Rudyard Kipling: 'Shot through with Hatred'?

In which I read a Kipling story and challenge his critics

Let’s consider a writer who almost everyone approaches politically: Rudyard Kipling. This is understandable because Kipling often writes quite politically. (The author of a poem with so infamous a title as “The White Man’s Burden” can’t exactly claim to be courting an apolitical response.) For this reason, it has been standard practice since the early 20^th Century to be grievously offended by Kipling in total. We find only the most cautious praise commingling with pages of censorious moralizing in essays by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Frank O’Connor, and Edward Said, among others. They all admit that Kipling is a significant artist, but his views are “intolerant and vindictive.” O’Connor even attacks Kipling’s obvious gift for physical description, writing, “Kipling loves the physical only if the physical happens to be his side and to be well equipped with repeating rifles.” Wilson goes so far as to say, “The whole work of Kipling’s life is to be shot through with hatred.”

When I read that last sentence, I felt bemused and disconcerted, as it matched up so little with the Kipling that I remembered: the author of Kim and two dozen or so short stories. Albeit this represented a small portion of the whole (Kipling wrote about 5,000 pages of short stories), though the stories I read were the ones widely considered to be the greatest hits. His best stories seemed remarkable for their subtle artistry, though seemingly straightforward and unassuming in style. There were ambiguities and depths in Kipling, curious lacunae for the reader to probe. The Kipling I remembered was as deft as Hemingway or Carver in his mastery of the unsaid, in his capacity to slide certain disturbing realizations under the reader’s conscious radar. I turned back to his fiction to see if I could find a clue to Wilson’s judgment. Surely if “the whole work” was infested with hatred, it would be evident from page one of his first short story collection, Plain Tales from the Hills, published in 1888 when Kipling was just twenty-three.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my original, positive reactions to Kipling not only confirmed, but amplified and refined. You might be surprised to discover that the first story in Plain Tales from the Hills, “Lispeth,” is not an attack on the subjects of British colonialism at all but on British Protestant missionaries in India. (Nothing in the critics I mentioned could have possibly prepared the reader for this.) The main character, Lispeth, is the child of Indian converts to Christianity. After her parents’ death, Lispeth is taken in by two Protestant missionaries, for whom she keeps house. One day, she encounters an injured British traveler, who has tumbled down a cliff during a hike. She promptly falls in love with him and begins nursing him back to health. Both the traveler and her missionary foster parents humor her affection, essentially letting her be led on, with no attempt to engage with the sincerity of her passion. As the time for his departure nears, the traveler promises to return to her, simply to make his departure smooth and avoid a scene. When Lispeth realizes that he’s never returning, and that the missionaries and the traveler never took her proclamations of love seriously, she “rage quits” (in contemporary parlance) Christianity. Afterwards, she marries an abusive wood cutter and grows increasingly bitter in old age, which is where the story leaves her.

You’d have to be a particularly clumsy reader to imagine Kipling’s sympathies lie with the missionary foster parents. Following Lispeth’s renunciation of the faith, her foster mother says, “There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the heathen, and I believe that Lispeth was always at heart an infidel.” Kipling’s narrator directly contradicts her, saying, “Seeing she had been taken into the Church of England at the mature age of five weeks, this statement does not do credit to the Chaplain's wife.” This being the case, I’m not sure how a reader could interpret Kipling’s asides about Lispeth, such as “Being a savage by birth, she took no trouble to hide her feelings,” as anything other than an ironic and satirical stab at the emotionally repressed English. (Kipling’s negative attitude towards missionary activity in India would be further displayed in his caustic portrayal of the missionary Mr. Bennett in Kim, probably the most unlikable single character in the entire novel). Furthermore, the story is prefaced by a poem authored by Kipling:

Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these
You bid me please?
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so!
To my own Gods I go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
The Convert.

This doesn’t necessarily represent Kipling’s own final stance towards Christianity, but it does represent a sympathetic channeling of his character’s feelings. And yet, in Orwell’s essay, we find him calling Kipling, “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting”!

This judgment doesn’t apply to “Lispeth,” and it doesn’t apply to Plain Tales from the Hills as a whole. Plain Tales from the Hills, as I’ve discovered, vividly sketches out an entire climate of being, providing some of the only truly telling glimpses of the British encounter with India offered by a great fiction writer who was birthed by that encounter. His evocation of this world, suffused with rich social complexities and sufferings, reminded me, oddly enough, of Sherwood Anderson’s desperate Ohio or Raymond Carver’s blue collar Pacific Northwest. It is not so much that Kipling’s world seems the same as theirs, but his artistry is prophetic of their own. So, why didn’t Orwell and O’Connor see it that way? Where does this disconnect come from?

Perhaps you think I’m advocating some sort of bizarre, unorthodox reading of Kipling, completely perverse and against the grain, since I’m dissenting from the opinion of such enlightened mandarins as Wilson and Said. But I’m not alone. Kipling has been reread and reinterpreted much more generously over the last seventy years or so—a trend that admittedly pushes against the general drift of academia as a whole. T.S. Eliot was early in recognizing the complex, multifaceted Kipling that I and many other readers have encountered. For instance, he had the following to say about Kipling’s attitude towards religion in his introduction to a volume of Kipling’s selected verse. You’ll find that it lines up closely with my own observations drawn from “Lispeth”:

Kipling can accept all faiths: that of the Moslem, that of the Hindu, that of the Buddhist, Parsee or Jain, even (through the historical imagination) that of Mithra: if his understanding of Christianity is less affectionate, that is due to his Anglo Saxon background—and no doubt he saw enough in India of clergy such as Mr. Bennett in Kim.

People find the Kipling they expect to find. In our time, the seer that T.S. Eliot found has been lost beneath the alleged jingo propagandist for imperialism, who Orwell, O’Connor, and Wilson all obsess over for various reasons: Orwell was a Trotskyite, O’Connor was an Irishman naturally hostile to a proud product of the British Empire like Kipling, and Wilson was the author of an adoring portrait of the Bolshevik Revolution, To the Finland Station. It is perhaps no surprise that none of them were willing to see Kipling plainly, due to their own ideological blinders.

Kipling’s genius, so evident in his actual works, has been lost beneath the public Kipling—or, at least, the public impression of Kipling as received and transmitted through the International Left of the 1930s and 1940s and the postcolonial movement later represented by Edward Said’s famous work of cultural analysis and critique, Orientalism. These intellectuals often complained about the exclusions and suppressions of fact in the dominant cultural narratives of the past. Yet, with regard to our subject, Kipling, their own suppressions and exclusions—like omitting an honest appraisal of his attitude towards religion—are ruthless. They amount to a systematic campaign of misrepresentation, one seemingly intentional and conscious.

If Kipling wasn’t the utterly insensitive, sadistic, monstrous Imperialist freak depicted in the essays of his opponents—who was he? An Imperialist he certainly was. But was his imagination, his genius, Imperialist or Anti-Imperialist—or something else entirely? That “something else entirely,” set free from the limitations and strictures, the biases and agendas of competing parties, is primarily what interests me.

Poststructuralist critiques, like those of the aforementioned Said, typically see biases and agendas as being all there is. A writer is nothing more than an excrescence of prejudice, a mere extension of the power politics of the time. Although Said generously acknowledges Kipling’s artistry, he sees the primary meaning of Kipling as being concentrated in his Imperialist bias. I am challenging this reading of Kipling partly because it is all too easy to interpret him through the lens of power politics, to analyze and dissect him with the tools provided by Foucault and Said. But this method of analysis only seems natural because of how pervasive these ideological currents have become, flowing through every vein and artery of academia and, in a dumbed down form, through the broader culture. It would be too easy to try to flush them out of the places where they obviously don’t belong—but do you have the guts to challenge them in their most natural domain, in their superficially appropriate critiques of figures like Kipling? Do you have the courage to search for the “something else” I mentioned—the genius of Kipling, which transcends the social forces of his time and place and perhaps even transcends Kipling’s own apparent intentions?

Trusting in William Blake’s adage that “Ages are all equal, but genius is always above the age,” and D.H. Lawrence’s famous advice to “Trust the tale, not the teller,” my approach to Kipling will take the notion of genius, of inspiration, seriously. It will try to see what we can discover about his imagination—which, one would assume, should’ve been the primary subject of literary investigation in the first place. Stay tuned for Part II.