And that's a wrap!
Sadly, we must let Andrew go at some point, despite all the fantastic questions we’ve had submitted and fascinating points raised during our Kim Reading Group this month.
If you’ve never taken part in the Reading Group, do join us this month as we start one of the greatest epics ever written... check back next Tuesday!
samjordison has a question to end the chat:
What would you recommend as a follow-up read from Kipling to our readers who have enjoyed Kim so much this month?
Guardian contributor Difficult one. Is it Empire you're paticularly interested in? Or the period? Going back, why not take a look at The Moonstone, with its strongly colonial link. Otherwise rRead a bit more Kipling e.g. Plain Tales
tonymcgowan has a question about Kim - and cricket:
I felt the first half of the book was magnificent, but then it somewhat loses its way. Am I wrong? And how has your experience as a wicket keeper, and in particular of the notorious Lycett-McGowan trench affected your reading of Kipling’s work?
Guardian contributor Thanks for raising the tone/bringing a note of levity to what has perhaps been a rather too serious discussion. Which book are you referring to? Kim? Or my biography? If the former, I can understand why you suggest that. You like Kipling in reportorial mode, telling us about Lahore and India, not the more spiritual stuff. If the latter, well, I can’t possibly comment. Sadly I wrote my book well before experiencing the excitements of the Lycett-McGowan trench. (Memo to other readers – we play cricket together. I’m the wicketkeeper, he’s often first slip, and the ball sometimes inexplicably sails past us both.) Kipling wasn’t a sportsman. As you know he railed against the ‘flannelled fools at the wicket’.
"Kipling did have modern sensibilities"
Terrapod says:
Kipling is often now pilloried as a racist, albeit one who just held views that were commonly held in his time. However, I feel that Kim is extremely sympathetic to Indians, even Hurree Babu despite Kipling apparently disapproving of “educated natives”. How do you reconcile Kipling with this book that is almost modern in it’s treatment of India and Indians?
Guardian contributor I guess the answer is something to do with the fact that Kipling was an imaginative writer. I don’t know about the book (I presume we’re back to Kim) being ‘almost modern’. As I think I’ve said, Kipling was often sympathetic to individual Indians, not necessarily to a mass of them. But then he wasn’t at all sympathetic to a mass of Americans either.
You raised something I haven’t really covered, which is that Kipling did have modern sensibilities. Around 1900 he was attacked by the conservative G.K. Chesterton for being too interested in modern things, particularly mechanical things, such as the motor car, telegraph, radio, cinema etc, which Chesterton thought would upset the delicate balance of British society.
Robert Rudolph says:
Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt were friends who clashed on their respective nationalist views, but it strikes me that they had a similar view of the world and our moral choices. Both believed in action and self-discipline. Both had a mystic religious streak and spoke much on moral issues, but were not really Christian. Both were much influenced by John Bunyan as children, and carried his images with them through life. [Kipling wrote a memorial poem about Roosevelt titled “Great Heart,” a Bunyan character--not knowing that “Great Heart” was TR’s private nickname for HIS father. Were they brothers under the skin?
Guardian contributor I didn’t know about the nickname. However you’re right about the affinities between the two men. Theodore Roosevelt introduced Kipling to some of the great and the good in Washington in the 1890s. Kipling sent Roosevelt a copy of The White Man’s Burden when America invaded Cuba in 1897. (This was when William Randolph Heart told his correspondent, ‘You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.)
Nataliya Lashtabova asks:
I am studying R. Kipling as a literary contemporary with H.R.Haggard. Is it possible to trace any parallelism in the characters, if we bear in mind that the countries he described are different, and the politics, culture etc. as well?
Guardian contributor If you referring to the two men themselves, I think they were similar – certainly in their approach to Britain’s empire. Haggard was trifle older, and he wrote classic romantic adventure stories, which wasn’t exactly Kipling’s thing. However he became very friendly with Haggard later in life. The two men used to discuss religious matters. As you can read in my biography, Kipling told Haggard about how he occasionally felt the love of God but felt it difficult to ‘hold’ the mystic sense of this communion. He felt that this meant mortals should get too near Him – a theme he often returned to.
Karolina Szymborska has a question about Kipling’s association with the boy scouts in America and Britain, and the significance of Kim to scouts:
Is there any correspondence between him and Baden - Powell? Also, do you know if Kipling knew about the Polish Noblist Henryk Sienkiewicz - was he aware of his writings?
Guardian contributor I’m going to be quite quick in replying to this,as we're nearing the end. Yes, there are correspondences. Kipling was a friend of Baden Powell, and he contributed to the birth of Scouting (and even more to the Cubs). I don’t know about the Sienkiewicz connection.
LilyDale says:
I’ve seen it suggested (can’t remember where) that Kipling’s Urdu was much more limited than you would think from reading the Indian stories and Kim. Is this the case? How much knowledge did Kipling actually have of the Indian languages?
Guardian contributor Kipling was brought up by in his birthplace Bombay by ayahs and servants, and was almost certainly proficient in kitchen Hindi from an early age. To complicate matters, however, the language was generally known as Hindustani in those days. He left India in 1871 at the age of just five. I imagine he would have lost his Hindi pretty quickly when he was at school. However he probably picked it up just as quickly when he returned to Lahore in India (as it then was) in 1882, aged 16. There he would have been introduced to Urdu, the very similar version of Hindustani with a Persian- Arabic script. It is known that he employed a teacher to learn Persian. He was fascinated by the language’s influences - in particular, that of the 14th century Shirazi poet and mystic known as Hafiz. One of Kipling’s own poems was ‘Certain Maxims of Hafiz’.
nilpferd asks:
Can Kipling be seen to have fed Britain’s obsession with India, in mythologising it so successfully? Or, conversely, might Britain have relinquished control of the region earlier if it hadn’t been so powerfully fused into the very core of that Empire in a cultural sense, thanks to Kim and other stories?
Guardian contributor I don’t think Kipling quite had that political influence. You have to remember that he never returned to India after 1892 when he was 26. However his poems, his stories (Plain Tales from the Hills in particular), the Jungle Books and his novel Kim played a significant role in introducing a version of India to British readers. I don’t think they had any influence on the way that Britain held on to India. That sort of decision was rather more dictated by politics and economics. After about 1910, Kipling’s die-hard attitude to India was seen as an anachronism. He probably had more political influence through his lobbying for national defence after the Boer war and his vehement antipathy to Germany which lasted until his death.
One point – I’m struck by how much the questions to me today have been about Kipling and India. I think I’m right in saying that many of you were in a Kim reading group. You’ve clearly thought a lot about that novel. Please ask me a bit about other aspects of Kipling’s life and work – his poetry, for example.
Is it possible to read Kipling without a sense of unease about the Raj?
Boxofviolets asks:
How difficult was it for you to get past Kipling’s apparent racism? Is it possible to read him without a sense of unease about the Raj?
Guardian contributor Kipling’s attitudes sometimes jarred – I can’t deny that. He was an imperialist, with a strong sense of the duties and responsibilities of imperialism (the stuff of his poem Recessional). As a right-wing Conservative, he was totally unsympathetic to any Indian aspirations to self-determination. However he had a deep understanding of and respect for Indian culture (as is evidenced in Kim – for all its minor discrepancies etc.) His writings are full of understanding of individual Indians. In retrospect it seems to have been a strange division of attitudes to straddle. But that is the way it was. And that is why it doesn’t leave me with any enduring unease. Rather I think a knowledge of Kipling leads to a more profound understanding of the Raj
TimHannigan asks:
Kipling often deployed a sly irony when it came to topics about which “no Englishman” should rightly know, but about which he wrote with apparent authority.
Can we make any reasonable assumptions about the origins of Kipling’s apparent knowledge of “native matters”, and of the goings on in brothels and opium dens? Was this stuff he properly knew first-hand, or was it truly gleaned from “friends”? Was it instead “knowledge” drawn, in classic Orientalist style, from written reports and texts? Or was it – worse yet! – simply cooked up in his own head?
Guardian contributor Like many writers (for example, Dickens in London), Kipling liked to (and was perhaps forced by the heat and insomnia) to get up and walk during the night. He would go in the bazaar, as he wrote in In the House of Suddhoo, On the City Gate and elsewhere.
Remember he was also a journalist on Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette, so he was visiting and reporting on all sorts of local places and events.
Remember also that he was an imaginative writer, so I think one can give him a little bit of licence to ‘restructure’ what he experienced. I’m not so sure of his need to ‘dominate’ however. He tried to be as objective an observer as he could. That is one of his strengths as a writer, though not necessarily as a political commentator.
"I think Kim is more nuanced and multi-layered than Edward Said seemed to suggest"
MGFMSKM wants to know:
I’m a big fan of Edward Said, but was (pleasantly) surprised to discover that Kim seemed much more nuanced and multilayered than Said’s writings seem to suggest. Do you have any comments/opinion’s on Said’s work on Kim, and/or postcolonial writings on the text more broadly?
Guardian contributor I think you are right about Kim being more nuanced and multi-layered than Said seemed to suggest. I believe Said himself understood that - if you read some of his other writings on the book. However, more generally, I think that Said’s approach has expanded our understanding of that novel, and of Kipling’s life and work in general. As a result of post-colonial studies, we can now see more fully Kipling’s position in history and literature. He is beginning to be appreciated as a man of his time who helps illuminate an early phase in modern Indian culture.
Batemans has done extra reading, having read Andrew Lycett’s article about Kipling published in the Guardian last year:
In his stimulating discussion of the unexpected revival of interest in Rudyard Kipling, biographer Andrew Lycett makes just two references to the powerful role of music, in each case folk items. On behalf of the Kipling Society I have catalogued over 860 musical settings of Kipling’s verse (320 titles) from some 400 composers worldwide. This vast, varied and growing resource could contribute so much to the enjoyment and appreciation of Kipling’s writing if only it were better known. Can Andrew suggest how this might be further encouraged?
Guardian contributor As I mentioned in that article I wrote in the Guardian, there is indeed an interest in Kipling among modern popular musicians, usually picking up on the folk strain in his writing. He wasn’t much interested in music per se, but he was fascinated by songs – from the music hall and elsewhere. One of his best known collections is of course Barrack-Room Ballads – a form of verse he often returned to.
If anyone wants to check this person's list of Kipling's musical settings (I know who he is), they can be found on the website of the Kipling Society
Another topic that has been discussed frequently is whether Kipling is primarily an author enjoyed by white, male readers.
palfreyman asks:
Do you think women, or non-white people could ever write biographies of Kipling? Would they even engage with his writing enough to want to do so? Do you know if any exist?
Given all the issues we have discussed regarding Kipling and his apparent advocacy of Empire, I thought this might be something worth considering: is Kipling’s audience primarily white and male?
Guardian contributor I think Kipling appeals (and has always appealed) to all sorts. It’s true that his readership has usually been white, but women have definitely featured strongly from the start. The Just So Stories were written for his daughter Josephine.
As for the question of women or non-white people writing biographies of him, I can say that I know of at least three excellent biography type books on him by women – one (a literary biography, really) by Professor Jan Montefiore of Kent University, another, Kipling and Trix – a fictional biographical study of the relationship between Kipling and his sister Trix by Mary Hamer, who happens to be chair of the Kipling Society, and finally The Long Trail, a life of him written through his travels, by his kinsman Meryl MacDonald.
Updated
A point that frequently popped up in this month’s Reading Group discussions: readers have varied on whether or not Kipling is critical of the British Raj in Kim.
MythicalMagpie says:
Kipling is still selling a political message. He’s showing us an India where religions live relatively harmoniously under British rule, a world where the troublesome Rajahs need to be got rid of for the good of all. In terms of modern British governments and their policy towards foreign intervention, you could ask what’s changed. Kipling is sometimes critical of the method, if fact at one point he criticised the British Raj for not going far enough militarily in Kim for cost reasons, but he was clearly a supporter of the system and saw it as largely benign. I doubt very much if he would ever have been a supporter of India’s independence.
Guardian contributor I think I just answered something from you. But they are interesting questions. So here goes again.
I think that is generally a fair enough assessment. Kipling was definitely critical of the way the empire was run. But he had little real understanding of its economic underpinnings. In some ways he was very aware how most of what happened in India went on without any references or consequences for the outside world. However he also saw it as an integral part of the British empire.
We can now see much more clearly how the Raj was run for British interests. Kipling didn’t necessarily see it that way.
"Kipling's views on India after WWI became a bit bonkers"
MythicalMagpie says:
Kim can be read as a coming of age novel. Kipling seems to be exploring the idea of India as communal parent to an orphaned boy, where the country itself and its varied people can work on his ‘white blood’ to create Kipling’s ideal of a man. Only he seems to be also pointing out that the child has to be white and male for it to work properly, not an uncommon belief in his time.
Given that, would you say Kim still has any place as a young adult book today, beyond that of a historical document and lesson in imperialist thinking? Do you think it can or should be allowed without qualification to teach kids how to become adults now?
Guardian contributor Kipling's views on India after the First World War became a bit bonkers. He really thought that any moves to self-determination posed threats to the whole fabric of the Empire.
As for Kim as a young adult book today, I appreciate your considered point of view. I don't see why it should just be a historical document. It's also a fasincating adventure story, an extraordinary quest.
"Kipling was both a creator and a follower of British society’s view of Empire"
barneymatey asks:
I’d like to know to what extent Kipling’s work a creator or follower of British society’s view on its Empire. Was his work saying something new, or was he just putting to paper commonly held views? Was his view of Empire seriously challenged while he was at the height of his career?
Guardian contributor Now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty. I think he was both a creator and a follower of British society’s view of Empire.
It used to be said of colonial administrators in India and elsewhere in the interwar years that they got tired of the way that everyone’s attitudes were conditioned by Kipling.
But of course Kipling much earlier had been reacting to what he found in India. A sceptic at first (a Gladstonian Liberal indeed), he found he was truly impressed by the commitment of the administrators, lawyers, soldiers there.
Was he saying something new? Well, he had first-hand experience of empire, and it’s no secret that he thought it was a good thing.
Certainly there were challenges to his opinions, particularly after c. 1900, when he had shown himself to be such a strong advocate of the Boer War.
nilpferd says:
Kim is often considered a forerunner of the modern espionage novel, and it contains aspects which would later be developed by Maugham, Ambler, Fleming, and le Carre, but none of those authors portrayed characters with any discernible appetite for the spiritual. Most of them began writing from personal experience of espionage work, or in Ambler’s case a keen interest in politics. Yet the spiritual aspects to Kim seem to dominate, with espionage seemingly only included for dramatic and plot purposes.
Guardian contributor You raise some interesting points, particularly about the apparent lack of a spiritual dimension to espionage stories. Some would argue differently – that the spy’s career is often part of a spiritual quest. As the biographer also of Ian Fleming, I have read several articles, and at least one serious and actually rather good book, about James Bond as a religious figure, fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of darkness.
"India helped Kipling realise there were different approaches to God"
nightjar12 wants to know:
Reading Kim I have the impression that Kipling was impressed by the Buddhist approach to life as portrayed in the character of the lama. Was he religious and if so, what religion did he follow?
Guardian contributor Good question. Kipling wasn’t religious in the sense that he adhered to any particular faith. However his consciousness was attuned to religion. Having lived in India, with its multiple religions, he realised there were different approaches to God. He liked to praise Allah for giving him ‘two sides to his head’. For a while he was a practising Freemason. One thing he liked about the Lodge in Lahore was that it was multi-ethnic.
Which authors influenced Kipling's writing?
MsCarey asks:
Who were Kipling’s writing influences and which writers did he admire?
palfreyman suggested:
It is well documented that he utterly admired the adventure novels of H Rider Haggard, [as well as] Ossian, Browning, Ruskin and more... he was deeply influenced by the King James Bible, and there are very few pages in Kipling that do not show something of its influence.
Guardian contributor You have made a good stab at Kipling’s literary influences. You are right about the Bible, and several authors from the generation just before his, such as Browning. But also William Morris, Rossetti and Swinburne, through his Pre-Raphaelite connections. Shakespeare of course, and lots of much wider reading – explorers such as Hakluyt etc.
Updated
"It is has taken Kipling a long time to recover from George Orwell's accusations"
L1ZDW1AR wants to know:
Kipling’s reputation has suffered since his great popularity during his lifetime. Is it time to reassess his contribution to literature eg in novels such as Kim?
Guardian contributor You raise some interesting points there. His reputation has risen and fallen over the years. In 1890s when he returned from India, determined to make his name in the London literary scene, he was the ‘great star from the East’, the hope of British letters. His reputation began to fall around or just before the time of the First World War, when readers began to tire of the unremitting nature of his right-wing politics.
Despite the establishment of the Kipling Society, one of the first literary societies, in the late 1920s, he had few advocates among the intelligentsia of the jazz age.
Then in 1942 came George Orwell’s cutting observations about Kipling, the ‘jingo imperialist’, whose view of life could in no way be ‘accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person’. I think it is important to understand that Orwell was a colonial, not unlike Kipling. (Indeed he, like Kipling, was born in India.) In the 1940s you either identified with the British Empire, probably because you have worked or lived in it, or you were agin’ it, because this was the age of progressive, anti-colonialist, anti-Nazi politics. There wasn’t a great meeting of minds between the two.
It is has taken Kipling a long time recover from those accusations. However I think that is beginning to happen, largely because that generation from the 1940s, with all its baggage, has passed on. Readers are now able to approach Kipling afresh and they are finding all sorts of things to celebrate. Look to some of his later hitherto neglected stories, for example
Updated
Kicking off the Kipling chat is Malunkey, who asks:
I sense a lot of emotional intelligence and imaginative sympathy in Kipling’s writings. Was this also true of Kipling the man in his dealing with friends, family, etc.?
Guardian contributor Hello, all. It’s good to start with a question that gets to the heart of Kipling, the man. You point to two qualities, which are arguably different, and also ask about Kipling the man as opposed to Kipling the writer. But I think the answer is that, as an individual, he possessed both attributes. One of his other traits was his curiosity. (We all know about the elephant’s ‘Satiable Curtiosity’.) He was genuinely interested in people. (This may be something to do with having been a journalist – of course, as a former journalist I would say that!) So when he working in Lahore (having returned to India to live with his parents who couldn’t afford to send him to university) he used to liked spending time talking to the soldiers in Mian Mir barracks just outside the city. However he didn’t just speak to the officers in their mess. He liked to get out and meet the rank and file soldiers, whose stories, problems and aspirations he was soon writing about in his Mulvaney tales (about the ‘Soldiers Three’) and later in his Barrack-Room Ballads, in which he demonstrated an extraordinary empathy with the squaddies who went to all corners of the globe to fight for the ‘Widow in Windsor’. I’ve always liked the way he understands how they incorporated this experience into their view of the world. So Kipling writes later poems about soldiers failing to fit into life at home (‘Chant Pagan’) and dreaming of their times abroad (‘Mandalay’).
I could point to other examples. But I’ll limit myself to one – the way he communicated with children. He seemed to have a real way of talking to them (as his Just So Stories, and other tales, show). This wasn’t a creepy semi-sexualised interest in young people, but a genuine fascination with what they had to say, coupled, it probably needs to be said, with the fact there was part of his psyche that was very child-like – or at least attuned to children.
Updated
And we're live!
Welcome everyone. Rudyard Kipling biographer Andrew Lycett is here to answer all your questions about the wonderful classic novel Kim – our Reading Group book this past month.
Thank you for asking so many fantastic questions already. Andrew is going to be nice and busy... Do please keep them coming and enjoy hearing from a fine writer.
Updated
Post your questions for Kipling expert, Andrew Lycett
Andrew Lycett is “a biographer of distinction”, according to Giles Foden. His life of Rudyard Kipling was described as a “magisterial study” by Terry Eagleton and met with wide acclaim when it was published in 1999. So too was Kipling Abroad: Traffics and discoveries from Burma to Brazil, a collection of Kipling’s travel writing. He has also recently edited Kipling and War – a look at Kipling’s intriguing, complicated writings about the military conflicts of his time.
Andrew has also written an excellent book about Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, and critically acclaimed lives of Wilkie Collins and Dylan Thomas, among others. He has also worked as a foreign correspondent for the Times and Sunday Times, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A fantastic guest, in other words, who will be able to tell us a great deal both about the art of biography and about Kipling.
Andrew will be here at 1pm on 29 January – but please feel free to get a question in early. To help get the ball rolling, I’m happy to say that we have five copies of his Kipling biography to give away to the first five readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive question, in the comments section below.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
OK, I think that it. Many thanks for posting such interesting questions.