The Man Who Would Be King

by Rudyard Kipling

  Kipling’s work is as much energized as fissured by these contradictions, the roots of which lie in his own childhood experiences of dislocation and exile. Born in Bombay, where his first language was the ‘vernacular’ Hindi spoken by the servants, who would remind him on visits to the drawing room to ‘Speak English to Papa and Mamma’, he was as a small child taken to England with his sister and left with a foster-family in Southsea, to endure six years of bullying and abuse culminating in near-blindness and ‘some sort of nervous breakdown’. After four years at a tough public school which he came to enjoy, he returned to his family and a gruelling job as reporter, which reintroduced him both to India’s rich glamour and to a colonial world where life was cheap and death common. He insisted that his harsh childhood had proved an asset to his career in that it taught him to survive by inventing stories and entering other imaginative worlds, while observing others’ behaviour with due wariness and maintaining his independence. But the unforgotten rage, hatred and despair of the dark years in the ‘House of Desolation’, mitigated by a delight in imaginative play, continued to shadow his work in his identification with the stern wisdom of just authority, and in his fascination by the strange worlds beyond its understanding.

  After Kipling’s initial enthusiastic reception in London as the young genius from India, responses to his work became divided. In the 1890s Mrs Oliphant praised him for showing how the Indian Empire was ‘defended and fought for every day against the Powers of Darkness’, while Robert Buchanan condemned him as a jingo who spoke for ‘all that is ignorant, selfish, base and brutal in the instincts of humanity’. Both writers defined Kipling in terms of a politicized split between defence of order and a daemonic abyss, one identifying him with the civilized side of the barrier, the other with the powers of darkness. This opposition is itself obviously conditioned by imperialist forms of thought, yet these writers correctly sense a connection between Kipling’s political allegiance with Authority and the potentially anarchic energies of his work. The knowing young writer’s ironic stories and poems insisted on the frustration, danger and misunderstanding that formed the conditions of colonial life, where ‘two thousand pounds of education / Drops to a ten-rupee jezail’ and British soldiers in barracks endured a monotonous life relieved by comradeship and the occasional prospect of action. Yet he was also fascinated by the unknowable strangeness of the ‘life of the peoples of the land, a life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian Nights’ just as he loved the idea of the sea, whose uncontrollable turbulence and endless horizons can be challenged but never subdued by human courage and skill.

  But to take the sea as social metaphor meant identifying imperialism with the natural world; and this raises the problem of Kipling’s politics. Despite his genuine respect for the humanity as well as the ‘otherness’ of Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, his ‘anthropological’ insistence on cultural difference as a social fact, and his fellow-feeling for private soldiers, Kipling’s wide-ranging sympathies are based on the assumption of an unbreakable class, race and gender hierarchy. Defiance of the property-owning class by socialists, of all-male rule by feminists, and above all of the British Empire by nationalist subjects, whether Boers, Irish or Indian, all provoked him to splenetic writing, while his patronizing, uneasy or downright contemptuous attitudes to the Irish, to Jews and to Africans are no more defensible than those of his Victorian and Edwardian contemporaries. These opinions, articulated with his characteristic candour and vividness, have made Kipling’s work a mine for post-colonial historians of imperialist thought from Edward Said’s Orientalism onwards.

  Yet although Kipling’s writing is certainly informed, and sometimes deformed, by his political views, it is by no means reducible to these. This can be seen in his masterpiece Kim (1901) and to a lesser extent in the two Jungle Books, colonial fictions in which ‘otherness’ is regarded with pleasure, not anxiety, just as the Just So Stories deal with the ‘other’ world of the animal fable and the Puck books with the differences as well as the continuity of English history. The orphaned heroes Kim and Mowgli, never disciplined to the life of labour and duty whose virtues Kipling so often preached, are made free of the Jungle and the street-life of Lahore, apparently threatening places which are really magical worlds and whose citizens, whether human or animal, speak the richly rhetorical, archaized idiom that Kipling invented for Indian ‘vernacular’ speakers. This ‘vernacular’ equivalent signals its own difference by its obvious distance from the narrator’s modern English, and yet is equally intelligible, and on the printed page indistinguishable from it, unlike cockney or Irish dialect with their dropped gs and aitches. These enchanted Indian worlds have their own cultures; the Jungle, far from being a place of raw terror, is ruled by a Law ‘which never forbids anything without a good reason’, while Akela the wolf and Bagheera the panther are models of nobility, unlike the cruel and superstitious villagers. The enchantment of Kim lies in the way the hero’s double story, as spy in the Government’s ‘Great Game’ and chela (disciple) to a Buddhist priest in quest of salvation, is lived through a rich variety of lovingly recreated and sensuously evoked Indian social worlds. Colonial racism is mocked in the persons of the fat drummer-boy who calls all natives ‘niggers’ and the parson who observes the holy and innocent Teshoo Lama ‘with the triple-ringed uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title “heathen” ’ while Kim’s Indian characters are far more complex and interesting than the English. Colonel Creighton may be significant for his joint role as ethnologist and intelligence boss, but as a character he barely exists compared with his agents Mahbub Ali and Hurree Babu. That said, Kipling’s conservative imperialism is obvious, not just in Kim’s work as a spy or in the stereotyping of ‘Orientals’ as lazy or untruthful, but more subtly in the vividly realized and sympathetic Indian characters whose assumptions about the benevolence and legitimacy of British rule match Kipling’s own, like the loyalist old soldier recalling the ‘madness’ of the Mutiny, or Hurree Babu deceiving the Russian spies by pretending to resent the British Government for having given him an education which he is not allowed to use. It is unthinkable in the world of Kim that nationalist claims or grievances might be justified.

  But Kipling’s achievement goes far beyond his ‘Indian writings’ and his books for children. His later stories and poems represent a substantial contribution to modernist literature, partly in the deep intuition of chaos underlying the ‘Law’, which Kipling shares with Eliot and Conrad, and partly in his response to the possibilities of modern communications technology, to which the stories ‘Mrs Bathurst’ and ‘Wireless’ are among the first and strongest creative responses in the twentieth century. Moreover, the scope and versatility of the early stories, written in styles ranging from understated irony to demotic dialect and the flowery archaized idiom of his ‘vernacular’ equivalent, developed in his later work into an irony and indeterminacy which are characteristically modernist. A similar modernist indeterminacy is discernible in Kipling’s poetry, not just in the rare but very successful free verse poems like the ‘Song of the Galley-Slaves’, but in what look like obviously ‘traditional’ forms; the cockney language and self-invented elaborate stanzas of Barrack Room Ballads, admired by Eliot and Brecht, are instantly identifiable as ‘Kiplingesque’ yet not identifiable with Kipling’s own voice. His poems are rarely or never spoken in his own person, just as the knowing ‘I’ who narrates so many of his stories is not identifiable with Kipling himself. Even the elegy for his son John, ‘My Boy Jack’, takes the form of a dialogue in which an anxious mother is repeatedly told that her son is lost to ‘this wind blowing and this tide’, a refrain suggesting the blast of trench mortars and the waves of troops advancing in battle while locating Kipling’s own unspoken loss in that figurative ocean. Through the use of the monologue form which he learned from Browning, his use of ‘impure’ demotic language and his skill as a parodist (evident from the 1884 ‘Echoes’ written with his sister to t
he 1904 ‘Muse among the Motors’), the modernity of Kipling’s poems lies in the interpretative uncertainty generated by the multiple voices and registers that speak his poems.

  There is evident traditionalism in Kipling’s contributions both during and after the First World War to the literature of mourning, such as the motto he contributed to the war cemeteries, ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’, and the formal sequence ‘Epitaphs of the War’ – and yet the famous couplet ‘Common Form’ (‘If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied’) bitterly mocks its own mode of heroic elegy. His pared-down, understated stories of mourning deploy a characteristically modernist irony, especially his tales of bereaved women. ‘Mary Postgate’ is as ambiguously open to interpretation as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and like that story turns on perverse sexuality and death. In both this story and ‘The Gardener’, the drily matter-of-fact narrative participates in the bad faith revealed in the protagonist, achieving both deep feeling and ironic ambiguity.

  Kipling continued to break ground in his late stories. Their varied subject matter, which includes psychosomatic illness, forgery and the journeys of St Paul, their length, complexity and unobtrusive use of motif and symbol, allowed him a new depth and range in his treatment of men and women. His writing had always insisted on gender difference, partly through its emphasis on the homosocial masculinity of soldiers in barracks, officers in their mess and experts talking in their clubs; but his dwelling on masculine solidarity becomes even more marked in the late stories of war veterans coping with their scars through the ritual and comradeship of freemasonry, or first-century Roman sailors talking shop over their wine. His women, conversely, are defined by sexuality and motherhood and are often associated in more or less complex ways with the numinous – like the Woman in the tale of ‘The Cat that Walked’ who domesticates Man and animals by her magic, and yet is responsible for letting in the untameable Cat. His late treatments of women, like the fiercely possessive yet selfless Grace Ashcroft in ‘The Wish House’, achieve a new psychological depth. As with the short-story form which he practised with such brilliance, Kipling is a writer whose limitations paradoxically allowed him an unsurpassed range.

  Jan Montefiore 2011

  Introduction

  Rudyard Kipling is a magical storyteller, about whose powers people have disagreed passionately for over a hundred years. Virginia Woolf mocked him; Brecht admired him; Borges revered him; T. S. Eliot anthologized his poetry and in ‘Burnt Norton’ drew inspiration from the elusive children in ‘They’ (as, I think, the over-decorated bedroom in The Waste Land draws on the garish interior of the chemist’s shop in ‘Wireless’).1 His prose has been described as a delicate precision tool and as a monument of crudeness.2 Enemies have dismissed his stories for jingo patriotism and/or racist reaction; admirers have praised their compassionate humanity. More recently, his Indian tales have been read both as political allegories prefiguring post-colonial perceptions of the intellectual and political limitations of Empire, and as elaborated symptoms of an anxiety-ridden desire to contain colonial lands and people by subjecting them to imperialist fantasies of knowledge.3

  Kipling’s public reputation has varied equally widely. The 24-year-old from India who was the sensation of literary London in the 1890s was the first brilliant young writer to become, not just a national figure like Dickens, but a global celebrity (which is partly, no doubt, why Kipling would become so fiercely protective of his own privacy). The advent of mass-produced newspapers and magazines, circulated by sea and railway, which ‘boomed’ the new author meant that, as his father Lockwood Kipling observed in 1891, ‘in one year this youngster will have had more said about his work, over a greater extent of the earth’s surface, than some of the greatest of England’s writers in their whole lives’.4 When Kipling nearly died of pneumonia in March 1899, his illness was headline news throughout the world, and the congratulations on his recovery included a telegram from Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Yet in the wake of his public contribution to the Boer War as journalist and pro-militarist propagandist, and despite public honours, including the Nobel Prize in 1907, his literary reputation after 1900 went into a decline that was to make him so deeply unfashionable amongst liberals and intellectuals that Edmund Wilson called him in 1941 ‘The Kipling That Nobody Read.’5 Yet Kipling was still read with excitement by other writers in England and abroad: Alain-Fournier drew on Kipling’s ‘They’ in Le Grand Meaulnes, Isaac Babel turned up at an Odessa newspaper office in 1921 with a book of Kipling stories under his arm,6 and the list of those who published significant criticism of his work includes George Orwell, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Connor and the poet Craig Raine. More recently, his work has been central to critiques of empire by the post-colonial critics Edward Said and Sara Suleri.

  Kipling’s tales tend to escape any single definition, however sophisticated. Even by the sparing standards of the short-story form, Kipling’s are remarkable for their extreme verbal economy, leaving out everything except the essentials so that readers must put together the stories’ significance from their language, point of view and incidents. (He explained this method in Something of Myself: you delete everything superfluous from a ‘final’ draft, brushing the redundancies out with Indian ink, let it ‘drain’ for days or months, and repeat the process twice.7) One aspect of a story may well contradict another. The description of Findlayson the engineer surveying his almost-completed great Kashi Bridge at the start of ‘The Bridge-Builders’ seems a classic example of ‘magical art’ written to arouse the socially useful emotions of patriotism and pride in work well done;8 yet loyal English readers inspired by Findlayson’s dedicated, unthanked skill must be disconcerted when his working day turns to a night of ‘long silence’ while the Hindu Gods debate whether his bridge is even worth the bother of destroying it: ‘Let the dirt dig in the dirt if it pleases the dirt.’ A puzzling and exhilarating diversity is likewise manifest between tales: the delighted Hindu child giggling when the money-lender is trapped in ‘The Finances of the Gods’, versus Gurkhas using their kukri knives on Afghans ‘with a nasty noise as of beef being cut on the block’ in ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’; British soldiers in ‘On the City Wall’, forbidden to shoot rioters, ‘banging the bare toes of the mob’, versus a former artilleryman in ‘The Janeites’ feeling nostalgia for the companionship of trench warfare where mess-steward and officers met in the unlikely common ground of Austen’s novels. Despite – or because of – the preoccupation with those administering practical law and order in these stories, ghosts, madness and the supernatural are never far away, a paradox exemplified by Morrowbie Jukes making his vainly exact measurements of the nightmarish pit of the living dead. And for all his emphasis on discipline and order, Kipling has a strong sympathy with outlaws, children and outsiders in stories that give literary voices to, among others, a furious ‘honour’ killer, an expert polo-pony and the rivets in a steamship. The harrowing autobiographical ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, in which the spoilt, beloved Punch-baba finds himself inexplicably taken to England to be abandoned to the loneliness and cruelty of Aunty Rosa’s bullying Calvinist regime, becoming the outcast ‘Black Sheep’ who tries to knife his tormentor and poison himself, shows how Kipling in his vulnerable childhood became acquainted with the dark places ‘where the injured / lead the ugly life of the rejected’.9 Punch’s parents are of course never blamed; but in choosing to publish this bitter story in an Allahabad newspaper’s Christmas supplement, whose Anglo-Indian audience certainly included his parents, Kipling allowed himself, consciously or not, his writer’s revenge.

  What value you put on Kipling’s stories rests both on which ones you choose to read (post-colonial critics, though persuasive in many respects, tend to edit Kipling’s oeuvre down to his ‘Indian’ fictions, leaving out the post-war tales altogether) and on how you read him. For despite their frequent opinionated asides about imperialist virtues or the greatness of the British Empi
re, the final meaning of these tales is, right from the start, remarkably hard to pin down. They offer not a total vision but a multitude of intensely perceived provisional truths and local effects in a way that makes Kipling as much or more modernist than Victorian.10 And the ambiguities increase in his post-1900 works – most notably in ‘Mary Postgate’, the significance of whose horrible denouement rests, quite as ambiguously as in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, on the reader’s interpretation. ‘The Wish House’ and ‘The Gardener’ are also heavy with unanswered questions. This selection of his stories, following the development of his work over fifty years, balances substantial selections of the ‘Indian’ tales by which he first made his name with the pioneering modernist ‘middle’ Kipling and the highly wrought subtleties of the later work. Selecting from the works of such a wonderful and prolific storyteller inevitably entails omissions, most notably of his children’s classics. Giving the Jungle Books, the Just So Stories, Stalky and the ‘Puck’ tales a fair showing would have made it impossible to represent the richness and variety of the stories that inspired his young Russian-Jewish contemporary Isaac Babel to claim that ‘everyone should write his kind of steely prose’.11