Completing his month-long journey at Bombay in October 1882, Kipling’s sense of the sight and smell and sound of India was revitalised, so that he began to say sentences in the vernacular whose meaning he did not know: his past had sprung up again within him, he had come home. He still had four days’ rail travel to Lahore during which, he said, his English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.26
While Kipling was at Southsea, in 1875, his father had accepted the post of head of the Mayo School of Industrial Art at Lahore and curator of the Lahore Museum, which was described as the Wonder House in Kipling’s novel Kim. The Museum stood in a broad avenue between the whitewashed walls of the European quarter and the cobbled lanes of the ancient Indian walled city of Lahore; opposite it was the Kipling family’s bungalow in a compound of its own – therefore neither in the European nor the native quarter. The military cantonment of Mian Mir stood nearby.
Kipling looked older than his years, the appearance accentuated by the whiskers he had grown since leaving school, which his mother ordered to be removed immediately. Henceforward Kipling himself did not have to shave while in India as his servant gently shaved him while he slept.
Kipling suffered the peculiar experience of meeting his mother and father as virtual strangers and he had genuine fears that he simply might not like these people whose lives he had not shared for ten years. Fortunately he found his mother delightful and his father a humorous, tolerant and expert fellow-craftsman. He had his own room, horse, cart and groom, and his own servant, handed over to him by his father’s servant, whose son he was, with the solemnity of a marriage contract.27 They delighted more in the company of each other than with strangers, and when Trix joined them, in 1884, the family was complete. She wrote that she had never laughed so much, before or since, as when she spent evenings at home with her brother and they played elaborate games. On Shakespeare evenings all talk was forbidden except quotations from Shakespeare, though Kipling was an unparalleled improviser so Trix grew to mistrust his parodies of Elizabethan jargon. She taught him to dance, which was not, she surmised, a part of the curriculum at Westward Ho!. She said, ‘He was so happy at home. He had his horse, his dog and dog-cart and the three of us loving and admiring him. I never remember him losing his temper all those years.’28
The Civil and Military Gazette, recently set up as a daily paper based in Lahore, was financed by Lockwood Kipling’s friend George Allen, who had arranged for Rudyard Kipling to be interviewed in London. Kipling’s defective eyesight left him unfit for any kind of government service, but as he had a gift for language his father thought he had better become a journalist.
He was, he found when he arrived, one of two editorial staff of the one daily paper of the Punjab – the other was the editor Stephen Wheeler – and Kipling worked for ten to 15 hours a day. A daily paper comes out every day even though fifty per cent of the staff have fever, he wrote. Through his fever and chronic dysentery he discovered that it was possible to work with a temperature of 104 degrees, even though he had to ask the office the next day who had written the article. Many of his contemporaries in the Punjab were to die, from typhoid mostly at the regulation age of twenty-two.29 When there was an outbreak of 11 cases of typhoid in their white community of 70, they felt themselves lucky to lose only four.
Kipling struggled with native compositors who knew no English and drunken proofreaders. He loathed Wheeler, whose task it was to make a reporter out of him, but acknowledged that he owed whatever he knew of accuracy and application to the older man. The editor had found his young charge (who had been foisted on him by his proprietor) excessively literary and endeavoured to beat this out of him with a gruelling routine of turning news agency telegrams into printable copy.
He covered race meetings, the opening of bridges and other big structures, floods on the railways, village festivals, cholera outbreaks and communal riots, viceregal visits, murder and divorce trials and something he described as a really filthy job: an inquiry into the percentage of lepers among the butchers who sold beef and mutton to the European community of Lahore.30 He learned how to work with the sensibilities of different communities and castes, to resist bribes and to take and give a rebuke in an Indian way which gave no offence.
His first taste of bribery came when he was called to the home of an old Afghan warrior who was in exile in Lahore for having fought against the British. As Kipling explained in a letter to his aunt, with grandiloquent compliments the Afghan appealed to the teenage sub-editor to write of the injustice of keeping him in Lahore while his wives were in Kabul: he should be allowed to return.
His story was interesting enough and could have formed the basis of a piece in the Civil and Military Gazette, but the Afghan made the mistake of handing Kipling a bundle of 16,000 rupees (about £1,300). After such an insult, Kipling could not write the requested article but he daren’t remonstrate with the man in his own house so he handed back the notes saying he was not one of the lower races, but an English sahib.
The Afghan concluded that the bribe was not appropriate, but since all sahibs valued women and horses he called for seven fine horses to be displayed, and asked Kipling to pick three. He also called for a beautiful Kashmiri girl who Kipling took the opportunity of kissing while the Afghan’s back was turned. Kipling admitted to being tempted but he eventually cursed the Afghan for attempting to blacken his name and went to leave, only to find under his horse’s saddle a bag of uncut sapphires and emeralds, which he pitched through a window. He rode back past the European settlement where people were pouring out of church, remarking to himself that he may be able to help the old boy respectably and without any considerations.31
In an event rather more telling about the reporter’s place in the scheme of things, Kipling was sent to the native state of Patialia to report on the visit there of the Viceroy, Lord Ripon. At the end of the visit Kipling was presented with a gift of fruit and nuts with a bribe of 1,000 rupees at the bottom. He immediately went to tackle the officials responsible and returned the notes to the finance minister, angry that he had been treated like a servant. Two other reporters present accepted their bribe, but they were half-castes, as Kipling said.32 He clearly had to put as much distance as he could between himself and such fellow newspaper professionals.
The other side of the work was his technical administration of composition and printing, which the teenager frequently had to take on because the editor had fever. One monsoon night he was at home at 10 pm but could not rest for wondering what was happening at the print works, so he left the house and splashed over to the press. As he had feared, mutiny was in the offing with the men saying they wouldn’t work any more and C. was tearing his hair over the advertisements. Ram Dass said he was cold and hungry and eyed the brandy bottle. Kipling encouraged the men to work all night by rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in himself. The two-colour title page was not printing on the worn-out type, requiring him to improvise a support with gum and paper; then he needed to correct the proofs of everything, even the advertisements. He then went round encouraging the workforce, telling them such work had never been done in India before and that they put the rival Calcutta printers to shame. He got to bed at 5.30 am but was still up, though late, for breakfast with his family.33
He joined the Punjab club at the age of 17 and was therefore in the company of those working in the army, railways, forestry, engineering, irrigation, medicine and the law, so he was able to absorb technical information, patterns of speech and stories about people which were to become the fabric of his Indian stories. He was also invited into the Freemasons, by a special dispensation as in 1885 he was under age at 19, but they needed a secretary and thought he would fit the bill. Here he was to meet, on an equal footing, as well as the white Christians of Empire, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, a Jew and members of the reform theistic Hindu movement the Brahmo Samaj. It was another world opening up to Kipling, and it is convincingly argued that Masonic symbols and themes occur in many of Kipling’s stories.34 The Masons also satisfied Kipling’s need for a sense of religion which was not dogmatic, and provided him with a reliable set of contacts in every country he was to visit in his many travels in the future.
He did not always swim easily in European circles. His coarse upbringing at the United Services College had given him no social graces and had led him into a habit of frequent swearing, which was tedious. His visual disability meant he had never played games to any degree, which excluded him from the company of those who thought about little else. Like many people who are emotionally insecure, he was aggressively superior, resisting contact with others before they had a chance to get close and potentially to reject him. Though moving in an adult world, he was an adolescent, unsure of his place and his powers. He was once thrown downstairs by two men at the club, irritated by an evening of his self-important persiflage.
In the night wanderings that became his habit he discovered the nightlife of India when it was too hot to sleep. He was criticised in the European community for moving among the natives, but he was protected from censure by the fact that however hard he tried to fit in with their society, he would never be one with the smart army officers and the government officials at the gymkhanas and polo matches. There was therefore no particular incentive to try, and he could follow his own path; he was the cat that walked by himself, taking the advice he would later give down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone.
He described in a letter to a friend how he had fallen in love with India, my own place where I find heat and smells and oils and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable.35 Kipling discovered an ability to immerse himself in native life, to know the ways and language of the bazaar so well that he could move in that environment naturally without troubling to translate. He later remembered, I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places – liquorshops, gambling- and opium-dens, which are not a bit mysterious, wayside entertainments such as puppet shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the sheer sake of looking. Sometimes, the Police would challenge, but I knew most of their officers, and many folk in some quarters knew me for the son of my Father, which in the East more than anywhere else is useful . . . One would come home, just as light broke, in some night-hawk of hired carriage which stank of hookah-fumes, jasmine-flowers, and sandalwood; and if the driver were moved to talk, he told one a good deal. Much of real Indian life goes on in the hot-weather nights. That is why the native staff of the offices are not much use next morning.36
In the intense heat he had six punkah wallahs working fans in relays round the clock to keep his bedroom cool. Kipling felt it was well worth petting them and remarked, They have a child’s weakness for sweets (serves ’em instead of flesh meat) and 31/2 pence give them all oceans of sticky sweet cakes.37
Kipling’s time at the United Services College gave him an easy manner with soldiers and in Lahore the military became another of the worlds in which he was able to move effortlessly. He first visited the barracks of the 2nd Battalion Fifth Fusiliers, for example, where an orderly officer friend had taken him to meet the colour sergeant and be introduced to some of the men with a view to writing about army life. Here he was able to follow the patterns of speech and mannerisms of professional soldiers. The fruits of these excursions were the 18 Soldiers Three stories about the trio of soldiers who were supposedly three friends of Kipling, but were in fact a composite of many soldiers he met.
He considered that private soldiers endured unnecessary torments on account of doctrinaire Christians who, on grounds of piety, resisted moves to have the bazaar prostitutes inspected for disease or the men taught how to avoid VD. This official virtue cost our army in India nine thousand expensive white men a year always laid up from venereal disease.38 He developed a keen sympathy for the bare horror of the private soldier’s life and became so known for his compassionate interest that as a young man he was invited by the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, well known for his sympathy for the common soldier, to give his feelings about the men’s opinions of their accommodation.
He came to know the rites and celebrations of the army, often dining with subalterns at meals beginning with 30 grains of quinine in the sherry to ward off malaria. An early biographer, Lord Birkenhead, remarked that it was at this time that Kipling ‘conceived his lifelong devotion to the army, and his intense veneration of the man of action to the detriment of the thinker and intellectual.’39 Kipling certainly idolised the soldiers in whose mess he often ate; and there is a certain amount of self-loathing in his devotion to a calling from which he is excluded by his physical defect of poor eyesight. Much of the brutality of his work seems to relate back to Kipling’s willingness to suppress his finer feelings in order to sit at the tables of the beefy giants able and willing to die for the Empire.
Beginning to Sing
Soon after Kipling returned to India he found his mother had collected and had printed a collection of his verse under the title Schoolboy Lyrics. Kipling flew into a rage and sulked for two days and none of the verses were reprinted in standard editions of his verse, which gives an indication of how he felt about his juvenilia.
He was busy assimilating experience and establishing himself in his profession as a journalist, but always with an eye to creative writing. He described for his Aunt Edith, the youngest of the Macdonald sisters and the only one unmarried, the life of the reporter who never ceased from writing, for the ‘par-boiled’ young man would recover the soul of a poet at the end of the day when the telephone stopped ringing.
He composed stories and poems for the Gazette, which were rarely subject to profound critical attention in the office. Rukn-Din, the foreman of the print works, was a Muslim of culture and responded positively to Kipling’s work: ‘Your potery is very good sir; just coming proper length today. You giving more soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page.’40 The ease with which he found a niche for his light verse was, of course, a result of the frequency with which such verse from a variety of sources appeared in newspapers; Kipling was just the best of the versifiers, always able to beat out some stanzas. What set him apart was not merely his ability to produce topical rhymes (many verse and song writers are so technically accomplished) but his refusal to be satisfied with this alone and determination to improve his work and produce real poetry. Some of his light verse was later published as Echoes, a collection of 39 parodies by Kipling and Trix, most of them written by him but all composed under the incisive criticism of Alice Kipling.
His early work owed much to his family for maintaining an environment in which creativity could flourish. Some of his work was owed to them in a more literal sense. He acknowledged that one of his most quoted lines, What do they know of England who only England know? was taken from his mother and Trix remarked that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet should also be attributed to Alice Kipling. His use of his family’s words was quite open according to Trix; he would call out O! good, bags I when he was taken with a particular phrase which he wished to use. Kipling was a ‘persistent pen-biter’ according to his sister, in every room in their house was a writing table and every table had a tray of pens, each one ‘bitten into a faggot at the end.’41
The newspaper’s management allowed Kipling to write for publications whose circulation did not compete with that of the Civil and Military Gazette and thereby both earned some extra cash and spread his name further around the sub-continent. He wrote ephemeral verse for a variety of Indian newspapers, often under pseudonyms, more than 20 of which have been identified. One paper, the Allahabad Pioneer, offered to take anything he cared to send them.
In his second year of adult work, the 18-year-old Kipling sent his regards to his cousin Stanley Baldwin and remarked wistfully, I’d give something to be in the Sixth at Harrow as he is, with a University Education to follow.42 His exclusion from academic education continued to rankle; it was tactless of an incompetent Indian clerk who handled the Gazette’s accounts to remind Kipling that he had been to university. The perennially sensitive Kipling took him to task and later fumed in a letter, Knows fractions and decimals – can’t keep the register of two hundred orders correctly or neatly – Remembers The Deserted Village and mislays an account book.43 These educated Indians, often Bengalis, were known as Babus and their supposed failings an object of ridicule among the Europeans, which attitude helped propel them towards the Indian Nationalist movement. Kipling had no time for the emerging political class who could impress English liberals with their knowledge of English language and culture, but were unwilling to tackle issues in their own society such as child marriage and bad drains. Kipling’s superiority was precarious, however; he was not on the lowest rung of Anglo-Indian life, but he was not far up the ladder. He would have to be more than a reporter for a local newspaper writing topical verse to gain the fame he craved.
One night in September 1884 when cholera was rife in Lahore, Kipling was alone in the house and he woke with agonising pains in his stomach and aching limbs. He found himself Threshing round in a pitch dark empty house and calling for servants who won’t hear and hunting for medicines one can’t find. Eventually he found his manservant, who lit a lamp, took one look at him and bolted out of the house. Kipling thought this must be the end, his servant had run away for fear of the cholera, and he poured himself a dose of chlorodyne and sat to await the progress of the sickness and to pray for morning. Very soon his servant reappeared carrying a lamp, a bottle and an opium pipe and set to work rolling opium pills to put in the pipe. He insisted Kipling smoke as much as he could, and he soon felt the cramps in his legs dying and his stomach more settled, followed by the blissful oblivion of opium. The next day, though clearly intoxicated with opium, he was fit to get up and go to work. My man is awfully pleased with himself and walks round me as though I was a rare and curious animal, occasionally putting his hand on my shoulder, Kipling wrote, he certainly cut short a spell of the acutest pain I have ever experienced in my life and no woman could have tended me more carefully than he through those terrible hours between eleven and two.44
The experience gave him the personal knowledge necessary to write his first published story, ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’, printed in the Civil and Military Gazette in September 1884. It is the rambling, stream-of-consciousness monologue of an Anglo-Indian opium addict. Deeply evocative of degradation and listlessness, its depiction of the other characters in the opium den and understanding of the narrator’s mind show how Kipling’s appreciation of character was deepening.
Stimulated by his limited literary success, Kipling now attempted a more ambitious project, a novel intended to lay bare the seedy underworld of Anglo-Indian life. By 30 July 1885 he had 237 foolscap pages written of Mother Maturin, the story of an old Irish woman who kept an opium den in Lahore. At one time he was thinking of having it published in weekly parts in an Indian newspaper, but it was an immense, bulky work, which seemed to have all the faults of a first novel, including a tendency to remain unfinished despite the proud author having advertised it widely among his friends. Parts of it, describing the hot, dark alleys and multifarious activities of the Indian underworld were used in Kim but Kipling’s skill in prose work was never to be as a novelist; his short stories were his great achievement.
His next two stories were published in Quartette, a Christmas 1885 supplement to the Gazette by ‘Four Anglo- Indian Writers’. The title was a reference to what his mother called The Family Square, wittily uniting a pun on ‘family circle’ with the fact that there were four of them and the notion of a British Square – the supposedly impregnable battle formation of the army. Quartette contained the first two stories by Kipling that he later thought, after revision, worth republishing: ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ and ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, both in a style that could be called Indian Gothic, a disturbing world much influenced by Edgar Allen Poe where reality and the paranormal meet.
The tales are full of feverish nights on the hot plains, in characterisation the straightforward and honest Englishmen confronted by the mystery and deviousness of the East. Kipling uses such expressions as there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death and Morality is blunted by consorting with the Dead who are alive.
‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ was a ghost story, and not a particularly sophisticated one, about a man haunted by a woman he had used and who had died of a broken heart; the other story was a far deeper tale of an Englishman in a fever who rode at night and fell into a pit with sloping sides. In the pit are those hastily taken to the cremation sites at a time of cholera but who then recovered, and were therefore unclean. Jukes is met by an insolent Indian he had known and beaten previously, who now declares that they will live together in a ‘republic’, for all are equal in the place of the undead.
At the same time that Kipling was making his first excursions into prose, the family’s social standing began to improve. The Earl of Dufferin’s appointment as Viceroy in 1884 meant power was in the hands of a more refined and cultured individual than previously and the Kiplings consequently flourished. The Viceroy’s daughter, Lady Helen, attended Lockwood’s sketching class; the Viceroy enjoyed conversation with Lockwood and was enchanted by Alice Kipling. He paid her the charming compliment of saying ‘dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room.’45 Trix nearly carried off the supreme prize when she became close to the Viceroy’s son Lord Clandeboye, but his family spotted the danger signs of romance and sent him away. The good relations between the families remained, however, and those who had passed over Kipling and his family with a superior air fumed to see the social progress they had made. By 1885 the Kiplings were welcome at Simla, the hill station whence the viceregal court moved in the hottest months, making the perch in the mountains into a seat of government.
Another change hastened Kipling’s development as a writer: his editor Stephen Wheeler returned to England in 1886, sick of the heat and fevers, and he was replaced by a young man called Kay Robinson, brought in to liven up the dull paper. Robinson had corresponded with Kipling over the newspaper verses they both wrote but his first impression of the writer was disappointing: ‘early in 1886 his face had not acquired the character of manhood, and contrasted somewhat unpleasantly with his stoop . . . his heavy eyebrows, his spectacles, and his sallow Anglo-Indian complexion; while his jerky speech and abrupt movements added to the unfavourable impression. But his conversation was brilliant . . .’ Robinson quickly became not only a colleague but a friend, an important consideration when Kipling was often lonely. In an affectionate portrait of Kipling’s working methods he described the young man often taking off his spectacles to wipe them with a handkerchief because he was laughing so much as to cry and mist them up. ‘In the heat of summer white cotton trousers and thin vest constituted his office attire, and by the day’s end he was spotted all over like a Dalmation dog. He had a habit of dipping his pen frequently and deep into the ink-pot, and as all his movements were abrupt, almost jerky, the ink used to fly. When he darted into my room, as he used to do about one thing or another in connection with the contents of the paper a dozen times in the morning, I had to shout to him to “stand off”; otherwise, as I knew by experience, the abrupt halt he would make, and the flourish with which he placed the proof in his hand before me, would send the penful of ink . . . flying over me.’46
Kipling’s first mature book of verse, Departmental Ditties, contained pieces on Anglo-Indian life, some of which had appeared in newspapers under the title ‘Bungalow Ballads’. The first edition was published in 1886 with the cover looking like a brown official envelope, tied up with ‘red tape’ and addressed to Heads of Department and Anglo-Indians from Rudyard Kipling, Assistant, Department of Public Journalism, Lahore District. He boasted that among a pile of papers [it] would have deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service. On the business side he said: The money came in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, my left-hand pocket, direct to the author, my right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements.47
Kay Robinson took eight volumes to England on leave and sent them to various newspapers. It may have been one of these that received a review in Longman’s Magazine where the ‘melancholy ditties’ were praised though the reviewer took no pleasure in the fact that Her Majesty’s raj was depicted as being administered by men who were preoccupied with jobs, posts, pensions and the attractions of their neighbour’s wives. Kipling can hardly be counted as among the ranks of the revolutionaries, but it is noteworthy that his satires were sharp and genuinely subversive in an autocracy where no official opposition to British administration existed. Kipling’s verse told such cases as the man sent off to do two men’s work in the heat so his superior could have easy access to his wife; or the ignorant colonel appointed to run the railways over the vastly superior but lower-class candidate.
As a result of the publication of Departmental Ditties, Kipling, still only 20, became a celebrity, an experience he at first found exciting. Strangers in trains, and hotels and all manner of out of the way places come up to me and say nice things.48 Not only was Robinson much more to Kipling’s liking than his predecessor, but part of the enlivening process was commissioning daily 2,000 word pieces for the middle of the paper, many of which were written by Kipling. The first of these were published under the title Plain Tales from the Hills on 2 November 1886 and Kipling was to write and have published 21 stories in the series between then and 10 June 1887, a rate of one a week.
They comprised Indian stories of natives and native life; army stories; and Simla stories featuring Mrs Hauksbee, the shrewd, knowing older woman beloved of Kipling. She was clever, witty, brilliant and sparkling beyond most of her kind; but possessed of many devils of malice and mischievousness, which could be a description of Alice Kipling.49 While it is refreshing to see an older woman enshrined in fiction, Mrs Hauksbee’s celebrated guile is used to secure advancement for second-rate men who flatter her, or obtain the attentions of a young man at a ball. An even more cloying portrait of an older woman was given in the story of ‘Venus Annodomini’, who exists only to enjoy the adoration of younger men. The very slight story is that one admirer young enough to be her son is nonplussed to find when his father visits that he had adored the same woman 20 years previously.
All Kipling’s close female relationships, with the obvious exception of that with Trix, were with older women. He delighted in the unobtainable, writing that he sought a lady well versed in domestic knowledge, not less than twelve years my senior, and by preference, some other man’s wife.50 What moved him to this adoration of older women is a matter of conjecture but it is reasonable to suggest that it related back to his longing for a mother figure while a child in the House of Desolation.
One of the principal models for the witty and alluring Mrs Hauksbee was Isabella Burton, wife of an intelligence officer, a lively intelligent woman who was able to talk philosophy and literature with Kipling. She also encouraged him to see in the Indian scene not just events and personal interactions, but the motives behind them: for social advancement, promotion or sexual opportunity.
Kipling wrote to Mrs Burton asking if he could dedicate the collection Plain Tales from the Hills to her; the intended dedication To the wittiest woman in India I dedicate this book would obviously lead to her and it was courteous to ask. He is also, however, said by Trix to have told their mother she was the dedicatee: it is most likely that both are true and he paid the compliment to both women in the hope they would not meet and confer.
He had no difficulty in finding a publisher for Plain Tales – he actually had a choice of publisher. The book contained 40 stories, the 29 which had been published under the Plain Tales title in the Civil and Military Gazette; three which had appeared in the newspaper before the Plain Tales series started; and eight new stories. It is one of those books that is more than the sum of its parts: some of the individual stories are not strong, but together they add up to a comprehensive picture of Anglo-India. The publication of Plain Tales as a book was to cement Kipling’s reputation in India and its later publication in London was to create one there. Oscar Wilde, reviewing it in The Nineteenth Century in the third quarter of 1890 wrote, ‘As one turns over the pages of Plain Tales from the Hills one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the storyteller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature Mr Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than anyone has ever known it . . . He is our first authority on the second-rate.’
Physically, by the age of 20 Kipling was a slight man of five and a half feet and just under eight and a half stone. His relentless energy and jerky mannerisms made his appearance a contrast to the urbane narrator of Plain Tales from the Hills, who often appears as a character to comfort a jilted woman or enjoy the confidences of a colonel.
As various descriptions of him as ‘caddish’ demonstrate, he was still a callow youth with much to learn of social grace, humility and tact. He was never backward in asserting his views, often in the company of others who knew the world rather better than he did. He took a lively interest in European girls, dancing with them and sometimes even sending them verses, but kept the image of Flo Garrard before him. I flirted with the bottled up energy of a year on my lips, he wrote to aunt Edith about a visit to the social scene at Simla. Don’t be horrified for there were about half a dozen of ’em and I took back the lacerated fragments of my heart . . . and returned the whole intact, to Flo Garrard’s keeping as per usual.51
It was a miserably one-sided relationship, the correspondence of which he later described in the form of a lament about a probably imaginary girl he called ‘My Lady’ but who is recognisably Flo: I don’t wait for her letters, he wrote, I get one, and go on till I get the next, my nose to the grindstone for fear of thinking. When a horrible Sunday comes and I am thrown back upon myself, I know how long I have waited and then I get all the arrears of suspense in one gloomy lump. I have written and told her that, save and except her letters, I have nothing, – absolutely nothing, and that is a fact. The fictional ‘Lady’ was not generous with her correspondence: My Lady does not favour me with any lengthy outpourings. She doesn’t gush and I try in my letters to her to keep myself within that decent insular reserve that is the hereditary mask of the Englishman.52 The very indifference of a woman is therefore taken as a spur to greater devotion rather than a signal that he should look elsewhere.
In a story, ‘On the Strength of a Likeness’ he pondered the uses of unrequited love for a young man: It makes him feel important and business-like, and blasé and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very happy in a tender, twilight fashion. One of Kipling’s adored older women was Mrs Maunsell, wife of a colonel, to whom the writer was attracted only because she bore a resemblance to Flo, a shallow relationship he drew on for this story. As a true professional he was always spinning his experiences into gold.
In July 1884 Flo wrote to put an end to what he considered their engagement, or to terminate a tiresome correspondence. Quite why she chose this time is not obvious, it could have been linked with the death of her grandfather, giving her a generous inheritance, but Flo was not the sort to base her actions on money; she had never cared much for material things. It was unlikely that Kipling was rejected because he was a poor prospect financially; it is more probable that the maturing Flo was examining her own personality and deciding that Kipling was not for her.
Kipling and Flo were almost comically mismatched. Trix reported that Flo hardly read a thing; Kipling’s sister was disappointed to find that her friend was unable to write a letter at anything above a childish level. Kipling might be one of the finest writers of his generation but it was to no avail if the object of his desires had no respect for the written word. It may have been, also, that Flo was never going to marry any man, perhaps because she was wedded to her art, or perhaps because that was not her inclination.
Now, approaching 20, he had to face the future without the wife back home. He explored his options in fiction, in particular in a bitter story, ‘In the Pride of His Youth’, where a man leaves his young wife and baby to go to work in India where he struggles to make do, sending much of his meagre salary back home, until the baby dies and the wife goes off with another man. By this time the husband’s diligence is rewarded and he is offered a promotion with sufficient remuneration to bring wife and child to India, if he still had them. Now, however, he feels he has missed the pleasure of youth and would go to the Devil.
Kipling was unable to make a clean break from Flo. Later that year he was pathetically writing to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones to ask her to enquire about Flo at the Slade School of Art. I want to know how she is and what she is doing. So far as I know youre [sic] the only person who’s likely to be able to find this out for me, and if possible I want you as quietly and unobtrusively as possible to learn all you can about the girl.53 The wound inflicted by his love for Flo would not heal, and he would return to it, both in fiction and in ill-advised attempts to see her. Two years later he was still counting time from the point when Flo gave him his ‘jawab’ (dismissal) and the bottom had tumbled out of the Great Universe.54
India offered sexual outlets, as Kipling knew well from his meanderings in the City of Night, as he called the walled city of Lahore, after James Thomson’s poem. One cryptic account of such an event was described in a diary he kept in 1885. He was in Simla in August, a sojourn that was part holiday though he was also writing sketches of expatriate life in the hills. At one time he had a room next to a couple called Hayes whose noisy sex life troubled him. Wish they wouldn’t put married couple next door to me with one half plank between, he wrote, Saps one’s morality and the following day added, Same complaint. This is really ghastly. For the next few days, August 4–5, the diary suggests a visit to a prostitute and fears for the consequences: My own affair entirely. A wet day but deuced satisfactory . . . Begin to think I’ve been a fool but aint certain. Back in Lahore he sought the opinion of Templeton Young, a doctor of his acquaintance. He is sanguine and hopeful. I also. More anticipation. He wrote on 26 August, when he was doubtless told that if he had no symptoms after three weeks the likelihood of his having either major venereal disease was much reduced. The following day he wrote, First period probation over. Mind easier. Now to look about me. This last reference relates to ‘looking about’ for a wife.55