The Ruddy Empire

THE LIFE OF RUDYARD KIPLING (433 pp ) -C. E. Carrington -Doubleday ($5.50).

The sun has set on Rudyard Kipling and his British Empire, but there are those less happy about it than, say, Jawaharlal Nehru and the editors of the Nation. Rudyard Kipling was a lowbrow genius, the classic case of a jingo word juggler whose skill brought out the heaviest sneers in the faces of more civilized but not necessarily more talented men.

"Reading life by . . . flashes of vulgarity," said Oscar Wilde of the writer, who, in the midst of the decadent Nineties, was celebrating the glories of the common British redcoat in the accents of the British music hall.

"Gutter patriot," said George Orwell, the grey-voiced conscience of the British left.

Cruelest of all was the gibe of G. K. Chesterton, who took the one poem in which Kipling approached beauty, Recessional, a prayer for humility under power, and made of it:

Lest they forget, lest they forget, That yours was the exclusive set . . .

Kipling is the wicked uncle of the modern British mind -the one they don't talk about, the one who went broke going to the wars and who died intestate, without visitors, in a Home. But now the belated floral tributes of highbrow attention have begun to come in. T. S. Eliot has written an introduction to a selection of his verse, and Edmund Wilson wrote a famous essay in which he proved that Kipling waved the flag because of something nasty he saw in the woodshed. Kipling's latest and best biographer, British Author C. E. Carrington, mildly remarks of his subject that "to this day he makes men lose their tempers, a sure proof of his importance."

Boy from India. Rudyard Kipling ("Ruddy" to his friends) was born in Bombay in 1865 and buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in 1936.

Between those two dates occurred one of the most buoyant lives in the history of English letters. When others sulked about the shape of things to come, he chortled, bounced, sniggered and bugled. The family into which he was born was a platoon of all the talents. His kin include Burne-Jones (uncle), the pre-Raphaelite painter, Angela Thirkell (second cousin), the sad librettist of middle-class soap operas, a president of the Royal Academy and a dull cousin named Stan Baldwin who became Prime Minister.

His father, Lockwood Kipling, had a job teaching art to the Indians. But India was regarded as an unhealthy place for growing boys, so at five he was boarded out in the home of a retired naval officer at Southsea, England. He was sent to the United Services College, and in Stalky & Co. wrote about it in one of the few procane, anti-self-pity books of schoolboy reminiscence ever to be produced. He was a prodigy and the only boy at school to wear glasses. They called him "Gigger" (for "giglamps," which was schoolboy slang for spectacles).

Instead of going to a university, he found himself before he was 20 producing a newspaper in Lahore. Says Carrington: "There had been nothing like his sudden rise to fame and fortune since Byron awoke one morning to find that the publication of Childe Harold had made him famous . . . 1890 saw the publication . . . of more than 80 short stories from his pen, many ballads and . . . a novel [The Light That Failed].'' Soon he was advising viceroys and was so famous that when he fell ill in New York (he married an American), crowds knelt in Seventh Avenue to pray for his recovery.

The Unknown Soldier. Everything Kipling touched turned to brass. While more sensitive writers shopped about for rare metals, he jiggled the coppers of common knowledge in his pocket. "Shillin' a day, Bloomin' good pay," he wrote of the British soldier, long before other English writers had acknowledged the existence of the uniform that guarded them while they slept. Kipling had been sniped at once in the Khyber Pass and since then had become the spokesman for all men who have nothing but a uniform between themselves and death.

His industry and vigor made an immense paraphrase of the remark of another Tory Englishman. Samuel Johnson, who said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having worn a red coat. But red coats were out in 1914. War meant mud, barbed wire and lice. Kipling's only son John was killed fighting with the Irish Guards in the battle of Loos. Rudyard Kipling got letters from all the world, and some exulted in the mean thought that the laureate of war had got his comeuppance. As a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, he promoted the patriotic symbol for the age of mass wars -the Unknown Soldier. His own son's body was never found.

In the pacifist '205, Kipling's name became a mockery. In the ideological '303, it was thought that a man who had spoken well of authority and soldiering must be a fascist. As he had ignored critics all his life, Kipling ignored this too. About the only notice he took of Hitler was to remove the Indian good-luck sign from new editions of his work -a swastika.

Contrary to the notion that he had a reactionary's contempt for the working classes, he saw in them the nation's strength in crisis. Once he wrote: "It will be the third-class carriages that'll save us."

As Biographer Carrington traces the story, now that the tumult and the shouting have died, Kipling rises from his grave to confront the world with neither a hum ble nor a notably contrite heart. He had the courage to hate -a healthy hate of all those who sneered at the seriousness of the white man's burden, who denigrated duty, honor, country. Americans, who in the past decade have had to accept concern for an area far greater than that ever ruled by the British Empire, may today better understand Rudyard Kipling -"this literary man," as Biographer Carrington puts it, "[who asserted] that literary men were not the most important people in the world, or not until they practised their Art for Duty's sake."

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