If

by Christopher Benfey

  Kipling’s view might be called the netsuke theory of local-color writing: the harder the conditions, the more possibilities in describing them. One of the first guests the Kiplings welcomed to Bliss Cottage was Mary Wilkins. “I invite Miss Wilkins to come to us today for tiffin,” Carrie wrote in her diary on October 11, 1892. With its spare furniture and bare floors, their tiny cottage could have been the setting for a typical Wilkins story of deprivation. Wilkins’s sharp-edged stories about tough-minded women in villages and farms, such as “A New England Nun” and “A Poetess,” appealed to Kipling, who once described a woman he had met in the neighboring village of Putney as “the best subject Mary Wilkins never wrote about.”

  And yet, perhaps out of respect for what writers like Wilkins and Jewett (whom he also befriended) had already accomplished, Kipling ultimately shied away from trying his hand at the dialect and the dilemmas of the local townsfolk. He wrote one fanciful story about personified locomotives in the Brattleboro railroad shed and another about loyal workhorses rejecting a new arrival who wants to organize them for a labor strike. Instead, he found his imagination fully engaged by a very different kind of local color—far beyond the villages, beyond the farms. “Beyond this desolation are woods where the bear and the deer still find peace,” Kipling wrote, “and sometimes even the beaver forgets that he is persecuted and dares to build his lodge.”

  4.

  Most persecuted of all the woodland animals, however, was the wolf. And it was the adventures of a family of wolves that began to take shape in Kipling’s imagination amid the wolf-less hills of Vermont. Abundant timber, as Molly Cabot explained, had first attracted European adventurers and settlers to the banks of the Connecticut River: virgin forests and the abundant wild game that lived among them. Great logs of white pine, destined for ships in the British navy, were floated down the river from Vermont as early as 1733, and laws were soon established for licenses of exploitation, as well as for provisions regarding reforestation of the land.

  The difficulties that these early lumbermen and their families encountered, as Molly Cabot noted, required “special energies of mind and body.” She wrote of a Mrs. Dunklee, among the earliest settlers, who was chased by wolves while traveling on horseback, “and only escaped by climbing the branches of a tree, when the horse made his way home and brought the family to her rescue.” Inspired in part by such horror stories of predatory wolves, vengeful hunters and trappers began targeting the wolves of New England. Wolves had not been welcome in the New England woods for a very long time, however. Among the first laws instituted by the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 was a bounty on wolves, which Roger Williams, who fled the colony for its religious intolerance, referred to as “a fierce, bloodsucking persecutor.” Extermination of the New England wolf was complete two centuries later; according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, the gray wolf has been extinct in the state since about 1840, fifty years before the Kiplings arrived in Vermont.

  Brattleboro played an important part in the extermination of wolves. After the free-love activist John Humphrey Noyes was banished from Putney for transgressing local moral codes, he established the Oneida Community in upstate New York, hoping that agriculture would keep his followers alive. Animal traps designed by a Noyes adherent named Newhouse proved more lucrative. Oneida wolf traps soon dominated the market, as free love and wolf hatred proved compatible with sales pitches. The Newhouse trap, according to one advertisement, “going before the axe and the plow, forms the prow with which iron-clad civilization is pushing back barbaric solitude, causing the bear and beaver to give way to the wheat field, the library and the piano.” Oneida traps were widely used in New England and the West, where strychnine inserted into buffalo corpses helped wipe out the wolf population.

  At precisely the moment that wolves disappeared from New England, some prominent New Englanders began to miss them. By the mid-nineteenth century, New England sages were already lamenting the loss of wildness in both landscape and society. They invoked wolves rather than bald eagles as a sort of national icon. In the epigraph to his classic essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson admonished his countrymen to embrace a regime of tough love—to cast their “bantlings,” their young children, into the wilderness and have them learn to fend for themselves.

  Cast the bantling on the rocks,

  Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;

  Wintered with the hawk and fox,

  Power and speed be hands and feet.

  Henry David Thoreau expanded the allure of a Romulus-and-Remus education in the wild: “It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.” Throwing down the national gauntlet, Thoreau added, “America is the she wolf today.”

  Emerson was a particular favorite of Kipling. He felt that his adopted home in Brattleboro was underwritten by Emerson, since the Sage of Concord had written admiringly of Mount Monadnock in his poetic series “Woodnotes.” Monadnock happened to have its own conspicuous place in New England legends about wolves. The woods around the mountain had been repeatedly clear-cut and burned to prevent wolves from taking refuge in the supposed wolf pits among the rocky outcroppings. The mountain’s bare face was thus a monument to wolf hatred. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” was more than a favorite essay for Kipling; it was a sacred creed to live by. Kipling’s poem “If—” is a recasting of Emerson’s idea of self-trust. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too; / . . . You’ll be a Man, my son!” Kipling writes. Kipling’s choice of wolves for Mowgli’s ideal family may well have been inspired, in part, by the epigraph from “Self-Reliance”: “Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat.”

  The belief that there were benefits of an education in the wild was widespread by the 1890s, when there was pervasive fear in the United States that the country was becoming overcivilized, a land of sissies unprepared for the onslaught of the immigrant hordes flooding the country. Wolves, however, were not always considered a part of this idealized life in the wild. Theodore Roosevelt drew a distinction between noble wild beasts worthy of preservation—such as deer, moose, and bears—and ignoble beasts. The wolf, in Roosevelt’s view, was “the beast of waste and desolation.” Bears should be hunted; wolves should be exterminated.

  5.

  Kipling’s vivid narrative in the Mowgli chapters of The Jungle Book is less driven by tooth and claw—the naturalist vision of Roosevelt and Jack London—than by a psychological conflict. The abandoned man-cub Mowgli is torn between his wild identity as a brother of the wolves who take him in and his dawning sense, as he is taught by Bagheera, the black panther born in captivity, that he rightly belongs among men. “I am two Mowglis,” he laments. “These two things fight together in me as snakes fight in the spring.” For Bagheera, however, this anguished status of being in between is actually a source of strength. “Yes, I too was born among men,” Bagheera tells Mowgli, recounting his years in the private zoo of an Indian king and showing the mark of the collar on his neck, “and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan.” The question for Mowgli—as it so often is for Kipling—is to find the proper balance between the claims of civilization and the claims of the wild.

  In 1907, Sigmund Freud answered a request from a publisher for a list of ten good books. The books on Freud’s list were, as he put it, “‘good’ friends, to whom one owes a portion of one’s knowledge of life and one’s world view.” The second entry on Freud’s list was The Jungle Book, a great favorite of his. One can easily see why the story of a child raised by wolves appealed to Freud, who had reimagined childhood—that innocent realm of the buttoned-up Victorians—as a battleground of contending forces: sexual, aggressive, and wild. Civilization, in Freud’s view, was built on the repression of these forces, but at a
considerable cost to human satisfaction. “Kipling’s lesson seems plain,” writes Peter Gay, Freud’s biographer. “Men cover up their libido and their aggressiveness behind bland and mendacious surfaces; animals are superior beings, for they acknowledge their drives.” One can see why Max, that latter-day Mowgli, wears his wolf suit when he goes on his night journey in Where the Wild Things Are. And one can see why The Jungle Book, that vivid story of adoption by wolves, was as close as Kipling came, after all his conversations with Mary Cabot, to writing the Great American Novel.

  Chapter Eight

  AT THE WASHINGTON ZOO

  1.

  “Those were great and spacious and friendly days in Washington,” Kipling wrote of the six weeks that he and Carrie, with baby Josephine in tow, spent in the nation’s capital from February 26 to April 6, 1895. Carrie had suffered two mishaps that winter. A horse pulling her carriage along the icy hillside had spooked and run wild, overturning the carriage and injuring Carrie in the process, while she held Josephine out of harm’s way. Then she had severely burned her face in an accident with the unpredictable furnace in the basement at Naulakha, singeing her eyebrows and causing painful inflammation. Kipling had bought her a new team of driving horses to cheer her up. On the advice of their friend Dr. Conland, Kipling determined that a few weeks in the warmer South might accelerate the healing, while providing social distractions from their isolated Vermont farm, buried in snow and exposed to every kind of weather New England could inflict.

  Kipling had his own reasons to get away. He craved a fresh direction for his writing, as he continued to add exotic tales to his Jungle Book. Travel and inspiration had always been closely associated in his mind. A first stab at the narrative that would eventually grow into Kim had persuaded him that a visit to northern India might help him more fully to imagine the setting and the characters. He envisaged something like his journey across the United States in 1889, with letters sent home (in this case to New York) for publication. In the meantime, there was the prospect of Washington. He confided to the Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton (a friend of his father who had traveled in India during his youth) on the eve of departure: “I have a yearning upon me to tell tales of extended impropriety—not sexual or within hailing distance of it—but hard-bottomed unseemly yarns.” He added, “One can’t be serious always.”

  After finding their first rooms in Washington intolerable, the Kiplings checked into the newly opened Grafton Hotel on fashionable Connecticut Avenue, expensive and not very comfortable, in Carrie’s snobbish opinion. But there was good company to be had nearby. Henry Adams was traveling in the Caribbean, but Adams’s close friend John Hay was in town. A novelist, dialect poet, Anglophile, and future secretary of state in the William McKinley administration, Hay had also served, as a young man, as Lincoln’s private secretary. Adams and Hay cultivated a group of promising younger men. Kipling had already met one of them, Cecil Spring Rice, a member of the British legation, in Tokyo. Hay and Spring Rice, accompanied by their wives, were the Kiplings’ first visitors at the Grafton Hotel. Another rising young man in the circle was twenty-six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, a civil service commissioner. “I liked him from the first,” Kipling wrote of Roosevelt. Rounding off the group was William Hallett Phillips, a Washington lawyer, congressional insider, and expert on American Indians, destined to be Kipling’s closest friend in what Adams called the “little Washington gang.”

  Had Kipling been more attentive, he could have heard “tales of extended impropriety” among his new Washington friends. For what he had stumbled upon, among the elms and gardens around Lafayette Square, was, in effect, an American Bloomsbury. John Hay had a romantic understanding with Nellie Lodge, wife of Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Massachusetts senator. Henry Adams, bereft after the suicide of his wife, Clover, was passionately in love with Elizabeth Cameron, wife of a dissipated senator from Pennsylvania. Hay was also secretly courting Lizzie Cameron, while trying not to step on his best friend’s toes. Yet another intimate of this circle was the prominent geologist Clarence King, who had secretly married an African-American woman in New York, in whose company he managed to “pass” as a black Pullman porter.

  2.

  A popular destination for these leisured aristocrats was the National Zoological Park, established by Congress in 1889 and first opened to the public in 1891. The National Zoo was placed under the administrative auspices of Samuel Langley, director of the Smithsonian Institution. The original conception was double: to amuse and instruct the urban inhabitants while preserving native species threatened by overhunting and the timber industry. The grounds were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park, on 166 forested acres along Rock Creek in northwest Washington. Here, Kipling and his new friends could talk freely, safely out of public view.

  The zoo’s first director was William Temple Hornaday, a taxidermist by trade and a fierce advocate of wildlife preservation. Hornaday had assembled a Noah’s Ark of 185 animals, sheltered in makeshift pens and cages on the Washington Mall, adjoining the Smithsonian’s main building. Hornaday’s menagerie, which he originally used as his taxidermy models, became the first inhabitants of the zoo. These included, according to Smithsonian records, “buffalo, a black bear, woodchucks, a panther, a grizzly bear cub, a Carolina black bear, a bald eagle, turkey vultures, and black snakes.”

  The charms of the zoo were not lost on Kipling. He was adding stories to The Jungle Book, and the animals he encountered at the zoo confirmed details in the narrative. The zoo also brought him fresh ideas for further stories. Spring Rice, Phillips, and Roosevelt escorted Kipling to the Smithsonian, where Langley gave him various publications, including one on Inuit culture. One such pamphlet inspired the story “Quiquern,” in The Second Jungle Book, about two sled dogs. The young men then proceeded to the zoo, where Kipling, according to Spring Rice, “was like a child and roared with laughter at the elephants and the bears.” More pilgrimages followed, and the zoo soon became Kipling’s favorite Washington destination. Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted to show off the bears to his new friend. As Kipling recalled in Something of Myself, he and Roosevelt “would go off to the Zoo together,” where Roosevelt “talked about grizzlies that he had met”—presumably on his hunting forays in the Rockies.

  3.

  One particular grizzly bear on display in the National Zoo that winter had a special meaning for Kipling’s Washington circle. This group of men—rich, well educated, and socially connected—shared a passion for hunting, in a style that they associated with the European-landed aristocracy. Hallett Phillips and Theodore Roosevelt were founding members of the Boone and Crockett Club, named for a couple of national heroes known for their prowess with a rifle. Established in 1887, the club was a coterie of wealthy big-game hunters who adopted an aristocratic code, known as the “Fair Chase Statement,” for the proper “taking” of animals, without recourse to traps, nets, and the like. Members were to engage in a “one-to-one relationship with the quarry” and pledged to take their prey “in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage.” The club lobbied Congress to protect wilderness spaces and had won an early victory when it rallied support for the expansion of Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park. Members also took an interest in the building of zoos, essentially game preserves by a different name.

  The greatest achievement of the Boone and Crockett Club was the federal legislation that established the national forests. Hunters like Phillips and Roosevelt had long worried that rapacious timber companies were destroying the natural habitat of big game—the bison, elk, and grizzly bears that they loved to hunt. According to Roosevelt, the average westerner had “but one thought about a tree, and that was to cut it down.” In 1891, Phillips slipped a provision into a congressional spending bill calling for the “reserving” of public lands. What came to be known as the Forest Reserve Act passed on March 3. According to the historian Charles
Beard, the act was “one of the most noteworthy measures ever passed in the history of the nation.”

  In recognition of this legislative victory, Adams invited a group of close friends, including Hay and Phillips, on a hunting and fishing trip to Yellowstone during the summer of 1894. They met in Chicago, crippled at the time by the great Pullman Strike. “The strike can hardly affect us much,” Adams assured Hay on July 13, a couple of days after US marshals had arrested Eugene Debs and suppressed the strike by force. Adams, whose brother Charles Francis Adams was president of the Union Pacific Railroad, could count on John Hay to share his negative assessment of the strikers. Hay had married the daughter of a Cleveland steel baron; in his bestselling novel The Bread-winners (1883), the villain is a labor organizer. By the end of July, the hunting party had reached their hotel in Yellowstone. Adams, who had accompanied his friend Clarence King on his forays for the US Geological Survey, claimed that there wasn’t much left to hunt. “Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had vanished,” he complained. “Only the more intelligent ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociable bear.”

  One such bear was destined for the National Zoo. Henry Adams playfully wrote to Martha Cameron, the young daughter of Elizabeth Cameron, reporting that news had reached their hotel that “a man had caught a big grizzly bear about seven miles above us,” adding, “Perhaps Mr. Langley will take him to the zoo, and you may see him there.” By October, the grizzly from Yellowstone was safely ensconced in Langley’s zoo. “Tell Martha that Bill Flips [William Phillips] and I went out to the Zoo last Sunday to see her bear,” Adams informed Lizzie Cameron. “It is so wild that it has to be put in a house by itself, where it was sore trying to break the bars.” Evidently, this Yellowstone specimen was one of the bears—“rather too big to lead home with a string,” Adams joked—that Roosevelt wanted Kipling to admire at the Washington Zoo.