Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life

234 Pages·2003·0.951 MB·English

by  Phillip Mallett (auth.)

Literary Lives
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English, Lancaster
University
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired
and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of the
writers’ working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to
trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their
writing.
Published titles include:
Clinton Machann Harold Pagliaro
MATTHEW ARNOLD HENRY FIELDING
Jan Fergus Andrew Hook
JANE AUSTEN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham Mary Lago
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË E. M. FORSTER
Sarah Wood Shirley Foster
ROBERT BROWNING ELIZABETH GASKELL
Janice Farrar Thaddeus James Gibson
FRANCES BURNEY THOMAS HARDY
Caroline Franklin Gerald Roberts
BYRON GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Nancy A. Walker Kenneth Graham
KATE CHOPIN HENRY JAMES
Roger Sales W. David Kaye
JOHN CLARE BEN JONSON
Cedric Watts Phillip Mallett
JOSEPH CONRAD RUDYARD KIPLING
Grahame Smith John Worthen
CHARLES DICKENS D. H. LAWRENCE
George Parfitt Angela Smith
JOHN DONNE KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Paul Hammond Lisa Hopkins
JOHN DRYDEN CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Kerry McSweeney Cedric C. Brown
GEORGE ELIOT JOHN MILTON
Tony Sharpe Peter Davison
T. S. ELIOT GEORGE ORWELL
Linda Wagner-Martin Joseph McMinn
SYLVIA PLATH JONATHAN SWIFT
Felicity Rosslyn Leonée Ormond
ALEXANDER POPE ALFRED TENNYSON
Richard Dutton Peter Shillingsburg
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
John Williams David Wykes
MARY SHELLEY EVELYN WAUGH
Michael O’Neill John Mepham
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Gary Waller John Williams
EDMUND SPENSER WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Tony Sharpe Alasdair D. F. Macrae
WALLACE STEVENS W. B. YEATS
Literary Lives
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Rudyard Kipling
A Literary Life
Phillip Mallett
© Phillip Mallett 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-230-55720-4
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Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data
Mallett,Phillip,1946–
Rudyard Kipling :a literary life / Phillip Mallett.
p.cm.— (Literary lives)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1.Kipling,Rudyard,1865–1936.2.Kipling,Rudyard,1865–1936–
–Political and social views.3.Authors,English—19th century—Biography.
4.Authors,English—20th century—Biography.5.Journalists—Great
Britain—Biography.6.British—India—History.I.Title.II.Literary lives
(Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))
PR4856.M24 2003
828’.809—dc21
[B]
2003048286
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
In Memoriam
John and Ellen Burrage

Contents
Preface ix
1 Childhood and Youth 1
2 Seven Years’ Hard: Kipling in India 17
3 The Conquest of London 45
4 Citizens of America 72
5 The Song of the English 90
6 Kim 116
7 In a Hidden Kingdom 123
8 Towards Armageddon 142
9 The Great War and After 161
10 The Last Decade 182
Notes 201
Bibliography 214
Index 216
vii

Preface
The narrator of Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, seeking to write a biography
of his parents-in-law, reflects that ‘Turning-points are the inventions of
story-tellers and dramatists, a necessary invention when life is reduced
to, traduced by, a plot.’ This biography is intended, like Kipling’s auto-
biographicalSomething of Myself, to look at the life of Rudyard Kipling
‘from the point of view of his work’. I have wanted to attend to the
forces, in particular the places and persons, which shaped his writing,
to his dealings with the literary world which he took by storm in
1889–90, but in which he was always an awkward and troubling pres-
ence, and to his increasing involvement with politics after he returned
to England from America in 1896. My first concern has been with
Kipling’s public rather than his private life. But I have, necessarily,
described turning-points, drawn connections, made inferences, while
being mindful of the obvious truth that even for the best-documented
lives the evidence is partial: even for one’s own.
InSomething of MyselfKipling gives one sentence to his marriage: ‘and
then to London to be married in January ’92 in the thick of an
influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses
and the dead had to be content with brown ones’. His biographers how-
ever are bound to say more, and I have done so. Victorian critics of the
novel liked to speak of its power to tell the truth. But rather than truth,
what the novels declare is a community in the process of creating and
sharing the values by which it lived: deciding who was good, and who
bad, but also how and why characters lived and moved and had their
being. The biographers’ truth is of a similar kind; a biography is true if
the story it tells is informed by the values of the community to which
the reader belongs, and by its beliefs about how men and women live
their lives – about, for example, the reasons which might lead a young
author to marry a woman others found difficult, or charmless. In recent
years biography seems to have usurped the role of the nineteenth-
century three-decker, as, increasingly, it has come to match it in length.
Both (it might be argued) deploy a notion of ‘character’ which hardly
exists in the postmodern novel; both offer a shared understanding of a
text which re-presents the world, and in doing so confirms the truth of
the text and the reader’s existence as an autonomous and knowing sub-
ject. To some readers what follows will no doubt seem ideologically
ix