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The Review - FEATURE
 

Rudyard Kipling


A scene from the Walt Disney version of Jungle Book, perhaps Kipling’s most famous work
A tale of two Kiplings

Rudyard Kipling is one of our most enduring writers, but also a mass of contradictions, finds Piers Plowright

Kipling
by Jad Adams,
Haus Publishing Company, £18

IF I’d been looking out of my window in the Spring of 1935 I might have seen a small man, top-hatted and probably dress-ed in black, on the arm of an even smaller, thick-set woman, going through the wrought-iron gates of Burgh House Hampstead.

Mr and Mrs Rudyard Kipling on their way to visit their only surviving child, Elsie. Kipling was by then nearly 70, worn out by the death of two children – his only son, John, one of the many dead in the First World War – overwork, poor health, and a feeling that he was no longer valued. The ‘Daemon’ that had been with him so triumphantly as he wrote his masterpieces had, he felt, deserted him.
Less than a year later he would be dead, and, a grand funeral in Westminster Abbey and his ashes interred in Poets’ Corner notwithstanding, the day of this complicated and contradictory man seemed past.
Seventy years later, things are very different though the contradictions remain: an Imperialist who wrote about the colonised even better than the coloniser, a patriarch with some sympathy for feminism, a wonderful short-story writer who never managed a decent novel, a war-monger who lived to regret the horrors of war, a High Tory who refused all civic honours, a lover of women who was passionately attracted to men, and a poet who could write jingoistic doggerel alongside beautiful lyric verse.
But few now challenge the fact that he wrote some of the enduring masterpieces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Plain Tales from the Hills, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Kim, Mrs Bathurst, Mary Postgate, and Baa Baa Blacksheep, continue to move, enchant and terrify.
The last, a long short-story about the appalling suffering of a small brother and sister at the hands of a ‘god-fearing’ woman on whom they were dumped by Anglo-Indian parents, was closely autobiographical and may well be the key to Kipling’s character, his anger, his uncanny sense of the vulnerability of children, his distrust of conventional religion, his sexual confusion, and his fierce desire to prove himself. The truth is that there were at least two Kiplings – what Kipling himself called ‘Separate sides of my head’. He saw this dual personality as a gift from God and not as a problem and in this he is not unlike a very different writer, DH Lawrence, who joined an extraordinary sensitivity to a violent world view, to produce work that sings with life even when it’s over the top or politically incorrect.
Kipling’s great luck was to find a subject – India – that inspired and deepened him, even though, as Jad Adams shows in this workmanlike biography, he only spent 12 years of his life there and never saw it again after the age of 25.
Like Kim, he could escape into the bazaars, the back-streets, the hills and the mysticism of this overwhelming continent to free himself for a while from the snobberies and the intolerance of white British society, a society which, in his other persona, so strongly appealed to him.
“What a luxury,” wrote Henry James to Kipling after the publication of Kim in 1900, “to possess a big subject as you possess India…The way you make the general picture live and sound and shine, all by a myriad touches that are like the thing itself pricking through with a little snap – that makes me want to say to you: …chuck public affairs which are an ignoble scene and stick to your canvas and your paint-box… there is the only truth. The rest is humbug.”
Of course, India wasn’t the only powerful influence and a strength of Adams’ biography is the light he throws on Kipling’s creative love/hate relationship with America – Carrie his wife was an American – and his hero-worship of Cecil Rhodes and Imperial African dreams. England too, seen from the Jacobean windows of his beloved Sussex house ‘Bateman’s’ –the short-stories about Sussex rural life seem to me as good as Hardy’s about Dorset. Although he made light of it, the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Kipling in 1907 was richly deserved. A fascinating man and a fascinating life and if you’re looking for a good introduction to both, this book is to be recommended. But it doesn’t add any great insights to previous biographies by Angus Wilson and Martin Seymour-Smith and though handsomely produced, its large black-and-white photographs are infuriatingly unattributed. Perhaps one of them is what I would have seen over 70years ago as Mr and Mrs Kipling called on Elsie Bambridge in Hampstead that fine spring afternoon.

• Piers Plowright is an award-winning BBC drama and documentary producer. Documentary-making has earned him three Italia prizes and several Sony Golds. He lives in Well Walk in Hampstead.
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