sake of the empire and a testing ground in which white men can discover what strength, or weakness, is in them.

early writing

Kipling continued to produce stories and poems at an astonishing rate, including his first (not very successful) novel, The Light that Failed (1890), and the highly successful collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). In 1892, following what seems to have been a breakdown, he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and moved with her to Vermont. Here they had two children, Josephine (b. 1893), and Elsie (b. 1896). Kipling made a number of American friends, among them Theodore Roosevelt, and as well as the two Jungle Books (1894) wrote a novel with an American subject, Captains Courageous (1897), but in 1896 a quarrel with his brother-in-law persuaded him to return to England. In 1899, on a visit to New York with his family, now including a third child, John (b. 1897), Kipling fell seriously ill and his daughter Josephine died. He never visited the United States again.

south africa and england

Kipling's interests turned to South Africa, prompted partly by the need to winter abroad, partly by his commitment to the British cause during and after the Boer War (1899–1902). Despite the success of the novel Kim (1901), the most generous of his books, and of the Just So Stories (begun as stories for Josephine), his reputation was on the wane. To many of his contemporaries, his imperialism seemed unduly harsh, and his anxiety over Britain's military unpreparedness seemed overstated. Increasingly, and with increasing bitterness, as in the poems in The Five Nations (1903), Kipling found himself writing in opposition to the dominant mood of the times.

The purchase in 1902 of Bateman's, a house in the Sussex countryside, helped to soften his temper. His political conservatism and his new status as one of the gentry were brought together in the stories and poems of Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), a series of fictional excavations into the history of the English countryside reading back through the sweetness of the landscape to the bitter and violent deeds by which it had been won and by which it must now be defended: henceforth a constant theme in his life and writing. At the same time, Traffics and Discoveries (1904) included two stories, "They" and "Mrs Bathurst," that exhibit a delicacy, a compassion, and an interest in the supernatural, which were to mark the more tolerant stories of his last decade. That Kipling's politics were frequently strident—anti-Irish, anti-German, anti-Jewish—has too often, wrongly, been taken to suggest that his stories must be similarly limited.

later years

In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, the first Englishman to receive the award. But the chief event of the second half of his life was the death in battle of his son, John, at Loos in 1915. Nothing could compensate him for the loss, nor could he ever forgive Germany. Yet while his war stories include the ferocious "Swept and Garnished" and "Mary Postgate" (1915), he wrote others that deal sympathetically with war neurosis ("shell-shock"), healing, and forgiveness, including "The Gardener" and "The Wish House" (Debits and Credits, 1926), and "Day-spring Mishandled," in Limits and Renewals (1932). Many of these later stories are allusive, elliptical, and self-reflexive, crosscutting between high and popular culture: not modernist, but with affinities to modernism, as Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) recognized in a review of Debits and Credits. But Kipling had no interest in literary movements and cliques; in any case, his health was poor, as was that of his wife, and he divided his time between writing, traveling, often for the sake of his health or hers, and campaigning for such causes as compulsory national service and rearmament, in the face of what he saw as the imminent threat from German militarism. In 1935 he began work on an autobiography, Something of Myself, a text as cunning and elliptical as any of the stories. In January 1936 he was taken into the hospital with a burst ulcer; he died there on 18 January and was buried five days later in Westminster Abbey.

See alsoGreat Britain; Imperialism; India.