The Written Word
for June 20, 1999

Rudyard Kipling, author and poet, was a fascinating man. He was the personification of Victorian Jingoism but in fact was married to an American.

I suppose Kipling is remembered best for his Jungle Stories and Mowgli, the underpinnings of the Boy Scouts movement of Baden-Powell and his jingoistic poems talking about the White Man’s Burden and crying "Lest We Forget".

There is a new biography of Kipling out called The Unforgiving Minute, A Life of Rudyard Kipling by Harry Ricketts and it’s a very good if sometimes puzzling read for those used to traditional biographies.

Kipling was born in Bombay but, along with his sister Trixie, was sent back to England to be brought up by friends and sent to school. This disengagement from his parents profoundly affected him and drew him much closer to his sister but, strangely enough, did not prevent him from sending his son Jack to boarding school when the time came.

After he had finished school Kipling went back to India where he became a journalist and very soon gained an enormous reputation which quickly gained him a huge following back home.

Kipling, in his early 20s, got the wander lust and his travels took him to the United States where he instantly fell both in love and in hate – indeed his love/hate relationship with the United States would last all his life. Interestingly the only American Kipling actually liked and admired was Teddy Roosevelt for whom Kipling was about the only Englishman he could tolerate – not surprising, I suppose, when you think of it.

After a long, unrequited love of an older and married American woman – and a mysterious sometimes lady friend Flo Garrard, he finally fell in love with and married Caroline Balestier a reasonably well off American with whom he had three children one of whom died of illness and one, his only son Jack, who was killed in his first taste of battle in the trenches in the First World War.

It’s perhaps not so strange that Kipling, the great writer of war poems, and inspiration for imperialistic Britain, never heard a shot fired in anger himself. Always bothered by bad eyesight, he joined the Punjab Volunteers at one stage but left them a few weeks later mostly because he was asked to.

Kipling will probably be remembered more for his books like The Jungle Stories and Kim than he will for his poetry which, when you look at it, is pretty much more of the same stirring stuff. In this department he is rather an extension of Sir Henry Newbolt ("Play up, play up, and play the game" …)

And of his books, it is his short stories which will surely live.

Kipling had a strong connection to this part of the world having once owned two lots in the Mount Pleasnt area. I have heard it said that he lived for a short time in Victoria and though I don’t doubt that, there is no mention of it in the book.

Kipling lived for some years in the States but finally in 1896 moved back to England for good … though he traveled back to Canada several times. He eventually settled in Bateman’s, a lovely 300 year old home in Sussex which I have visited and which is well worth seeing.

By the end of the book one is left quite unsure of Kipling’s place in the literary hierarchy. That he was enormously popular in his time and made a lot of money cannot be denied. That he was an excellent rhymer who could make cadence jump off the page at you is also clear. Moreover, his short stories make good reading today, especially to youngsters.

Whatever his place, Kipling was a fascinating man and Ricketts book, well worth buying though so far as I know it has not been published this side of the water yet.