It was while at the Gazette that Kipling produced his bestseller, the cynically light-hearted Simla stories of Plain Tales from the Hills, a portrait frozen in time, of Anglo-India at play. Anglo-India at work came later, with Barrack Room Ballads and Other Works, capturing the cadence of official and military life with such exactitude that General Younghusband remarked that "the soldiers thought, and talked, and expressed themselves exactly like Rudyard Kipling had taught them in his stories...Kipling made the modern soldier".
It was not just Kipling’s prolific output and observations of Indian life that made him so readable; it was his imperialist views—of moral certainties couched in scathing satire or jingoistic verse or allegorical fantasy—that made him the unforgettable "poet of work". By the time he arrived in London in pursuit of a literary career, after six years in India, he was already a celebrity. Thomas Hardy, Rider Haggard and J.M. Barrie were at the height of fame when the creator of ‘Gunga Din’, and ‘The White Man’s Burden’ returned home. Oscar Wilde had just published his instantly successful The Picture of Dorian Gray. So what was it about the 22-year-old writer (who looked middle-aged and 40) that struck such a powerful chord with the reading public?
David Gilmour draws a brilliant study to contrast Kipling’s style and ethic with that of a dandified Wilde and the "self-preening aestheticism" of the decadent poets (Ernest Dowson, pining for a glass of Pernod and Paris garrets a la Baudelaire, quipped that "absinthe makes the tart grow fonder"). Staunchly conservative, Kipling abhorred the aesthetes and in politics he hated all enemies of Empire—liberals, socialists or Irish nationalists. He saw it as his mission in life to tell the English something of the world outside England and "to paint a canvas of the duties, opportunities and self-sacrifice of the imperialist idea".
Gilmour follows Kipling’s life through its many adventures, his years in America (he married an American), his journeys to South Africa during the Boer War and close friendship with Cecil Rhodes and his last years when he emerged as a national icon, warning of the dangers of Nazism.
Like his acclaimed biography of Curzon, arrogant colonialist and visionary statesman, Gilmour’s biography goes much beyond the man: it is as much a study of the imperial ideal as its literary spokesman.
