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Rudyard Kipling
(1865 - 1936)
English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for
his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British
soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1907.
Life
Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who
had considerable influence on his son's work, became curator of the
Lahore museum, and is described presiding over this "wonder house"
in the first chapter of Kim, Rudyard's most famous novel. His mother
was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly successful
19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter,
while a third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of Stanley
Baldwin, later prime minister. These connections were of lifelong importance
to Kipling.
Much of his childhood was unhappy. Kipling was taken to England by his
parents at the age of six and was left for five years at a foster home
at Southsea, the horrors of which he described in the story "Baa
Baa, Black Sheep" (1888). He then went on to the United Services
College at Westward Ho, north Devon, a new, inexpensive, and inferior
boarding school. It haunted Kipling for the rest of his life--but always
as the glorious place celebrated in Stalky & Co. (1899) and related
stories: an unruly paradise in which the highest goals of English education
are met amid a tumult of teasing, bullying, and beating. The Stalky
saga is one of Kipling's great imaginative achievements. Readers repelled
by a strain of brutality--even of cruelty--in his writings should remember
the sensitive and shortsighted boy who was brought to terms with the
ethos of this deplorable establishment through the demands of self-preservation.
Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked for seven years as a journalist.
His parents, although not officially important, belonged to the highest
Anglo-Indian society, and Rudyard thus had opportunities for exploring
the whole range of that life. All the while he had remained keenly observant
of the thronging spectacle of native India, which had engaged his interest
and affection from earliest childhood. He was quickly filling the journals
he worked for with prose sketches and light verse. He published the
verse collection Departmental Ditties in 1886, the short-story collection
Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and between 1887 and 1889 he brought
out six paper-covered volumes of short stories. Among the latter were
Soldiers Three, The Phantom Rickshaw (containing the story "The
Man Who Would Be King"), and Wee Willie Winkie (containing "Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep"). When Kipling returned to England in 1889, his
reputation had preceded him, and within a year he was acclaimed as one
of the most brilliant prose writers of his time. His fame was redoubled
upon the publication of the verse collection Barrack-Room Ballads in
1892. Not since the English poet Lord Byron had such a reputation been
achieved so rapidly. When the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson died
in 1892, it may be said that Kipling took his place in popular estimation.
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of Wolcott Balestier,
an American publisher and writer with whom he had collaborated in The
Naulahka (1892), a facile and unsuccessful romance. The young couple
moved to the United States and settled on Mrs. Kipling's property in
Vermont, but their manners and attitudes were considered objectionable
by their neighbours. Unable or unwilling to adjust to life in America,
the Kiplings eventually returned to England. Ever after Kipling remained
very aware that Americans were "foreigners," and he extended
to them, as to the French, no more than a semiexemption from his proposition
that only "lesser breeds" are born beyond the English Channel.
During his years in America, however, he published his novel The Light
That Failed (1890), the story of a painter going blind and spurned by
the woman he loved; Captains Courageous (1897), which, in spite of its
sense of adventure, is often considered a poor novel because of the
excessive descriptive writing; Kim (1901), which, although essentially
a children's book, must be considered a classic; and The Jungle Books
(1894 and 1895), a stylistically superb collection of stories linked
by poems for children. The first three books give further proof that
Kipling excelled at telling a story but was inconsistent in producing
balanced, cohesive novels.
In 1902 Kipling bought a house at Burwash, Sussex, which remained his
home until his death. Sussex was the background of much of his later
writing--especially in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies
(1910), two volumes that, although devoted to simple dramatic presentations
of English history, embodied some of his deepest intuitions. In 1907
he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In South Africa, where he
spent much time, he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate
and South African statesman. This association fostered Kipling's imperialist
persuasions, which were to grow stronger with the years. These convictions
are not to be dismissed in a word; they were bound up with a genuine
sense of a civilizing mission that required every Englishman, or, more
broadly, every white man, to bring European culture to the heathen natives
of the uncivilized world. Kipling's ideas were not in accord with much
that was liberal in the thought of the age, and as he became older he
was an increasingly isolated figure. When he died, two days before King
George V, he must have seemed to many a far less representative Englishman
than his sovereign.
Assessment
Kipling's poems and stories were extraordinarily popular in the late
19th and early 20th century, but after World War I his reputation as
a serious writer suffered through his being widely viewed as a jingoistic
imperialist. As a poet he scarcely ranks high, although his rehabilitation
was attempted by so distinguished a critic as T.S. Eliot. His verse
is indeed vigorous, and in dealing with the lives and colloquial speech
of common soldiers and sailors it broke new ground. But balladry, music-hall
song, and popular hymnology provide its unassuming basis; and even at
its most serious--as in "Recessional" (1897) and similar pieces
in which Kipling addressed himself to his fellow countrymen in times
of crisis--the effect is rhetorical rather than imaginative.
But it is otherwise with Kipling's prose. In the whole sweep of his
adult storytelling, he displays a steadily developing art, from the
early volumes of short stories set in India through the collections
Life's Handicap (1891), Many Inventions (1893), The Day's Work (1898),
Traffics and Discoveries (1904), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debits
and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932). While his later
stories cannot exactly be called better than the earlier ones, they
are as good--and they bring a subtler if less dazzling technical proficiency
to the exploration of deeper though sometimes more perplexing themes.
It is a far cry from the broadly effective eruption of the supernatural
in "The Phantom Rickshaw" (1888) to its subtle exploitation
in "The Wish House" or "A Madonna of the Trenches"
(1924), or from the innocent chauvinism of the bravura "The Man
Who Was" (1890) to the depth of implication beneath the seemingly
insensate xenophobia of "Mary Postgate" (1915). There is much
in Kipling's later art to curtail its popular appeal. It is compressed
and elliptical in manner and sombre in many of its themes. But that
his reputation among informed critics should have declined steadily
during his lifetime can scarcely be accounted for except in terms of
political prejudice.
Kipling, it should be noted, wrote much and successfully for children;
for the very young in Just So Stories (1902), and for others in The
Jungle Books and in Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. Of
his miscellaneous works, the more notable are a number of early travel
sketches collected in two volumes in From Sea to Sea (1899) and the
unfinished Something of Myself, posthumously published in 1941, a reticent
essay in autobiography.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling (1990- ), selects
from a large surviving correspondence. A substantial biography, Charles
Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, rev. ed. (1978), is
judicious and sympathetic and benefits from a thorough knowledge of
Kipling's background in three continents. Further biographies include
Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977, reissued 1994);
and Lord Birkenhead (Frederick W.F. Smith, Earl of Birkenhead), Rudyard
Kipling (1978). James Harrison, Rudyard Kipling (1982), is a useful
introduction to his life and works. Critical studies include J.M.S.
Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (1959, reissued 1965); Bonamy Dobree,
Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist (1967); Kingsley Amis, Rudyard
Kipling and His World (1975); Robert F. Moss, Rudyard Kipling and the
Fiction of Adolescence (1982); B.J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and "Orientalism"
(1986); Sandra Kemp, Kipling's Hidden Narratives (1988); and Helen Pike
Bauer, Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction (1994). Collections
of essays include Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Kipling's Mind and Art (1964);
and Harold Orel (compiler), Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling (1989).
R. Lancelyn Green (compiler), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (1971),
affords a valuable conspectus of the development of Kipling's reputation.
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