Rudyard Kipling His Life and Work

If you ask me to recommend as close to perfect a literary biography as I know, I would name RUDYARD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND WORK (1955) by Charles Edmund Carrington (1897-1990). In 1929 Carrington earned a modest literary fame with A SUBALTERN'S WAR, his recollections of his military service from age 17 in World War One. Later he wrote of Gibraltar, Lawrence of Arabia and other historical topics. He was authorized by Kipling's only surviving child Elsie Kipling (Mrs George Bambridge) to write RUDYARD KIPLING. Carrington quotes at length from the diary of Rudyard's wife Caroline (Carrie) Balestier Kipling, an invaluable document that the family later caused to be destroyed! Elsie contributed the Epilogue to this biography. *** Want my advice on a good way to bury yourself in Rudyard Kipling for three weeks on a desert island? Bring three or four Kipling novels (each a critical edition with good notes): KIM, STALKY & CO. and THE JUNGLE BOOKS (Two in one volume), plus Random House's fat RUDYARD KIPLING COMPLETE VERSE -- DEFINITIVE EDITION, also Everyman's Library's RUDYARD KIPLING COLLECTED STORIES with an Introduction by Robert Gottlieb and, finally, two biographies: Kingsley Amis's RUDYARD KIPLING (mainly for its fabulous collection of drawings, cartoons and photos) and Carrington's RUDYARD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND WORK. First, race through Amis's bio once over lightly. Next read slowly and meditatively Carrington's RUDYARD KIPLING. When you reach his coverage of individual works, e.g. STALKY & CO. or poems such as "Danny Deever" and "If" or short stories like "The Man Who Would Be King," set Carrington aside for long enough to read and savor the Kipling work in question in the two collections mentioned above. Then return to where you had bookmarked Carrington and resume reading Kipling biography. That method has much to commend it. It constitutes nearly a quarter of the way I have prepared myself to teach in October 2012 an adult education course on "Young Rudyard Kipling." *** Kipling's admiring parents in faraway Lahore, Punjab, India, without their son's knowledge, published his first book of poems in 1881 when "Ruddy" was only 15 years old. Before he was 25 years old Kipling took London by storm. A very few critics had managed to lay hands on and read scarce copies of his poems and short stories written and published in India during his seven years there as a journalist, beginning at age 16, in Muslim/Sikh Lahore and later in Hindu Allahabad. A couple of reviewers had even seen his travel letters written back to Allahabad as Ruddy came from India to England via China and Japan and then across North America (where in 1889 he interviewed his hero Mark Twain.) But he became all England's man of the hour in December of that same year when Macmillan's published (under the pseudonym of "Yussuf") Kipling's "Ballad of East and West. Suddenly young Rudyard was in "the first rank of contemporary writers." "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet..." was on thousands of English-speaking lips. As a London writer, 1890 was Kipling's "annus mirabilis", with dozens of reprinted poems and stories, many fresh ones pouring out in magazines and book form. His was the sudden fame that had been Lord Byron's when Childe Harold burst upon the scene in 1812 and quickly drove Sir Walter Scott to give up poetry for WAVERLEY and novel-writing. In France Rudyard Kipling reminded of Guy de Maupassant. *** Charles Carrington dwells at leisure on Kipling's early and middle years, beginning with birth in Bombay, India in December 1865. In his own savoring later memory young "Ruddy Sahib" was deliriously spoiled and happy there for five years. Then came six years of misery in a seaside English boarding house with two years younger sister Trix. Next, after daily mistreatment and descent into near blindness and a dramatic rescue by his mother, he had four wonderful, creative years in an innovative, affordable all male public school on the north Devon coastline -- remembered mischievously and fondly in STALKY & CO. -- a school created by India-serving Generals and officers for the sons of cash-strapped armed forces and civilian officers in India. Then came India's seven years as assistant editor in succession of two anglo-Indian journals. Next the trip via China and Japan across America to London. Marriage followed in 1892 to his American best friend's younger sister Caroline "Carrie" Balestier. We soon find the young Kiplings settling down for four years in Vermont where Rudyard wrote THE JUNGLE BOOKS. And on and on we read of many an English winter spent by the growing, prospering Kipling family in or near Captetown South Africa, through the loss of two of his three children, into and beyond the First World War, and of his final dark but hugely creative literary outburst in the illness-driven final twenty years of his life. Curiously, biographer Carrington devotes only a couple of paragraphs to Kipling's 1907 Nobel Prize. He was the first Englishman to receive that great literary award and to this day remains its youngest recipient. He was 41. *** Carrington's gift is to weave a seamless garment made up of Kipling's life and writings. Rudyard Kipling was not only an imaginative fabulist but also a pioneer of science fiction, displaying from youth an inordinate curiosity about all things mechanical and technical. He could fantasize about talking animals, talking steamships and thinking American locomotives and envision a future world of the years 2000 and 2020 united by technocrats managing a worldwide air transport network. *** Kipling was the poet of the common man. He wrote more often than the elite cared for in dialect. He echoed conversations heard in barrack rooms of India. You can see this in SOLDIERS THREE and MULVANEY STORIES. He made the world of both New England cod fishermen and transcontinental railroading come alive in CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. In THE NAULAHKA he brought a starry eyed Coloradan medical missionary girl to ancient, corrupt Rajputana north of Bombay. And throughout his llfe Kipling's sympathies were with working underappreciated men and women, not with the dreamers and the rich they supported. Read his 1907 poem, "The Sons of Martha." "Her sons must wait upon Mary's sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest." And what of the sons of Mary? "They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and -- the Lord He lays it on Martha's Sons" Kipling's philosophy of life: find your duty, be loyal to it, work hard and with pride at its way of being useful to your fellow men and women. *** Carrington roots each written work of Kipling's that he studies in Kipling's life, past or present, in his memories and in his day to day imaginings. From Kipling's wife, daughter and other relatives we learn that Rudyard first caught an idea for a poem, then paced up and down sometimes for uninterrupted hours humming hymns or dance hall tunes till he found the rhythm that he wanted (and his rhythms were vast in range, often very unconventional) and then the poem virtually wrote itself. The book's notes and index are first-class. Try RUDYARD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND WORK. You will not be disappointed, unless you want nothing to do with the author of "The White Man's Burden."-OOO-