Palgrave Macmillan £55 each
pp584 (Vol 5) pp527 (Vol 6)

The origin of Rudyard Kipling’s hatred of the people he called the Hun has long mystified me. I can understand his distrust of Germans before the first world war. Clearly the death of his only son John at the battle of Loos in 1915 did not improve matters. But his attitude is much older — linked to his emotional Francophilia, which emerged when, as a schoolboy, he accompanied his father to the 1878 Paris exhibition.

One of Kipling’s letters suggests a reason for his anti-Germanism. In 1934, two years before his death, he recalled the disgust felt by his father, who ran a crafts-based government art school in the Punjab, “when the Hun first introduced his aniline dyes into India” and “all the carpet designers of Amritzar fell with rapture on the puces, magentas and alazarine tints as they came along”.

It was quite like young Kipling to seize on this commercial brinkmanship (which destroyed traditional Indian skills) as the fount of his anti-Germanism. Such unexpected insights make collections of letters worthwhile. By choosing the best of more than 7,000 of Kipling’s missives, and adding scholarly notes and index, Thomas Pinney has performed an invaluable service for students of this coruscating writer and his turbulent times.

These two volumes of his magnum opus cover the last, often dour but intensely interesting years of Kipling’s life when, struggling with his son’s death and an unfriendly modern world, he produced a flurry of memorable short stories in what Pinney calls his “rich later manner”. John was hardly mentioned, as Kipling initially poured his hurt into a history of his boy’s regiment, the Irish Guards. On its completion in 1922, he would only say it was not much as a book “but it was done as one fidgets a sore tooth (or turns a knife in a wound) and each day, almost each hour, was pain and grief to me”.

He also worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission. Touchingly, his own loss taught him something he called the “equality of sorrow”. So he argued against the rich being able to commemorate their war dead with ornate personal graves. As a War Graves commissioner, he often went to France — the “most marvelous (sic) nation on the planet”. He also ventured further afield, to new places such as Algiers, Palestine, Brazil and Jamaica, where he was always alert to telling details, whether the 224 Rolls-Royces on the French Riviera, or the choristers in Jerusalem’s St George’s cathedral who threatened to strike in protest against the visit of A J Balfour.

Alongside this restless Kipling was another who enjoyed being at home, although less for the domesticity (the unspoken sense of sadness made even his lumpen daughter Elsie flee the nest) than for the game of playing the country squire. Predictably, Kipling railed against most aspects of modernity, such as jazz and psychoanalysis. His world view was dominated by his prejudices — for France in its historical struggle with Germany, against America for shirking its post-war responsibilities. Any suggestion of self- government, as in India, was dismissed, although, to give him his due, he warned early and often about German resurgence.

In Britain, his main gripes were spreading suburbia, neglected defences, and the rise of a pliant state-educated clerisy — “a sort of jealous eunuch” heard too often on the new BBC. Typically, he thought Britain had been wrong to scupper Roman Catholicism, a religion that had absorbed people with “that nebulous, pragmatical, drifting kind of mind” who now made up what passed as an intelligentsia. Such carping verged on the psychopathic and found physical expression in the many ailments suffered by him and his dutiful wife Carrie, whom he quoted with amused affection as “ ‘pityingly sorry’ for the male who does not understand the joy and solace of shopping”.

He regaled Elsie with reports of his forays into the aristocracy. For someone who attacked the Higher Cannibalism of biography, he could gossip with the most carnivorous about the royal family or even Charlie Chaplin. But his general tone was courteous — as much to enquiring foreign worthies as to close friends such as his American publisher Frank N Doubleday (whom he dubbed from his initials “Effendi”).

With his wide political contacts, he could tell good stories about a “richly coopered” F E Smith, or a burnt-out Bonar Law on holiday in France. (“Twenty years of political life leaves a man with fewer resources in himself than I should have conceived possible.”) Even his cousin Stanley Baldwin was dismissed as “a Socialist at heart”.

And always touches of genius could not help intruding, as when, after seeing the windows at Chartres cathedral, he informed Rider Haggard, “Colour, old man, is what, au fond, clinches a creed. Colour and the light of God behind it.”

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