If

by Christopher Benfey

  Kipling was thoroughly familiar with Indian ideas of reincarnation and divination. He had also read widely in contemporary attempts, in both England and America, to uncover evidence of paranormal abilities, mentioning in one early story the research of Frederic Myers, founder of the British Society for Psychical Research, and his popular book Phantasms of the Living (1886). Apart from the shenanigans of certain professional spiritualists—fakery involving secret signals, hidden trapdoors, and disguised voices—there was a serious side to this research. It was part of an ongoing attempt to make room, in a scientific and materialist age, for religious faith, and specifically for phenomena that could not be explained by material causes alone. Thinkers like William James were eager to reveal fraud in order to explore more aggressively what might just possibly be true, such as claims of telepathy (a word coined by Myers in 1882) or dreams that predicted the future. Mark Twain joined the Society for Psychical Research on the basis of just such a dream.

  With its own rich traditions of meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices, India was a seedbed of paranormal claims and a favored destination for Westerners drawn to the “wisdom of the East.” European sojourners gave their own interpretive twist to Hindu ideas of reincarnation, grafting pseudo-Darwinian notions of spiritual “evolution” to ancient beliefs regarding the progress of human souls. Simla, the summer retreat that Washington resembled, became a center for such roving pilgrims and practitioners. The Kipling family, sojourning in Simla to escape the dangerous summer heat, had a close-up view of some of the exotic claimants to spiritual superiority.

  Madame Blavatsky, the Russian-born founder of Theosophy and a firm believer in reincarnation, was the foremost of these. “At one time our little world was full of the aftermaths of Theosophy as taught by Madame Blavatsky to her devotees,” Kipling recalled in Something of Myself. “My Father knew the lady and, with her, would discuss wholly secular subjects; she being, he told me, one of the most interesting and unscrupulous imposters he had ever met.” Her trickery was evident to the researchers from the Society for Psychical Research who traveled to Simla to investigate, but not before the head editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, for which Kipling wrote, had turned the newspaper into a propaganda organ for Theosophy. Kipling’s early story “In the House of Suddhoo” concerns a scam perpetrated by a spiritualist fraud.

  And yet Kipling was not a firm disbeliever in spiritualism either. Both his mother and his mentally unstable sister, Trix, were said to have clairvoyant powers, the gift of “second sight.” Kipling suspected something of the same capacity in himself. He was once asked if he believed that there was “anything to spiritualism.” “There is; I know,” Kipling answered. “Have nothing to do with it.” Kipling’s sister, as it turned out, would have a lot to do with it. For Charlie Mears, Longfellow was the “medium in which his memory worked best.” Under the American poet’s influence, the “jarring cross-currents” of the echo chamber of English poetry were, momentarily, “dumb.” Medium and Cross Currents suggest a variety of spiritualism that Trix, ten years after the publication of her brother’s famous story, fully embraced.

  6.

  Beginning in 1901, four women produced lengthy scripts, either by dictation or by automatic writing, while in a hypnotic trance. Two of the women, the London-based Verrells, were mother and daughter. Another, unknown to the Verrells, was Winifred Coombe Tennant, who went by the spirit-name of “Mrs. Willet.” And the fourth, several thousand miles away in India, was Trix herself, who adopted the spirit-name “Mrs. Holland.” When assembled, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, these enigmatic fragments of text from various hands could be shown to produce a coherent message, hence the term that was adopted for such bizarre phenomena: “cross correspondences.”

  One such case came to be known as “The Ear of Dionysius.” During the summer of 1910, Mrs. Willet dictated, in a trance, a script that contained the phrase “Dionysius Ear the lobe.” No explanatory context was given, but the classicist Gerald Balfour, in his book The Ear of Dionysius, explained that the Ear of Dionysius is “a kind of grotto hewn in the solid rock at Syracuse [on the island of Sicily] and opening on one of the stone-quarries which served as a place of captivity for Athenian prisoners of war” after the failed siege described by Thucydides. Later, the tyrant Dionysius imprisoned his enemies in the cave, which, as Balfour noted, “has the peculiar acoustic properties of a whispering gallery, and is traditionally believed to have been constructed or utilized by the Tyrant in order to overhear, himself unseen, the conversations of his prisoners.” The echoing cave magnified their lamentations.

  Another oracular script produced by Mrs. Willet, three years later, confirmed the location in Syracuse. “It concerned a place where slaves were kept—and Audition belongs, also Acoustics / Think of the Whispering Gally / To toil, a slave, the Tyrant—and it was called Orecchio—that’s near / One ear, a one eared place.” Balfour examined many more scripts, including one from Trix. There are references to “Noah and the grapes” (supposedly suggesting the captivity of Odysseus and his crew in the drunken Cyclops’s cave), to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (with John Wilkes Booth’s cry of “Sic semper tyrannis” confirming Dionysius’s identity as a tyrant), and so on, before an eventual solution is proposed for the baffling riddle of the messages.

  The scripts, when fitted together properly, proved (according to Balfour) that two respected classical scholars who had recently died, named Verrall and Butcher, had connived from beyond the grave to send messages back to the world of the living. Their messages were intended to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the survival of personal identity after death. The scripts by Trix and the other three women could be shown (with much ingenuity on the part of both the ghosts and the interpreter) to allude to an obscure monograph on Greek poetry, known only to specialists, written by a professor at Bryn Mawr, the women’s college outside Philadelphia.

  The case has an undeniable suggestive power. And yet what is striking to a reader of Longfellow and Kipling is how many details of The Ear of Dionysius seem drawn directly from “‘The Finest Story in the World,’” and from Kipling’s Longfellow fixation more generally. Charlie Mears, on the same evening in which the narrator discovers that Longfellow’s poetry was “the medium in which his memory worked best,” listens to “nearly the whole of ‘The Saga of King Olaf.’” Toward the end of the evening, Charlie implores the narrator for more. “But go back, please,” Charlie says, “and read ‘The Skerry of Shrieks’ again.”

  “The Skerry of Shrieks” tells how King Olaf, who introduced Christianity to Norway by force, punished a crew of pagan warlocks who intruded on his drunken Easter festivities. Olaf has them bound “foot and hand / On the Skerry’s rocks.” Then he sits back with his knights to listen to the “sullen roar” of the rising tide on the rocky shores of the island, mingled with other, crueler music: “Shrieks and cries of wild despair / Filled the air, / Growing fainter as they listened; / Then the bursting surge alone / Sounded on;—” It is very strange indeed to find features of Kipling’s “‘The Finest Story in the World’” and of Longfellow’s “The Skerry of Shrieks” reproduced in the published account of The Ear of Dionysius. In the very first quoted passage from Mrs. Willet we find, among other things, a place where slaves are kept, a reference to the “toil” of the slaves, a reference to a “Whispering Gally” (presumably “gallery,” though also punning on a galley).

  As a case meant to prove spirit survival beyond the grave, The Ear of Dionysius would seem to offer tempting evidence. “The implications of the cross correspondences cannot be lightly dismissed,” according to the historian Janet Oppenheim, “although they are still a long way from proving the reality of communications from the dead.” Nonetheless, it is difficult to avoid the impression that what we are reading, in The Ear of Dionysius, is more a case of literary invention than of scientific exposition. Particularly conspicuous in this regard are the recurrent references to English
poetry, Greek and Latin texts, and the like, all features of Kipling’s tale. It would seem that the four women, listening in a trance for the echoes of eternity, heard instead the echoes of Kipling’s “finest story in the world.”

  What the story meant for Kipling, though, had more immediate implications. He was on his way to London, at last, to make his fortune, and yet America was firmly on his mind. He had made pilgrimages to pay his respects to Twain and Longfellow, anchoring his literary ambitions firmly in American soil. He had felt himself, in the emotionally charged landscape of Emerson’s Concord, “in the very beginning of things.” He had tried hard to attach himself to an American family, and, specifically, to two sisters, the Taylors of Beaver, Pennsylvania. In London, not surprisingly, he would soon find another, more suitable family in which to make himself at home—an American family, of course, and again with two sisters. Literary ambition would again align itself with his emotional needs, at the dawn of a great career.

  Chapter Three

  A DEATH IN DRESDEN

  1.

  In Henry James’s fictional version of the story, a brash young American, eager to escape the confines of a sleepy city in the American outback, travels to Europe in search of adventure. Daisy Miller, James’s heroine, is the very embodiment of what he called the “American Girl.” She delights in unnecessary risks; she forms attachments with rootless Americans and shiftless natives. Heedless of age-old conventions, Daisy is a modern young woman in every way. And yet the darker, less salubrious places of the ancient lamplit world—the legendary ruins and the picturesque shadows—attract her like a moth to moonlight. An American bachelor with the wintry name of Winterbourne, long residing in Europe, tries to shield her from danger. But daisies, as everyone knows, are particularly vulnerable in winter.

  Late one night, Winterbourne, sleepless in Rome, ventures within the moldering walls of the moonlit Colosseum. To his horror, he discovers that Daisy herself has sought out the same dark refuge, in the company of an unsavory Roman suitor. There, poor Daisy catches the dread old-world fever that kills her. She is buried in the little Protestant cemetery, “by an angle of the wall of imperial Rome,” James specifies, near the grave of John Keats, another doomed exile far from home. Lacerating himself for having failed to protect her, Winterbourne keeps vigil among his fellow mourners, “staring at the raw protuberance among the April daisies.” And the moral is—well, what exactly? That Daisy Miller should have stayed home in Schenectady, and gone to bed early?

  Only this time, in real life, the circumstances were slightly different. It was the death in Dresden of another youthful American—a slender young man not yet thirty and full of ambitious plans cut shockingly short—that set so many surprising things in motion. (One was the doomed theatrical career of Henry James; another was the marriage of Rudyard Kipling.) The young American who launched so many schemes had arrived in London in December 1888. Originally from Rochester—two hundred miles from Daisy’s Schenectady—via Brattleboro, Vermont, he had spent a significant part of his life in the Far West. He knew his way among mining towns and railroads that led to nowhere. His name was Charles Wolcott (pronounced “WOOL-cut”) Balestier. Huguenot sugar planters originally based in Martinique, the Balestiers had abandoned that lucrative slaveholding island with the fall of Napoléon. There was a hint of exoticism about Wolcott, an air of aristocratic origins. On his mother’s side, he was related to Oliver Wolcott, an original signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and to Paul Revere, hero of Longfellow’s stirring ballad about the midnight ride.

  Almost his first conquest in London was Henry James. Wolcott Balestier headed the parade of young men who would play a central part in James’s later life. Alice James hoped that Balestier, “the effective and the indispensable,” might be a lifelong companion for her brother. But Balestier had the same fatal taste as Daisy Miller for the darker, danker corners of the Old World. Shunning the well-traveled neighborhoods of Fleet Street or the Strand, favored by publishers, he established his business offices instead in one of those pestiferous corners of ancient London. He caught a chill, like Daisy Miller—“a damnable vicious typhoid,” as James wrote, “contracted in his London office, the ‘picturesqueness’ of which he loved.” In Alice James’s memorable phrase, Balestier was “swept away like a cobweb, of which gossamer substance he seems to have been himself composed.”

  Pale as fine porcelain and impossibly slender, Balestier resembled nothing so much as a graceful Meissen figurine, illuminated by candlelight. He died in Dresden, where Meissen is made, and he was buried, like Daisy Miller, in a small Protestant cemetery far from home. Henry James made his way—his “miserable pious pilgrimage,” as he called it—to Dresden for the sad little service. Meanwhile, another of Balestier’s close associates was very far away indeed. Summoned from the South Seas, Rudyard Kipling returned to mourn Balestier and to marry Balestier’s sister. And that, one might say, is how it all began. But the details—the details that Henry James would have insisted upon—are what make the story interesting.

  2.

  Wolcott Balestier had tried his hand at many things before he came to London, and he had learned from his failures. After a year at Cornell, he invested some of his considerable Caribbean inheritance in mining interests, without success. Then he tried to spin his rambles in the West, to Colorado and down to Mexico, into literary gold. Like other writers in his cohort, he emulated, in a series of facile novels, the gentle realism of William Dean Howells, the influential editor of The Atlantic, who had called on American novelists to record “the more smiling aspects of life.” Balestier tried to follow Howells’s example in other ways. As a young man, Howells had written a campaign biography for the underdog Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln. His reward had been a diplomatic post in Venice. Howells, like Balestier, had Brattleboro connections. His wife, Elinor, was from Brattleboro, and her first cousin was Rutherford B. Hayes, another Brattleboro native. In addition to his Lincoln book, Howells wrote a campaign biography of Hayes, the eventual Republican victor in the contested election of 1877.

  And so it was that Wolcott Balestier secured the job of writing the campaign biography for James G. Blaine, senator from Maine and the Republican candidate for president in the 1884 election. If Blaine won, as seemed likely—no Democrat had been elected to the White House since the beginning of the Civil War—Balestier might look forward to a European post. In his preface, he took care to quote Howells, fawningly, “in his admirable ‘Life of Hayes,’” to the effect that “whatever is ambitious or artificial or unwise in my book is doubly my misfortune, for it is altogether false to him.”

  Balestier’s particular challenge in the book was to defend Blaine from scandal. Known as the “Plumed Knight” to his admirers but as “Slippery Jim” to his detractors, Blaine had been a member of President Ulysses S. Grant’s notoriously corrupt cabinet. He was already tainted by deals that he had previously pushed through, as Speaker of the House, in favor of railroad interests. He had apparently been rewarded for his efforts with lucrative stocks. Though never convicted, Blaine could not shake the odor of corruption attached to his name. In a chapter titled “Slander,” Balestier summarily dismissed the charges. “These pages need not be burdened with a defense of Mr. Blaine against the accusations of political enemies,” he wrote huffily. “They were disposed of long ago.”

  In the 1884 election, many lifelong Republicans crossed party lines to vote for the more honest-seeming Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, a pro-business lawyer from upstate New York. Such “mugwumps,” as they were called—an Algonquin word popularly interpreted as meaning those with their mugs on one side of the fence and their rumps on the other—included such prominent figures as the historian Henry Adams (the grandson and great grandson of American presidents) and Mark Twain. The Blaine campaign, in turn, tried to smear Cleveland by alleging, baselessly, that he had fathered an illegitimate child, and adopted the slogan “Ma, Ma, Where’s
My Pa?” Cleveland won, eventually serving two terms, though not in succession, before his administration took the blame for the financial Panic of 1893.

  After Blaine’s defeat—a blow to his biographer’s hopes as well—Balestier settled in New York, as editor of a magazine called Tid-Bits. He did not relinquish his hopes for a foreign posting, however. He and his publisher, John Lovell, hit on a scheme to take advantage of the absence of international copyright agreements, which had resulted in rampant piracy. This was the same problem that Mark Twain had raised so vehemently with Kipling in Elmira. The idea was for Balestier, based in London, to secure the rights to publish English books simultaneously in the United States.

  In London, Balestier established his business in a peculiar, if picturesque, locale. Behind Westminster Abbey, a stone archway leads to an enclosed courtyard. Ancient buildings, among them a school for choirboys, surround a central green. Here, in serene if slightly fetid Dean’s Yard, the Abbey tower looms above the rooftops. The doorway to number two—where Balestier pursued his publishing deals among the priests in their rustling robes—would have been adjacent to the stone archway. Among the austere buildings in brick and stone, it is the only one missing today, a break in the stately fabric like a gap-toothed smile. The corner building at number two apparently fell victim to persistent problems of drainage, a challenge in this damp, enclosed space.