In 1918, TS Eliot asked: “Who reads Kipling any more?” — when Rudyard Kipling still had 18 years to live; when he was my age, 53; and when he was still to sell millions of books in the Soviet Union. It was only 11 years since Kipling had won the Nobel prize for literature. But he was already defunct. The love affair was over.
Since the end of the first world war, it has been necessary to intermittently kick the literary pages to remind them that Kipling is one of Britain’s greatest talents, a writer who transfixed a literary generation that included Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Who, on writing Danny Deever, had sent a professor of English scurrying into his class clutching the poem and crying out: “Here’s literature at last!” Ten years ago, the news that If was the Nation’s Favourite Poem was greeted by a mass moue. “A typical bombastic choice.” Ian McKellen pointed out that Kipling was writing in the voice of an old man, like a Polonius figure. But virtually everybody else felt obliged to apologise for the public’s embarrassing choice. It’s the beardie-weirdies who are agin’ him. Why?
In February, I met up with Craig Raine, the Oxford authority on all literature, who has a pretty formidable beard himself. We were talking about Betjeman. “What else are you doing?” he asked. “Oh, I’m making a little documentary on Kipling.” Raine had made a piece himself for Channel 4 — J’adore Rudyard Kipling. Adore? It seems quite difficult to “adore” Kipling. The blood, boots and “at ’em” attitude feel heavy-handed. The funny voices — “Oos an ’eathen?”, the stage Oirish, the music-hall rhythms — are all dated and hard work, and we sensitive types don’t respond well to talk of the “white man’s burden”, do we?
Pages of drivel have been written to prove Kipling wasn’t a racist. But he was. He classified attitudes according to race. He was an imperialist — an out-and-out imperialist at that, who wrote about an English mission (nearly always English, by the way), a duty, to spread the bureaucratic, organised English way of doing things to the world (in much the same way our government believes we in “the west” have a mission to reform Muslim countries). “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” — there’s that “racism” again, although, believe me, he was being as much a racist about the English and their burdensome bureaucratic character as he was about the elemental Asiatic. But can we adore a man like this? What was his grip?
He certainly had one. I was in a second-hand bookshop in Wales recently, and there they all were. Some wonderful India-paper editions for the imperial export market: beautiful, bound matching volumes — Limits and Renewals, Something of Myself, Traffics and Discoveries. (Left to his own devices, he was never very good at titles.) But there was a time when every middle-class household in Britain had to have a few volumes, adorned with their little gold swastikas. I have my dad’s leather-bound school prize on my shelf as I write. That’s where I found Rikki-Tikki-Tavi at the age of nine.
Every family had Kipling in their home because every middle-class family probably had at least one member “out there”. They had Kipling like they had those ivory elephants on the mantelpiece. And they had all those phrases rattling around in their heads. “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” “Boots-boots-boots-boots.” He was the voice of the empire; he was born in it and championed it, and perhaps fell with it.
Hardly a typical late-Victorian writer, though born in 1865, Kipling reeks of the early 20th century. He never went to university. After a ghastly childhood experience, harrowingly recounted in Ba Ba Black Sheep, deported to a kindergarten dungeon in Southsea, he went to Westward Ho, the school for sons of the empire, and then, at 16, back to India to work on a newspaper. He survived the school. He survived the responsibility of the paper — theatre reviewer, compositor, night editor, rewrite man, reporter (he did every job, and all at once, one day working through a bout of disease to get the English-language paper onto the streets of Lahore). At 19, he was barracked in the Punjab club for an editorial he had written supporting a law allowing Asian judges to try Europeans. He survived that, too.
He survived the ordeal of supercilious superior officer classes on summer holidays in Simla. He survived working in the baking heat on the plain, with the engineers, doctors and commissioners who “stayed at their posts”. (“If you can keep your head...” ) Kipling dressed for dinner, tried opium and wrote short stories in his spare time. His Plain Tales from the Hills reveal a deep sophistication, very deep considering he was still in his early twenties when he wrote them. Wilde congratulated him on detailing the “true vulgarity” of the servants of the empire. “They’re not quite Chekhov,” a journalist and fellow enthusiast said to me last week, but he was implying that they very nearly are. They made Kipling’s fortune and built an extraordinary reputation quickly.
If the original audience recognised themselves, the home audience recognised the accuracy. He detailed the adultery and the back-stabbing and the bitchiness just as much as the service and the sacrifice and the danger.
Success meant he travelled from Outer Gaul to Rome, as some sort of prophet of the empire. He arrived in London when it was the centre of the world. It was fixated with its role. Imperial typewriters wrote the imperial news. Imperial laundries starched your sheets. The imperial docks welcomed banana boats. Imperial films, books and magazines entertained the population.
It wasn’t really until after the Indian mutiny that Britain had decided to be the “ruler” of India, as opposed to a heavily armed trading partner, but the mother country had taken to the idea with vigour, and Kipling was her Horace.
McKellen was completely right. The essence of Kipling is to get under the skin of other men. He inhabits them. “He does the voices.” In The Man Who Would Be King, although it is clearly Kipling who meets the louche characters who invade his compositing room on a humid night in Lahore, it is the wild-eyed lad himself who “tells the tale”. Two men who seek to rule a remote country are treated as gods, but taking on a woman they reveal themselves as human, so their “subjects” kill them. Of course, the message is there. The servants of the British Raj were known in India as “the heaven-born”, but the men in the story are free- booters, little more than the lowest of conmen. What does this tell us about Kipling’s attitudes? Only that he liked the ironic and skewed. Like all good writers, he doesn’t take sides. His characters do.
For Kipling, writing was an act of possession. His “daemon” would come to him:
