The title of this post is a reference to an ancient music-hall joke, in which a young man asks his new girlfriend if she likes Kipling, to which she replies, “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled!”

This topic was brought to my mind when I commented on David Fosters’ Amelia Does Kipling post – that admitting to a liking for and knowledge of the prose and poetry of Rudyard Kipling is a kind of secret conservative/libertarian handshake, by which we recognize another of our kind. Recognizing and readily quoting something like The Gods of the Copybook Headings, or When the English Began to Hate, The Sons of Martha, or The Dane-Geld, and being familiar with his vast and varied body of work is something which goes bone-deep among us but also leaves those of a woke inclination utterly cold. Kipling himself was a curious but very logical sort of writer and observer of the human condition. He was insanely popular, a best-selling writer, international celebrity and recipient of the highest honors for literature in his time.

Owing to his own personal circumstances and background; being born and raised in India to the age of five, that he later worked there himself as a newspaper reporter, and set a large portion of his novels and stories in that milieu, he has since been connected in the popular view to an increasingly embarrassing Imperial Britain – Jewel in the Crown-Colonial mindset. As the whole ‘sun never set on the British Empire’ concept became less and less popular in the minds of the intellectual great and good after WWI and politically and economically unsupportable after WWII, Kipling’s own popularity and respect faded by association. He had been ferociously anti-communist. and not terribly keen on fascism either which should have gotten him some credit, but didn’t. Likely this accounts for the literary scorn poured on him by the progressive avant garde. He was basically held to be stuffy, intolerant, imperialist, racist – the whole panoply of discreditable ‘ists for the shiny new modern and tolerant 20th century. Still, it is curious to realize – but at the same time, completely logical – that his words would still speak to us, decades and decades after the world of Imperial Britian which formed him seems to have vanished into vapor, leaving just a bare outline of its former self.

I believe there are several reasons for this long-lived, unfashionable but quiet popularity. First – he wrote both prose and poetry – and a lot of both. Most fameous writers in the English canon seem to write mostly one or the other. Tennyson did poetry, Dickens did melodrama. Kipling did both.

Secondly, his contemporaries, like most writers today, make their name and establish a readership based on one or two genres, but Kipling romped through darned near every story-telling category there is and made doing it look easy. His short story collections and novels covered a mind-boggling array of genres: ghost stories, war and adventure (The Naulahka, Soldiers Three, The Man Who Would be King), horror and suspense (The Mark of the Beast), (historical fiction for younger readers (Puck of Pook’s Hill), spy stories, (Kim), science fiction (With the Night Mail), animal tales (the Jungle Books), fables for small children (Just So Stories), boarding school adventures (Stalky & Company), coming of age (Captains Courageous). tales for adults about marriage, commitment and infidelity (The Light that Failed, The Story of the Gadsbys, many of his early India stories) and straight military history (The Irish Guards in the Great War.)

Thirdly, Kipling had an ear for the way that people spoke – not just for dialect, which is something that many Victorian scribblers perpetuated (to the point of sometimes being unreadable when they exactly duplicated curious accents and pronunciations in print) but the phrasing and vocabulary, the curious slang and verbal shortcuts of an unimaginably broad array of characters. I have found this rather rare among writers – generally in modern novels, one character’s voice in dialog sounds very much like everyone else. Perhaps this quality – this ear for the way that people spoke – had to do with English being the language that as a small child, he spoke to his parents in, but a native Indian language to his primary caregivers.

Mostly, what strikes me in rereading many of his stories – set in India and elsewhere was that Kipling was a stone-cold realist, with a kind of observational eidetic memory. He saw things and people – so many, many people of varied backgrounds and experiences as they exist in the real and messy world. He didn’t seem to see them as how the dreamers and theorists wished that they were, or might be, or could be, with the proper management and in service to the appropriate moral lesson incorporated into the plot. Kipling saw with a gimlet and unsparing eye; grand, or petty, trivial or noble, the great and the humble. He saw and put them into his stories and poems, just as they were. Just the messy, complicated, nuanced reality of people and their messy and complicated, contradictory lives. And that is what still speaks to readers, and to those of us who know the real world.

Plus – he was a darned good writer. Discuss as you wish.