Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (90 page)

As Kipling explained in his brief Preface: ‘This is not exactly a book of real ghost-stories, as the cover makes believe, but rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector can be certain of is that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted; another man either made up a wonderful fiction, or visiteda very strange place; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself.

‘Ghost-stories are very seldom told at first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule. It is not a very good specimen, but you can credit it from beginning to end. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did.’

In fact, despite the author’s entreaty to ‘credit’ the events reported in ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, the supernatural element was basically explained away at the end.

Kipling had sold the rights for the six paperback books for £200 plus a small royalty. Each of the Indian Railway Library booklets featured a line drawing on the cover by an artist named Brownlow Fforde. His artwork of skull-headed figure for
The Phantom ’Rickshaw
was suitably macabre.

Encouraged by his parents and his editor-in-chief, Edward Kay Robinson, in the autumn of 1889 Kipling left India to become a roving correspondent and try to make a career for himself as an author.

‘After all, there was no need for me to stay here for ever,’Kipling later recalled, ‘and I could go away and measure myself against the doorsills of London as soon as I had money.’

He travelled with the Hills to Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canton, Japan and San Francisco. While crossing the United States, they visited Mrs Hill’s family home in Beaver, Pennsylvania, where he met her sister Caroline Taylor, to whom he became informally engaged.

The group finally arrived in London in September and took rooms in Villiers Street, off The Strand. Kipling’s reputation had preceded him, and within a year he was already being acclaimed as one of the most brilliant authors of his time and a literary heir to Charles Dickens.

‘There was an evident demand for my stuff,’ Kipling observed. ‘I do not recall that I stirred a hand to help myself. Things happened to me.’

Yet despite his new fame, Kipling soon found himself in debt. On the advice of Walter Besant, founder of the Authors’Society, he retained the services of AP Watt as his literary agent. ‘In the course of forty odd years I do not recall any difference between us that three minutes’ talk could not clear up,’ Kipling later wrote about their very successful working relationship.

By the spring of 1890, Kipling had become so famous that his work was the subject of an editorial in
The Times
of March 25 which stated that the author had ‘tapped a new vein’. Amongst the titles singled out for praise by the newspaper was ‘that very grim story’, ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ (1886).

‘I am afraid that I was not much impressed by reviews,’ said Kipling. ‘As I got to know literary circles and their critical output, I was struck by the slenderness of some of the writers’equipment.’

Kipling found himself being praised by such contemporaries as Oscar Wilde, Lord Tennyson, Henry James and Andrew Lang, while Jerome K. Jerome observed that the author, ‘must have felt like a comet trying to lose its tail’.

By now, all his earlier books had finally been published in English and American editions. However, despite his literary success, Kipling remained unlucky in love. While staying in London, his engagement to Caroline Taylor was broken off, and a chance meeting in the street with childhood sweetheart Florence Garrard ended unsuccessfully when he tried to resume their relationship.

The strain was too much, and Kipling suffered another nervous breakdown.

While Kipling was convalescing in London, he made a new friend, American writer and publisher Wolcott Balestier. He also met Balestier’s mother and his sisters, Josephine and Caroline (‘Carrie’). During his recovery, Kipling wrote his first novel,
The Light That Failed
,about a painter going blind who was spurned by the woman he loved. It was published in New York to great success the following year.

Meanwhile, an unauthorised collection of his articles from the
Pioneer
was published as
The City of Dreadful Night
,thefourteenth volume in AH Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library series. The title piece was an atmospheric prose-poem about death-like sleepers during the heat of an Indian night. Kipling attempted to have the book suppressed.

One of Kipling’s best-known horror stories, ‘The Mark of the Beast’ appeared over two issues of the
Pioneer
in July 1890. It was about a man cursed by a native priest to apparently transform into a were-leopard. Kipling himself described the tale as ‘a rather nasty story’, while Andrew Lang declared it ‘poisonous stuff’.

However, in his ground-breaking essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, American author HP Lovecraft wrote: ‘The naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to display towards him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget.’

The unconventional policeman Strickland who appeared in the story later turned up in a further five tales by Kipling, including ‘The Recrudescence of Imray’ (aka ‘The Return of Imray’, 1891), a murder mystery that revolved around a deadly curse and the decaying corpse of an Indian manservant. This latter tale appeared in another pirated volume of Kipling’s fiction,
Life’s Handicap
,published by Hurst & Company of New York in 1891.

That same year Kipling collaborated with Wolcott Balestier in writing the romantic novel
The Naulahka: A Story of West and East
,Balestier, who had now become Kipling’s American agent, also helped his friend establish his copyrights in the United States, after many problems with unauthorised editions.

It was another busy year for Kipling, and the author suffered a further breakdown from overwork.

After setting off on a voyage to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, he returned one final time to India to spend Christmas with his family. But no sooner had Kipling arrived than he was informed by cable of Balestier’s death fromtyphoid, and he rushed back to London, arriving on January 10, 1892.

Just eight days later, Kipling married Balestier’s sister Caroline in a London gripped by an influenza epidemic. ‘The undertakers had run out of black horses,’ observed Kipling, ‘and the dead had to be content with brown ones. The living were mostly abed.’

The newlyweds quickly left for a voyage around the world, stopping in Brattleboro, Vermont, to visit the bride’s family. While there, Caroline’s brother Beatty sold them a plot of land for a nominal sum.

The honeymooners then continued on to Japan. But when Kipling’s bank failed, the couple were left with no assets but their travel tickets, which they exchanged for return fares to New England, where the Balestiers found them a house to rent for ten dollars (around £2.00) a month.

Written after his final visit to India the previous year, ‘The Lost Legion’ was one of the author’s final supernatural stories set in his homeland. It shared the May 1892 issue of the then one-year-old
Strand Magazine
with the Sherlock Holmes mystery, ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’ by Arthur Conan Doyle. The two men would later become neighbours in Sussex, and Kipling paid tribute to the Great Detective in his 1909 story ‘The House Surgeon’.

That same year saw the publication of
The Naulahka
,his collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, which was not a success. However,
Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses
,which included the poem ‘Gunga Din’, only added to Kipling’s fame and, during this period, the author bought back the rights to some of his earlier books with the money he continued to earn in royalties.

With the death of the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, it could be said that Kipling unofficially took his place in the public’s estimation, although he reportedly turned down this and many other honours, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit.

A daughter, Josephine,wasborntothe KiplingsonDecember 29 – her father’s and mother’s birthdays falling on the days either side. Perhaps inspired by the arrival of his first child, Kipling began writing for children.

Published in 1893,
Many Inventions
contained stories written both before and after his marriage to Caroline. It included the last story narrated by the Irish soldier Mulvaney (who, up until then, was his most popular character) and the first story about Mowgli, the feral child who would become the leading character in Kipling’s classic collection of children’s stories and poems,
The Jungle Book
(1894).

Many Inventions
also featured ‘The Finest Story in the World’, one of Kipling’s few fantastic stories not to be set in India, which concerns a poetic writer who suffers from a recurring dream of previous lives upon the sea.

Later that year, the Kiplings moved into ‘Naulakha’, a large wooden house they had had built on the land purchased from Beatty Balestier.

The Second Jungle Book
was published in 1895 and was as equally successful as the first volume. ‘When those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off,’ Kipling explained.

He also considered Edgar Rice Burroughs’
Tarzan of the Apes
to have been explicitly inspired by his own work: ‘He had “jazzed” the motif of the
Jungle Books
and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself,’ said Kipling, with a trace of irony. ‘He was reported to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and “get away with”, which is a legitimate ambition.’

On February 2, 1896, a second daughter was born to the Kiplings, who named her Elsie. Unfortunately, their happiness was shattered when the family’s manners and attitudes were considered objectionable by Beatty Balestier and their neighbours. The dispute ended with a well-publicised court case after a confrontation on the road between Kipling and his alcoholic brother-in-law.

‘The idea seemed to be that I was “making money” out of America,’ explained Kipling, ‘and was not sufficiently grateful for my privileges.’

From that time onwards, Kipling considered Americans – like the French – as ‘foreigners’, and he maintained his position that only ‘lesser breeds’ were born beyond the English Channel. As if to reinforce this xenophobic outlook, his collection of poems
The Seven Seas
(1896) included the popular patriotic cycle, ‘A Song of the English’.

The family left Brattleboro, and in the spring of 1896 moved into a house in Torquay, England. Kipling admitted that the family’s new home, ‘seemed almost too good to be true’ and despite the building’s bright rooms and the fresh sea air, he revealed that he and his wife experienced ‘the shape of a growing depression which enveloped us both – a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart, that each put down to the new, soft climate and, without telling the other, fought against for long weeks. It was the Feng-shui – the Spirit of the house itself – that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips.’

He later wrote about the experience in his psychic detective story ‘The House Surgeon’, which was published in two parts in
Harper’s Magazine
in September and October 1909.

In 1897, the family finally settled at ‘The Elms’ in Rotting-dean, Sussex, near Kipling’s cousin, Stanley Baldwin. A son, John, was born on August 17 in ‘North End House’, the holiday home of Kipling’s aunt, Georgiana Burne-Jones.

That same year, Kipling published
Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks,
his novel about the New England cod-fishing fleet that was inspired by the author’s American doctor and friend, Charles Eliot Conland. ‘My part was the writing; his the details,’ Kipling wrote. ‘I wanted to see if I could catch and hold something of a rather beautiful localised American atmosphere that was already beginning to fade. Thanks to Conland I came near this.’

In America, Scribner’s published a collection of Kipling’s work by subscription. The stories were rearranged by topic, and some uncollected material was added. At the age of thirty-two, he was now the highest-paid writer in the world.

During the first of many winter holidays in South Africa, Kipling travelled to Rhodesia in 1898, where he struck up a friendship with the diamond magnate and statesman Cecil Rhodes, who presented him with a house near Cape Town.

This association only strengthened Kipling’s imperialist and racist persuasions, which grew stronger with the passing of years. He genuinely believed that it was the duty of every Englishman – or, more likely, every white man – to bring European culture to the uncivilised natives who populated the rest of the world. This glorification of Britain as a colonial Empire reached its apogee in his poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’(1899).

However, Kipling’s ideas were out of step with liberal thought of the age, and as he grew older he became an increasingly isolated figure. In 1924, the critic Alfred Ward wrote: ‘Nearly all his Indian stories demand that the reader, shall, at the outset, grant certain large premises: such that the British are God’s chosen race.’

That same year he published the short story collection
The Day’s Work
which included ‘The Maltese Cat’, a story about polo ponies that would prove one of the most popular he ever wrote. He also published
A Fleet in Being,
a series of six articles on the navy reprinted from the
Morning Post.

In the winter of 1899, the Kiplings paid their final visit to America. During the stormy sea crossing, Kipling and all the children became ill.