Rudyard Kipling

Bombay, Southsea, and the newspapers of British India

He was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture who later became a provincial art director and museum curator in India, and Alice Macdonald, one of four sisters who married remarkable men — one of Rudyard's uncles by marriage was the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and one of his cousins, Stanley Baldwin, became prime minister. At five he and his sister were sent back to England and boarded with a foster family in Southsea, on the south coast, where he was miserable for years; he went on to the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, a school for the sons of army officers, and turned it into the schoolboy stories of Stalky & Co.

In 1882, aged sixteen, he went back to India to work on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and then the Pioneer in Allahabad. Journalism was the apprenticeship: he filled the columns with poems and short stories written around his reporting, and when they were collected into cheap paper-covered volumes for the Indian railway bookstalls they made him famous before he had properly left the country. He returned to England in 1889 by the long way round — Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, then across the United States — and arrived to instant success with the soldiers' poems of Barrack-Room Ballads.

On the American leg of that journey he made a detour of his own: he hunted Mark Twain down at Elmira in upstate New York, was misdirected by half the town, finally reached the ivy-covered house on East Hill and talked to him for two hours over two cigars. The write-up he sent the papers begins by telling his readers in India that they are all a contemptible lot, because they have not met Mark Twain and he has.

A boy loose in the Exposition Universelle, 1878

In the spring of 1878 France held an Exposition Universelle — a world's fair, staged in Paris to show that the country had recovered from its defeat by Prussia eight years earlier. Lockwood Kipling was there to arrange the Indian section, and he brought his son on the condition that the boy gave no trouble. They crossed the Channel and lodged in a boarding house behind the Parc Monceau, and on the first morning his father handed him about two francs, told him there were restaurants called Duval all over Paris where he could eat for one franc, promised him a free pass to the Exhibition, and left him to it.

It was through the eyes of France that I began to see.

What followed was, as he put it, the delight of a child let loose among all the wonders of all the world as they came out of their packing cases. After a few days nobody checked his pass. He wandered the half-built pavilions around the Trocadéro palace, picked up workmen's French from the men in blue blouses, ran paper-chases in the Bois de Boulogne with two English schoolboys in the yellow stockings and blue gowns of Christ's Hospital until the gendarmes stopped them, found the bookstalls on the Quai Voltaire and the men clipping poodles on the quays below the bridges, and discovered Notre-Dame de Paris for himself by way of Victor Hugo's novel. The exhibit he climbed most often was the head of Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty, then still in Paris awaiting shipment to New York: five centimes bought you the staircase up into the skull, and you looked out through the empty eyes.

He went home, he wrote later, knowing that there was a land across the water where everything was different and delightful and all the food tasted extremely well — and he never revised the verdict. His memoir Something of Myself puts it flatly: his father allowed him, at twelve years old, the full freedom of that spacious and friendly city, and it set his life-long love for France.

The Jungle Books, Kim, and the Nobel Prize

In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, an American, and the couple settled for four years at her family's home in Brattleboro, Vermont. The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) were written there: linked stories about Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the Indian forest and taught the Law of the Jungle by a bear and a black panther, with animal fables — Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose, the white seal — set among them. They are moral tales in the shape of adventure, and they made him the most widely read children's author alive. (Walt Disney's 1967 cartoon, which keeps the names and almost nothing else, is how most people now meet them.)

Kim (1901) is the other book people mean when they say Kipling. Kimball O'Hara is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, growing up as a street child in Lahore, who attaches himself as disciple to an old Tibetan lama walking India in search of a sacred river — and is simultaneously recruited by British intelligence for the espionage between empires that the book calls the Great Game. It is a spy novel, a road novel and a portrait of the whole subcontinent at once, and the argument over it — whether the loving detail of India cancels or merely decorates the imperial frame — has never been settled.

In 1907 the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his power of observation, originality of imagination and remarkable talent for narration. He was forty-one, and the first writer in English to receive it. It was very nearly the only honour he ever accepted: he turned down a knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Poet Laureateship, and in 1934 he declined the Légion d'honneur — the French state's order of merit — as well. The distinctions he took from France were academic: honorary doctorates from Paris and Strasbourg, both in 1921.

John Kipling, Loos, and the graves

Kipling's son John was seventeen when the First World War began, and had already decided on the army; he was rejected by three recruiting offices for his eyesight, so his father used his friendship with Field Marshal Lord Roberts, colonel of the Irish Guards, to get him a commission. John went to France in August 1915, a few days after turning eighteen, and was killed at the Battle of Loos on 27 September, effectively his first day in the line. His body was not identified. Whether Kipling had pushed him into uniform, and what guilt he carried afterwards, has been argued over ever since; the family record shows the boy choosing the army himself in 1913, before any war existed to be sent to.

In September 1917 Fabian Ware — the man who had spent the war recording where the dead lay, and had just had his work made permanent as the Imperial War Graves Commission — invited Kipling to join it. He accepted the next day and gave it the rest of his life. He argued for regimental badges on the headstones, wrote pamphlets defending the Commission's decisions, and above all supplied the words: after his death the Commission recorded that every inscription on every memorial it had raised anywhere in the world had been written, approved or selected by him. The ones it named as his alone include Thiepval on the Somme, the Menin Gate at Ypres, Tower Hill in London, Delville Wood, Baghdad, Lagos, Dar-es-Salaam — and the memorial to the British Empire's dead inside Notre-Dame in Paris.

The work also gave him a reason to keep crossing the Channel. Through the 1920s the Kiplings wintered in the south of France or Algeria, met their Rolls-Royce and chauffeur at Marseilles, and wandered home northwards through the old front, stopping at any Commission cemetery near the road so that he could note what still needed doing. He was in the party for King George V's pilgrimage to the battlefields in May 1922; his own travel diary of it records the sole at the Hôtel Terminus in Calais, the price of a butter knife, and the rebuilt Ypres, which he thought absolutely ghastly. In August 1930 he was to speak at Dud Corner Cemetery at Loos, close to where John had died, and could not: he was overcome and did not deliver it.

Souvenirs of France, 1933 — and the argument since

On 19 November 1921 the University of Paris made him a doctor honoris causa in the great amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, alongside the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, before the President of the Republic, Alexandre Millerand — the citation naming both men as eminent friends of France. Kipling's own comic account of the day, printed in a Paris educational paper a month later, has a distinguished old writer receiving the degree while remembering the night thirty years earlier when he and three companions had tried to push the Sorbonne's walls over by moonlight and run from the gendarmes. Louis Fabulet, who had made the first French translations of Kipling and was not invited to the ceremony, wrote to the Mercure de France to point out that it was he, and nobody at the Sorbonne, who had introduced Kipling to France.

Twelve years later he set the whole attachment down. Souvenirs of France appeared first in French, in two instalments of the Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 and 15 March 1933, translated by the critic Louis Gillet; the English text ran in the Daily Telegraph the same month, and the little book went through five editions in Paris. It moves from the boy with his two francs at the Trocadéro to the motoring years, the Algerian journeys and the graves — a book about one country written by a man from another, and the warmest thing he ever published.

He haemorrhaged at Brown's Hotel in London on 13 January 1936, from the duodenal ulcer a Paris doctor had finally diagnosed three years earlier, was operated on at the Middlesex Hospital and died of peritonitis on 18 January, two days before King George V. His ashes were interred in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey on 23 January. Bateman's, the seventeenth-century ironmaster's house in Sussex he had bought in 1902 and where he wrote Puck of Pook's Hill and 'If—', went to the National Trust under his widow's will in 1939, and is open to visitors. His reputation has been contested for a century: George Orwell, reviewing T. S. Eliot's selection of his verse in 1942, opened by conceding that no civilised person could accept Kipling's view of life, and then spent the rest of the essay explaining why he outlasts the people who sneer at him. The Kipling Society, which exists to promote his work, prints a warning at the foot of every page of its website that some of it contains words and views on race and gender now generally considered unacceptable. Both things are true at once, and any honest account of him has to hold them together.