It does not much matter what people think of a man after his death, wrote Kipling near the end of his life, with a scornful eye on future biographers.1
With a view to frustrating biography, he set about the destruction of many of his own papers, and those of his parents, and wrote an autobiography almost comically deficient in its description of his life events.
He knew his life would attract interest. He was the most famous English writer in the days when Britain ruled the largest empire ever known; he was the first writer of English to win the Nobel Prize.
His work was richly biographical: Kipling was cruelly abandoned and abused as a child, but was to create some of the most enduring children’s characters ever written in Mowgli and Kim.
He took inspiration for his children’s tales from his own children but, to his despair, two were to die young. Family quarrels and the mental illness of those around him cursed his middle years; and in old age simplistic political views, crudely expressed, diminished his reputation.
He has been castigated as a misogynist, though few writers of either sex have written so warmly about middle-aged women. Similarly, he can be criticised for his racial views, but no other artist wrote with such intimacy of native life. He was physically unfit for military service but his identification with soldiers was so deep that real soldiers started acting like the characters in his stories.
Kipling was in London in the spectacular 1890s, placing him in the spectrum of literary ‘decadents’ and ‘hearties’, when it was by no means obvious in which group he fitted. The contradictions in his character are revealed in his biographical novel The Light that Failed, which gives an insight into the challenge of the New Woman to society, the paralysing confusion which struck men when presented by a woman who, like the woman Kipling himself loved, had her own goals in life, her own work and her own sexual self-sufficiency.
Kipling was the first world writer, making his home in four continents. While he is thought of as quintessentially Indian, he in fact spent only 12 of his 70 years in India, visiting the country for the last time at the age of 25. He married an American and spent the first four years of his married life in the United States. He kept a home in South Africa for 35 years, to the end of his life. America supplied his wife, the formidable Carrie; and Africa a father-figure for his mature years in the form of Cecil Rhodes. He had a close relationship to France all his life, which was reciprocated in the acclaim he received there.
Kipling’s work is now so well known that many people who have never read any Kipling think they have. He added more phrases to the language than any writer except Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible.
Unlike his contemporaries in London – Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde or Bram Stoker, who created one enduring character each – Kipling created a cast of characters who live independently of the stories, such as Mowgli, Mrs Hauksbee, Kim and Mulvaney. The only recent writer he resembles in this is Dickens, another immensely prolific writer and also a journalist as well as a fiction writer. In verse, Kipling is a true successor to Browning, Swinburne and Tennyson, whose clear influences he shows. His poem ‘If’ is still among the best known in the English language.
Despite his many achievements, Kipling was always a subject of controversy: at first he was adored by reviewers; after 1891 he was attacked by the critics yet adored by the public; as the 20th century wore on he fell from favour with the public but increasingly began to enjoy the grudging respect of critics. Regardless of the criticism, this multi-faceted man will not go away: his work stays in print and new generations around the world read him. As George Orwell said, ‘During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there’.2 He wrote thus in 1942, a truth which is undiminished by the passing years.