Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  As in Lahore, Ruddy’s depression was accompanied by a bloody-minded mood which led him to respond to a judicial committee report clearing the Irish nationalist Charles Parnell of links with Fenian terrorism by reworking some old verses into a bitter diatribe against Gladstonian liberalism. The verses were rejected by The Times and the Fortnightly Review and Ruddy put them to one side – at which point W. E. Henley, poet, dramatist, true-blue Tory and editor of the Scots Observer, made his appearance.

  Popular legend has Henley receiving the manuscript of ‘Danny Deever’ by an unknown hand and hopping up and down on his wooden leg whooping ‘in an ecstasy of delight’ before he was halfway through reading it. But in fact Henley had first come across Ruddy’s work two years earlier when his brother-in-law, a chief officer on board the P&O steamer SS Lycia, sent him a copy of Departmental Ditties. He had taken note, and when he heard of the author’s arrival in London had asked to meet him. If Henley danced anywhere on his wooden leg it was at Embankment Chambers, where he was taken by a nephew of the eminent biographer Leslie Stephen. Here he was shown ‘Danny Deever’ and ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’, the earliest of Ruddy’s Barrack-Room Ballads – and the rejected anti-Government squib ‘Cleared!’, allegedly rescued from Ruddy’s wastebasket.

  Henley prided himself on his ability to spot up-and-coming talent, and he was delighted to meet a young author whose political views accorded with his own ‘organic loathing of Mr Gladstone and all Liberalism’.21 He immediately published ‘Cleared!’ and the Barrack-Room Ballads followed week on week: first ‘Danny Deever’ in February; then ‘Tommy’, ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’, ‘Oonts’ and ‘Loot’, all in March. A further fourteen ballads appeared at weekly or fortnightly intervals thereafter, among them ‘The Widow at Windsor’, ‘Gunga Din’, ‘Gentlemen-Rankers’, ‘Ford o’ Kabul’, ‘Snarleyow’ and ‘Mandalay’ – the last a reversal of the several exile’s laments Ruddy had written in India as the retired soldier, sick of the ‘blasted Henglish drizzle’ and of ‘wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones’, looks back on the India he has left behind:

  Ship me somewheres East of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

  Where there aren’t no ten commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.

  For the temple bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be –

  By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea.

  A similar mood of alienation can be found in ‘Tommy’, with its disquieting truth that the British public held the British common soldier in contempt – until such time as his services were needed:

  I went into a public ’ouse to get a pint o’beer,

  The publican ’e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’

  The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,

  I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:

  O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’;

  But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play.

  The shock-value of ‘Danny Deever’, ‘Tommy’ and the best of the Barrack-Room Ballads has faded over the years – and the rest have not aged well. ‘Mandalay’ now sounds almost maudlin, Kipling’s cockneyfication seems contrived and the racial insensitivities contained in such poems as ‘Gunga Din’, ‘Loot’ and ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’ are embarrassing, even when taken in context, which is Kipling giving voice to the Victorian working man. For all his talk of ‘niggers’, the cockney soldier admires the water-carrier ‘Gunga Din’ and the spiky-haired warriors of the Sudan. As a member of a supremely successful nation he looks down on them, but as a fellow soldier he salutes them: ‘So ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan, / You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man.’ What is also overlooked today is the degree to which the Barrack-Room Ballads challenged British social taboos, just as Departmental Ditties had done with the Anglo-Indian community. In ‘The Ladies’ the cockney soldier speaks unblushingly of the various women he has enjoyed while on overseas service:

  I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it;

  I’ve rogued an’ I’ve ranged in my time;

  I’ve ’ad my pick o’ sweet’earts,

  An’ four o’ the lot was prime.

  One was an ’arf-caste widow,

  One was a woman at Prome,

  One was the wife of a jemadar-sais [Indian military groom]

  An’ one is a girl at ’ome.

  He then goes into details about his four lovers, ending each verse with ‘And I learned about women from her’. His conclusion is that ‘the more you have known of the others / The less you will settle for one’, ending with one of the most quotable of the Kipling aphorisms still in circulation: ‘For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady / Are sisters under their skins!’ This was not at all a common sentiment in the drawing rooms of Chelsea and Kensington in 1890.

  The Barrack-Room Ballads were eminently memorable, quotable and singable, and there can have been few among those who read or heard them that spring and summer of 1890 who did not recognise that a new genre of popular poetry had arrived, or who did not agree with The Times that their author was ‘a bright, clever and versatile writer, who knows he has caught the public taste’. On 25 March 1890, with only the first four of the Barrack-Room Ballads published, The Times paid Ruddy the signal honour of an entire leading article devoted to his work. It compared the best of his short stories to those of Guy de Maupassant and praised him as ‘the discoverer, as far as India is concerned, of “Tommy Atkins” as a hero of realistic romance’. It also wondered if Kipling possessed the necessary ‘staying power’ to last the course.

  Kipling was right to honour Henley as ‘a jewel of an editor’, but he also owed a great deal to the marketing skills of his literary agent, Alexander Watt. The fact that ‘Danny Deever’ had been published in the Scots Observer did not prevent it from appearing in the Week’s News in India and the New York Tribune in the United States. The same applied to his fiction, which now began appearing in different magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. These early magazine publications included a number of short stories that were masterpieces of the genre, all drawing their inspiration from India. They included ‘At the End of the Passage’, in which a man dies of terror arising from a combination of isolation, heat and insomnia; two military love stories – ‘The Courting of Dinah Shadd’ and ‘On Greenhow Hill’– widely regarded as among the finest of the Soldiers Three tales; and a third love story, ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, set in Lahore. The last tells of John Holden’s doomed love for his beloved Ameera, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl. Holden buys Ameera from her mother and sets her up as his bibi in a house in the city, where he visits her in secret. Theirs is a forbidden love and, despite Holden’s best efforts to bridge the cultural divide, both he and she come to understand that it is doomed. A child is born, upon whom both parents dote, only to be snatched away ‘as many things are taken away in India – suddenly and without warning’. Their shared grief draws the lovers closer together, until Ameera too is struck down with cholera, dying in Holden’s arms. ‘There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched under the shadow of the sword,’ Kipling writes of the lovers trapped in a city gripped by cholera:

  The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphur fires blazed in the streets; the conches of the Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great Mahomedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of the mother who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In the grey dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered.

  Twelve of the best of these dark tales were collected and published as Life’s Handicap; Being Stories of Mine Own People, together with a dedication
to Kay Robinson acknowledging Ruddy’s indebtedness to him and the time they spent together on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. Published within months of each other on both sides of the Atlantic, Barrack-Room Ballads and Life’s Handicap were the literary equivalent of giving the reading public both barrels. They made the name of Kipling famous as far away as Australia, confirming the judgement of the commentator in the Weekly Times that ‘even if he were twice that age [of twenty-four] his talents would be remarkable; but as matters stand they look something akin to genius’.22 The novelist Henry James had no qualms about using the same word, declaring Rudyard Kipling to be ‘the most complete man of genius’ he had ever known.

  In February 1890 Trix passed through London with her husband Jack Fleming, invalided home after contracting malaria in Burma. She visited her brother in his chambers and was dismayed to find him suffering recurrent bouts of fever and dysentery, and very low in spirits. Having broken off his engagement with Carrie Taylor and in the process lost his beloved Edmonia Hill, he had now become re-entangled with his first love, Flo Garrard. Flo had by this time graduated from the Slade School of Art and had moved to Paris to continue her art studies, but while on a visit to London had bumped into Ruddy in the street. Again she had given him no encouragement, but the encounter had been enough to reignite all his old feelings and he was once more pining for her. His unhappiness pitched Ruddy into making his first serious miscalculation as a writer since The Story of the Gadsbys. He threw himself into writing a novel about a young artist, Dick Heldar, who comes to London to make his fortune and suffers from his unrequited love for an art student, Maisie, whom he has known since childhood, when the pair of them suffered together at a seaside lodging house run by a cruel housekeeper. But Maisie is more interested in her art than in him, so Dick abandons London to become a war-artist in Egypt and the Sudan. After several years in exile he returns to London, where he accidentally meets his love again.

  But with the novel half-written Ruddy suffered another of his breakdowns. He telegraphed to Lahore the terse message ‘Genesis 45:9’, which his parents had no trouble in interpreting as an appeal to follow the command of Joseph to ‘come down unto me: tarry not’. They had already received Trix’s report, and they lost no time in coming home. There was leave owing to Lockwood and they could now afford to travel, since Trix was no longer a financial burden and the success of the commission for the Duke of Connaught had led to a further royal command to install a Durbar Room at Queen Victoria’s residence at Osborne House ‘in the Indian manner’. His parents’ arrival in London in early May lifted Ruddy’s spirits and he felt sufficiently emboldened to go to Paris with the intention of proposing to Flo. Nothing came of it. As Trix saw the situation, ‘Flo was naturally cold, and she wanted to live her own life and paint her very ineffective little pictures.’ But this was unkind, for no one guessed then that Ruddy’s failure to win Flo Garrard’s heart had much more to do with her sexual orientation than with any failings on his part or heartlessness on hers. Nevertheless, Ruddy returned to London deeply dejected, a state which even the company of his father and a visit to Uncle Crom and United Services College failed to lighten.

  Flo’s rejection continued to fester over the summer. Writing to Edith Plowden from the London flat they had rented, Lockwood Kipling described his son as going through ‘tribulation’. No doubt it was partly for this reason that Lockwood took to staying over at Ruddy’s chambers, sleeping on the couch in his study. It allowed the two of them to work together with a new intimacy, Lockwood providing the Yorkshire details for the latest Soldiers Three story, ‘On Greenhow Hill’, and much else besides. But the one area where Lockwood could do nothing but look on helplessly was in his son’s writing of The Light That Failed – ‘a story he went at in a sort of fury that lasted for a long time’.23

  Whatever Ruddy’s original intentions, his novel now became an outlet for the rage and pain he felt, so that what had been intended as a romance became a rant against cheating publishers, effete literary types and women who refused to conform to men’s idealised images of them. The Light That Failed was first published in the United States in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in February 1891. In this American version Maisie finally warms to Dick Heldar when they meet again after his exile, and all ends happily. But when the novel was published in England two months later it had an additional chapter and was prefaced with the author’s untruthful remark that ‘This is the story of The Light That Failed as it was originally conceived by the writer.’ In this second, bleaker version Maisie knows that Dick wants her to love him but she doesn’t understand ‘what that feeling means’. When they meet again Dick pleads with her to come back East with him: ‘You’ll see for yourself what colour means, and we’ll find out together what love means.’ But Maisie again rejects him, and Dick eventually goes to Sudan with his eyesight failing, to meet his death on the battlefield.

  The polite puzzlement with which reviewers had received the first version became outright hostility when they read the second. ‘His chief defect is ignorance of life,’ wrote J. M. Barrie in one of the kinder reviews. ‘This seems a startling charge to bring against one whose so-called knowledge of life has frightened the timid. But it is true. Dick Heldar’s views are Kipling’s views.’ Dick Heldar was little more than a two-dimensional mouthpiece and Maisie a blurred cipher. Nothing rang true. As in his own confused relationship with Flo Garrard, Ruddy had indulged himself with imagined feelings which had no basis in reality. ‘We see at once that his pathos is potatoes,’ was Barrie’s final judgement. ‘It is not legitimate.’24

  A month after completing the revised version of The Light That Failed in late August 1890, Ruddy heard that Professor Alex Hill had died suddenly in India. Having digested the news and its implications he followed the example of his creation Dick Heldar and fled. ‘We regret to hear that Rudyard Kipling has broken down from overwork,’ reported the Athenaeum on 4 October. ‘He has been ordered to take a sea voyage and sailed on the P&O steamer Shannon for Naples.’ In Something of Myself Kipling offered this explanation: ‘The staleness and depression came after a bout of real influenza, when all my Indian microbes joined hands and sang for a month in the darkness of Villiers Street. So I took ship to Italy.’ This was nonsense, for the bout of flu had occurred months earlier, during the darkness of the preceding winter. What caused him to take ship was the realisation that the woman whom he had so assiduously courted as a married woman was now a widow – and on her way home to America by way of England. For two years he had worshipped Edmonia Hill as a soul-mate, secure in the knowledge that she was unavailable. The prospect of her reappearance in his life as a real and available woman seems to have filled him with panic. He needed to get away to clear his mind.

  Little is known about the sea voyage other than that Ruddy visited the Sorrento villa of Lord Dufferin, now British Ambassador in Rome. He was back in London before the end of October and a month later met Edmonia Hill and her sister Carrie Taylor as they passed through London on their way home to the United States. But Ruddy’s mind was now hardened and there seems to have been no question of his returning to the romantic intimacy which had once meant so much to him, never mind taking it a stage further. The two sisters came and went, apparently without reawakenings on either side. The last meeting took place at the sisters’ hotel on 5 December, and Ruddy and Edmonia never again met face to face.

  It was while in this state of self-denying withdrawal from the opposite sex and very much in the tenor of ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone’ that Ruddy found a kindred male spirit in Wolcott Balestier, an intense young American not that much older than himself – twenty-nine years to his twenty-five – who shared his passion for literature and who was equally determined to make his mark. The two met in early March 1890 at a soirée at the home of the popular novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and each proceeded to dazzle the other, the one with his prodigious talent, the other with his American charm and brio. Balestier was then workin
g in England as an agent negotiating contracts between English authors and an American publishing house notorious for its piracy of British authors’ work, but he had previously spent three solid years at Lovells as a magazine editor and he knew the business inside out. He took Ruddy’s side in a copyright quarrel with Harper and Sons, arranged for the authorised edition of Life’s Handicap to be published in America, and went out of his way to provide a sympathetic ear whenever Ruddy needed to talk.

  A curious letter to an unnamed recipient, accidentally filed among the papers of Kay Robinson in the Kipling Collection at the University of Sussex, was almost certainly written by Ruddy to Wolcott Balestier after their first meeting. Its dating of 9 March 1890 places it after Ruddy’s encounter with Flo Garrard in the street and before he sent his terse appeal to his parents. In it Ruddy thanked his correspondent for his ‘beautiful sympathy and insight’ but rejected his counsel of perfection:

  Where I come from they taught me (with whips of circumstance and the thermometer at 110 in the shade) that the only human being to whom a man is responsible is himself … Pray for me, since I am a lonely man in my life, that I do not take the sickness which for lack of understanding I should call love. For that will leave me somebody else’s servant – instead of my own. My business at present, so far as I can feel, is to get into touch with the common folk here, to find out what they desire, hope or fear and then after the proper time to speak whatever may be given to me … From this ideal I make no doubt I shall lamentably fail.25