ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
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The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan
Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable
The Double Life of Stephen Crane
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Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Benfey
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Image credits:
1: Kipling Wimpole Archive, Special Collections, University of Sussex.
2: The Minuteman, Daniel Chester French. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D416-72901.
3: MS Am 1094 (2245) f. 61, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
4: Bateman’s © National Trust / Charles Thomas.
5: Felice Beato, via Wikimedia Commons.
6: Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (1912), via Wikimedia Commons.
7: Photograph by Neal Rantoul.
8: Image courtesy of Rice-Aron Library, Marlboro College, Rudyard Kipling Collection, and The Landmark Trust, USA.
9: Image courtesy of Rice-Aron Library, Marlboro College, Rudyard Kipling Collection, and The Landmark Trust, USA.
10: Clifford K. Berryman, via Wikimedia Commons.
11: The Fog Warning, by Winslow Homer, 1885 © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
12: John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911), via Wikimedia Commons.
13: Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Benfey, Christopher E. G., 1954– author.
Title: If : the untold story of Kipling’s American years / Christopher Benfey.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058060 (print) | LCCN 2018060255 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221444 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221437 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936–Travel–United States. | Authors, English–19th century–Biography. | Authors, English–20th century–Biography. | Literature and society–United States–History–19th century. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | HISTORY / United States / 19th Century.
Classification: LCC PR4856 (ebook) | LCC PR4856 .B39 2019 (print) | DDC 828/.809 [B]–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058060
Version_1
To my father
IF—
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
CONTENTS
Also by Christopher Benfey
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
If
PROLOGUE: THIS STRANGE EXCUSE
I
Chapter One
A DENIZEN OF THE MOON
Chapter Two
AT LONGFELLOW’S GRAVE
Chapter Three
A DEATH IN DRESDEN
Chapter Four
A BUDDHA SNOWMAN
II
Chapter Five
AN ARK FOR JOSEPHINE
Chapter Six
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
Chapter Seven
ADOPTED BY WOLVES
Chapter Eight
AT THE WASHINGTON ZOO
III
Chapter Nine
A FISHING TRIP
Chapter Ten
DHARMA BUMS
Chapter Eleven
WAR FEVER
Chapter Twelve
THE FLOODED BROOK
EPILOGUE: AMERICAN HUSTLE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
PROLOGUE: THIS STRANGE EXCUSE
1.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and educated in England. Readers have always associated this towering writer with colonial India, where he spent his early childhood and his literary apprenticeship, and with England, where he lived, in relative isolation, during the final decades of his life. Few readers are familiar with his exuberant American years, however, during the heart of the American Gilded Age. And yet Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, the first draft of Kim, his first “just so stories,” and some of his greatest poems on the crest of a Vermont hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view of Mount Monadnock “like a gigantic thumbnail pointing heavenward.” A principal aim of this book is to introduce today’s readers to a largely unfamiliar writer: an American Kipling.
During his astonishingly productive sojourn in New England, the key creative period in his entire career, Kipling’s American accent took his English visitors by surprise. Arthur Conan Doyle brought his golf clubs to Vermont; the inventor of Sherlock Holmes taught Kipling to whack a ball around the rolling hills and shared Thanksgiving dinner with his Americanized host. Kipling announced, more than once, that he was preparing to write the Great American Novel. Among his close friends were American luminaries like Mark Twain, William James, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt. Kipl
ing would have remained in Brattleboro, with his American wife and their two daughters, if a family quarrel—along with a pointless dispute between England and the United States over the border of Venezuela—had not cut short his New England idyll. His departure from Brattleboro in 1896, he confessed, was the hardest thing he ever had to do. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live, Bombay and Brattleboro,” he said. “And I can’t live in either.”
A tantalizing sense of “what if” hangs over Kipling’s American years, and complicates his present cultural status. His vivid creations are among the most familiar in the English language. Children all over the world are familiar with The Jungle Book. They thrill to Mowgli’s adventures among his adoptive family of wolves or the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’s epic battles with cobras. Tales such as “How the Camel Got His Hump” and “The Elephant’s Child,” from Kipling’s Just So Stories, remain beloved bedtime reading. Kim, Kipling’s shimmering novel of international intrigue and spiritual quest, is a favorite for countless readers, young and old. And teenagers continue to be exposed to the hammering exhortations of “If—”:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too . . .
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same . . .
If you can do all these things, Kipling concludes, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” A favorite of presidents and graduation speakers, of political conservatives and revolutionaries alike, “If—” was recently voted the most beloved poem in Great Britain. It is almost certainly one of the most familiar poems in the world. In 2007, Joni Mitchell released a jazz version of the poem on her album Shine, accompanied by Herbie Hancock on piano. It might surprise the poem’s many admirers that Kipling originally used this plea for stalwart, levelheaded leadership to illustrate a story about George Washington, thus giving it an American setting. When he included it in his collected verse, he placed it opposite an elegy for his good friend Theodore Roosevelt.
From around 1890 to 1920, Rudyard Kipling was the most popular and financially successful writer in the world. At the height of his fame, in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; at forty-one, he was the youngest writer ever to win the prize and the first to write in the English language. That same year, in the company of his idol Mark Twain and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, he was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford, to the raucous applause of an adoring crowd.
At this remove, it is difficult to recover the sheer depth of reverence once accorded Kipling. “He’s more of a Shakespeare than anyone yet in this generation of ours,” wrote the great American psychologist William James. His brother, the novelist Henry James, who gave the bride away at Kipling’s wedding, called Kipling “the most complete man of genius” he had ever known. “Kipling’s name, and Kipling’s words always stir me now,” Mark Twain confessed, “stir me more than do any other living man’s.” The Jungle Book was included on Sigmund Freud’s list of the ten most important books in his life. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht—they all admired Kipling, and drew inspiration from his work. When Kipling died in 1936, at the age of seventy, his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, alongside Shakespeare’s memorial and Chaucer’s grave.
New film versions of The Jungle Book appear regularly, seeking to displace the Disney classic of 1967, one of the most successful movies of all time. Kipling’s incomparable children’s books continue to be read and loved. And yet we are expected to outgrow Kipling. “It was only when I got to secondary school that I realized I wasn’t supposed to like Rudyard Kipling,” the historian Sir Simon Schama has written. Despite the efforts of influential admirers—including major American critics like Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot, Irving Howe, and Randall Jarrell—Kipling has never quite joined the ranks of unquestioned canonical writers, like Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. His reputation has suffered in recent decades in particular. With the rise of postcolonial theory—a view of literature that assesses the human cost of colonial arrangements—Kipling is often treated with unease or hostility in university literature departments, as the jingoist Bard of Empire, a man on the wrong side of history. It was Kipling, after all, who wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” his strident plea for the United States to take up the imperial burden long held by Great Britain. And it was Kipling who wrote, notoriously, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
In July 2018, indignant students at the University of Manchester painted over a mural of the text of “If—,” inscribed on the wall of the students’ union, and replaced it with the African American writer Maya Angelou’s popular 1978 poem “Still I Rise.” Such actions are understandable, especially during a time when the commitments of Britain and the United States to what used to be called the Third World are increasingly in question. And yet the two poems are similar in their defiant spirit. “You may write me down in history / With your bitter twisted lies,” Angelou writes, “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” Kipling’s poem may even have influenced “Still I Rise,” for young Maya, in Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “enjoyed and respected Kipling,” and admired “If—” in particular. Gramsci, who translated “If—” into Italian, recommended it specifically for leftist revolutionaries. “Kipling’s morality is imperialist only to the extent that it is closely linked to a specific historical reality,” Gramsci wrote from one of Mussolini’s prisons, “but there are lessons in the poem for any social group struggling for political power.”
Even some of Kipling’s most articulate critics have recognized the complexity of the case and the necessity to continue to read and understand his works. “Kim is a work of great aesthetic merit,” Edward Said, one of the founding figures of postcolonial theory, proclaimed in his much-cited introduction to the novel; “it cannot be dismissed simply as the racist imagining of one fairly disturbed and ultra-reactionary imperialist.” Confounding his critics, Kipling retained a deep sympathy for the despised, the marginalized, and the powerless. Kim is himself a homeless child, initially cared for by his father, a down-and-out veteran addicted to opium, and a mixed-race prostitute. Kipling’s portrait of the Tibetan holy man in Kim is a wonder of empathy. Early tales like “Lispeth,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” and “Jews in Shushan” assess the cost of racial division and bigotry. “Gunga Din” is an admiring portrait of a lowly Muslim soldier. And “The Man Who Would Be King” remains a powerful parable, as the film director John Huston recognized during the Vietnam War era, of the folly of imperial overreach. “Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” as D. H. Lawrence wrote of Hawthorne, another major writer of sometimes repugnant political views.
We live in a time of rising nationalism, extreme cultural antagonism, and the breakup of empires, when the United States is as ideologically riven as it was in Kipling’s time. This seems an opportune moment, following the 150th anniversary of Kipling’s birth, to take a closer look at a fascinating writer and a complex historical figure. Fifty previously unknown Kipling poems were recently brought to light. A trove of lost personal documents has surfaced in Vermont, and a major exhibition on the career of Kipling’s father, the prominent India-based arts administrator John Lockwood Kipling, was mounted in London and New York. Among contributions to a fuller understanding of Kipling’s vagabond life, Charles Allen’s account of his background in India and Sir David Gilmour’s study of his political relations with the British Empire stand out. Meanwhile, contemporary Indian writers, such as Arundhati Roy and
Salman Rushdie, have shown a renewed interest in this Anglo-Indian author. “No other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it,” Rushdie writes, “and it is this knowledge of place, and procedure, and detail that gives his stories their undeniable authority.”
2.
There is one conspicuous lacuna in serious efforts to make sense of Kipling’s career, however. His intense engagement with the United States—on a personal, political, and aesthetic level—has never received the sustained attention it deserves. The central focus of this book is Kipling’s extraordinary American decade, extending roughly from 1889 to 1899. During the 1890s, the crucial decade for his aesthetic development, Kipling sought, deliberately and with very hard work, to turn himself into a specifically American writer. As a young man, he cultivated American influences like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. A photograph of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Self-Reliance” Kipling adopted as his personal creed, adorned his writing desk. For Kipling, America was a place of promise, of freedom, of experimentation, relatively free, in his view, from the class and caste divisions that marred England and India, a place where he could reinvent himself, as so many American writers had done before him.
If Kipling had his own sense of America, Americans developed their own version of Kipling, independent of what British or Indian readers made of him. He was the most influential writer of his time in the United States. It was largely through Kipling that naturalism, the Darwinian view that environment determines character and that only the fit survive, entered mainstream American literature. It was partly through Kipling that the cult of the strenuous life in the wild—in the jungle or the desert, among soldiers or among wolves—entered American writing.
Kipling urged his friend Theodore Roosevelt to bring this strenuous ethic into American politics; he partnered with his friend William James in conceptualizing what James called the “moral equivalent of war”—a necessary testing ground for American manhood in times of peace. And it was Kipling who introduced to the reading public the romance of the war correspondent and the international spy, those interlocking heroes of twentieth-century popular literature and film. His work profoundly influenced a generation of American writers, including Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Jack London (and, later, Ernest Hemingway). “There is no end of Kipling in my work,” London wrote. “I would never [have] possibly written anywhere near the way I did had Kipling never been.”
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