1865–1936
“Kipling toward the end,” wrote Guy Davenport, “managed to write stories with complex layers of meaning, as rich as Shakespeare’s.” This claim might be extravagant, but Kipling’s reputation has evolved curiously through the three quarters of a century since the Nobel laureate’s death. It reached its nadir during World War II, when George Orwell denounced Kipling as a prophet of relentless expansionism, a man who thought of the British Empire as “a sort of forcible evangelizing,” when in fact, Orwell maintained, it was and had always been “primarily a money-making concern.” Eton alumnus Orwell dismissed Kipling as “vulgar,” mocked his attention to vernacular speech as a condescending failed comedy, and contrarily declared soldier poems such as the 1892 collection Barrack-Room Ballads “his best and most representative work.” But then Orwell even complained that Kipling exaggerated the horrors of the wars he had seen, which surely could not compare with the wars of Orwell’s own benighted era.
Kipling’s reputation rebounded from Orwell’s attack. Nowadays literary critics lavish praise on many of his works, especially the 1901 novel Kim. It demonstrates not only Kipling’s verve and style as a writer, but also his photographic observation of a setting and his broad compassion for a variety of human beings. In a 2006 Guardian interview, Salman Rushdie admitted that he has “many of the difficulties with Kipling that a lot of people from India have, but every true Indian reader knows that no non-Indian writer understood India as well as Kipling . . . If you want to look at the India of Kipling’s time, there is no writer who will give it to you better.”
In 1836 Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born to English parents in Mumbai (then still called Bombay by Westerners), and after several unhappy years in England he returned in his late teens to the land of his birth. There he began working hard as a journalist and literary balladeer and by the age of twenty had published his first collection of poems, Departmental Ditties. Kipling’s books are wildly varied, from the boarding school antics of M’Turk and the titular antihero against the brutal masters in Stalky & Co. to the playful history-minded fancy of Puck of Pook’s Hill. Nowadays he is best known for The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, and Just-So Stories, his inspired volumes of talking-animal stories written mostly during the last few years of the nineteenth century, and for his grand stories of the supernatural. “His tales of the fantastic are chilling, or illuminating or remarkable or sad,” remarked Neil Gaiman, “because his people breathe and dream.”
So do his settings. In an insightful critique of Kipling, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell remarked, “Knowing what the peoples, animals, plants, weathers of the world look like, sound like, smell like, was Kipling’s metier, and so was knowing the words that could make someone else know. You can argue about the judgment he makes of something, but the thing is there.” As Jarrell points out, the man who began as a journeyman journalist, author of Plain Tales from the Hills, continued to mature as a bold and elegant writer for a half century.
Kipling wrote many fine and original stories about the supernatural, ranging from the ancient gods of “The Mark of the Beast” to the modern gods of “Wireless.” Many are set in India, including his best-known ghost story, “The Phantom Rickshaw.” His poignant ghost story “They,” however, is set in England. A few months after it was published in the August 1904 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, it appeared in Kipling’s collection Traffics and Discoveries, where he placed immediately before it his poem “The Return of the Children,” in which the Virgin Mary opens the doors of heaven to permit children to return to the world they miss. It’s worth mentioning that the verse the blind woman sings in “They” is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from “The Lost Bower,” a poem about childhood filled with the spirits of lost heroes. In 1899, five years before he published “They,” both Kipling and his seven-year-old daughter Josephine developed pneumonia. Surely Kipling felt guilt as well as sadness when he survived but Josephine did not.