This book addresses key moments and encounters during the 1890s, while also offering a fresh perspective—Kipling’s own—on the American Gilded Age, that fraught period first named, indelibly, by Mark Twain. It was an era, like our own, of vast disparities between rich and poor, of corruption on an appalling scale, of large-scale immigration and rampant racism, of disruptive new technologies and new media, of mushrooming factories and abandoned farms, of vanishing wildlife and the depredation of public lands. Kipling took up many of these topics in his writings. In his friend Mark Twain’s view, this was not a Golden Age—that utopian dream of a perfect society in the remote past—but merely a Gilded Age, concealing the dross beneath its glittering facade.
As a historical figure in the American Gilded Age, Kipling is not just fascinating; he is unavoidable. His gravitational pull is detectable everywhere: in politics and literature, in American attitudes toward masculinity, in American preoccupations with the supernatural. In registering this gravitational pull, I have allowed myself the freedom to follow patterns of suggestion and implication wherever they lead. The opening chapters explore Kipling’s relations with major American writers: Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry James, and others. Later chapters pursue certain strands in Kipling’s life: his honeymoon in Japan, his fascination with hallucinogenic drugs, his imaginative engagement with the occult, his impact on the Spanish-American War, and the growth of the American empire. Each chapter supports a single theory: that Kipling became the writer we know, in large part, because of his deep involvement with the United States.
Kipling’s influence on children’s literature remains indelible. Tarzan, to Kipling’s annoyance, was little more than an inferior remake of The Jungle Book; Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was an inspired tribute to it. Kipling’s enduring American presence is not merely literary, however. His ideas and his fictional characters have affected public policy and popular culture in ways that we do not yet fully understand. In registering Kipling’s influence on American culture, I have followed him to the Washington Zoo in the company of Theodore Roosevelt, admiring the beavers and grizzly bears. I have also ventured beyond his death, mapping the surprising invocation of Kipling’s writings—by ordinary soldiers and reporters, generals and movie directors, political hawks and antiwar doves—during and immediately following the Vietnam War. We cannot adequately gauge and critique Kipling’s significance in American cultural and political history if we refuse to acknowledge it.
3.
Kipling’s decade-long engagement with the United States can best be seen as a quest for a lost paradise. The arc of his life, as it unfolds in this book, is that of someone who discovered, when he was too young to digest the devastating news, that the world is a precarious place, and that disaster (one of the two “impostors” dismissed in “If—”) can intrude at any moment. His first six years were idyllic. “My first impression is of daybreak,” he wrote of his early childhood, “light and color and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder.” His parents were creative, supportive, artistically inclined.
Kipling’s family connections were auspicious for a future writer. One of his uncles by marriage was the great Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Another was the painter Sir Edward John Poynter, president of the Royal Academy. Family friends included the visionary writer and designer William Morris and the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A favorite first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, would become prime minister.
Paradise ended abruptly when five-year-old Kipling and his younger sister were farmed out, without explanation, to a sadistic foster mother in the South of England. (Intended to socialize English children born in India and shield them from disease, the practice was not uncommon.) Abandoned as a child, subject to torments both physical and psychological, he found solace in the fantasy world of books. As he matured, Kipling came to believe, as his political views veered to the right, that civilization was a veneer, keeping order over raging instincts and potential invaders. He believed in soldiers and despised comfortable people who amused themselves by “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.” As George Orwell put it, Kipling “sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
Even amid his mounting fame as a writer, Kipling himself suffered so many personal disasters that nothing shook his faith in the need for dire arrangements. These views spoke in turn to American readers and writers in chaotic times, even as Kipling himself took up residence in the United States, in a sustained—and ultimately doomed—attempt to establish a safe haven for himself and for his family. Kipling once wrote that the twentieth century began in 1889. It certainly did for him. The realization that he could leave India struck him with the force of a “revelation,” as he put it in his autobiography. That decisive year, he left India for good and began his nomadic years of circling the globe, in search of his destiny. And that, accordingly, is where this book begins.
4.
Many times over the past few years, I have been asked what in the world possessed me to write a book about Rudyard Kipling. The implication was that I must have had some suitable excuse for adopting such a rash, quixotic, potentially career-killing course of action. One close friend, a writer himself, warned me, again and again, that I should think twice before publishing a book on Kipling. “Don’t you realize,” he said, his voice rising for maximum effect, “that Kipling is the most politically incorrect writer in the canon?” He wondered whether I was prepared for the inevitable consequences, and suggested, darkly, that I had better have a defense in place, some sophisticated scheme of damage control, for the ensuing outrage.
I discovered soon enough that it was no use answering that I wasn’t writing a defense of Kipling, and that my primary interest was historical. I wanted to map the imprint that Kipling had left on his adopted country, and the imprint that the United States had left on him. I certainly wasn’t trying to rehabilitate him—a strange verb that I heard more than once in such conversations, as though Kipling, after years of justified imprisonment, was about to be released (by me!) upon an unsuspecting world.
Of course, it would be surprising indeed if I were the first interpreter of Kipling to be asked to defend himself. It turns out that there is even something of a tradition of such excuses. The best-known formulation comes in W. H. Auden’s elegy for the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, in which he maintains that Time with a capital T “worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives,” adding, “Time that with this strange excuse / Pardoned Kipling and his views.” Auden later excised these lines from the poem. Perhaps he had come to realize, rightly, that readers aren’t called upon to pardon the views of writers they disagree with. Kipling himself was intolerant of excuses, in any case. “If—” is a plea for the self-reliant man who accepts responsibility for his actions, and an indictment of the practice of blaming others for one’s failures. Time, according to Kipling, does not excuse; it is composed of one “unforgiving minute” after another.
Auden was not simply arguing that good writing will survive despite the political or religious views of the writer. He seems to be specifying, instead, that certain writers, among whom he numbers Yeats and Kipling, are part of the lifeblood of language itself. These writers aren’t merely embedded in our language, Auden suggests; our language lives through them and by them. Auden’s claim seems particularly apt for Kipling, who is said to have bequeathed more familiar quotations to the English language (from “East is East and West is West” to “That’s another story”) than any other writer since Shakespeare. According to Orwell, “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.”
Ultimately, it is Kipling’s complexity, as a writer and a historical figure—especially in his relations with the United States—that I hope to convey in this book. Borges was impatient with those who reduced Kipling’s thirty-five vol
umes to a “mere apologist” for empire. “What is indisputable is that Kipling’s prose and poetic works are infinitely more complex than the theses they elucidate,” he wrote in a review of 1941. “Like all men, Rudyard Kipling was many men (English gentleman, Eurasian journalist, bibliophile, spokesman for soldiers and mountains), but none with more conviction than the artificer.”
Kipling at his uncanny best offers little of the pat solutions, the ringing advice that he is often reputed to supply. Even his declamatory “If—” hangs on one of the oddest, one of the iffiest, words in the English language. Instead, he draws us, word by slippery word, to the very brink, to the ultimate mysteries of language and life. And those mysteries, he leads us to believe, lie somewhere in the specific interlocking of our words and our worlds—our lived experience. Our initials, our given names, our mother tongues, our verbal slips, our hasty ensuing excuses: how strange these are, Kipling tells us in tale after tale, how internal to who we are.
Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea for readers to give Kipling a fresh look, despite his conspicuous liabilities and limitations, comes from Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient. As the Canadian nurse Hana reads Kim aloud to the mysterious patient, whose true identity is as enigmatic as Kim’s own, he gives her a reading lesson. Kim must be read slowly, he tells her, to appreciate Kipling’s rhythms, his sinuous sentence-sounds. “Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses,” he instructs her. And when Kip, the Punjabi mine detector, all too aware of the historical disaster of British colonialism in India, appears in the abandoned villa, he is said to come directly from the pages of Kim, as his nickname, an amalgam of Kipling and Kim, suggests. “As if,” writes Ondaatje, “the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp. A drug of wonders.” Ondaatje implies that there is still potential magic to be found in Kipling’s books, if we only know where to look.
I
Chapter One
A DENIZEN OF THE MOON
1.
It was a hot and dusty afternoon in the middle of August 1889. Mark Twain was sequestered from a prying public in his summer refuge in Elmira, New York, correcting the proofs of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In his darkening mood at the time, Twain was convinced that this dystopian novel laced with violence would be his last. There was a hesitant knock at the door. His oldest daughter, Susy, showed in, unannounced, a short, bespectacled young man of twenty-three. The stranger had bristling eyebrows, an odd accent, and an even more peculiar name. Presenting his card, he introduced himself as Rudyard Kipling, a reporter for the Allahabad Pioneer, in remotest India, and conveyed his intense admiration for Twain’s books. Under ordinary circumstances, Twain, after a few minutes of friendly banter, would have shown the intruder the door, but there was something about the visitor’s command of language that mesmerized him—“talk which might be likened to footprints,” Twain remarked later, “so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind.”
Mark Twain had made it his business to be difficult to find, but Kipling was a newspaper reporter, trained to get the story. Later, he summarized his loopy itinerary in quest of his hero: “They said in Buffalo that he was in Hartford, Connecticut; and again they said ‘perchance he is gone upon a journey to Portland’; and a big, fat drummer [a traveling salesman] vowed that he knew the great man intimately, and that Mark was spending the summer in Europe.” Kipling was so confused that he boarded the wrong train, only to be “incontinently turned out by the conductor three-quarters of a mile from the station, amid the wilderness of railway tracks.” Discouraged, Kipling returned on foot, battered suitcase in one hand and overcoat in the other, to the Buffalo train station, where he learned from a stranger the name of his true destination: “Elmira is the place. Elmira in the State of New York—this state, not two hundred miles away.” Around midnight, Kipling checked himself into a “frowzy” hotel in Elmira, only to be told, yet again, that he might have made the journey for nothing. “Yes, they knew all about ‘that man Clemens,’ but reckoned he was not in town; had gone East somewhere.”
And so it was that, after a sleepless night, the feverish quest for Twain’s whereabouts resumed at dawn—“Morning revealed Elmira,” as Kipling wrote—in a rented carriage in a small industrial city, its main streets washed clean by the recent flooding of the Chemung River. After a few more dead ends, Kipling’s driver finally pulled up at a “miserable, little, white wood shanty,” where he was met by a young woman sketching thistles and goldenrod. The artist, who turned out to be Susy Clemens, quickly “set the pilgrimage on the right path,” directing him to a pretty house a little further on—the home of Mark Twain’s brother-in-law. And there, finally, Kipling met “this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.”
As the two men talked, Twain was astonished by the breadth of his young visitor’s knowledge. “I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before,” he wrote admiringly. How exactly did the outlandish name, the exotic accent, and the job on the Indian newspaper come together, he wondered. And what in the world was this Rudyard Kipling doing in Elmira, of all places? They sat on the veranda while Kipling caught his breath and regaled Twain and his daughter with his extraordinary talk of faraway lands. Transfixed by this traveler from “a land made out of poetry and moonlight,” Susy felt that she was listening to “a denizen of the moon.”
2.
How did this lunar visitor appear to his American hosts? His odd first name was easily explained. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was trained as a sculptor and potter, and employed at the Staffordshire Potteries around present-day Stoke-on-Trent. His mother, Alice, was visiting her brother in the neighborhood, and joined a holiday party for a picnic at Lake Rudyard. It was there that Kipling’s parents met and fell in love, and they commemorated the occasion when they named their first child Joseph Rudyard Kipling. The American Civil War, which figured so prominently in Twain’s life, also had a bearing on Kipling’s early years. The naval blockade of the Confederacy prevented Southern cotton from reaching England, opening markets to Indian cotton instead. In 1865, the last year of the war, Lockwood and Alice, pregnant with their first child, moved to Bombay, flush with the cotton trade, where Lockwood took a job teaching art and design at a newly founded school.
It was in England, where Kipling and his younger sister, Trix, were farmed out to a harsh foster family, that Kipling first discovered the world of books. His father sent him Robinson Crusoe and the Brothers Grimm, without realizing that his miserable son was living a fairy tale, part “Hansel and Gretel” and part “Little Red Riding Hood.” Four years at a second-rate private school, mainly for the children of military officers, followed. Diminutive, dark-skinned, bespectacled, Kipling was an exotic figure to his classmates; he shocked his teachers by announcing that his favorite poet was the disreputable Walt Whitman. To Kipling and his friends, America—the land of Tom Sawyer and Uncle Remus—seemed a place of mischief and boyish high spirits. Too poor for college, Kipling returned to India for a job with a local newspaper in Lahore, the northern outpost now in Pakistan, where his father had become director of the art school and museum.
Rudyard Kipling and his father in India, c. 1883.
During what he called his “seven years hard” as a newspaper reporter in northern India, Kipling remade himself as a tough-minded observer of the life of ordinary soldiers. He followed British troops on their sometimes dangerous missions along the Afghan border and watched, with an eagle eye, the behavior of the British colonial community at work and at play. Soon he began publishing short stories and poems based on these experiences, garnering a local readership for his racy accounts of local life, in a pulp series for travelers called the Indian Railway Library. In 1889, seeking a broader scope for his work, Kipling began his epic journey around the world and gradually transformed himself into an international writer. He traveled to Hong Kong and Japan. Most importan
tly, he traveled to the United States, where his dream of restoring something of the wondrous early life he had led as a child, in Bombay, took hold. Part of that dream was to meet Mark Twain.
3.
Kipling’s pilgrimage to Elmira had begun two months earlier with an unexpected thump. Just short of the dock in San Francisco Bay, the American steamer he had boarded in Yokohama, the City of Peking, had run aground in a mudbank. Already exhausted from a violent storm at sea, the exasperated passengers were ferried the rest of the way in a pitching tugboat. Over the previous few days, tensions on board had erupted between American and British passengers, and Kipling had grown tired of Americans bragging about the wonders of their can-do country. “When the City of Peking steamed through the Golden Gate,” he wrote belligerently, “I saw with great joy that the block-house which guarded the mouth of the ‘finest harbor in the world, Sir,’ could be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong with safety, comfort, and dispatch.” He felt disoriented in the strange city. Glancing at the hotel register, and misreading the word “India,” a local reporter asked him what he thought of Indiana. Kipling made his way to the offices of the San Francisco Call, eager to question the staff about the magazine’s most famous writer, Sam Clemens, who had served his apprenticeship there twenty-five years earlier, and who had adopted the pen name Mark Twain as he began his own conquest of America.
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