If

by Christopher Benfey

  8.

  A few years after the ignoble and extremely hurried American retreat from Saigon, the reporter Michael Maclear interviewed General Westmoreland for his 1981 documentary of the war. At the end of an episode titled “Westy’s War,” Westmoreland recalls the handoff of power from General Harkins, in 1965, when Westmoreland was put in charge of military operations. According to Westmoreland, Harkins’s habitual optimism about the war would suddenly darken, as he “constantly” quoted “a version” of a Kipling poem:

  The end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased.

  And the epitaph drear, “A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

  Deadpan, book in hand, Westmoreland reads the poem aloud, hesitating slightly over the word “drear,” as though either its meaning or its placement—following rather than preceding the word “epitaph”—is puzzling to him. “I’m very fond of Kipling because he’s a soldier’s poet,” Westmoreland concludes, staring straight into the camera. “I didn’t take it quite to heart.”

  And so it was that Rudyard Kipling’s work, as though to mark the centennial of his birth, was invoked to make sense of the war in Vietnam in three different phases. First, there was the buoyant (and boyish) romantic phase, when Edward Lansdale considered Kim the best possible guide for American escapades in Vietnam. This was the period, from 1954 up through the Diem coup, when the war seemed a second Great Game, in which CIA agents pulled off daring missions redolent of the Boy Scouts, to advance what they thought was the unimpeachable cause against the spread of Communism. The second phase was a dawning realism, when the body counts—and body bags—began to accumulate, and the clear-eyed view of ordinary soldiers in Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads seemed a better gauge of the horrific quagmire that was emerging in full view on the televised evening news.

  The third and final phase was the tragic realization that it had all been a terrible mistake, and on a truly colossal, even apocalyptic, scale, a folly of proportions still not fully known or adequately acknowledged, casting a long shadow on every subsequent decision by the United States in diplomacy and in combat. Here, too, Kipling had found precisely the right words for the debacle. After the death of his own son on the battlefield, a century ago, he wrote in “Epitaphs of the War,” adopting the voice of the dead:

  If any question why we died,

  Tell them, because our fathers lied.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First of all, I am profoundly grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for granting me a Public Scholar Award for the 2016–17 academic year. Jon Western, dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College, made it possible for me to have a year free and clear to devote to Kipling. As the Andrew Glasgow Writer-in-Residence, Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina, during the summer of 2012, I had a few quiet weeks to develop some early ideas for this book.

  I would like to thank my longtime editor, Ann Godoff, and my agent, Melanie Jackson, who believed in this project from the start. I can’t imagine a stronger team for a writer. Casey Denis at Penguin Press has been a steady hand along the way.

  I have been grateful for the companionship of Kipling scholars, and I wish to thank in particular Alexander Bubb, Sandra Kemp, and Jan Montefiori. Other scholarly debts appear in the Notes section.

  Hugh Eakin, former editor of NYR Daily, and Professor Montefiori of The Kipling Journal gave me space to try out some of the ideas in this book. An early draft of Chapter Eight appeared in NYR Daily (July 4, 2015); a discussion of Lockwood Kipling’s network of American friends appeared in the May 2018 Kipling Journal. I laid out some of the guiding ideas of the book in the December 6, 2013, issue of The New Republic, with the encouragement of Leon Wieseltier. It was a particular honor to speak at the “John Lockwood Kipling: Changing Worlds” conference at King’s College, London (March 4, 2017), organized by Professor Bubb and Professor Kemp, and to share the stage with Andrew Lycett and Charles Allen, two Kipling biographers I greatly admire. At an earlier symposium on “Kipling in America: 1892–1896,” held at Marlboro College in Vermont in October 2013, I was lucky to spend time with Thomas Penny and Ulrich Knoepflmacher. An early version of Chapter Seven was the Torrence C. Harder Lecture at the Boston Athenaeum, March 14, 2013.

  Many friends have helped along the way. A partial list would include Sven Birkerts, Nick Bromell, John Cullen, Joe Ellis, Susan Halpert, Jim Hartley, Megan Marshall, Valerie Martin, Barry Werth, and James Young. Michael Gorra generously read an early draft of the book and made incisive comments. Alex Bubb read the entire book with a shrewd eye for detail. The screenwriter and novelist Bill Nicholson kindly drove me to Bateman’s. Neal Rantoul, a terrific photographer and friend, accompanied me to Naulakha for a memorable photo shoot.

  My wife, Mickey Rathbun, and our sons, Tommy and Nicholas, have shown the right amount of curiosity and forbearance about each stage of the project. So has my father, who, like Kipling, was a foster child in England, where he first read Kipling. To him I dedicate this book.

  NOTES

  I have tried to limit this record of sources to the essential. Kipling’s writings exist in multiple editions and formats, both British and American; much of his work can also be found online, where it is easily searchable. I have found two selections of Kipling’s stories particularly useful: Jan Montefiore, editor, The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling (London and New York: Penguin, 2011), and Robert Gottlieb, editor, Collected Stories (New York: Everyman, 1994).

  Anyone working on Kipling owes a special debt to the painstaking work of Thomas Pinney, who has kindly responded to my queries over the past few years. All poems quoted in this book are from Pinney’s authoritative three-volume The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Quotations from letters are drawn from Pinney’s six-volume edition of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990–2004). While I do not supply references for every letter cited, which would greatly expand this apparatus, interested readers should have no difficulty identifying the approximate date of particular quotations, in those cases where the specific date is not supplied.

  Among biographies of Kipling, I have relied primarily on Charles Carrington’s Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1955) and Andrew Lycett’s Rudyard Kipling (London: Phoenix, 2000). Pinney’s edition of Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), notes discrepancies between memory and biographical fact.

  The extensive website of the Kipling Society, with its authoritative commentary and generous sampling of Kipling texts—including many of those discussed in this book—is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Kipling.

  Prologue: This Strange Excuse

  I am grateful for three pioneering essays on Kipling’s engagement with the United States: Thomas Pinney, “Rudyard Kipling and America,” William Roger Louis, editor, Resurgent Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (London: I. B. Tauris; Austin: Harry Ransom Center, 2011), pp. 31–44; and Judith Plotz, “Kipling’s Very Special Relationship: Kipling in America, America in Kipling,” in Howard J. Booth, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 37–51. Simon Schama’s remark about Kipling is the opening sentence of his Landscape and Memory (1995). Frances Perraudin, “Manchester University Students Paint over Rudyard Kipling Mural,” the Guardian, July 19, 2018. For Rushdie on Kipling and India, see his introduction to Kipling’s Soldiers Three and In Black and White (London: Penguin, 1993), p. x. My sense of Kipling’s “gravitational pull” during the American Gilded Age is based on such books as Thomas Beer’s The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1926). George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (New York: Ancho
r, 1954), pp. 127 (on less civilized men protecting civilization) and 133 (on phrases Kipling added to the English language). Auden mentions Kipling in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” The Borges quotation is in Eliot Weinberger, editor, Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 251.

  Chapter One: A Denizen of the Moon

  The principal sources for this chapter are Kipling’s travel letters from his 1889 journey, collected in the two volumes of From Sea to Sea (New York: Doubleday, 1899), and Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, editors, Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 176–77. Kipling’s account of his interview with Mark Twain, the final letter in From Sea to Sea, is available online: http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/04/interview-with-mark-twain.html.

  Chapter Two: At Longfellow’s Grave

  I wish to thank Alexander Bubb for suggesting to me, in conversation, the possible importance of Kipling’s visit to Longfellow’s grave, and for his treatment of Kipling and spiritualism in his book Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, UK: Oxford, University Press, 2016). Carrington cites a letter from de Forest (p. 132) on the encounter between Kipling and Henry Harper. On William James and the American Society for Psychical Research, I have relied on Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for the Scientific Proof of Life After Death (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985) gives the English side of the story, with conclusions about the “cross correspondences” on p. 134. Kipling mentions Myers’s Phantasms of the Living in “The Dreitarbund” (1887). A. W. Baldwin, in The Macdonald Sisters (London: Peter Davis, 1960), quotes Kipling on the perils of spiritualism (p. 126). Gerald Balfour, brother of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, described one of the cases of “cross correspondences” in his book The Ear of Dionysius: Farther Scripts Affording Evidence of Personal Survival (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). William Dillingham, in the first chapter of Rudyard Kipling: Life, Love, and Art (Greensboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 2013), argues that Charlie is a con man. Borges translated Kipling’s story; Brecht adapted a German translation of “Song of the Galley Slave” and published it under his own name; Eliot particularly admired the poem. James K. Lyon, “Brecht’s Use of Kipling’s Intellectual Property: A New Source of Borrowing,” in Monatshefte, vol. 61, no. 4 (winter 1969), pp. 376–86.

  Chapter Three: A Death in Dresden

  For details of Wolcott Balestier’s life and career, I have relied primarily on Lycett’s account, pp. 296–317. Balestier’s James G. Blaine: A Sketch of His Life was published by R. Worthington in 1884. Henry James’s tribute to Balestier is included in The American Essays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956). Edmund Gosse’s tribute is in Portraits and Sketches (New York: Scribner, 1914). Edel’s Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (New York: Avon, 1978) has a nuanced account of James’s relationship with Balestier (pp. 282–84, 287–89); Alice James’s assessment of Balestier is on p. 299. Fred Kaplan, in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: Morrow, 1992), quotes Balestier’s offer to attend James’s first play (p. 352). In Willa Cather’s novella Coming, Aphrodite! the artist Don Hedger resembles Dick Heldar. Lycett quotes Balestier on the progress of The Naulahka (p. 311); Carrington quotes Balestier on the division of labor (p. 181). Lycett quotes Carrie’s letter to Josephine about their friendship with Kipling (p. 304). The title of the novel, with its misplaced k, was mysteriously misspelled; it should have read The Naulakha. On the effect of Balestier’s death on James, see Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1910 (1969; New York: Avon, 1978), pp. 48–50; on James and Kipling, see pp. 50–59. On Harry Macdonald and his sisters, see Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 230. Lycett quotes Heinemann’s concerns about Balestier running their company from the Isle of Wight (p. 317).

  Chapter Four: A Buddha Snowman

  The primary source for this chapter is Kipling’s Japan: Collected Writings, edited by Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb (London: Athlone, 1988), especially two travel letters from 1892: “Our Overseas Men” and “Some Earthquakes.” Additional material is drawn from chapter 5, “The Committee of Ways and Means,” of Something of Myself. Kipling’s “In Sight of Monadnock” first appeared in the Springfield [Massachusetts]Republican (April 17, 1892). Kipling quoted Emerson’s “Woodnotes” from memory; the final line should read, “And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.” Reviewing Kipling’s Letters of Travel in 1920, Virginia Woolf praised the passage about the ruined “Outside Men,” noting how Kipling managed to convey “much more vividly than by means of direct description . . . the excitement and strangeness of the East.” See “Mr. Kipling’s Notebook” in Mary Lyon, editor, Books and Portraits: Some Further Selections from the Literary and Biographical Writings of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978).

  Chapter Five: An Ark for Josephine

  Kipling’s initial impressions of Brattleboro are recorded in chapter 5 of Something of Myself. See also Stuart Murray, Rudyard Kipling in Vermont: Birthplace of the Jungle Books (Brattleboro, VT: Images from the Past, 1997). Edward Said compares human diversity in Kim to a Noah’s Ark in his introduction to the novel (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 42. On the possible connection between Naulakha and Kashmiri houseboats, see Julius Bryant, “Kipling as a Designer,” in Julius Bryant and Susan Weber, editors, John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London (New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 140. It has been assumed, based on a comment by Mary Cabot, that Henry Rutgers Marshall was a friend of the Balestier family, but de Forest seems a more likely intermediary. Records of Columbia undergraduate classes are available online. Henry Rutgers Marshall, Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics (London and New York: Macmillan, 1894), p. 321. William James’s (unsigned) review of Marshall’s book appeared in The Nation, vol. 59 (1894). For details of the Wesselhoeft Water Cure and similar nineteenth-century therapeutic communities, I am grateful to Philip Gura, Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). For three recent accounts of John Humphrey Noyes, see Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (New York: Random House, 2016); Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); and Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (New York: Picador, 2016). For visitors to Brattleboro, see Molly Cabot’s Annals of Brattleboro, 1681–1895 (Brattleboro: E. L. Hildreth, 1921), in two volumes. Conan Doyle’s report on his visit to Naulakha is included in Harold Orel, editor, Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 2 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), pp. 237-38. Kipling’s golf clubs remain at Naulakha. A talk delivered by Professor Ulrich Knoepflmacher at a symposium organized by the Kipling Society and held at Marlboro College, near Brattleboro, on October 7–8, 2013, clarified for me the range of Kipling’s use of symbols like Noah’s Ark. See Knoepflmacher, “Kipling’s American ‘Berangements’ for the Young,” in The Kipling Journal, vol. 88, no. 355 (July 2014), pp. 58–74. Three elements of Kipling’s life and work—his traumatic experience as an abandoned, foreign-born child, with religiously obsessed foster parents in England; the Masonic symbolism of Noah’s Ark; and a toy Noah’s Ark—reappear in the German-born writer W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz.

  Chapter Six: The Fourth Dimension

  The best source on Kipling’s father is Bryant and Weber, editors, John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London. Sandra Kemp’s contribution to the volume, “‘An Expert Fellow-Craftsman’: Rudyard Kipling and the Pater,” explores the personal and professional relationship between father and son. My account
of Kipling’s opium use relies on Charles Allen, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Pegasus, 2019), pp. 165–74. According to Allen, Kipling’s use of drugs “brought a new dimension to his thinking” (p. 171). For Dr. Robert Dawbarn’s article “Opium in India—A Medical Interview with Rudyard Kipling,” see Harold Orel, editor, Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 1, pp. 108-9. Thomas Pinney includes Kipling’s diary of 1885 in his edition of Something of Myself and Other Biographical Writings, pp. 195–218. The entry about “Mother Maturin” is on p. 207. Lycett quotes Edmonia Hill’s account of the novel, p. 140. Kipling’s “In an Opium Factory” was included in From Sea to Sea. Henry Adams prays to the dynamo in the famous twenty-fifth chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” of The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918). Jorge Luis Borges notes, “The Italian futurists forget that [Kipling] was the first European poet to celebrate the superb and blind activity of machines.” See Weinberger, editor, Borges: Selected Non-Fiction, p. 251. On Kipling’s use of the “vehicles” of the Hindu gods, see Harish Trivedi, “Of Beasts and Gods in India: Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Bridge-Builders,’” in The Kipling Journal, vol. 92, no. 373 (May 2018), pp. 38–41.