Rudyard Kipling (post 2): Multiple personality suggested by well-known fact that he was self-contradictory, a two-sided man, a man of permanent contradictions.

“Kipling was not…a racist or an imperialist or a sadist or an anti-Semite or a repressed homosexual—and there is sound evidence, in his writing and in his life, to counter any such simplistic interpretations. But there is also much evidence, drawn from the same sources, to suggest that Kipling was all of the above. It is far preferable to approach this author…as a man of permanent contradictions…

“Kipling’s most successful and polished achievement in prose, Kim (1901), is also dependent on the idea of a double life…The whole action of the story hangs on dissimulation and duality…the epigraph to Chapter Eight…

     Something I owe to the soil that grew—

     More to the life that fed—

     But most to Allah Who gave me two

     Separate sides to my head.

This is drawn from a Kipling poem titled ‘The Two-Sided Man.’ As if to underline its message, Kipling added,

     I would go without shirts or shoes,

     Friends, tobacco or bread

     Sooner than for an instant lose

     Either side of my head.

“If one were to assemble a balance sheet of Kipling’s own explicit contradictions, it would necessarily include his close relationship with the Bible and the hymnal, and his caustic anti-clericalism; his staunch Anglo nationalism, and his feeling that England itself was petty and parochial; his dislike of nonwhite peoples, and his belief that they were more honest and courageous; his love-hate relationship with the Irish; his contempt, and deep admiration, for the United States; his respect for the working class, and his detestation of the labor movement; his exaltation of the empire, and his conviction that its works were vain and transient” (1).

Search “self-contradiction” for previous posts on this clue to multiple personality.

1. Christopher Hitchens. “A Man of Permanent Contradictions.” The Atlantic, June 2002 issue.