If

by Christopher Benfey

  7.

  Nothing in Findlayson’s previous hallucinations prepares the reader for what happens next, as the spinning Ark finally runs aground on its Ararat in the Ganges. One by one, to the amazement of the stranded mariners, the native Hindu gods of India appear, in the guise of their “vehicles,” their beasts of burden: first the Bull, Brahma himself; then Kali and Shiva; and finally the monkey god, Hanuman. The deities gather to listen to Mother Gunga’s complaints. She, the Ganges River, pleads for revenge against the intrusive bridge builders, who have imprisoned her waters with their modern technology. “I have seen Sydney,” Peroo tells Findlayson. “I have seen London, and twenty great ports, but . . . never man has seen that we saw here.” Findlayson either doesn’t understand what Peroo is saying or he refuses to do so. But Peroo persists. “Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?” “There was a fever upon me,” Findlayson answers uneasily, looking across the water. “It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men talking, but I do not remember.”

  The ending of the story may seem the rankest orientalism, a sentimental view of native superstitions, based in part on Lockwood Kipling’s loving account in his book Beast and Man in India. The Hindus have their gods of the night, of the deep, unchanging past. The Europeans, by contrast, have their progressive gods of technology, the low-pressure cylinder. The natives are Nature and the past; the Europeans are Science and the future. Only black men see the gods. As Kipling noted, in an 1885 letter to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, “Underneath our excellent administrative system; under the piles of reports and statistics; the thousands of troops; the doctors; and the civilians runs wholly untouched and unaffected the life of the people of the land—a life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian nights.”

  But this hierarchy is too simple for Kipling, at least in “The Bridge-Builders.” His Hindu gods do not present a unified vision; they energetically disagree among themselves. Mother Gunga does indeed lobby hard for the rights of Nature, the timeless cycle of flood and drought. But Hanuman, who seems to have drifted to India from the modern industrial world (and perhaps from some city near Brattleboro, Vermont), speaks for technology. “I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood still breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me.” Hanuman is the voice of materialism, of the railroad engineers, and the bridge builders in their daytime work.

  Only Peroo, in this commanding story, seems to have achieved a proper balance between the claims of the night and the day. Only he remembers, in the sunlit day, what he has seen on the island at night. Findlayson has built one kind of bridge, the daytime bridge over the Ganges. It is Findlayson who is the hero of the first part of the story; we, the readers, experience progress on the monumental bridge from his point of view. But Peroo has bridged something else entirely, something that, ultimately, is more important for Kipling, writing in Vermont in 1893, and discussing the gods of India with his father, Lockwood. Peroo understands the claims of both kinds of gods, the gods of the daytime and—with the help of opium—the gods of the night. It is Peroo’s perspective that, in Kipling’s scheme, takes over for the ending. It is Peroo who, at the end of a long day’s night of work, has had his vision. Meanwhile, Kipling, holed up in his study at the south end of Naulakha, stared at his father’s injunction in the flickering candlelight, “The night cometh, when no man can work,” and went on writing anyway. Opium had opened some of the mysteries of India to Kipling, but what wondrous drug could reveal the hidden Fourth Dimension of the United States?

  Chapter Seven

  ADOPTED BY WOLVES

  1.

  Kipling’s first achievement in The Jungle Book is to establish, from its opening words, a believable family of wolves, neither overly anthropomorphic nor too alien and wild:

  It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. “Augrh!” said Father Wolf. “It is time to hunt again.”

  When Kipling specifies how Father Wolf spreads out his paws, one after the other, to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips, he turns us all into wolves.

  Into this cozy domestic scene a tiny stranger intrudes. Father Wolf identifies the visitor as “a man’s cub,” separated from his terrified parents by the marauding tiger, Shere Khan. Mother Wolf, meanwhile, is nursing her own cubs. “How little! How naked, and—how bold!” she remarks. Her last observation coincides with the man cub’s efforts to muscle his way among the wolf cubs and get some milk for himself. “The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide,” Kipling writes. “Ahai!” says Mother Wolf. “He is taking his meal with the others. . . . Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her children?” This is meant as a rhetorical question, but Father Wolf answers it anyway: “I have heard now and again of such a thing,” he says, “but never in our Pack or in my time.”

  Most readers (or viewers of the classic 1967 Disney adaptation) are familiar with Mowgli’s progress among his wolf brothers; his tutelage under the kindly bear, Baloo, as he learns the precepts of the Law of the Jungle; the teachings of more severe panther, Bagheera, who was born in captivity and knows the ways of men; his ambiguous relations with the deadly snake, Kaa; his fight-to-the-death hostility toward the tiger, Shere Khan. These are all part of our mythology, as enduring as Huck Finn or Tarzan, that latter-day Mowgli. We come to accept Mowgli’s wolf family as his real family, his primary allegiance. “I have obeyed the Law of the Jungle, and there is no wolf of ours from whose paws I have not pulled a thorn,” Mowgli says. “Surely they are my brothers!” We allow ourselves to be outraged, later in the book, when he is kidnapped by a band of monkeys, as though wolves are closer in nature to humans than monkeys are. We might contrast this upbringing with that of Tarzan, who is adopted by humanoid apes, a much closer link in the evolutionary chain, as Edgar Rice Burroughs repeatedly reminds us.

  Kipling in his Naulakha study, with a statuette of Mowgli’s wolf brother, a gift of Joel Chandler Harris.

  No moment in The Jungle Book is more poignant than Mowgli’s brief and ambivalent sojourn in the home of his presumed birth mother, Messua, a kindly rural villager who doesn’t know quite what to do—like many a mother since—when her teenage son wanders back into her life for a few weeks. It has become clear, to Mowgli and to us, that he will not be able to choose a mate from among the wolves or the monkeys. His only real future, even in a book as fantastical as this one, is with his own kind. Mowgli, who has grown up in the forest, is uncomfortable in his birth mother’s hut, which feels like a trap to him; she is uncomfortable outside it, where wolves and tigers roam. One thing she does do, however, is give the child milk to drink, as though her nursing, interrupted so many years earlier, could now be resumed without complication. Suddenly, at this very moment, Mowgli feels something touch his foot. “Mother,” says Mowgli, “what dost thou here?” It is Mother Wolf, his adoptive mother, licking his foot. “I have a desire to see that woman who gave thee milk,” says Mother Wolf. Then she growls, possessively, “I gave thee thy first milk!”

  Kipling often explored the imaginative possibilities of his stories by working out alternatives in his poems. In a poem written in Brattleboro around 1893, and included as an epigraph in early editions of The Jungle Book, he staged an encounter between a human birth mother and her wayward son, who is drawn to the night world of wolves. The poem is called “The Only Son,” and its opening lines describe a mother’s fear about noises in the night outside: “She dropped the bar, she shot the bolt, she fed the fire anew, / For she heard a whimper under the sill and a great grey paw came through.”

  Having secured th
e door, she does nothing more, but her son has an unsettling dream, related to that great gray paw: “Now was I born of womankind and laid in a mother’s breast? / For I have dreamed of a shaggy hide whereon I went to rest.” After a few more lines in this questioning vein, the Only Son asks his mother to unbar the door since, as he says, “I must out and see / If those are wolves that wait outside or my own kin to me!” The poem concludes as it began, from the mother’s point of view: “She loosed the bar, she slid the bolt, she opened the door anon, / And a grey bitch-wolf came out of the dark and fawned on the Only Son!” Kipling has led us into another myth altogether, the familiar nightmare figure of the werewolf. The poem is a reminder of how original the treatment of Mowgli is by contrast, in which the wolves are a comforting, intimate family, a refuge from human turmoil and not, as in the poem, an intensification of it.

  2.

  Kipling’s originality is even more striking when his account of Mowgli’s adoption by wolves is contrasted with its Indian sources. He alludes to these accounts when Father Wolf tells Mother Wolf that he has heard of wolf adoptions, “but never in our Pack.” Kipling’s father had a particular interest in such stories. In his encyclopedic book Beast and Man in India, published in 1891, Lockwood Kipling wrote, “India is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories, which are here universally believed and supported by a cloud of testimony.” One source that Kipling drew on for his Mowgli narrative is titled “An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens,” written by W. H. Sleeman, a British official. Sleeman is best known today for his suppression of a secret criminal gang known as the Thuggee (from which the word “thug” is derived); Mark Twain was enchanted by Sleeman’s account of his successful campaign. In 1849–50, however, Sleeman traveled throughout the Kingdom of Oude for the purpose of recommending measures to improve the region and the plight of its people. He was also supposed to provide evidence in support of the recent annexation of Oude by the British East India Company. During his travels, he claims to have heard many reports of wolves carrying off native children.

  The six stories Sleeman reports have certain features in common. The children carried off by wolves are always native children, never British. They are always rescued by government officials, never by villagers. In those cases where parents recognize their children after their rescue, things do not go well; the parents give up the children for adoption or the children die. The behavior of the feral children, after their rescue from the dens of wolves, is remarkably similar in the six accounts. They have calluses on their elbows and knees from crawling around on all fours. They prefer raw to cooked meat. They tolerate the company of dogs when feeding. They are incapable of learning human language. They die young.

  Sleeman appears to have thought that such consistency added to the credibility of the stories, but the repetitive details suggest instead their formulaic nature. All of the reports come from the same period, from about 1842 to 1848, with a cluster of three or four—Sleeman is not precise—dating from 1843, apparently a banner year for wolf adoptions. Such a concentration of stories in a particular place and time would suggest either an epidemic of wolf adoptions, as though the wolves had suddenly developed an appetite for raising human children rather than eating them, or a mass hysteria among villagers. Sleeman argues, however, that the Hindu villagers made a profit from their transactions with wolves, essentially trading their children for money. “It is remarkable that they very seldom catch Wolves, though they know all their dens, and could easily dig them out as they dig out other animals,” he writes. “This is supposed to arise from the profit which they make by the gold and silver bracelets, necklaces, and other ornaments, which are worn by the children, whom the Wolves carry to their dens and devour, and are left at the entrance of these dens.” He concludes with the damning observation, “In every part of India a great number of children are every day murdered for the sake of their ornaments.”

  One might think that this peculiar analysis would help explain why so many native children are eaten by wolves rather than nurtured by them. But for Sleeman, the devouring and the nurturing are part of the same pathology, namely that native Hindus, in his view, simply don’t care very much for their children. The characterization of Indian peasantry that he is at pains to establish is that of careless and apathetic parents distracted by their work in the fields, as their children meanwhile are “carried off” by wolves. When the feral children are returned to them, the parents, appalled by their grunts and nasty smells, proceed to place the children, doubly lost to their parents, in charity care. The responsible parties in these stories are never the villagers, with their benighted family values, but rather the British officials and those employed by them. The need for European paternalism is triumphantly demonstrated at every turn. The local Hindus must be taught to value their children more than the gold bracelets on their wrists.

  Kipling departed from these Indian sources in several key ways. He chose a native child for his hero, rather than a British official or child, and he portrayed Mowgli’s native birth mother as a sympathetic figure. Kipling went further, in portraying the adoptive family of wolves with equal sympathy. One might compare, in this regard, the Mowgli stories with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s eugenic fantasy Tarzan of the Apes, for which Burroughs borrowed many details from The Jungle Book, including a godlike hero of superhuman strength, agility, and physical beauty raised in the wild by ferocious animals. Burroughs departs from Kipling in his insistence that Tarzan’s birth parents are English nobility, Lord and Lady Greystoke, and that what Tarzan learns about proper behavior does not come from the great apes who raise him but rather from the books his parents have left behind. Mowgli, by contrast, is adopted by friendly wolves that also happen to be model parents. He grows up not with calluses on his knees and elbows, cowering in the shadows like Sleeman’s unfortunate waifs, but as an energetic and sensitive leader, powerful in mind and body, who can kill a tiger, make complicated moral choices, and right the wrongs in both human and animal communities.

  3.

  If Kipling relied in part on Indian sources for his tale of Mowgli among the wolves, he also drew on his Vermont surroundings, especially his conviction that he was living in a lawless jungle. “Kipling never quite outgrew his first impression that every American citizen carried concealed weapons of war,” his friend Molly Cabot recalled. He had witnessed a murder in a San Francisco gambling den. He had watched an American woman enjoying the carnage of a Chicago slaughterhouse. Such experiences had left him convinced that violence was at the molten core of American life. As though to stave off the chaos that surrounded them, he and Carrie dressed each evening for dinner, much to the amusement of their more informal neighbors. Kipling considered himself, as a well-informed outsider, uniquely qualified to interpret this bloodthirsty society. He was “the only man living,” he insisted to Cabot, “who could write The Great American Novel.”

  Kipling believed, furthermore, that America was “the place in which to create.” His father summarized Rudyard’s expansive view: “There is undoubtedly a freer outlook from America for the man who prefers to think for himself than from London.” Kipling gleaned most of his useful information about his new surroundings from Cabot. Lively, sophisticated, and well read, she was a longtime friend of the Balestier family, long assumed to be Wolcott’s future wife. She had never married, living alone in the handsome, upright house inherited from her father in the fashionable neighborhood of terraces near the Connecticut River, on the northern edge of Brattleboro. A dedicated antiquarian who wrote two volumes about her native city, Cabot was a steady fund of anecdotes and gossip for Kipling, as he eagerly sought out material for his own writing.

  A passionate reader of American literature, high and low, Kipling was acutely aware of contemporary writing about ordinary lives lived in New England, the so-called “local color” school, which consisted primarily of women writers writing about women’s subjects. Kipling was contemplating a volume of “C
ountry Sketches,” for which Cabot supplied photographs. These would be about women, since so many of the men had fled the farms and villages of Vermont for better prospects elsewhere. “It would be hard to exaggerate the loneliness and sterility of life on the farms,” he wrote. “What might have become characters, powers, and attributes perverted themselves in that desolation as cankered trees throw out branches akimbo, and strange faiths and cruelties, born of solitude to the edge of insanity, flourished like lichen on sick bark.” These were the resilient lives described by local-color masters like Mary Wilkins (later Freeman), who lived in Brattleboro, and Sarah Orne Jewett, based in Boston and Maine. “It has been said that the New England stories are cramped and narrow,” Kipling wrote in their staunch defense. “Even a far-off view of the iron-bound life whence they are drawn justifies the author. You can carve a nut in a thousand different ways by reason of the hardness of the shell.”