In Our Time - Rudyard Kipling

Episode Date: October 16, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling has been described as the poet of Empire, celebrated for fictional works including Kim and The Jungle Book. Today his poem 'If--' remains one of the best known in the English language. Kipling was amongst the first writers in English to develop the short story as a literary form in its own right, and was the first British recipient of a Nobel Prize for Literature. A literary celebrity of the Edwardian era, Kipling's work for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission played a major role in Britain's cultural response to the First World War.Contributors:Howard Booth, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of ManchesterDaniel Karlin, Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of BristolJan Montefiore, Professor of Twentieth Century English Literature at the University of KentProducer: Luke Mulhall.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in March 1890, the Times published an editorial, praising the work of a 24-year-old author. Quote, India has given us an abundance of soldiers and administrators, it said, but she's seldom given us a writer. There's no question, however, that she's done so. She's done this in the person of the author of the numerous short stories and verses of which we give the titles below. They were talking about Rudyard Kipling, in his early 20s already a prolific and celebrated literary figure.

He's best known for his children's works, the Jungle Book and the Just So's stories, but Kipling was a writer of great range who tackled everything from espionage to duty or the fairies that lived at the bottom of his garden. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born and grew up in India and was a major apologist for the British Empire, if it was run correctly. correctly. This made and then perhaps unmade his reputation. With me to discuss the work of Brodardierke Gippling,

Jan Montefiore, Professor of 20th century English Literature at the University of Kent, Howard Booth, Senior Lecture in English Literature at the University of Manchester, and Daniel Carlin, Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. Daniel Carlin, he's probably best known for his children's books, or perhaps as a poet, but can you give us an idea, just to start up with the range of his work? Well, it's a work of extraordinary diversity. It begins with stories and poems about Anglo-Indian life, but it branches out into almost every genre of literature,

including non-fiction travel writing and journalism, and it covers almost every area of human experience that Kipling encountered in 50 years of, literary writing. And he gave voice not just to people, but to animals and even machines as an extraordinary short story, one of whose

heroes are the rivets on a ship. So it's a remarkable range, and quite a lot of it not explored any longer today, unfortunately. So that's some idea of his range. And also he tended to concentrate on and he wrote three novels, but

it was mostly short stories and poems. Yes, the core of the literary achievement is the short story and poems, although he never called them poems, he always called them verses. We'll come back to that because it's interesting that he was born in British rural India in 1865. Can you tell us about that earliest part of his childhood? Well, perhaps the best way of doing it is to read from the posthumously published memoir, something of myself, which begins with an invocation to Allah. the dispenser of events, and goes on.

My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my Ayah, a Portuguese Roman Catholic who would pray, I beside her, at a wayside cross. Mehta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples, where being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the same. of the dimly seen friendly gods. This memoir begins with invocations of Allah, the Roman Catholics and the Hindus, and Kipling came of Protestant Methodist stock.

So that gives you some idea of the extraordinary multicultural origin of this writer who we think of as associated with English nationalism. His first language, as he grew up, was not English. It was what he called the vernacular. Hindi. Another little passage from something of myself talks about the stories and nursery songs, all unforgotten. These are Hindu. We were sent into the dining room after we'd been dressed with a caution, speak English now to Papa and Mama. So one spoke English, in inverted commas, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.

What was his father doing in India? He was teaching at an unethical, an unlawful, art college in Bombay, and he later became director of a museum in Lahore, which then becomes famous as the House of Wonders or Treasure House in Kim. So he was an arts and crafts man, John Lockwood Kipling, and a very important figure in Kipling's life

taught his son the beauty and value of making things, something that Kipling never lost. The arts and crafts and the side of it, he was linked with the pre-Ratholites, wasn't it? Absolutely. His mother, Alice Kipling was one of five McDonald's sisters, one of whom married the painter, Edward Byrne Jones. So there's a strong, there are strong artistic connections with that whole kind of phase of English culture.

So those are the first five or six years, which he looks back on. The word idyllic isn't misplaced there, is it? Absolutely not. No. Then he was wrench, we can say, Jan Montefiore from, Idyllic Bombay and sent to a boarding house in Southsea when he was just about six so he spent the next six years there

and from what he wrote about it later it was hell well in something of myself he calls it the house of desolation which speaks for himself he was not quite six when he left India and his sister

Alice who was always called tricks was only three and the three of them were there for, yes, six years. And it was a very, very, it was a traumatic experience, and it certainly scarred them for life. Well, the man in the boardhouse

seems to have been a kindly chap from what we know. The woman was evangelical, bullying. She thought little boys were full of sin and told lies. And the result of her treatment, we're told, he suffered from hallucinations and even bouts of blindness. It can't get very much worse than that. No, indeed. I mean, I think that it culminated in that. You know, Kippling wrote a very vivid, very bitter story about it,

bar-bar black sheep in which he calls his sister Punch and Judy. And it's told in, you know, that there are three bags full, and there was the first bag, the second bag, the third bag, and they get worse and worse and worse. And he's regularly beaten. He's also, he's also taken. told he's wicked, he's going to hell. And the things that seems to have saved him were, I think, partly the attachment between

himself and his sister, which never failed, even though his sister was Auntie Rose's favourite, and he was the kind of the outcast of back sheep. And his imagination, it sort of threw him on himself. Sort of he describes very vividly the games he used to play in the cellar. what the tradition was that people had enough means or in certain positions sent their children back to England to be educated. Yes, they did. But why did they send them back to this lot?

I mean, they were well connected. They had relatives who talked about what on earth did they send them to an evangelical maniac in South Sea boarding house? Well, they didn't know she was an evangelical maniac. And his mother, Alice Kipling, seems to have not wanted him to stay with any of her brothers and sisters. She said it could have led to complications. What did she mean?

We don't know, but at Georgie, Byrne Jones and Uncle Ned Byrne Jones were having their marital problems. You can see why he might think that. And when she had taken the children over, when Ruddy was about two and a half, I think when Tricks was born at home, wasn't she? Rurdy had been an obstruperous two-year-old, and all the relatives had said, what, pain in the neck he was, how sort of self-willed, how arrogant and so on. And I think she thought that, you know, maybe her relatives wouldn't like them.

And she wanted to be, that there was a sort of family tradition of being fiercely independent. So I suppose that's what she decided. So this beaten and abused boy, at the age of about 12 or 13, went to a minor public school, that's what you call these things, Westwood Ho for a few years, where it seems to have got a bit better. He wrote and edited the school magazine, but soon left at 17 and went straight back to India. Yes. Well, things went a lot better for him at school, actually.

He had been restored to his parents. He'd been taken away from bullying and abuse. And it was a tough school, but it suited him. He made friends. A thing that is very striking about something about it for myself is that there don't seem to be any playmates whatsoever, except for his cousins the Bern Joneses, the month at Christmas. But otherwise there were no friends.

And at schools he did make friends. And he discovered Browning. That was a big discovery. And he went by Juney and started work with a seven-year apprenticeship as a journalist, which vitally affected the rest of his work. Absolutely, yes. And he was going back to sort of the original paradise, but of course it wasn't paradise.

And also, you know, people always say he was 16 going on 17. It has struck me that his contemporaries would be, going to sixth form and then to university. He was that kind of age, impressionable. And he was back in this place which was also strange, place full of sun, colour, strange smells,

foreign languages, being ruled by a small English community of which he was one. He was working very, very hard as a journalist, but it meant that he got out and about everywhere. Howard Booth, as Jan said he got out and about everywhere and these fed into the early stories

can you tell give us some idea of the when he started those stories and what the range of them was even at that early stage yes he's publishing creative works in the Civil and Military Gazette they didn't only take

news but many of them emerged out of the stories that were finding their way into the newspaper because it didn't only contain original reporting. It acted as a kind of digest of other newspapers. And the initial work, Short Stories Poems, is much more heterogeneous than perhaps the later work. I believe isn't looking so much to impose meanings on that material. And one can just quickly bring out three kinds of story.

One is stories on Anglo-Indian Moors, on the way people behave, particularly the sexual mares of Anglo-India. Another set of stories are around soldiers, particularly ordinary soldiers. One of the things that Kipling is credited with is starting to give attention to the ordinary British soldier, the Tommy Atkins figure, in both poetry. It's Tommy this, it's Tommy that, yeah. Yes. both in poetry but also in short stories

and he invents three ordinary soldiers Orveni, Thoris and Leroyd who become these stocks with three figures who feature in many of his stories. So the ordinary soldier and then the third category is that the young Kipling who found the hot water

weather in Lahore very difficult. Every Anglo-Indian did. There was a lot of disease and illness. It was quite a risky place for Anglo-Indians to be. And his way of dealing with this was to go out in the night and make these night prowls of Lahore. And he became aware of the prostitutes in the hall, the drug-taking in Lahore. And that finds its way into short stories around haunting, around very... mental states that also characterise some of these very famous early short stories. Are we talking at this time of him hardening an attitude

towards a colonial experience towards the British Empire? If so, can you just answer? I think in his writing it's more open at this point and the short stories were always more open but Kipling did inherit what one might call the family politics which is associated in particular with Lockwood Kipling and widely held in Anglo-India,

which held the politicians back home as failing to really understand India and what was needed to keep India under control and therefore being very conservative. We have to remember these are the years after the Indian mutiny, as Kipling would have known it, the Indian uprising, we'd call it now, And the Anglo-Indians were always fearful

and their attitudes towards Indians hardened in those years after the mutiny. Is it possible to summarise this young man, we're talking about before the Times was written in the editorial even, and he's establishing himself in his late teens, early 20s, rapid production of short stories. Is it possible to crystallise his view of the British? I know it's complicated, so it's maybe a stupid question. But if you can, that'd be great.

Well, I think a good way to do this is through the short story, the man who would be king, because that captures his particular take, I think, in these years. And on the one hand, that short story is very interested in the initiative of its two main figures, Daniel Travert and Pichy Karnahan, who go from India north to Kfiristan, the mountains of Afghanistan, and seek to establish. this kingdom there. But that attempt is undone when Travert, the would be king, is exposed. They've been pretending to be gods, but when the woman he wants to take as his wife bites him and he bleeds to reveal that he's human and their effort to establish this kingdom collapses. And the opposition

that sets up is Kipling's interest in initiative, the person not being bound by stifling conventions and bureaucracy. But there's another side as well. which is that Kipling always held to the importance of the law, of doing things within bounds, within convention. And that tension between the talented individual and order and codes being within the law, it's very important to Kipling. Daniel Carlin, in 1889, still a very young man,

Kipling moved to London. Deliberately, as I understand it, to build his reputation as a writer, goodness knows it at the time they're given. a heck of a send-off. But when he came to London, he wanted to be more than a taste of the Orient. He wanted to be in the mainstream,

and he became friends with Henry James, who admired him a great deal, and as I understand it, Conan Doyle, and so on. But can you give us a more rounded view of what was going on in literary London and how he got to be so central a part of it so quickly? Well, Kipling arrives in London at a kind of pivotal moment

in English, British literary culture, because it's the, in a sense, it's the end of nearer, has died in 1889, Tennyson is going to die in 1892. So these great Victorian sages and prophets are, that generation is passing away. There's a new ferment. Oscar Wilde is in his pomp, and it's Wilde who also writes about plain tales from the hills, the collection of short stories.

As one turns over the pages of his plain tales from the hills, one feels as if one was seated under a palm tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. And Kipling caught a mood, a mood for change, for the exotic, for the new in literary London. It's also associated with an explosion of new journals and forms of publication. So he arrives at, you know, he had, and this again, he says in something of myself, he had tremendous luck. He arrived in the nick of a particular moment when the initial taste for his exotic writing could then be used as a kind of platform for building a much wider, larger literary career. I think it's also important to say that

he'd had that ambition from the beginning. That's to say that he was never going to be a writer are content with simply having a kind of Anglo-Indian reputation. It's a much fiercer, more determined drive towards some literary achievement. John Montefiore, can we develop that a little bit? He did cover determined to make his reputation as a writer on what he saw is the world scene centered on London. And there was something in that. And he did it. Can you give us some idea of how he said about it?

who helped him to succeed? He joined clubs. He was elected to the Saville Club. He describes that in something of myself, which was in a sort of enormously important literary centre, so sort of Sir Walter Besant, Edmund Goss, influential people like that.

And Andrew Lang, of course, he was a member of the Saville, and Lang was one of Kippling's earliest reviewers. so he did that. He also, this is very characteristic, Kipling preserved a sort of fierce independence. He lived an economical bachelor life, just off Charing Cross Station. And he says that he lived on sausage and mash

until his sort of big payments started to come in. He spent a lot of time at the music halls. He was kind of... He fed into the barrack room balance. and so on. Oh, very much so, yes. Yes. And then the barrack-room ballads became part of the musical. They did. They did indeed, yes.

And so he's there, but let's go on a bit. I mean, Henry James wasn't easy to charm and get an admirer, but Kipling managed to do both. Yes, he seems... Whose initiative was that? His or Henry James? Do you know, I don't know that one. Oh, he would have been introduced, I think he was introduced to James by Walter Besant.

James said of Kipling quite soon after he'd met him. He strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, and then wonderful James year parenthesis, as distinct from fine intelligence that I've ever known. And that's a very shrewd kind of assessment, and I think... He was full of that, wasn't it? Yes. He was very something like he had a mind so fine and no idea violated it.

But there is a great truth there, that James saw that he was a, and to be fair, Kipling loved James. He has a wonderful comment about him. Someone sent him a book of sort of history of the American short story. And he wrote back to the author of this book saying that he hadn't given enough attention to Henry James. He is head and shoulders, the biggest of them all,

and will in the end be found to be perhaps the most enduring influence. And it's a very strange thought that the influence of James on Kipling short stories is palpable in some of those. Yes. I mean, Kipling pays him a direct tribute, doesn't he, in that very charming book, The Jane Knights, which is about a bunch of soldiers who all read Jane Austen. And one of them are rather drunk addresses the other, the others, and says that they say that Jane had no lawful issue. What a shame that was.

She did have lawful issue. Her son was one, Innery James. But let's just go on. Let's just finish this, I don't take a minute to him, but finish this settling himself, and setting himself as a very important person among brilliant people who thought themselves and were told that they were brilliant people

and influential people in London literary metropolis. Does anything clinched it or have we said enough about it? He was sort of eagerly sought by editors of all the leading journals. The one that he seems to have been particularly closest to and sort of eager to associate himself with was W.E. Henley of the National. observer. That is where he published Danny Deva, which had the Scottish professor saying, here's literature. Here's literature. And at the same time, he rather distanced himself from the literary world. He was a bit wary of his instant fame. He says that very explicitly in something of myself,

that he didn't trust reviews, he didn't trust reviewers. Howard Booth, it might be Extraordinary for our listeners so used are they to people making literary reputations through novels and to a certain extent of poetry, obviously. But it was short stories. There was the short story that clinched his reputation, and they came out in scores. Yes, particularly in the early period. That's absolutely right. Kipling really is absolutely at the right time for his talents, really, because, the literary scene was shifting from the serial publication of novels.

Dickens. Dickens, yes, towards readers wanting the short story, literary text they could read at one sitting or close to it. And that was changing the pecking order of literary genres. But also it allowed Kipling to other changes. Jan's mentioned Walter Bessent sooner. after Kipling arrived, he became involved with the Society of Authors and indeed was on its council. And the Society of Authors was campaigning for copyright so that authors were not

undercut by pirate editions of their work. And Kipling comes at the right time because he's able to make copyright work for him. He has difficulties with the law and with pirate editions for many decades to come. But through active use of agents and so on, he's able to secure a continual revenue stream from his

past publications, which means that he can work on these short stories, polished short stories, in a considered way. And that's different from the author who has to keep writing because his last text is no longer earning him any money.

But he can publish it in England, WANV, publishing a periodical, as it were. a periodical in India or in American Northing, Notary, Notary, Noetherly, and he, by that way, he becomes an extremely rich author, apart from Minga very famous. And you've then got collections, and then you've got the various collected editions

of his work, which then run throughout his lives. So, yes, Kipling is able to buy eventually a country home at least the National Trust and set his, by another one, Wimple Holding, Cambridgeshire for his daughter. It's difficult to think of any other canonical author. He's made as much money from literature as can.

Can we step back a little in this story, Jan Montefiore? In 192, he married an American woman and moved to Vermont. And for a while, people thought he was going to become an American citizen, certainly. He describes those as the happiest days of his life. He wrote both forms of the Jungle Book. What attracted him about America? Well, his closest friend was what would have been his Walcott Ballister, who would have been his brother-in-law had he lived.

So he married his best friend's sister. And he liked a great deal about him. He liked its openness. He liked its mixture of people. He was a tremendous admirer of Mark Twain. And also have comic American writers like Brett. Hart and Brett Hart

and lesser known ones like Fence Brightman who wrote kind of dialect and he loved the country I mean his letter the letters that he writes from Vermont in his honeymoon there's are just sort of ecstatic and he does the most wonderful word pictures

of... You mean the countryside? Of the countryside, yes. Yes. And what's one thing that attracted him to? You might want to step in on this as well, Daniel. the fact that it was a building content was to do with, he loved craft.

He did it in his work. He loved crafts, as we mentioned that earlier. But he wrote about men who did work and machines, as you say, were to promote machines. And it was one of the few people who's ever really done that with power and conviction. And it took the fancy. I mean, he hit the mood of the time,

building things, making things, things that worked and really changed life. He loved the, he loved the, the doers more than the thinkers. And one of the great American books that he wrote is a children's story, Captain's Courageous, which is, the title of which comes from an old poem about Elizabethan adventurers, English Elizabethan adventurers. But that sense, that spirit of adventure and expansion has now, belongs now to America.

But he's also very clear-sighted. He wasn't completely swept away. He saw other things in America. He saw the tendency of democracy towards certain kinds of corruption and demagoguery. So there's a dark side to the American experience as well as a joyful and celebratory one. Both those things come in to the writing. Very much so. And he felt that there was violence in America.

And he felt that very strongly. that there was a lawlessness about American life that he didn't like. It's more in America and at this stage, how it starts getting interested in politics. It's a Venezuela issue, isn't it? Yes, there is a border dispute between the British Guiana and Venezuelan, which America becomes involved against the British. But Kipling's whole effort is,

actually the other way to try and find a common cause between this emerging power America and the British Empire. Because in America at this point you had two competing narratives. Isolationism, which of course is to remain a strong tendency through into the 20th century, but also expansionism. And Kipling becomes very friendly with Theodore Roosevelt, yet president, but a growing force in America, on the side of expansionism. And as the 1890s go on, the United States fights the war with Spain in 1998, and it is starting to become a country with,

for one of a better word, it didn't like to apply it to itself, colonies. And the difficulty for Kipling was that many Americans still saw themselves as defined against the British because of their history, because of their own efforts to gain independence from Britain. But Kipling wanted to establish an Anglo-Saxon renewed empire. And the other key thing that's happening in the 1890s, the late 1890s,

is that Germany is starting to build up its navy, which is a huge threat to the British Empire, which depends on naval superiority. So this is not a kind of triumphalist move. It's also, so often with Kipling's imperialism and anxious, move as well. Now this is where, in a sense, there's a nubb point here, Daniel Carling,

he's bringing these views into his verse and stories, which are phenomenally successful. We can't say that often enough, because one poem alone earned him, one poem earned him the equivalent of seven million pounds, which he gave to the war office, the absent-minded beggar that one.

For instance, that just didn't monetary terms, but still is an indication if how popular it was. But he's using stuff for his political views, and he's He's putting together a feeling of not so much Anglo-Saxon superiority, but Anglo-Saxon responsibility, the white man's burden can be put that way. And he wants to bring the Americans into that, as it were, plot that he's got in his mind.

Is there something in that? Absolutely there is, but it's also true to say that Kipling takes the long view of these matters, so that one of the things that fascinated him was the rise and fall of empire. And he knows in his bones that the British people, empire, like all other empires, won't last. And recessional, the great poem that he published on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, is about that uncomfortable fact. So there's both the contemporary sense that something good, something valuable,

can be made of the British Empire and that it can be associated with the expansion of America. but you have to see that within this long time, deep time, if you like, of imperial rise and decline. But he's using his poems to, I think the correct will be, to propagate these views. Absolutely, and poetry, because it's more economical, it's pithier, it gets published in newspapers, it's more widely circulated, and it's sung as well, gets turned into into... on an intervents. So there's a sense

of this which it's very much for common people he's writing for us. Absolutely. And must have been one of the few poets who's on most soldiers' tongues. Both other guests want to get John first and then. Now I wanted to say that I absolutely agree with all that

you who have said, that Kipling's love for the British Empire for the rule of law, his idealising of it, is, I think it's the other side of his sense of, as you say deep time. One of the poems he wrote in Puck says cities and thrones and powers stand in time's eye almost as long as flowers which daily die. And he always sees the sort of the works

of man in relation to as Danny says, that Danny says deep time. And yet he knows they won't last. He always knows they won't last. The point I wanted to make is about this idea of writing for ordinary people. Of course, the people who are excluded here are the people who are to be ruled, those who aren't white. And so Kipling is depending on Victorian race theory, on notions that certain people had the attributes and, in Kipling's view, have the responsibility to rule others who are intrinsically not as developed. And so the poem, the white man's burden, has this famous repost from Gandhi who says that while Kipling talks about the white man's burden

is actually the white man's yoke on colonial peoples. He's... His daughter, one of his daughters has died, the flu, and he was made desolate by that. But I'd like to move on to the response to the outbreak of events in the First World War, because that brings a lot of things together, including, as you said,

he's beginning to warn people in the 18th. He was a war chart for Germany, partly because he thinks there are a threat and partly because he thinks there are a threat to the British Empire. Nobody's much listening, but he hammers away at that for about 13 or 14 years. Jan, you would say something. No, and he also tries very hard to get England to introduce national service. And he... Well, considering the poverty-stricken forces we had in 1940s, he was right, wasn't he?

He was in South Africa during the Boer War, and particularly identified the weakness of the forces and thought that the empire was really under threat because the politicians back home were not prepared to take the decisions that would protect the empire. There's a curious sense of which the empire is being held up by people who are maintaining it in the field and particularly by the common soldiers who are maintaining it in the field

and they're doing it with a rumbustious, complex, funny, but they don't feel like oppressors, They have innately a feeling of superiority. And this goes back really to the Barracrim Ballads and to the giving voice to the common soldier, and that goes forward into the writing about the First World War. So when you go back to Barakrym ballads, and he uses this really wonderful metaphor,

this is the soldier speaking, Tommy Atkins saying, I went into a theatre as sober as could be. They gave a drunk civilian room, but hadn't none for me. they sent me to the gallery or around the musicals, but when it comes to fighting Lord, they'll shove me in the stalls. It's Tommy this.

Tommy this and Tommy that. Tommy wait outside, but it's special train for Atkins when the trooper's on the tide. And it's that sense of the... But it's partly about giving... He was the first, the first writer, the first poet, to give a voice to these people.

When the First World War comes around, of course, there is a... a very malign myth, which is circulating that Kipling, as it were, consciously and deliberately sacrificed his own son by forcing him to join up or maneuvering it so that he could join up, which is absolutely untrue. But what is true is that his son, John Kipling, enlisted and was killed at the Battle of Luce in 1915. Kipling therefore becomes not just a poet of the war but a poet of the pity of war, the casualties of war. And it's interesting that his poems have been neglected in celebration of war firms recently and some of them are very fine.

They are... Gatsimini, for instance. Yeah, I think Gatsimini is one of the greatest of all the First World War poems. But there are also... Because of this, we haven't watched out, I just want to get some idea inside the answer that you're going to...

or going to give it an issue, that this ideas contaminated the work in some way, and that it is perhaps possible to peel them away and see the work as it is because they don't they're not a good match

sometimes, are they? Well, I think I can answer if you'll forgive me for doing this allegorically. There's one of the story, the Just Say stories, is about called the crab who played with the sea and it's Po Amar is the great the giant crab who refuses to cooperate with the Lord of Creation

and won't do as he's told and he has this tremendous hard shell that protects his kind of interior itself but once every year he has to shed that shell and become vulnerable and he's reminded that he's a vulnerable now Kipling that's what Kipling is like the politics the race theory

some of it unendurably horrible but it is like a hard shell when you crack that shell and you get inside it's a completely different picture Howard in 1915 he sat on the War Memorials Commission and was very influential there

yes it's a little later it's 1970 John dies in 1915 and Fabian Ware is moving to set up the Imperial Wargraves Commission or became the Imperial War Graves Commission and Kipling becomes very involved with this as it's literary advisor. Other people, Lutchins, go to Jekyll, other aspects. But what did you contribute that was important? Well, he was involved in all the inscriptions,

all the cemeteries until his death, things like their name liveth forevermore. That was Kipling's choice. Other authors suggested different things. Jay and Barry suggested all as well, which would make a visit to a First World Cemetery very different. And he, he, was really... And another important thing, sorry to Russia, but I'm going to, that he insisted that they were listed, not as officers first in order of merit, but they were listed in alphabetical order,

whoever they were, and this is probably the first time that the British working class have had their names in public print, and it was in stone, different religions, so he wasn't in favour of just crucifixes. And there was a personal investment here, clearly. He was very strongly involved in the idea that the names of the missing should be listed because John's body was never found. John, he's seen as a lifetime establishment figure.

Would you accept that? How did you see himself? He saw himself as his own man, and he was his own man. I mean, he was conservative, he was a patriot, but he did not hesitate to attack the government, even in the middle of the war. He wrote one of his best war poems is Mesopotamia, 1917,

which is about the Mesopotamia campaign what is in present day Iraq. It was a disaster. And he denounced the generals, but not only the generals, but also the cabinet, the idle-minded overlings. Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? When the storm is ended, shall we find, how softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to par

by the favour and contrivance of their kind? brings down this century, isn't it really? Another thing that's happening is that he is a, he accepts a Nobel Prize, but even though his friend, the king offers him the order of merit, he declines that to the king's chagra. He won't have a knighthood and so on.

But again, after the war, he's onto Hitler right away, and from the end of the 1920s, he's saying, early 30s, don't trust this. And partly because he was so anti-German after the first of war, People tend to ignore him, but again, he was onto something. Yes. I mean, he saw the rise of Nazism as a direct consequence of the weakness of the post-war settlement in his eyes.

And he did. One of the very last poems that he wrote, the Storm Cone, is a warning of the coming cataclysm. and there's a sense in which right until the end, really, the hatred of Germany, which has become pathological, is mixed with a very sharp, acute political sense of where Germany was headed in the late 1920s and 1930s. But it did make it very difficult for his voice to be listened to in those final years. Can I briefly ask you, and you have to be very brief,

I'm obviously sorry, we could go on for the rest of the day, where is his reputation now starting with you John I think increasingly he's admired as the great writer that he was particularly I think the stigma which it became of being a supporter of the Jewish Empire has faded I think it's still there but Kipling would always was and always will be a contradictory figure

and he was also he will be remembered as for Kim Yes. I think what he lays down for the future of Indian writing in English, and of course a lot of Indian writing is not in English, is the idea of a multiple plural attractive India rather than just one, now as you say, a Hindu one or a Muslim one or a regional one. That's to have a big influence on the future of Indian writing. I'm afraid we have to go. I'm awfully sorry.

Thank you very much, Howard Booth, Daniel Cullen and Jan Matta Viori. We're back next week with the Haitian Revolution. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, let's go to me. We didn't talk about his involvement with the masons. He became a Freemason in...

Was that significant? It was significant more because of what it symbolised and because of what it was. It symbolised this passion here. he had for, if you think about the whole South Sea trauma, which is a trauma of separation and then not belonging, so what the Masons offer you is a kind of surrogate community. And you think of, and all his life he was interested in in stories of adoption,

people who were adopted into. What we never got right to was the idea of him calling it verse and not palm. Yes. I wish we had, which T.S. Eliot picked up on in an admiring piece about it. Absolutely. In a choice of Kipling's verse in 19. 1941. Why do you think that was?

Why did he want to insist on calling it verse, Jan, do you have any idea? Well, partly because he did write an awful lot of light verse and parodies and things like that. But I think also, because he's one of the very few poets that I know of, who never writes in,

almost never writes in his own person. He's always, he's Tommy's voice or he's a galley slave or he's we I think it's also it is a reaction

against that whole late 19th century idea of poetry as something kind of very highly aesthetic and an idiotist and special yeah

and he has a wonderful comment on the absent-minded beggar he says I wrote some verses which had I think he has had oomph he doesn't use the word oomph something like that but lacked, quote, poetry, he says.

And he's using that term in inverted commas in a kind of ironic way. That's the term that sold 250,000 copies. Absolutely, yeah. But not only that, it was an extraordinary phenomenon. I mean, it got reprinted on sort of tea cloths and kind of handkerchiefs and posters. That's the way.

It was a cultural phenomenon. Contemporary to give their eyes for that, wouldn't they, to be in a tea cloth. And Kipling would have been fascinated by modern media. I mean, I know it's very vulgar to make these... But, I mean, he would have been tweeting. He would have been, you know, doing all those things.

The 140 characters, that would have suited him down to the ground. We didn't talk about his style either, which is a bit like Hemingway. You used the journal to hammer out a very... And that's why that's seven years apprenticeship really trained him in how to write with economy and kind of directness. Yes, writing short. Yeah. And really...

He only had 1,200 words for the first plain tales from the hills. It's very short for a short story. Really? Yes. That was the limit he was writing to. It's the versatility, isn't it? That he has absolutely no fear as a writer, setting a short story in any period,

assuming all these different voices in the poetry. Of all writers in English, he's one of the least fearful. He's never somebody who goes, I'd like that idea, but technically it would be too difficult. I sometimes think of him as a kind of, also as a kind of jobbing poet as though you had a subject would come along

and knock on the door and say, can you write a poem about me? He said, yep, I can do that. Luke's just come in. Hello. There's our producer this week. It's all right. There are many more Radio 4

Arts and Discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.ukuk slash Radio 4.