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Summary
Author Notes
Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful.
In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there.
Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books.
Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day.
In 1907, Kipling became England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
In 1890, Rudyard Kipling was living in two rented rooms above a sausage shop in Villiers Street, next to Charing Cross station, when he was commissioned to write a novel for Lippincott's Magazine. He worked to an exacting deadline of three months as he grappled with the most complex problem of his literary life. The result was The Light that Failed , a richly revealing, semi- autobiographical novel, which, though badly reviewed, has stayed in print for more than 100 years. The spark that ignited it was the reappearance in Kipling's life of his first love, Flo Garrard, and her crippling second rejection of him. He had first met her as a teenager. When Kipling and his sister Trix were aged five and two respectively, they had been sent from India to board with a Southsea landlady so that they could have an English upbringing and avoid the social fate of "going native" which would have befallen them if they had stayed with their parents in India. Later, Garrard also boarded there. She was a slender girl with pre-Raphaelite looks, pale skin, long dark hair, large grey eyes and a boyish figure. Kipling was smitten on sight with a love that would last 11 years and inform his attitude to women for the rest of his life. Flo was about a year older than Kipling but much more sophisticated, having been brought up in continental hotels. She had a maddeningly elusive, self-centred manner, smoked cigarettes and was careless of her appearance. Her family owned the jeweller Garrard and Co. Trix called her "a curious blend of simplicity and sophistication, wisdom and ignorance. A gift of natural refinement stood in the place of religion and of home training." Kipling and Flo maintained a relationship and by 1882 when he left for India to begin his career as a reporter, he believed himself engaged to her. They corresponded over the first two years he was away, but she was a poor letter writer, had no real interest in him and, as his distraught letters to other family members show, she terminated the relationship. He met her again in 1890 during some lonely wandering on the Thames embankment. Kipling had come back to London after seven years in India. His "Raj" stories had preceded him and he began to publish poems about Danny Deever and Gunga Din which were to establish him as the major force in British writing. He was well on his way to literary success, but for literary London short stories were the precursor to a novel, and so he began to write The Light that Failed while he was living it. As he described in the novel, "There was no mistaking. The years had turned the child to a woman, but they had not altered the dark-grey eyes, the thin scarlet lips, or the firmly modelled mouth and chin; and, that all should be as it was of old, she wore a closely fitting grey dress.' Trix visited Kipling shortly after this meeting with Flo and was able to recount that her brother "was instantly her slave again". Flo, training as a painter, had finished at the Slade School and was due to study further at the Academie Julian in Paris. In the novel aspiriring artist Maisie, the character based on Flo, half- heartedly accepts Kipling (in the character of successful painter Dick), permitting him to visit her on Sunday afternoons and seeking his advice on her work. Dick is completely unable to conceive "that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since he loved her". He feels that his success should command love. Kipling visited Flo at her house in London where she was living with Mabel Price, a fellow student at the Academie Julian and the daughter of an Oxford mathematics don. In the novel, Maisie is living with an unnamed "red-haired girl" who has power over her and seems to despise Dick. The red-haired girl is furious, for example, when, before the two women go off together to France, Maisie permits Dick a chaste kiss. Flo's indifference to him, her resistance to the display of his abilities, probed a deep wound of loneliness and rejection in Kipling. His parents had abandoned him in Southsea, in the House of Desolation as he called it, with no justification that was comprehensible to him; now he could not make the girl he loved love him back. Kipling, irresistibly drawn back to past failures, tried again. Kipling visited Flo in Paris in May 1890, at the flat she shared with Price in the Avenue de Jena. Little is known about this time except that they went to the countryside to sketch and to picnic with friends. He was never to see Flo again, and clearly something had transpired between them that ended the relationship and sent Kipling off in a white heat of creativity. If she had not known it before, Flo had definitely discovered her sexual orientation. It is not known whether she told Kipling she was a lesbian; or he worked it out for himself on seeing her intimacy with Price; or perhaps he never did understand explicitly, except that she rejected his advances and gave him no hope for the future. Soon after his return he wrote The Light that Failed , which begins with Dick and Maisie as children in a dire seaside boarding house. Dick is then seen as a young man in the Sudan campaign. He is a war artist, demonstrating the possibility of being both creative and a man of action, full of "the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged the same oar together". Dick goes to London where his pictures are attracting attention, and meets Maisie. He declares love but she is dedicated to her work and wants only his advice. She goes off to France with the red- haired girl. Dick begins to go blind and in a messy sub-plot his friend Torpenhow becomes entangled with a prostitute, Bessie. The affection between the two men is the only emotionally satisfying relationship in the book: "Torpenhow thrust out a large and hairy paw from the long chair. Dick clutched it tightly, and in half an hour had fallen asleep. Torpenhow withdrew his hand and, stooping over Dick, kissed him lightly on the forehead, as men do sometimes kiss a wounded comrade in the hour of death, to ease his departure." Maisie is last seen alone in her house in London, ashamed of herself for her treatment of Dick but unable to change; neither a great painter nor a great lover and therefore a failure both as an artist and a woman. Torpenhow goes off to join in the re-conquest of the Sudan, leaving Dick alone, but he determines on a last great gesture: he travels to the army via Egypt and is shot dead as he finally reaches his beloved friend. The strain of Kipling's emotional burdens saw him overload the plot with implausibilities. He is unable to face Maisie's (or Flo's) lesbian relationship, and so has the red-haired girl confessing love for Dick. Kipling depicts the love between men to be noble, pure and untainted by sex with women.It is unlikely that a noble man such as Dick would appear on the battlefield in an enfeebled state, endangering his comrades by obliging them to care for him. On the other hand, the figure of the heroic but wounded imperialist, riding literally blindly into another desert adventure where he will certainly die is one which could only have been created by Kipling, the great poet of empire. Dick's life and fatal last ride is also a metaphor for the failing gallantry of 19th- century man confronting the new woman, which makes it a richer and more interesting story than many contemporaries realised. It is now used in gender studies to examine the pathological inability of men such as Kipling to accept the new woman, and is mined for its homoerotic undercurrents. The man-loving and misogynistic nature of the book was not lost on contemporary writers. Max Beerbohm slyly remarks that if he knew only this work of Kipling's, with its adoration of military men, he should assume it was the pen-name of a woman writer, "strange that these heroes with their self-conscious blurting of oaths and slang, their cheap cynicism about the female sex, were not fondly created out of the inner consciousness of a female novelist". As usual, Kipling had turned his experiences into art: his terror of blindness (a genuine fear given his history of poor sight), which is also an age-old symbol of sexual impotence, and thus symbolises both his loss of creative power and the surrender of the male force to female will. The light is the light of his eyes but also the light of female love, which is betrayed when Flo and Maisie take up a man's instruments: the smoking gun and the smoking cigarette are both masculine symbols that, in Kipling's ideal world, a woman should not hold. Tobacco is taken as a symbol of male bonding: "Have you any tobacco?" being an effective password to male intimacy. The pressure of this doomed relationship combined with his routine of work and intense loneliness to send Kipling into a nervous breakdown. There is little record of this. His novel is the only lengthy clue to what was happening: the way Dick was feeling like a limp-wristed decadent but acting like a muscular hearty is a biographical pointer to the dichotomy Kipling was experiencing in the brilliant 1890s when young writers were torn between the twin poles of Oscar Wilde and WE Henley. On publication, critics were not kind to Kipling, but he disdained their negative as much as their positive criticism, though it is as well he never saw what Flo Garrard wrote. On the flyleaf of her copy of the book, signing herself "Maisie", she wrote: "If you happen to read this singular, if somewhat murky little story you are very likely to rather wonder if real people could be quite so stupid and objectionable as this crowd." The only addition to the story of Flo Garrard in Kipling's life is that he went on to kill her. That is, as recorded by his first official biographer, Lord Birkenhead. Kipling said to Trix in 1902, "Do you remember Flo?" "Of course, I shall never forget her." "Well she died three months ago: neglected lungs I think, she never took the least care of herself." It is quite possible that Kipling had made a mistake (or Trix had) but far more likely that he decided to fictionalise her death, just as he fictionalised her life. By killing her he could lose that troublesome part of his memory, of romantic and literary failure. In fact, she became a painter of portraits and landscapes, exhibited regularly in the Paris Salon and once had a small exhibition in Bond Street. Flo died two years after Kipling on January 31 1938 at 73, attended by the partner of her later years, Frances Egerton. Her obituarist thought it necessary to remark on "Miss Garrard's sturdy figure and rather masculine costume". Jad Adams's Kipling is published this month by Haus Books, price pounds 18. To order a copy for pounds 17 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-kipling28.1 The result was The Light that Failed , a richly revealing, semi- autobiographical novel, which, though badly reviewed, has stayed in print for more than 100 years. The spark that ignited it was the reappearance in [Rudyard Kipling]'s life of his first love, Flo Garrard, and her crippling second rejection of him. He had first met her as a teenager. When Kipling and his sister Trix were aged five and two respectively, they had been sent from India to board with a Southsea landlady so that they could have an English upbringing and avoid the social fate of "going native" which would have befallen them if they had stayed with their parents in India. Later, Garrard also boarded there. She was a slender girl with pre-Raphaelite looks, pale skin, long dark hair, large grey eyes and a boyish figure. Kipling was smitten on sight with a love that would last 11 years and inform his attitude to women for the rest of his life. Flo, training as a painter, had finished at the Slade School and was due to study further at the Academie Julian in Paris. In the novel aspiriring artist Maisie, the character based on Flo, half- heartedly accepts Kipling (in the character of successful painter Dick), permitting him to visit her on Sunday afternoons and seeking his advice on her work. Dick is completely unable to conceive "that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since he loved her". He feels that his success should command love. Kipling visited Flo at her house in London where she was living with Mabel Price, a fellow student at the Academie Julian and the daughter of an Oxford mathematics don. In the novel, Maisie is living with an unnamed "red-haired girl" who has power over her and seems to despise Dick. The red-haired girl is furious, for example, when, before the two women go off together to France, Maisie permits Dick a chaste kiss. - Jad Adams.