Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy

by Rudyard Kipling

  Kipling visited Egypt in 1913. He also published Songs from Books,a collection of poems that had appeared in, or been used as introductions or afterwords to his previously published stories, some of which were expanded upon for this edition.

  That same year, The Harbour Watch,a play written in collaboration with his teenage daughter Elsie, was performed in London but closed after only a few performances.

  Around this time Kipling began work on a story about the dead of the Boer War ‘flickerering and re-forming as the horizon flickered in the heat’ during a summer day’s military manoeuvres. However, he eventually decided that ‘in cold blood it seemed more and more fantastic and absurd, unnecessary and hysterical,’ and he later discarded the draft.

  With the outbreak of the First World War, Kipling wrote ‘Swept and Garnished’ during the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of Belgium. A ghostly propaganda story, it appeared simultaneously in British and American magazines in January 1915.

  After John was told that he could not enlist because of his poor eyesight, Kipling used his considerable influence and his son was given a commission in the Irish Guards as a Second Lieutenant. Not long after, the eighteen-year-old boy was reported missing in action, believed killed in the Battle ofLoos, his first conflict on the Western Front. Kipling did everything he could to trace his son, including travelling to France and even dropping leaflets behind enemy lines, but John’s body was never recovered.

  Perhaps exacerbated by worry for his missing son, from this period onwards Kipling was in constant pain from a duodenal ulcer, although at the time he feared it was cancer, which he thought was a family ailment.

  He later explored his terror of the disease in the story ‘The Wish House’ (1924), which was published in the American MacLean’s Magazine in October 1924, but did not appear in Britain until the December issue of Pall Mall Magazine.

  Although a sense of bitter emptiness entered his work after his son’s death, Kipling continued to publish articles on the war (much of it censored), and eighteen of these pieces from the Daily Telegraph were eventually collected in The New Army in Training, France at War and Fringes of the Fleet (all 1915).

  Tales of the Trade (1916), Sea Warfare (1916) and The Eyes of Asia (1917) were further collections of war journalism from, amongst other sources, the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times.

  In 1917, Kipling joined the War Graves Commission. That same year he published A Diversity of Creatures,a collection of stories mainly written before the outbreak of war, but including two ‘Tales of ’15’. One of these, ‘Mary Postgate’, apparently about a woman who refused to help a dying German pilot who had crashed in her garden, has been seen as among the most controversial and important of the author’s later stories.

  The book also included ‘As Easy as ABC’, a science fiction story that was a sequel-of-sorts to ‘With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD’. It had originally appeared over two issues of both The Family Magazine in America and The London Magazine in Britain in 1912, where it carried the subtitle ‘A Tale of 2150 AD’.

  Kipling also published in newspapers a series of war articles about the Italian-Austrian front, five of which were collected in The War in the Mountains (1917).

  The Years Between (1919) was a collection of poems written during the period from just after the Boer War until the aftermath of the First World War and included ‘Epitaphs of the War’, while Letters of Travel 1892–1913 (1920) collected old articles on Japan, the United States, Canada and Egypt.

  The Irish Guards in The Great War,published in 1923, was a history of his late son’s regiment that Kipling compiled from soldiers’ letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of survivors. That same year, Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides contained uncollected stories with two new additions and extra verse.

  In 1924, Kipling’s only surviving child, Elsie, married former Irish Guards Captain George Bambridge, MC.

  Published in Pall Mall Magazine for September of that year, Kipling’s story ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ had its inspiration in the First World War. As its reference to ‘the Angels of Mons’ indicated, it also had its roots in Arthur Machen’s totally fictitious tale ‘The Bowmen’, which had created great controversy almost a decade earlier when British troops returning from the first battle of Ypres had claimed to have seen the phantom archers featured in the story.

  Debits and Credits (1926) was a collection of short stories that expanded upon some of the material Kipling collected while writing The Irish Guards in The Great War. It also included such tales as ‘The Wish House’, ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ and ‘The Eye of Allah’.

  The latter tale caused its author some problems, as he revealed: ‘Again and again it went dead under my hand, and for the life of me I could not see why. I put it away arid waited.’ He finally decided to treat it as ‘an illuminated manuscript’ rather than ‘hard black-and-white decoration,’ and was able to finish it.

  The final story in the book, ‘The Gardener’, was an enigmatic blend of religious symbolism and the supernatural. It was written after Kipling visited the war graves at the Rouen Cemetery in France. ‘One never gets over the shock of this dead sea of arrested lives,’ he wrote to H. Rider Haggard two days later on March 14, 1925.

  The story was finished at Lourdes on March 22, and was originally published in the April 1925 edition of McCall’s Magazine before Kipling spent a year revising it for its appearance in Debits and Credits.

  ‘The Gardener’ was Kipling’s final supernatural story.

  In 1927, Kipling took a voyage to Brazil and Brazilian Sketches reprinted his travel articles that had previously appeared in the Morning Post.

  A Book of Words (1928) was a volume of collected speeches delivered between 1906 and 1927, while Thy Servant a Dog (1930) contained a series of tales ‘Told by Boots’, about a family living in an English country house as observed from the viewpoint of their dogs.

  The Kiplings visited the West Indies in 1930 and were forced to stay for three months in Bermuda, due to Caroline’s illness.

  Kipling’s final original story collection, Limits and Renewals,appeared in 1932. It contained ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ a tale concerning literary forgery that contained some scathing comments on the relationships between authors and critics.

  ‘It must be nice to inspire affection at short notice,’ Kipling had once written to H. Rider Haggard. ‘I haven’t the gift. Like olives and caviar and asafoetida, I’m an acquired taste stealing slowly on the senses.’

  The largely autobiographical Souvenirs of France the following year covered Kipling’s first visit to France in 1878, when his father took him to the Paris Exhibition.

  Although it was initially thought to be gastritis, Kipling’s gastric ulcer was finally diagnosed correctly in 1933.

  Three years later he collapsed when his ulcer perforated. Kipling died in London on January 18, 1936 at the age of seventy-one. Although his death came two days before that of his friend and reigning sovereign, King George V, the country no doubt thought it had lost a far more representative Englishman with Kipling’s passing. He was buried in Poets’ Corner at London’s Westminster Abbey.

  Kipling’s reticent autobiography, Something of Myself for MyFriends Known and Unknown, written in the last year of his life, was posthumously published in 1937. It was edited by his widow with help from Lord Webb-Johnson, Kipling’s surgeon and friend. The book ended somewhat abruptly with the prophetic line ‘… which were well in use before my death’.

  Over the next three years, the complete Sussex Editions of Kipling’s works were published. Although they included the author’s final revisions, they still had to be completed by others.

  Following Kipling’s death, Hollywood finally recognised the popularity of the author’s tales of adventure, romance and selfless heroism.

  Spencer Tracy gave an Oscar-winning performance as the Portuguese fisherman who rescued Freddie Bartholomew’s spoiled brat in Captains Courageous
(1937), ably supported by Melvyn Douglas, Lionel Barrymore, Mickey Rooney and John Carradine.

  Ronald Coleman’s artist was determined to finish Ida Lupino’s portrait before he went blind in The Light That Failed (1939), and Shirley Temple was the cute little moppet befriended by Victor McLaglen’s soft-hearted sergeant in John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie (1937).

  McLaglen, Gary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. played the three soldier comrades saved by Sam Jaffe’s water boy in Gunga Din (1939), Errol Flynn befriended a young Dean Stockwell in Kim (1950), while Stuart Granger, Walter Pidgeon and David Niven were the Soldiers Three (1951).

  Sean Connery and Michael Caine played the two loveable rogues who sought the hidden treasure of a lost empire in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), which also featured Christopher Plummer as Kipling himself.

  ‘They’ was updated into a 1993 made-for-television movie starring Patrick Bergin and Vanessa Redgrave, while ‘The Mark of the Beast’ was adapted for a low budget anthology movie entitled Things 3: Old Things (1998).

  Inspired by his cousin Philip Burne-Jones’ 1897 painting of the same name, Kipling’s poem ‘The Vampire’ was first filmed in 1910. It also formed the basis for a 1915 film starring Theda

  Bara (the screen’s first ‘vamp’) and a 1922 version, both retitled A Fool There Was (the first line of the verse).

  The Jungle Book has, of course, been filmed several times, most notably in live-action with Sabu (1942) and Jason Scott Lee (1994), and by Walt Disney in 1967 as an animated musical that probably had the author spinning in his grave.

  Caroline Kipling died in 1939. She bequeathed their home in Sussex to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and it is preserved as a memorial to Kipling’s memory.

  In 1976, Mrs Elsie Bambridge, Kipling’s sole surviving child, died without an heir. His copyrights were bequeathed by her to the National Trust and lasted until 2006.

  Although he fell out of favour with the public after the First World War and with the waning of British Imperialism, there are currently signs that a critical revaluation of Rudyard Kipling’s work is underway.

  Today it is difficult to imagine just how extraordinarily popular Kipling’s fiction and verse was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During his lifetime, he published around 550 poems (with at least as many again remaining unpublished), and seven million copies of his books were sold in Britain alone, with another eight million in the United States.

  Despite his often jingoistic and imperialist views, his early tales conjure up the atmosphere of a colonial and often exotic India, while his verse precisely captures the colloquial speech of the common man.

  ‘As of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India,’ said George Orwell, ‘… it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have.’

  It is hoped that this extensive collection of the author’s fantastical tales will introduce his stories of a bygone era in British history to a whole new generation of readers.

  Stephen Jones

  London, England