Triumph and Disaster: The Life of Rudyard Kipling

This is Lee Habiv, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to Our American Stories dot com. They’re some of our favorites. And now, onto The History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories. The life of the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudyard Kipling, was filled with tragedy. He survived a difficult childhood to go on to become one of the most celebrated authors of his day, penning such classics as “The Jungle Book” and “Just So Stories.” Here’s The History Guy with the story of Rudyard Kipling.

Now a ninjus, send a climb. What do you used to spend my time? Son of Her Majesty the Queen! All the black face to crue. The finest man I knew was regimental Beastie, Gungaden. Was Din! Din! Din! You limp and Leppo, brick dust Gungaden! High slippery, hithero water, bring it to Perry low! Yes, squishy-nosed, no idle Gungaden! Written in 1890, the poem “Gungaden” was one of the most famous poems in the world in its time. Chronicles the life of a British soldier in Indian offers an unlikely hero in the person of Gungaden, the regimental water-bearer, who represents an idea, perhaps surprising to the soldier narrator, that a person’s worth is not defined by their race. The poem has inspired films and songs, and its famous last line, “You’re a better man than I am, Gungaden,” is an off-quoted bit of praise. But the author of the poem, the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, lived a tragic life. Rudyard Kipling, the author of such beloved classics as “The Jungle Book” and “Captain’s Courageous,” suffered an abusive and difficult childhood. Went on to become one of the most famous authors of his time, but lived a life of tragedy. The father of three, only one of his children would survive him. Rudyard Kipling was born to Lockwood Kipling, who was the head of an art school, and his wife Alice, in Bombay, India, on December 30th, 1865. They entrusted the early care of their son to an Indian nurse who carried the young Kipling with her during her daily duties to the bazaar. He was with her so much that Kipling’s first language, and the one that he said he spoke in his dreams, was Hindi. But then Nre’s always reminded Kipling to speak only English to his parents, so that they didn’t necessarily know the extent of his fluency. Kipling’s parents were concerned about the health of their amiable son. He was nicknamed “The Little Friend of the World” because of his friendly attitude, and their second child, a daughter named Alice, whom everyone called Tricks, who was born a few years later. Typhoid, cholera, and other epidemics were common, partially because the causes of the disease were unknown, and the Kiplings believe their children would be safer from potential illness. Back in England, they found a boarding house in the south of England that seemed like the perfect place, but they apparently didn’t check all the appropriate references, and it was an unfortunate decision for Rudyard and Tricks. The family that ran the boarding house, called the Holloways, told the children that their parents had left him behind in England because they had been bad. There never seemed to be enough to eat. Would called the lady the house, quizzing him about his daily activities and then picking Aparty’s every answer in an effort to catch him in a lie. The Halloway’s son cruelly beat the five-year-old Kipling with his fists. If the children cried after receiving a letter from their parents, they were locked in the basement for an entire day. The word “help” was carved into the house’s walls by one of the children kept by the Holloways. It was bleak. Kipling forever after called the place “The House of Desolation.” Later in life, Kipling wrote a semi-autobiographical novel entitled “Bob Bob Black Sheep” that detailed the lieves of a six- and three-year-old were left in the care of an abusive family in the south of England. Kipling’s readers didn’t know that he had modeled the story after his own life. “For when young lips have drunk deep o’ the better waters of hate, suspicion, and despair, all the love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge, though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach faith where no faith was.” “Bob Bob Black Sheep,” 1889. After Rudyard’s mother came to take care of children home six years later, she was putting Kipling to bed and went to give him a kiss goodnight. He automatically threw up his hands as if to ward off an attack. It was then that she realized how awful the boarding house life had been to her children. Emotional scars ran deep. Trix would struggle with what might be now labeled as bipolar disorder for her entire life. Rudyard, on the other hand, had intermittent periods of what he called depression and, according to some historians, and an ability to form a close relationship with his wife. Kipling said he’d dealt with his variable moods by working long, at sometimes as much as sixteen hours in a day. He’d later write to a friend, “My head is all queer and I’m going to have to have it mended someday.” But that someday never seemed to come. Kipling received his formal education at United Services College in Devon. It was another boarding school, on one at which he didn’t necessarily thrive. Who called being terrified as this fellow students hung him by his ankles out of the window on the fifth floor of a dormitory. Never particularly athletic, the dreamy and bookish Kipling was described as an indifferent student. “Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and steered away, so he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood.” “The Dream of Duncan Parnis,” 1884. But there were echoes of Kipling’s earlier amiable attitude towards the world. One of his classmates remembered him as a “capering, podgy little fellow, as precocious as ever could be.” When he finished his time at United Services College, Kipling took a job at a newspaper near his parents in Lahore, India, which is now in Pakistan. Kipling began publishing his poetry, which was incredibly well received by the public, almost from the beginning of his career. He formed a close relationship with an American publicist in London named Walcott Bellister, and when Balister unexpectedly died, Kipling married the deceased man’s sister, Carrie, in January 1892. The rush wedding was small, with only four people in attendance, because London had virtually come to a standstill; there was a crippling influenza epidemic sweeping in the city. Kipling described the atmosphere in his biography as, “It was in the thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones.”

And you’re listening to The History Guy tell the story of the youngest winner in the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudyard Kipling. Mike Goodness, monsters, “The House of Desolation,” the story of the boarding house. He grew up in. An indifferent student. You hear that a lot about really talented folks. They’re indifferent students because they just haven’t been tapped for their potential and their talent. We capture that often on the stories we tell here. When we continue more of the remarkable life of poet and writer Rudyard Kipling here on Our American Stories. Leah Abib here, and I’m inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country’s 250th birthday only a short time away. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here to millions for years to come, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, any amount helps. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Rudyard Kipling.

Let’s return to The History Guy.

The couple honeymoon to the United States for a time and went on to Japan, where they received news that their bank had collapsed and taken much of their fortune with it. They returned to the States, Carrie’s home country, pursas a home near her family in Brattleboro, Vermont. Carrie Kipling discovered she was pregnant and gave birth to the couple’s first child, Josephine, on December 29th, 1892. In his biography, Kipling wrote that his daughter was born in “three foot of snow on the night of 29 December 1892, her mother’s birthday being the 31st, and mine the 30th on the same month. We congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things.” Kipling described this period of his life as the happiest and most productive as his career. He loved living in the countryside of Vermont, away from the noisy cities or temptatos like alcohol or opium. He wrote such classics as “The Jungle Book,” “Captain’s Courageous,” both of which would later be made into films, and other books filled with short stories and poetry. “Now this is the law of the Jungle, as old and as true as the sky, and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper, the girls the tree trunk. The law runneth forward and back, for the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” “The Second Jungle Book,” 1895. In 1896, Carrie gave birth to the couple’s second child, a daughter named Elsie. And a son quickly followed in 1897, whom they named John. Kipling began telling his eldest daughter, Josephine, whom he called Effie, versions of his now beloved “Just So Stories” for little children every night before bed. He said, “In the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word that would be told ‘just so,’ or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them: ‘The Whale Tale,’ ‘The Camel Tale,’ and ‘The Rhinoceros Tale.'” The “Just So Stories” are imaginative stories about how animals began to look and act the way they do in nature. The titles detail each story. There’s “How the Whale Got His Throat” and “How the Camel Got His Hump.” The enduring popularity of these stories speaks to the loving care with which Kipling wrote them for his children. “I keep six honest serving-men. They taught me all I knew. Their names are What and Where and When and How and Why and Who?” “The Elephant’s Child,” 1902. The Kiplings’ idyllic existence in the United States ended when Kipling had a public run-in with Carrie’s brother, Baby Ballister. Blister struggled with addiction to alcohol and money troubles. After publicly threatening to blow off Kipling’s head, Balister was arrested and a trial followed, which drew quite a lot of attention from the press because of Kipling’s popularity as an author. As for his part, Kipling seemed to mourn the loss of his privacy. Ever, moved his family back to England in an effort to reclaim it. “Were all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” “The Light They Failed,” 1891. Unfortunately, he suffered one of the largest losses of his life. The Kiplings’ eldest daughter, Josephine, aged six, succumbed to pneumonia on March 6th, 1899. Kipling had been ill at the same time, and at first the family feared that they would lose them both. Ever, Kipling survived to discover that his daughter had not. “The world is very lovely, and it is very horrible, and it doesn’t care about your life or mine or anything else.” “The Light They Failed,” 1891. When “The Justice Stories for Children” was first published in 1902, Kipling illustrated the stories himself. The timing of the publication, so soon after the loss of Josephine, was particularly poignant. The loss forever after changed the author. According to those close to him, the man who had once been described as “a friend of the world” smiled and laughed a little less often. Kipling’s sister Tricks said, “He became a sadder and a harder man.” Kipling received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, and remains the youngest person ever to have obtained the honor, but his star seemed already to be fading. He espound imperialistic political ideas and encouraged countries to pursue imperialistic policies. Kipling wrote the poem “The White Man’s Burden,” and in an effort to encourage the United States to take a more active role in the Philippines. “Take up the White Man’s Burden, Send forth the best you breed, Go, bind your sons to exile, to serve your captive’s need.” “The White Man’s Burden,” 1899. He was also in support of the Great War, World War One, encourage his son John to serve the conflict. At first, John failed a medical examination to join the Royal Navy because of his weak eyesight. He attempted to list two more times, it was rejected both times, and then, using his father’s connections, Kipling joined the Irish Guards took part in the bloody Battle of Loos, the largest British assault of 1915. John Kipling, age 18, was assumed to have been blown apart by shells, and no piece of his corpse was ever recovered for his family to mourn. Over 2015, the Commonwealth Grave Commission announced it had located the grave of John Kipling, whose remains been buried in a French cemetery. “If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.” “Epithets of War,” 1918. This second-last hit Kipling and his wife incredibly hard. Kipling said he read the novels of Jane Austen to his wife and remaining daughter over and over again in an effort to shake the grief he felt at John’s death. He also joined the group that would later become the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in honor of his lost son. Kipling suggested some of the biblical verses the Commission put on the stones of the war dead. He also wrote a regimental history of the Irish Guards, which was published in 1923 and has been considered by some to be one of the best examples of a regimental history ever pinned. “There were too many almost children, of whom no record remains. They came out of Warley with the constant renewed drafts, lived the span of a second lieutenant’s life, and were spent.” “The Irish Guards in the Great War,” 1923. While morning his lost children, Kipling’s health began a study decline. Kipling suffered from dwadno Ulcler’s, which it is believed eventually killed him at age seventy. The writer’s ashes are interred at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. This Forever and of the remains of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens. Kipling’s only surviving child, Elsie, married George Bambridge, a diplomat, in 1924. She never had any children, so Kipling’s bud line ended. She died on April 24th, 1976. Like some celebrities today, Kipling’s death was reported ahead of its time. Reading about it in a magazine, he wrote to the magazine, “I’ve just read that I died. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.” Many of his political viewpoints, notably about imperialism, no long younger held sway in the international world as he grew older, and he did receive much criticism for that. George Orwell described him as a “jingo imperialist” who was “morally insensitive” and a “gutter patriot.” His literary career had a meteoric rise, but then seemed to stagnate; and he often spoke to friends about the foibles of early fame, like his idyllic views of empire. In many ways, Rudyard Kipling seemed to become history even before his days had passed, especially in the way that the loss of his children affected him. But what is left of Rudyard Kipling when everything else is turned to dust are his writings, like perhaps his most famous poem, “If,” Penn in 1895, which seems to represent his tragic life but exhorts us all to be the best that we can be, even in the face of terrible loss. “If you can make one heap of all your winnings, risk it on one turn of pigeon toss, lose.

Start again at your beginnings.

Never say one word about your loss. If you can force your heart and nerve and sin you to serve your term long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will that tells them all, ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk to crowd to keep your virtue, walk with kings, nor lose the common touch. If neither foe nor loving friend can hurt you, If all men matter to you, but none too much. If you can fill the everlasting minute with sixty seconds of distance roun, then yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and—what’s more—you’ll be a man, my son!”

And great job as always by Greg Hangler bringing us the story, and a special thanks as always to The History Guy. “History Deserves to be Remembered.” That’s where you can find him and his work on the YouTube channel, “History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered.” Just do that Google search and you’ll enjoy what you see. Poets’ Corner is remarkable all by itself, with memorials, but the very few who actually got buried. Include, as was indicated, not just Dickens and Chaucer and Tennyson, but in the end, Kipling too, joining this august breed. And in addition, there are memorials for au Jane Austen and Blake the poet, and Auden and.