Any hope for a prompt settlement was soon dashed. The judge issued a preliminary ruling in Kipling’s favor, and demanded bail from Beatty if he wished to escape jail. When Beatty said he couldn’t pay the bond, Kipling—adding another farcical detail to the circus—offered to do so. Beatty refused the gesture. After Beatty’s lawyer posted the bond, the judge set the date for a second hearing in September. “Rud a total wreck,” Carrie wrote in her diary. “Sleeps all the time. Dull, listless and weary. These are dark days for us.”
At this grim juncture, yet another fishing trip was proposed. Kipling packed his rod and reel on June 15 and set off for the coast of Newfoundland, where he remained for two weeks. “It’s a great land and I caught a 15-lb salmon—my first on the fly,” he reported on July 2, “and I have grown three inches in my boots since.” This time, Kipling’s fishing companion was Lockwood de Forest, the New York designer who had helped decorate Naulakha. As the dreaded second judicial hearing approached, the Kiplings abruptly decided to leave Brattleboro, but they left open the possibility of a return. “I don’t think quite of quitting the land permanently,” Kipling wrote William Dean Howells. “It is hard to go from where one has raised one’s kids and builded a wall and digged a well and planted a tree.” His hurried departure to England, in late August, “was the hardest thing I had ever had to do,” Kipling said. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he lamented, “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.”
6.
The Kiplings spent their final night in a hotel near the Hoboken dock where their ship waited. Rudyard wrote a long letter to William James, the distinguished Harvard psychologist. With his wife, Alice, James had visited Naulakha in June 1895, just after the Kiplings had returned from Washington. He was tremendously impressed with Kipling, whom he compared to Shakespeare. William James has come to be known for the conviction that young people in peacetime needed a challenge comparable to battle—a “moral equivalent of war”—to learn the martial virtues of “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command.” They needed danger, they needed hard physical labor, and they needed extreme experience to relieve their boredom amid prosperity. Kipling and James discussed precisely this theme a few years before James delivered his famous speech at Stanford (Harvey Cheyne’s alma mater) on the moral equivalent of war. Kipling and James, it now seems clear, developed the idea together.
On August 31, the day before the Kiplings left the United States, Kipling wrote to say that Captains Courageous was the book that James had urged him to write. “I have just finished off a long tale wherein I have deliberately travelled on the lines you suggest—i.e., I have taken the detail of a laborious and dangerous trade (fishing on the Grand Banks) and used it for all the romance in sight.” Kipling diagnosed the American predicament of the 1890s. “Half your trouble is the curse of America—sheer, hopeless well-ordered boredom; and that is going some day to [be the] curse of the world. The other races are still scuffling for their three meals a day. America’s got ’em and now she doesn’t know what she wants but is dimly realizing that extension lectures, hardwood floors, natural gas and trolley-cars don’t fill the bill.”
Reciprocally, Kipling’s novel on deep-sea fishing, written along the lines that James had suggested, left an imprint on “The Moral Equivalent of War.” “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers,” James proclaimed, “would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.” Indeed, the famous novel and the famous essay—with William James’s prescription of “fishing fleets in December” to toughen up the “luxurious classes”—might be thought of as an imaginative collaboration between two writers bent on solving an American problem.
Chapter Ten
DHARMA BUMS
1.
“In a gloomy, windy autumn Kim came back to me with insistence,” Kipling wrote in Something of Myself, recalling the long gestation of the strange and magical novel that he had begun in Vermont in 1892. He had put the manuscript aside several times before picking it up in earnest, six years later, during the summer of 1898. He and Carrie were living at the time in an old stone house in the isolated village of Rottingdean, four miles down the Sussex coast from the English seaside resort of Brighton. The Rottingdean village green, a mile inland from the sea, was anchored by North End House. This imposing structure served as a summer refuge, furnished by William Morris, for Sir Edward Burne-Jones and his wife, Georgiana, Kipling’s favorite aunt. Originally two houses, North End House had a gap between its two connected structures that allowed huge canvases to be moved in and out. Nearby, there was another opening known as “the Gap,” in the chalk cliffs of Rottingdean, which gave access to a lovely valley and the rolling Sussex Downs beyond.
Over the years, Rottingdean had become a Macdonald family colony, a gathering place for relatives of Kipling’s mother. Rudyard’s cousin Stanley Baldwin had married a Rottingdean neighbor. Meanwhile, Lockwood Kipling, in poor health, had retired from his position in India and settled with Alice in Tisbury, in Wiltshire, an easy train ride from Brighton. The proximity of family members gave the Kiplings abundant reason to settle down in the South of England as well. “Let the child that is coming to you be born in our house,” the Burne-Joneses had generously urged the Kiplings. And so it was that John Kipling, their third child, was born in North End House on a warm August night in 1897.
Finding refuge in the Burne-Jones household, filled with art and exotic furniture—medieval love seats, heavy-legged tables, and a quaintly painted piano with green keys—recalled Kipling’s difficult childhood years when he spent holidays with his uncle and aunt. Burne-Jones was collaborating with William Morris on their illuminated version of The Aeneid, and providing designs, known as “cartoons,” for stained-glass windows. Burne-Jones was also painting The Beguiling of Merlin, in which so much depends on the play of the magician’s shadowed blue eyes, as he is turned into a hawthorn bush by Nimue, the snake-haired Lady of the Lake. The half-finished pictures at the Grange in New York made a strong impression on Kipling. “At bedtime one hastened along the pathways, where unfinished cartoons lay along the walls,” he wrote. “The Uncle often painted in their eyes first, leaving the rest in charcoal—a most effective presentation. Hence our speed to our own top-landing, where we could hang over the stairs and listen to the loveliest sound in the world—deep-voiced men laughing together over dinner.” Now, Kipling himself had joined the deep-voiced men laughing over dinner, even as the memory of those eyes peering from the darkness stayed with him.
The Kiplings stayed on with the Burne-Joneses while looking for a house of their own. They ventured down the coast to Dorset, where Thomas Hardy showed Rudyard around on a bicycle. When a house called “the Elms”—“old, red-tiled, stucco-fronted with worm-eaten stairs”—opposite North End House became available, the Kiplings grabbed it. “It was small, none too well built, but cheap,” Kipling noted, “and so suited us who still remembered a little affair at Yokohama.” Kipling was recalling the banking disaster during their honeymoon, and the refuge they had found in tiny Bliss Cottage in Vermont. Shielded by high flint walls for privacy, the Elms had once served, Kipling learned, as “an old depot for smugglers.” The novelist Angela Thirkell, granddaughter of the Burne-Joneses, fondly recalled evenings when the visiting children would be invited into Kipling’s bow-windowed study, and Kipling would read aloud from his Just So Stories. “There was a ritual about them,” she remembered, “each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same each time and without which the stories were dried husks.”
2.
When Kim first took root in Kipling’s imaginati
on, in Vermont, he envisioned a short story about an English child who helps a Tibetan lama find “a miraculous river that washed away all sin.” The story mushroomed over the years, and Kim became an Irish child instead, “Kim o’ the Rishti,” dialect for “Kim of the Irish,” with the initials K and R reversing Kipling’s own. Once again, as with Mowgli among the wolves, or Harvey Cheyne between luxury liner and fishing boat, Kipling was exploring a central character caught between two worlds. He made frequent visits to Tisbury to go over Indian details of the story with his father. “Under our united tobaccos it grew like the Djinn released from the brass bottle,” Kipling wrote, “and the more we explored its possibilities the more opulence of detail did we discover.” Kipling found it hard to relinquish some of the riches, adopting a metaphor later used by Hemingway: “I do not know what proportion of an iceberg is below the water-line, but Kim as it finally appeared was about one-tenth of what the first lavish specification called for.”
“Nakedly picaresque and plotless,” in Kipling’s assessment, Kim is a string of vivid encounters played out across northern India, as the boy and the priest search for the elusive river. In this twin search, Kim assumes the guise of Ananda, cousin and helper of the Buddha, or Enlightened One, embodied by the Tibetan lama. The search is a pilgrimage; the epigraphs to the first two chapters are drawn from Kipling’s poem about the statue of the Buddha at Kamakura, a destination for pilgrims. Much of the book’s energy and originality are derived from a second search, however: the quest for Kim’s identity.
Kim’s birth parents are a drunken Irish soldier named Kimball O’Hara and the unmarried English nursemaid whom he seduces. When the young mother dies, Kim’s father takes up with a Eurasian prostitute. She introduces him to her own vice of opium, which kills him. Alone in the world, Kim owns nothing but an amulet around his neck, sewn by his father’s lover. Inside are documents left to him by his father: his membership in a Masonic lodge, his regimental papers, and Kim’s birth certificate.
There is one more bequest from Kim’s father. The prostitute shares with him a mysterious prophecy. She informs Kim that he will recognize his destiny when he sees a red bull on a green field. Kim’s quest eventually finds confirmation of the prophecy when he encounters the colors on the banner of his father’s Irish regiment, the Mavericks. The vivid image of red and green exerts a larger gravitational pull on the narrative, however, encompassing both horoscopes and landscape details. In his efforts to decipher images, Kim finds a willing partner in the Tibetan lama. For the lama is himself a master of images, creating vivid representations, in a complex, calligraphic fusion of drawing and writing, of the Wheel of Life.
3.
Kim is a novel of education, with special attention to the proper training of the eyes. The narrative begins at the threshold of an art museum, a place consecrated to informed looking. Kim and his playmates clamber on the great cannon placed opposite the entrance. Kim sits, “in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.” It is there, by the museum, that Kim encounters the mysterious holy man, the Teshoo Lama, who has come on foot from Tibet and sought out the Wonder House as part of his own quest for the Buddha’s sacred river.
The leisurely narrative allows us to consider what the museum might mean to the “keen-eyed” Kim and his devout companion, who “followed and halted amazed” in the entrance hall. The lama marvels at the spectacular Gandharan (i.e., Alexandrian) treasures on view. Kipling shows off his knowledge of these hybrid masterpieces of Buddhist and Greek inspiration, fashioned “by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskillfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch.” The lama’s informed guide is the kindly curator or “Keeper of Images,” modeled on Kipling’s own father. The Keeper gives the lama a gift of crystal spectacles, the better to look at these Buddhist stupas (structures containing relics) and viharas (monastic halls).
Kim is adopted as the elderly lama’s chela, his assistant and pupil, entrusted to beg food for him and provide for his comfort. But with his eager curiosity and shape-shifting talents for camouflage and mimicry, Kim is also drawn into the aims of other schemers, who turn out to be the English officers and their native spies of the British Raj in northern India. Kim delivers secret messages and outmaneuvers the Russian agents on the other side of the “Great Game” (a term Kipling made current) of imperial rivalry. When the kindly British officer Creighton recognizes Kim’s extraordinary intelligence, he persuades the boy to enroll in a school, from which Kim periodically escapes to pursue his own adventures. Like the legendary native Pundits who, disguised as wandering priests, first surveyed the contested border regions dividing Afghanistan and India, Kim is trained to be a surveyor, a chainman, who can draw accurate maps and decipher them as well. He is himself a keeper of images.
4.
If the Lahore Museum is the first stage of Kim’s education in looking, and his training as a surveyor his second, Lurgan Sahib’s mysterious antique shop in Simla, the summer resort of the British colonial establishment in the Himalayan hills, is the culmination of his preparation. “The Lahore Museum was larger,” Kim notes, “but here were more wonders” from all over the world. Kim sees “gilt figures of Buddha and little portable lacquer altars; Russian samovars with turquoises on the lid; egg-shell china sets in quaint octagonal cane boxes; yellow ivory crucifixes—from Japan of all places.” But Lurgan himself is the strangest curiosity on view. “A black-bearded man, with a green shade over his eyes, sat at a table, and, one by one, with short, white hands, picked up globules of light from a tray before him, threaded them on a glancing silken string, and hummed to himself the while.” The description zooms in on the jeweler’s eyes. “He slid off the green shade and looked fixedly at Kim for a full half-minute. The pupils of the eye dilated and closed to pin-pricks, as if at will.” With his elaborate memory games and illusionist tricks, Lurgan, with his “hawk’s eye,” systematically teaches Kim how to look. Eight times in the course of the Play of the Jewels and the other games, Lurgan commands Kim, simply and urgently: “Look!”
Like Kim’s other masters of the Great Game, Lurgan is teaching Kim the skills required of a police spy. And yet this “healer of pearls” seems more a master of some esoteric Glass Bead Game (“The Glass Pearl Game” is the literal translation of Hermann Hesse’s title) than an instructor in weaponry or the proper handling of state secrets. Lurgan’s specialty is the art of repairing broken necklaces. This mysterious necklace mender is a master in discerning how things are linked together. This would seem to be an important skill for young spies to learn. It is at Lurgan’s shop that Kim first meets another of his father-like masters, the Bengali Babu. Reinforcing the point that informed looking is the key to Kim’s activities, the Babu teaches Kim the secret password for recognizing other players of the Great Game. Kim is instructed to bring the conversation around to specific curry dishes, including a vegetable curry known as tarkeean. Then he is to say, “There is no caste when men go to—look for tarkeean.” As the Babu carefully explains, “You stop a little between those words, ‘to—look.’ This is the whole secret.” The whole secret, to put it differently, is to look.
As Kipling details the stages of Kim’s apprenticeship, stringing episodes together to put Kim’s lessons to the test, he is also inventing a new literary genre: the novel of international espionage. The narrative structure of the novel and its characters—the gifted secret agent, his training in spycraft and weaponry, his masters in the game, his disguises, his sinister rivals—will flower in the works of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré. At the same time, Kim may rightly be considered, as Hannah Arendt puts it, the “foundation legend” of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a narrative argument meant to justify the British presence in India.
And yet, as Arendt notes, the Great Game as portrayed in Kipling’s novel is
less a matter of political allegiance for Kim than it is the great adventure of life itself. “Since life itself ultimately has to be lived and loved for its own sake, adventure and love of the game for its own sake easily appear to be a most intensely human symbol of life.” Kim relishes the diversity of modern India and refuses to take sides. “It is this underlying passionate humanity that makes Kim the only novel of the imperialist era in which a genuine brotherhood links together the ‘higher and lower breeds,’” Arendt observes. “Kim, ‘a Sahib and the son of a Sahib,’ can rightly talk of ‘us’ when he talks of the ‘chain-men all on one lead-rope.’” She notes that Kim’s use of the collective “us” is “strange in the mouth of a believer in imperialism” like Kipling. And yet “playing the Great Game, a man may feel as though he lives the only life worth while because he has been stripped of everything which may still be considered to be accessory. Life itself seems to be left, in a fantastically intensified purity.” It is this intensity of engagement with life, Arendt suggests, that brings readers back to Kim.
5.
The end of the search is marked by two epiphanies. The lama’s discovery of the River of the Arrow is told rather than shown. The location of the river, which turns out to be a nondescript trickling brook, has come to him, like a cosmic reward, with his release from the things of this world. It is only when he has learned to renounce both his beloved native hills and his chela, his disciple Kim, that he can achieve the supreme detachment of enlightenment. Kim’s own moment of enlightenment, by contrast, is shown rather than told, and involves a reattachment to the things of this world. Fittingly, Kim’s nirvana is achieved by a higher act of looking, a seizing of the world made new after a spate of physical arduousness and fever.
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