Biography: Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling By Charles Allen Little, Brown, 426pp. £20No English writer has been more ardently idolised and vehemently denounced than Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). He lived when the British empire was at its apogee, and later at the beginning of imperial decline and public apathy.
In 1907, Kipling was the first writer in English, the youngest writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. On the other hand, George Orwell, in a 1942 essay, spoke for Britain's liberal intelligentsia when he called Kipling's verse "horribly vulgar", the work of "a good bad poet", "a gutter patriot". As Noel Coward said, "Strange how potent cheap music is". Verses such as Gunga Din, Danny Deever and If once made a profound, favourable impression on the public of Britain and elsewhere. But ask a child in Britain today what he knows about Kipling and the answer might be that he makes "exceedingly good cakes".
Charles Allen has confronted the extraordinary diversity of Kipling's literary personality and shifting reputation and has made a fine job of putting together a coherent synthesis. The resulting portrait is sympathetic, without concealing some warts. Allen is well qualified for the task. He too was born in India under the Raj, travelled extensively there and has written books about the place and its history. There is even a family connection: Allen's great-grandfather gave Kipling his first job in journalism, on the Civil and Military Gazette, in Lahore, at the age of 16. Allen is an assiduous researcher whose prose is orderly, detailed and a pleasure to read.
As in many other biographies, the account of childhood is the least lively part, but essential for an understanding of what made the adult tick. Ruddy, as his family called him, was "cast out of Paradise at an early age", Allen writes. Like the biographer, Ruddy was separated from his parents to spend his most influentially formative years at school in England. He had the misfortune to be brought up by harsh guardians in a seaside boarding house he described as "The House of Desolation". Forever afterwards, though passionately loyal to queen and country, he resisted authority, especially as represented by senior army officers, civil administrators and everyone else who demanded orthodox conformity in the military messes and racially exclusive clubs of British India. As a young reporter and newspaper contributor of features, short stories and verses, he wasted no opportunity to reveal the snobbery and scandals of established society and to support the underdogs, British and Indian. He cultivated the friendship of private soldiers and Indian women of the streets.
WEAK EYES PREVENTED him from serving in uniform, but buying beers for off-duty soldiers enabled him to see army life from their point of view and to learn the speech of the ordinary rank and file. Orwell deplored as condescending Kipling's way of recording the dropped aitches and terminal Gs of Cockney dialect. However, it gave his army ballads, such as Tommy and Fuzzy Wuzzy, their authentic flavour. Imagine the following excerpt if it were edited for political correctness:
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy Wuzzy, at your
'ome in the Soudan,
Your're a pore benighted 'eathen but a
first-class fightin' man;
And 'ere's to you, Fuzzy Wuzzy, with
your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air -
You big black boundin' beggar - for
you broke a British square!
John's father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a leading British authority on Indian arts and crafts and a talented draughtsman. Some of his drawings of Indians are used to good effect, complementing photographs, in Allen's elegantly designed book. Though Ruddy and his father became good friends and collaborators, Ruddy was never close to his mother. When he became persona not very grata in conservative circles in Lahore and Simla and he felt impelled to pursue his literary career in London, he found it quite easy to leave India. He was only 23 but already famous.
His later family life was burdened by tragic losses and episodes of mental illness and occasional dependence on opiates. He was badly hurt by the death of his son Jack in France in the first World War (recently the subject of a film). The youth had inherited myopia and could have stayed out of the army, but Kipling pulled strings to get him a commission in the Irish Guards, and bitterly regretted having done so. Kipling see-sawed up to the elation of creativity that produced books such as Stalky & Co., Just So Stories and Kim, his masterpiece, and equally far down to the depths of depression.
He left the English language decorated with a number of sayings, which were widely quoted until they became threadbare cliches: "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet"; "the white man's burden"; "the female of the species is deadlier than the male"; and "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke". He was not entirely humourless. Or was he?
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer