Rudyard Kipling. By Andrew Lycett. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 659pp. £25 in UK
One of the wilder improbabilities of Anglo-Irish literature would surely have been Rudyard Kipling's mother, Alice Macdonald, marrying her first fiance, the Donegal poet William Allingham - he of "Up the airy mountain,/Down the rushy glen,/We daren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men". That it nearly happened - but didn't - possibly spared us winsome little horrors from Allingham Og on the lines of "Oh elf is elf and sprite is sprite and never the twain shall meet . . ."
The failed engagement says a lot. Far from being simply an unreflective celebrant of empire, Rudyard Kipling was of eminent and artistic stock. His cousin Stanley Baldwin became prime minister. His mother Alice Macdonald mixed with the Pre-Raphaelites, who quarried a treacle-mine of faery sentimentality in a vain pursuit for art. The emotional and intellectual simplicities of Pre-Raphaelism - which could have been halted simply by flogging its ringleaders around the fleet - paradoxically were re-created in the writings of Rudyard Kipling, though, thank god, its simpering preoccupations with blessed damozels leaning over the gold bar of heaven were not.
Rudyard Kipling clearly inherited his very considerable wit from his mother. Loathing the Methodist austerity in which she had been raised, she once took a preserved lock of John Wesley's hair and cried: "See! The hair of the dog that bit us", before throwing it into the fire. Yet for all her charm, she was a classically imperial mother: Rudyard was born in India, his first language being kitchen Hindustani, but he was soon sent to England, where he spent the rest of his childhood, not seeing his parents for seven years. Neither fully English, Indian nor Anglo-Indian, he was, classically, a man of the margins who not merely captures the centre but then creates an enchanting myth around which the centre proceeds to shape itself.
Because that centre - imperial, white, Protestant, English - is so deeply unfashionable today, Kipling himself is profoundly unfashionable; yet his name survives despite his appalling political credentials. Why? The answer is simple. He is one of the giants of English literature; for all his simplifications and his often appalling ideas, he was a writer of true and incandescent genius, whose tales and whose expressions enrich the English language perhaps more than those of any other writer this century.
Irish people understandably dislike Kipling, for few polemicists have so vilified the cause of Irish nationalism as he did. But Kipling's attitude to the Irish was deeply complex, a feature Andrew Lycett completely ignores in this sadly unimaginative biography. Kipling's very first (and now vanished) novel was about Mother Maturin, an Irishwoman in Lahore. From that uncompleted tale, over time, emerged the novel Kim, whose hero's full name is Kim O'Rishti, or "Kim of the Irish."
Kipling was obsessed with Irish soldiery. "My name is O'Kelly, I've heard the Revelly/ From Birr to Bareilly", opens his poem Shillin' a Day, not mentioned in this biography. Not mentioned, either, is Boh da Thone, which observes admiringly: "There were lads from Galway, Louth and Meath/Who went to their death with a joke in their teeth". His fixation with the Irish under arms went so far as to put his son into the Irish Guards after the outbreak of the Great War. Poor John was killed in action in 1915.
This was the most important event in Kipling's life. Not merely did it prompt him to pen some fine and coruscating - yet largely neglected - poems about war, but it caused him to write his quite magnificent two-volume history of the Irish Guards in the conflict. Lycett gives no appearance of having read this work, though it is a masterpiece of military literature, its every line beating with a passionate pride in the feats of Irish soldiers.
Throughout, there are semi-fictional interpolations from plain guardsmen: ironic, self-depreciating, laconic, and thoroughly Irish. Moreover, it is an astoundingly detailed work, which, as I know from experience, could only have been written by a man who walked every inch of the battlefields he describes. Lycett makes no mention of this.
Yet for all his love of Irish soldiers, Kipling detested Irish nationalism. Lycett reports an unsubstantiated claim that Kipling gave (an astounding) £30,000 to the Ulster Volunteers, though admits there is no evidence for this. No matter. It is of a piece. Kipling's poem Ulster 1912, one of the most vitriolic and libellous invectives in accepted literature, plays to a deeply sectarian gallery; though he had elsewhere despairingly written, "The deuce of the whole situation is that behind & over all is fear of Rome . . . as I thought had died out in the fires of Smithfield". He did not scruple about rekindling those fires, his bitterness surviving death: his will stipulated that none of his estate be invested in Soviet or Irish government bonds.
Kipling's opinions were often pure caricature. Suffragettes? "You realise of course that even a limited female bill means more trouble in India and Egypt." Wogs? "One cannot rejoice over dead Mahomadens unless they are Arab." Yids in Palestine? " . . .That end of the world which is all microbes & Jews and germs."
Yet withal, his opinions could often be perfectly irreproachable. "I love the immaterial in English achievements. Let's have no more dominant races. We don't need them". Torquay struck him as being so smugly British that he yearned to dance naked down its streets, and he openly kissed his close male friends on the cheek.
Kipling, his extraordinary life and his astonishing output - unparalleled in English letters - all deserve a biographer who writes with panache and who can integrate the writer's life with his work. Lycett, a plodder through laundry lists, does neither. Furthermore, he resorts to jarringly anachronistic modernisms. "His neighbour, Enid Bagnold . . thought (Kipling) was gay". Gay? Bah. Rudyard's sister, Trix, who in childhood succumbed to the authority of her acting-governess, is said to have been a victim of "the Stockholm syndrome". Trite psychobabble. And Lycett's observation of the period that "the official attitude to sex remained ostrich-like" is both a typical stylistic atrocity - inexcusable in a book about a very great stylist indeed - and a reminder that good literary editors, like good literary biographers, are a vanishing species.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist