Frank Doubleday, the American publisher and friend of Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. 'For heaven's sake, Rud, what are you doing?' Doubleday asked. To which the answer came: 'I was looking over old papers and I got thinking. No one's going to make a monkey out of me after I die.' But Kipling has been more caricatured in popular memory than most.

LRB 4 October 2001 | PDF Download