How the Just So Stories Were Made, by John Batchelor
In 2018, the authorities at Manchester University decided to adorn their new Students’ Union building with verses from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If.
A cloth-eared selection if ever there was one. Sure enough, within days, the students had painted it out and replaced it with another by, inevitably, the AfricanAmerican writer Maya Angelou. Speaking to the Times Educational Supplement, Sara Khan, the Manchester SU’S Liberation and Access Officer, said that Kipling was ‘well known as the author of the racist poem The White Man’s Burden and … other work that sought to legitimise the British Empire’s presence in India and dehumanise people of color [sic]’. Pressed to respond, Kipling’s biographers duly issued a countersqueak, saying ‘there was no evidence that the students have read anything that Kipling wrote’.
That is probably correct. In the event that any student be moved by curiosity to redress that lack, they could do a lot worse than start here, with this intelligent, balanced, finely-written book that pretends to be about children’s stories: a safe-seeming pool into which one might dip one’s toe; but which run, by means of underground channels, into the open restless waters of Kipling’s life.
Batchelor draws you in with tales of whales and leopards. Before you know it, you have learned, almost by accident, that Kipling spoke Hindi as a first language; that he began married life as a settler in Vermont; that his best-beloved uncle was the painter Edward BurneJones; that his wife, Carrie, was his self-appointed Rottweiler whom he allowed his friends to dislike; that two of his children died, leaving him in a half-life of grief; that in India, the term ‘elephant-gaited’ expressed the rolling walk of a beautiful woman. Try it, it’s true.
Equally imperceptibly, you are obliged to acknowledge the boggling range of Kipling’s talent, the many voices and genres in which he speaks.
How is this done? Recognising how the rind of Kipling is signally unappealing, John Batchelor, an academic whose own head teems with Edwardian history and books, opens him up like a splayed tangerine, each segment of which is tagged to a Just So story.
Each story proposes a theme, or passage, from Kipling’s career, and each animal reflects a version of this evasive, paradoxical man for whom the word most commonly used is ‘protean’. Thus the Camel with his hump leads naturally to Kipling’s own depressive episodes, his breakdown of 1890 and an explanation of how his own schoolmasterly prescription – ‘Dig till you gently perspire’ – never worked for him. The Ethiopian and the Leopard, whose protagonists change their skins to vanish into the landscape, opens onto matters of race and self-concealment.
Batchelor has devised a light-footed, non-chronological, meandering progress around the stations of Kipling’s life that complements its restiveness and enables him to revert to certain motifs, confronting them from another direction.
The theme of punishment and revenge, for instance, runs under a number of these stories to feed Batchelor’s roaming investigations. The Elephant’s Child suffers from both ‘’satiable curtiosity’ and relatives whose principal diversion is spanking him for it.
For Kipling, it was important to distinguish a considered and rational chastisement from the ungoverned sadism he suffered as a small child far from home, at the hands of Mrs Holloway in Southsea. This leads to a consideration of the other ‘fostered aliens’ of his work, such as Kim and Mowgli, both of whom achieve a resolution of identity which continued to evade their creator. Riven with splits like an old barn door, he preached what he could not practise.
Take his friendship with another creature of the veldt, Cecil Rhodes, who had him to stay each winter in return for words, which the ‘largely inarticulate’ Rhodes couldn’t find. ‘What am I trying to express?’ he would ask his guest. ‘Say it, say it.’ Kipling’s admiration for Rhodes’s wealth and power was helplessly at odds with his declaimed contempt for those trinkets.
Batchelor does deal with Kipling as a ‘reprehensible and problematic’ political figure, an enthusiastic imperialist and sometimes outright racist. But he is careful to place those concerns towards the end. By this time, he has placed in the balance the heavy element of art, which, as Boris Pasternak says, ‘outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence … of the work’.