Since the true story of the British, fifty years ago, was the story of the British Overseas, in the age of Cromer, Curzon, Kitchener, Milner, Johnson, Lugard and Rhodes, it was Kipling’s task to reveal the secrets of their actual life to his contemporaries.
(Rudyard Kipling His Life and Work by Charles Carrington, Penguin paperback edition, page 398)
Charles Carrington’s biography of Kipling is a masterpiece, thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and above all packed with good sense and grounded judgments.
Charles Carrington (1897 to 1990)
Carrington was himself a military man. Although under-age, he enlisted in the British Army in 1914, and wangled a posting to France, where he spent six months on a quiet part of the Western Front before taking part in the Battle of the Somme. In 1929 he published memoirs of his time as an officer on the Western Front, A Subaltern’s War. He rejoined the Army during the Second World War, working as liaison with the RAF. In his book and in later text and TV interviews, he consistently took the line that the Great War was worth fighting, and that it had to be seen out to the end, a view – having read a number of revisionist histories on the subject in recent years – which I agree with.
After the Second War Carrington was approached by the Kipling family to write the official biography. He was given access to family correspondence by Kipling’s only surviving child, Elsie, who is deeply thanked in the Preface, where Carrington says she was so closely involved that she ought to have been credited as joint author. Although this sounds limiting, his biography has stood the test of time and is still the standard work which all others refer to.
Carrington’s unique position
1955 was less than twenty years after Kipling’s death (1936) and Carrington was old enough to remember the tremendous influence Kipling had as a creative and cultural force through the 1890s, 1900s and into the post-war years – to have experienced it himself as a patriotic schoolboy.
But the biography itself was written after the watershed of the Second War, in the era of decolonisation, as Kipling’s beloved India and Pakistan were given independence, followed by a long stream of Asian and African colonies.
What makes Carrington so valuable, then, is that – as a military man – he has a good working knowledge of the British Army which Kipling revered so much and whose values he promoted – and throughout the book is sympathetic to Kipling’s super-patriotism (and often disdainful of the educated artistic elite which held Kipling’s – and by extension – much of the nation’s values in contempt). Yet Carrington lived on into the disillusioned, decolonising and unrecognisably more liberal post-War era and so is able to distance himself from Kipling’s more extreme political and social views.
So this biography inhabits two eras, brilliantly interpreting and translating the earlier one for the later one. It is consistently sympathetic but not afraid to be critical, and I think it’s this balancing act which makes the book so attractive and which later writers on Kipling have found difficult to repeat. In our politically correct times it is all too easy to dismiss Kipling as the sadistic, racist Imperialist which so much of his writing reveals him to be and so never to experience the imaginative power and force that his best writing, particularly the poetry, without doubt still possesses.
My attitude to Kipling
I am not an ancient Greek, but I have spent many days and weeks trying to imagine my way into the intellectual, psychological and cultural world of Agamemnon and Achilles, of Aeschylus and Plato. Neither am I a Roman Catholic, but I have spent many weeks imagining myself into the mental world of the Fathers of the Church, of early English Catholics like Gildas and Bede, of the medieval Scholars, of Chaucer and his pilgrims. I am not a Viking, but I have spent months reading the Norse sagas and trying to understand the world-view and beliefs which gave rise to their appalling ferocity and effectiveness. I am not a medieval zealot, but I have spent weeks reading about the millenarian cults and witch-burning frenzies of the Middle Ages. I am not a Nazi, but I have spent long periods reading about Nazi Germany and trying to imagine myself into the minds of both the demented Nazi leaders and fanatical rank and file. I am not a Stalinist, but I have spent time imagining my way into the minds of the comrades who oversaw the mass famines and then the show trials of the 1930s.
Similarly, I am not a racist but I am spending these weeks rereading Kipling’s life and stories and poetry in order to feel my way into the minds of sometimes unpleasantly arrogant and racist white Sahibs, the better to understand the complex of beliefs and behaviours which existed in Imperial India and the broader British Empire in Kipling’s time (the key years from 1885 to the 1930s) – in order to understand how people lived and believed then – and how we, now, today, are still living amid the heritage of those views and beliefs.
Kipling’s childhood
This is a long and thorough account of a fascinating life, which would take far too long to summarise – and anyone can read a good outline on Kipling’s Wikipedia page or at the Kipling Society (links below). For me the key learnings are:
Very artistic family
Kipling’s father, (John) Lockwood Kipling, was an artist, designer and writer in his own right, who spent his career in Bombay then Lahore, dedicated to reviving and teaching traditional Indian crafts during his thirty years’ service in the sub-continent.
Kipling’s mother was one of the four MacDonald sisters, who were famous in their day and have had several books devoted to them. Alice MacDonald married Lockwood Kipling. Her sister, Georgiana, married the pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The third sister, Agnes, married the artist Sir Edward Poynter. And the fourth sister, Agnes, married the MP Alfred Baldwin, whose son Stanley was to become British Prime Minister.
So, although he was sent to a fierce boarding school set up to train the sons of Army officers (the basis of the Stalky and Co stories) and although it was his proud boast to prefer the company of rough soldiers and sailors to long-haired aesthetes -–Kipling also had this completely different Arts and Crafts heritage and eminent artistic family environment to draw on (as he did when he created the artist protagonist of his novel The Light That Failed) and to support him, emotionally, artistically, psychologically.
Toddler years in India
Kipling was born and spent his first five years in his parents’ house in Bombay, with a native ayah, snakes in the garden, dust and the searing heat – sights, sounds and smells which never left him.
Cruelty in Southsea
In 1870 Kipling’s parents brought him and his sister Trix back to England to visit the various in-laws, before they heartlessly abandoned them both in the house of a working class couple in Southsea (part of Portsmouth) who advertised as ‘caring’ for the children of India Army officials. Although the father, a retired captain, was sympathetic, the little Rudyard was routinely beaten by the cruel mother, Sarah Holloway, and then beaten by the bully son. He was sent to attend a prep school, which also featured routine physical punishment. The Mrs Holloway was a fervent Evangelical Christian and beat the whole of the Old Testament and every element of the church services into the quivering boy – arguably his deepest artistic influence.
Army boarding school
In 1878, aged 13, he was moved to the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, a boarding school for the sons of Army officers. Here there was more bullying and cruelty but, as the years passed, Kipling found his feet and a few sympathetic teachers who opened his eyes to literature and cultivated his talent for writing.
Kipling never went to university
He wasn’t bright enough for Oxbridge, which his parents couldn’t have afforded anyway. So, aged 17, he graduated from the College, sailed back to India and started work as a journalist on the small Lahore-based local newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette.
These early years set the pattern:
- Emphatic support of the Army and the Empire, particularly of the working men, the soldiers and sailors and engineers at the cutting edge, who made things work.
- A strong streak of violent physical bullying and punishment (it is hard not to be revolted by the number of ‘natives’ who get casually kicked in Kipling’s earlier stories and his idea of a practical joke always involves cruelty and humiliation; even the Just So stories often feel harsh), let alone the cruelty in the various Stalky stories.
In terms of style, the two hugely important influences of his childhood are:
- A complete soaking in all aspects of the Bible, a deep working knowledge of the most recondite characters and stories from the Old Testament, along with word-perfect recall of the various collects and services in the Book of Common Prayer. These dominate his prose and poetic style (and his letters), allowing him to whistle up portentous and deep-sounding phrases at will when he moves into ‘Nation Addressing’ mode, but also appear as frolics and casual references throughout the works, references which almost all need footnotes now in our post-Christian age.
- A complete absence of classical references. Contemporaries as diverse as Oscar Wilde or Thomas Hardy could confidently refer to the Greek gods and myths and legends and authors, as part of the broader shared heritage of a classical education. Kipling has none of that; it is a great gap in his imaginative world. Instead, Kipling has India and the vast multifarious faiths of the East to draw on. And, as he travelled the world in his 20s and 30s, he was fascinated by the native gods of everywhere he went, from Africa to Greenland. Its almost complete absence in Kipling’s oeuvre makes you realise the effect they have in almost everyone else’s writings – that is, a reassuring effect, reassuring the reader that we are all operating/writing/reading within the same realm of shared values and references. But it is also a big plus as well, since the casual way Kipling can mention Eskimo or Ashanti or Aborigine or Afghan gods is one of the things which give his works such an incredible global range – the sense of reaching into the lives of peoples and races which most of his audience had barely even heard of. And this was one of the reasons for his huge impact on his generation, the sense of One Man single-handedly opening up to them the vast and disparate new territories of the Empire, in all its mystery and exoticism.
Journalism
Instead of going to university Kipling returns to India and starts working, aged 17, on Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, quickly learning the ropes of newspaper production and seeing at first hand every aspect of British rule in India as experienced at the hard end, by the working soldiers and administrators and doctors, working themselves to death for little or no thanks and a steady chorus of denigration and criticism from Liberals back home.
Kipling learned how to write features and articles to order and to length. He develops a cult of ‘work’ and the fitness of ‘the day’s work’, putting in long hours in the newspaper’s offices and print rooms, and then spending thousands of hours wandering the native quarters of Bombay or Lahore at night, seeking out mystery and strangeness.
Plain Tales from the Hills
Not only did Kipling learn to write all kinds of copy to order – articles, interview, reviews – and to length and to a deadline, but he was secretly converting anecdotes and incidents large and small which he came across, into ‘stories’. Carrington’s pages devoted to the creation and publishing of the Plain Tales stories is fascinating, as is Kipling’s unbelievable productivity: Some thirty-nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887 and were republished in Plain Tales from the Hills, his first prose collection, printed in Calcutta in January 1888.
London
By 1889 Kipling had learned everything he could in the newspaper and a new editor suggested it was time to move on. He travelled to London in 1889 (characteristically going right round the world, via the Far East, Japan and sight-seeing all across America) before crossing the Atlantic to arrive in Liverpool, then travel to London.
a) His art world contacts and his father provided him introductions to various magazine editors and publishers who, between them, promptly flooded the literary world with Kipling’s accumulated stories and poems, creating a massive Boom and the impression of a superstar appearing from nowhere. He was just 22.
b) I’ve always been fascinated by the way he found digs in Villiers Street, next to Charing Cross station, over a pie and mash shop and opposite Gatti’s music hall. It was the rhythms and diction of music hall songs which inspired the phenomenally popular Barrack Room Ballads (1892).
The 1890s
Like many bohemian students I tended to associate the 1890s with ‘the Decadence’, the fin-de-siecle, with Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book. It is chastening to realise how wrong this is, and that it was really the decade of Kipling’s greatest popularity. He bombarded the reading audience with stories and novels and poems about worlds they’d barely heard of before, in a phenomenal outpouring of stories, novels and poems;
- The Light That Failed (novel, 1891)
- Life’s Handicap (short stories, 1891)
- Barrack Room Ballads (poems, 1892)
- The Naulahka, A Story of West and East (novel, 1892)
- Many Inventions (1893)
- The Jungle Books (short stories, 1895, 1895)
- The Seven Seas (poems, 1896)
- Captains Courageous (1897)
- The Day’s Work (short stories, 1898)
- Stalky and Co (short stories, 1899)
What emerges from this list is:
1. His equal facility in verse and prose (not unique for that period: Wilde wrote successful poems, stories, a novel and plays; Thomas Hardy was equally fluent in novels and poems).
2. The weakness of the novels:
- The Light That Failed is about an artist who has a frustrated love affair, realises he is going blind and goes off to the Sudan to die a ‘hero’s death’ in the desert. Respectable but not rave reviews.
- Nobody liked The Naulahka, which was a collaboration with his American friend Wolcott Balestier (who died half way through writing it).
- Captains Courageous is really a short story (the licking into shape of a spoilt millionaire’s son aboard a tough New England trawler) stretched out and told in Kipling’s impenetrable attempt to convey New England trawlermen diction.
And what is so hard to capture is how quickly and completely he came to dominate the tone and discourse of the period. Carrington quotes a very useful description of Kipling’s influence from a man at the opposite end of the political spectrum, H.G. Wells, in his novel The New Machiavelli (1910).
The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;—never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and ‘shop’ as a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his “Recessional,” while I was still an undergraduate. What did he give me exactly? He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. (H.G. Wells The New Machiavelli, Chapter 4)
Marriage and America
When Wolcott Balestier died suddenly in Germany, Kipling cut short a Christmas trip to his family in India, returned to London for the funeral, and proposed to Wolcott’s sister, Caroline Starr Balestier. They were married on 18 January 1892 (with Henry James giving away the bride) in a service with just four attendants – but ‘Carrie’ was to be an invaluable rock to him for the rest of his life.
They moved to America, to rural Vermont, to be near the other Balestier sibling, Beatty and here they had their three children, Josephine, Elsie and John. Kipling helped build the family home and furnished it exactly according to his requirements, with a big study window looking out over beautiful New England scenery, carpeted with rugs from India. Here he wrote The Jungle Books and, a few years later, took the trips to the New England cod harbours with a friend, an American doctor, to collect the factual, technical and above all slang and diction of the sailors which makes Captains Courageous almost unreadable.
The crisis of Imperialism
For me the most compelling section of Carrington’s brilliant biography covers the years 1898 to 1902. A massive falling-out with Carrie’s brother made their Vermont home unpleasant, and this was compounded by a wave of Anglophobia whipped up by the administration of President Cleveland when American nearly went to war with Britain about the border between Venezuala and British Guiana in South America.
The Kiplings returned to England and settled, first in Torquay, then in Ringwood in Hampshire. Kipling wrote the first of a series of grave, sombre admonitions to The Nation, Recessional, about the state of the nation at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. It is an extraordinarily sombre, serious poem, notable for not mentioning the Queen at all.
But it was the two white men’s wars at the turn of the century which form the axis in Kipling’s career and reputation:
- The Spanish-American War (1898) during which the US defeated Spain in the Philippines.
- The Second Boer War (1899 to 1901) which Kipling went out to South Africa to contribute and report on, for which he wrote his immense bestseller, The Absent-Minded Beggar, and where he saw how mismanaged the war was, how ill-prepared the British were, how badly organised and badly led, and was shocked to realise that a large part of the British population and most of the intelligentsia were strongly against it.
Anti-imperialists at the time and all the way to our time, see both wars as grotesque bullying of small peoples and unashamed wars of conquest designed to open up areas of the world for British economic exploitation. Carrington’s is a useful corrective, emphasising that Kipling and the millions of patriots like him saw them as wars to ensure Progress – material, economic and social – and Freedom. The Boers oppressed the indigenous Africans and refused to give any legal or political rights to the three-quarters of the population who were Uitlanders – white settlers from Britain or the colonies. The Boer War was fought to defend their rights and freedoms – and this, Carrington points out, explains why thousands of men volunteered from Australia and New Zealand to fight the Boers: they were fighting for mates like themselves.
Kipling and those like him felt that Britain and America were united in being at the cutting edge of Civilisation and Progress: they were pledged to bring political freedom and the blessings of civilisation – law, order, agriculture, irrigation, proper drains, schools, hospitals – to areas where many millions of native peoples lived in breath-takingly primitive conditions and savagery.
To inhabit this point of view, no matter how briefly, is the only way to get inside Kipling’s famous booming national poems, like The White Man’s Burden. We may disagree with every shred of its utterance and assumptions, but it is important, historically, to get inside the mind of its maker and its many, many, fans. As I write these words the British House of Commons is debating whether we, the British Army or Air Force, should intervene somehow in Syria to stop the Russians bombing Aleppo, to arrange peace agreements which will allow the return of law, order and all the blessings of civilisation – hospitals, schools etc, and plenty of bien-pensant newspapers, TV and radio programmes feature pictures of the bombings and voices calling for Western intervention.
But why? Why should British armed forces personnel put their lives on the line for people five thousand miles away who, as the examples of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya show us, will not thank us and will not do as we wish and adopt the nice, human rights-based democracies we’d like ’em to, any more than they did during Kipling’s day? Because we are still labouring under the delusions of Kipling and his time, that ‘the West’ somehow has a duty, a responsibility and a ‘burden’ to bring peace, civilisation, law etc etc to troubled parts of the world. Why?
The engineers of Empire
Over and over Carrington places Kipling’s stories and poems in their historical and technological context, celebrating the tremendous achievements and breakthroughs of the age.
To write poetry and prose about steamships, for the men who worked in the engine-rooms, was so new a practice that it left the literary critics gasping, but Kipling’s own public was to be found among the makers of the world as it was at the turn of the century. They found no difficulty in his vocabulary, no unfamiliarity in his subject-matter. The generation that bridged the Forth, built the Uganda Railway, damned the Nile, laid the Pacific Cable, irrigated the Punjab, sent radio messages across the Atlantic, crushed the ore of the Golden Mile at Kalgoorlie, servid with the Mounties at the Klondyke, tunneled through the Rockies, revealed the last secrets of the earth’s surface, and learned to fly, had found its own laureate and not upon the advice of the approved literary critics. (p.398)
From the mid-1890s Kipling took an increasing interest in the Royal Navy and, by this stage, had the friends and contacts to be taken out on various naval vessels and shown round the Fleet. Carrington makes the point that in every year from 1889 to 1908 Kipling took a long sea voyage, and his love of the sea and seafaring men grew and grew. This resulted in a series of short ‘stories’ (many really just glorified reportage) aboard RN ships – not least the half dozen ‘stories’ about Petty Officer Emanuel Pyecroft. These are, frankly, pretty poor.
Far more impressive are the poems he wrote about the sea, about the naval engineers who keep the ships running, such as the famous McAndrew’s Hymn (1894). And they are just part of Kipling’s commendable and admirable interest in the practicalities of WORK and in the astonishing scientific and technological achievements of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Carrington captures this mood of a generation really well:
They [Rhodes and Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt] lived in a world in which the British and the Americans were immeasurably the most progressive of nations; in which their standards of conduct prevailed wherever civilisation spread; in which they were in fact spreading those standards over all the world. The partition of Africa, of South-East Asia, and of the Pacific, the revelation by explorers of the last secrets on the earth’s surface, the linking of all the world’s seaports by telegraph cables and steamship routes, the crossing of all continents by railways, the bridge-building, the engineering, and the commerce: these astonishing achievements made a revolution in history unlike anything that had ever happened before, and Kipling’s genius had revealed to his generation what it was that they had done. (p.335)
The Edwardian Kipling
After the Boer War his contempt for Liberals and anyone who questioned the ‘civilising mission’ of the Empire makers hardened, his fictional and poetic satires of them grew more savage, the brutality of his brutal stories tougher and harder to read.
And yet the 1900s were also the decade of The Just So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, overtly light and dainty children’s stories, after he settled into his final home at ‘Bateman’s’. a comfortable country house near the village of Burwash in Sussex, and fell in love with the English countryside and its traditions.
Carrington’s biography continues to be informative and to provide fascinating background, especially around the political crises of the years 1910 to 1914, during which Kipling made increasingly vehement statements in defence of the Empire, against Irish Nationalism, in defence of the Ulster Unionists and so on, speeches and articles which crystallised his reputation as a fiery demagogue of the Right. Many of his earlier fans and supporters fell away, disappointed and alarmed at the ferocity of his political opinions, but also at their increasing estrangement from reality.
For the events of the Great War and then of the post-war years, see my reviews of the two key collections of short stories, A Diversity of Creatures (1917) and Debits and Credits (1926).
Early adopter
One of the minor themes which emerges is that Kipling was a gadget freak. He not only was riveted to learn everything possible about every piece of technology which was shown him – and then stuffed his stories with show-off facts and jargon, from steamships to the new wireless – but he himself adopted, bought and experimented with them.
While in Vermont he took delivery of one of the first pairs of modern skis and off he went. He was an early adopter of the new-fangled bicycle in the 1890s, until he and his wife fell off their tandem in Torquay and gave it up. He was one of the first motorists, buying a steam-driven ‘Locomobile’ in 1900, a breakdown-prone machine which features in the story ‘Steam tactics’. In fact, from that point onwards Kipling was fascinated by cars and owned a sequence of steadily better and better spec machines – while the joys and perils of motoring appear in quite a few of the Edwardian short stories – as well as creating the frame for one of his best supernatural stories, ‘They’ (1904). In fact, he was inspired to write a series of parodies of classical and English poets writing about motor cars, which was eventually collected in the light-hearted volume The Muse Among The Motors.
He was fascinated by the new technology of electric lights, got Bateman’s rigged up and then wrote an eerie ‘comic’ story about a cat and rat and the millwheel and water, all of whom get speaking parts in a story about how an old mill gets fitted with a blazing electric light, ‘Below The Mill Dam’ (1902). Similarly, he describes an amateur and very early radio ham in Sussex trying to fix an aerial to the roof of the local chemists’ shop in another supernatural tale, ‘Wireless’.
His 1904 story ‘Mrs Bathurst’ contains one of the earliest references to the new cinematograph in fiction: in it a man obsessed with a remote love affair he had with a woman in New Zealand drags the narrator of the tale along to see an amazing coincidence – that the subject of his long distance love has been captured on a few seconds of film walking towards a very early movie camera in a London railway station, a film which is now being shown as part of a sideshow attraction in South Africa. The man insists on paying the entry fee again and again to sit through forty minutes of jerky black and white figures, just to see the few seconds of his beloved jerking towards the camera. An eerie premonition of the circular relationship between film, repetition and obsession which was to haunt the medium throughout the 20th century.
Conclusion
Carrington’s biography is compulsory reading for anyone interested in Kipling. It has at least four inestimable strengths:
1. Access to the family’s private papers, to Kipling’s correspondence and to his wife’s diary, alongside the guiding hand, anecdotes and personal memories of Kipling’s own daughter.
2. It offers sensible, grounded, unideological insights into scores of the poems and stories, thoroughly explaining their background and genesis, and shedding new light wherever he turns his attention.
3. Carrington was a military man himself who served in both world wars, and shares some of Kipling’s animus against both the elite urban intellectuals who looked down on Kipling and his vulgar little ways, and against the Liberal politicians who campaigned so violently against Kipling’s Conservative party friends during the Edwardian era. This makes Carrington an unusual right-wing voice in the world of academia, of modern introductions and editions and commentary on Kipling which is uniformly politically correct, feminist, post-colonial and often shrilly critical of the man and all his works. I don’t agree or disagree with his views; but it is just fascinating to see the world from that point of view and to be forced to reconsider a whole set of issues and events from a different perspective.
4. Finally, Carrington is simply a good critic. He has interesting things to say about almost every aspect of Kipling’s output and sheds light on every poem or story which he considers. This is why you often come across him being quoted in later editions and essays and introductions to Kipling’s work: because Carrington got there first and often said it best. This is an indispensable work.
Books & Boots 