Kipling’s complex internal life reflected itself in his work in a more subtle and allusive manner than is the case with most writers, which is presumably why he was so secretive about that life. It is that buried essence of himself that gives the answer to the question posed by Orwell at the beginning of this book: ‘why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.’225
Kipling was below average height, extremely short-sighted and prone to illness but he loved swaggering about world literature in the company of tough men. When he actually encountered a tough man on the road in the form of Beatty Balestier he was unable to cope. His reaction to genuine threat was to run away rather than confront it, or, in the case of bereavement, not to speak of it.
Kipling was a tremendously well-travelled writer, yet it seemed he was cutting out parts of his life as tragedy was associated with different countries. He never returned to India, the country that made his name, after he was told while he was there that Wolcott Balestier was dead; after his daughter died in America he was never to return there; he removed from his house any reminder of dead children or friends. He kept the South African house, the Woolsack, loaned by his dead friend Rhodes, but would not visit the country again after Jameson lost the election and the Boers were in control.
Running away from conflict or denial of painful experiences may be unattractive traits for a person to have, but they were productive for Kipling, who internalised his difficulties and turned them into literature. Thus there is always the sense of buried truth with the best Kipling, that the story is not everything but the reader is reaching in the dark to understand more.
The process started when he was six when his experience of the House of Desolation gave him an instinctive understanding that he could only escape his torment by the creation of a fantasy world within. His childhood left him bereft, with a desperate urge to please older women, who were replacements for the mother who had abandoned him, but also a hero worship of men, filling the corresponding place of the missing father.
Kipling loved men and male company though he did not engage with them sexually; in that area he was attracted to older, masculine or lesbian women. This is not suggestive of homosexuality, it rather indicates that those who divide sexual feelings into merely homo- and hetero-sexuality are using too crude a scale. Sex is more interesting and has more to offer than that. In literary terms, Kipling’s sexuality is a key to his extraordinary ability to understand the feelings of middle-aged women, a gift he displayed in characters from Mrs Hauksbee to Mary Postgate. With men he communicated, to less beneficial literary effect, by talking about technology or politics.
When he approached the inner child, however, it was as if he entered a different world. His children were often under six, the age at which he was placed in the House of Desolation; or just under puberty, the age at which he was released. They inhabit two worlds: European and Indian; human and animal; or historical and present day. Kipling’s gift dwindles as the children grow up, and he has little to say to adolescents.
Kipling gives a sense of having been set apart from society by his unique experiences, which produced an individual creed. His best characters live by a set of rules, explicitly set out in the Law of the Jungle but implicit in the behaviour of his best characters. Thus in ‘The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot’ Badalia takes money from the church to do social work, which is just but far from Christian. She accepts murderous violence from her drunken husband but would never give him away to the police any more than the Soldiers Three would report misconduct. The boys in Stalky & Co would tie up and torture another boy to ‘teach him a lesson’, but would not sneak to a master about him. Kipling may have been an authoritarian, but the authority was authority for other people. For himself, and for those he respected, the rules were personal. Authority had betrayed Kipling as a child, and he made up his own rules to live by; he was The Cat That Walked By Himself: doing deals with life on his own terms according to a personal creed.
He refused, therefore, to allow the pains of bereavement and defeat to touch him, yet the pressure of suppressed private grief released itself in his public anger at political targets. Many people mellow and are able to take a mature and longer view of the world in later life; Kipling was one of those who did not. He became narrower in his outlook, more closed and unreceptive to new influences, at a cost to his reputation. The change was not immediate, but he got harder, his opinions ossified as he aged. Of course, he was thrown off balance by his own near-death and the death of his beloved daughter, as anyone would be. What was remarkable was his reaction: hurling himself into the morally dubious Boer War and a compulsive meddling in politics, a trade for which he had neither the necessary skills nor the temperament.
To witness Kipling repeatedly returning to the political fray is to recall his lines from ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’:
. . . the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.
Kipling had no ability to compromise or willingness to withhold comment until a more propitious time; no ability to set aside grudges and see the principle beyond the man. It is almost impressive to observe a man so keen to perform in the political arena, so little blessed with any skills that would aid him, and so unable to see it.
It is unfortunate for his position that he so tarnished his reputation, for most of the values Kipling espoused were universal and could be admired in any society, such as self-denial for the common good, bravery in the face of danger, and preparedness to resist attack. They became risible when they were endlessly repeated by the insincere and hypocritical – precisely those people who Kipling satirised in the Stalky stories.
On the negative side of his views, Kipling did stand for the self-deception of empire: presenting the illusion that it was operated in the interests of subject people; the empire builders laboured to seek another’s profit, / And work another’s gain. While this was not true (for the brown man’s burden was markedly heavier than the white’s) it is the case that the British Empire was well-run and was generally benign, particularly if compared to the Belgian, German or Japanese imperial presence.
As Kipling predicted, the Empire faced its greatest challenge in the late 1930s when, incidentally, it was at its largest. The Second World War was a victory over racist authoritarians, after which democracy was successively restored in the states of western Europe, and former colonies were freed in a dismantling of foreign empires.
We are left, when most former British colonies have been independent for approaching half a century, with the fact that in terms of peace, law and order, transport, health or any other measure of a successful society, the British Empire was able to deliver while self-rule failed to do so, at least in the short term. Nor was the autocratic rule of the British replaced by resilient democracy in most places, with the honourable exception of India.
The departure from Empire was the largest largely peaceful handover of power in world history. It was not entirely without bloodshed, but when compared with France’s ill-fated attempts to hang on to Algeria and Vietnam, or Portugal’s in Mozambique and Angola, Kipling’s empire did very well in disbanding itself with a minimum of pain. The values of stoic pragmatism which had sustained empire also distinguished it in dissolution.
Kipling feared for the future of the Empire and its values. Had he a wider, deeper and longer vision he would have found more in the future to his liking. His views about such issues as women, homosexuality, ‘a strong man ruling alone’ and the position of the armed forces in society would find a better reception in African culture in the 21st century than in Britain.
Even in Europe and North America Kipling’s work has done extraordinarily well for someone who is often thought of as a Victorian writer with outmoded imperialist views. His work ranges over such a wide field, and is so complex and allusive that there is always something for a new generation to grasp. Kipling’s enduring images recur throughout literature, such as the airman dying suspended in a tree from ‘Mary Postgate’ which reappears in Golding’s 1954 classic Lord of the Flies. The Walt Disney production of The Jungle Book, made in 1967, has introduced the basic theme and characters of the work to successive generations, in one of the most successful children’s films ever made. The Jungle Book as a cartoon was of necessity changed by Disney (and it was the last film he personally oversaw) but the central metaphor of the man raised by wolves, the character of his ambiguous life and the cast of animals is so strong as to shine through this treatment.
Lindsay Anderson’s If. . . . as well as taking its title (with the addition of four dots) from Kipling, took the school study life of Stalky & Co and pushed it into an anarchic 1968. In this he replicated the way in which Kipling had remoulded the improving public school stories of Dean Farrer’s Eric or Little by Little.
A line adapted from the poem ‘The Ladies’, ‘sisters under the skin’, was adopted as a motto in the 1970s and 1980s by feminist separatists who thought, as Kipling did, that gender was more important than class or education. On a similar theme, the emotionally charged sex war of The Light that Failed has stayed in print, to be read now as a study in pathology, of the ‘old’ man rendered impotent by the New Woman, a key text in gender studies.
Kipling’s influence has been particularly widespread in former colonies. It was very noticeable while writing this book that of the librarians, journalists and others I came into contact with in London, it was black people with roots in other countries who wanted to talk about Kipling and spoke of his work with affection. For the whites he was just another Dead White European Male in the literary canon. For those who came from Commonwealth countries, Kipling was one of the few canonical writers who had something to say about what gave them the lives they have. Kipling the literary chameleon is still crossing barriers.