I arrived in Karachi in 1990, en route to Lahore to check out Kim’s Gun, and to see if the great collection of Greco-Buddhist sculpture so knowledgeably described in the first chapter of Kipling’s novel was as he had said. It was a Friday, and accordingly Dawn, Pakistan’s premier English-language paper, was providing its readers the equivalent of a Sunday supplement. There was much to linger over—enthralling ads, an encouraging advice column (girls shouldn’t marry too young, but they shouldn’t wait too long either), a crossword puzzle, a children’s page. It was the children’s page that riveted my attention. Kipling had brought me to Pakistan, Kipling, author of “Recessional” and “The White Man’s Burden,” imperial Kipling, source of so many guilty pleasures, “horrible old Kipling,” as Auden had jokingly called him (New Year Letter, 1940). And the children’s page was all Kipling. Kiplings, rather. For it was not the author of The Jungle Book who held pride of place (evidently the children already knew about him), but his father, John Lockwood Kipling, first curator of Kim’s Wonder House, the very museum I was heading for, the “sahib with a white beard” his son honored in the book that is his finest achievement.
Rudyard was there too. Filling the rest of the page, marred only slightly by the misprints normal to foreign-language type-setting, appeared—“If—,” Woodrow Wilson’s favorite poem (the king of Siam put it into Thai), what David Gilmour calls “that brilliant but unintended parody of public-school reverence for the stiff upper-lip,” here displayed for the innocent edification of the English-speaking children of Pakistan.
I
Kipling’s account is still unsettled.
—Randall Jarrell, Kipling,
Auden & Co (1961)
In l907, when Kipling became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, his critical reputation was already in decline. George Orwell, the strongest anti-imperialist voice of his generation, summed up the paradox in 1942: “During five literary generations, every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” But in what sense? Edward Said reads Kim as “belonging to the world’s great literature,”1 “rich, absolutely fascinating,” “a work of great aesthetic merit.” Yet he finds it “profoundly embarrassing” as well. Salman Rushdie struggles with conflicting emotions of “anger and delight,” reading stories which possess “the power simultaneously to infuriate and entrance.” Scarcely one of the proliferating studies of “Orientalism” leaves Kim undiscussed, and every newspaper reminds us that India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are nearer than we thought. Kim is up for reappraisal; Zohreh T. Sullivan’s Critical Edition (which I’ll discuss later) is long overdue.
In fact Orwell was exaggerating. Auden had already written that Time had pardoned Kipling “for writing well.” Edmund Wilson had published “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” calling him (with other less attractive adjectives) “the old great man” (The Wound and the Bow). Eliot had collected his Choice of Kipling’s Verse. Lionel Trilling, reviewing it, had recorded the usual mixed feelings; Kipling was “unloved and unlovable,” his imperialism “puny and mindless,” yet capable in “Recessional” of “a remarkable and perhaps a great national poem.” (Twenty years later, when his brief essay was collected, he asked the editor to note that he now viewed Kipling “less censoriously and with more affectionate admiration.”) Auden too revised his 1940 joke; “If today [1943] the war makes people discover that Kipling is good, it will be an excellent thing.” Ahead was Randall Jarrell, calling Kipling “a great genius,” “one of the most skillful writers who have ever existed.” “If Kipling had written instructions on how to make a bed with hospital corners . . . I could read them with pleasure.” In short he was “one of the immortals,” who, he noted, “oversay everything—a characteristic from which only we mortals are free.” In 1959 Noel Annan insisted on the “mindless” Kipling’s place in the history of ideas; in 1977 Irving Howe wrote on “this incomparable book.” And Said, flanked by squads of postcolonialists, is still to come.
And there are the biographies. Though Kipling damned the whole “biography and reminiscence business” as “the Higher Cannibalism” (he tried to discourage his old friend Dunsterville, the “Stalky” of Stalky & Co., from starting the Kipling Society—“dam [sic] society,” “unutterably repugnant”), cannibals were not deterred. Charles Carrington’s Life and Work, the authorized biography, begun while many who knew Kipling were still alive, came out in 1955. Though the family obsession with privacy required that much be left out, Carrington had done the essential spadework, and all subsequent biographers are indebted to him. He was followed in the seventies by Lord Birkenhead and Angus Wilson. Yet another Life, by Martin Seymour-Smith, appeared in 1989. Now all these are out of print (though Carrington went through several editions, the last in 1986), and publishers, evidently, think we are ready for more. Harry Ricketts’ Rudyard Kipling came out in 2000. And here is David Gilmour’s The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.2
The story, then, has been told often. Only six years after his death, well before Carrington’s necessarily reticent account, Edmund Wilson’s seventy-five-page essay was essentially a mini-Life-and-Work, feeling its way through the early story “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and the revealingly titled Something—only something—of Myself to a darker Kipling than had yet been recognized. In that book Kipling recorded the paradisal Indian childhood, all color and comfort, and the inexplicable abandonment into the chill English hell that to the end of his life he would call the House of Desolation. The schooldays tendentiously recalled in Stalky & Co. were somewhat less boisterously revisited. So were his return to India as a sixteen-year-old journalist, and the “seven years’ hard” out of which the Indian stories came. There too he described, with proper modesty, something of his triumphant reception in England, a literary phenomenon at twenty-three. He described his four years in Vermont, where his daughters were born and where, in a house built to his own design, he knew “a corner of the United States as a householder.” He said nothing, however, of the nasty trouble with his brother-in-law that sent the family back to England. There are only hints of the recurring bouts of depression, the constrictions of his marriage, the years of fame, anger, disappointment, and increasing physical pain. Most poignant of all, there was in the autobiography no mention of the loss of two of his three children to illness and to war.
So there was plenty left for biographers, and they have worked hard. They have mined The Kipling Journal and the memoirs of friends; they have recognized his voice in unsigned pieces he wrote for Indian newspapers; they have read his work with a thoroughness few can match. They have collected the family photographs—Carrie, solid and formidable; exquisite, heartrending little Josephine, his Best Beloved; seventeen-year-old John, straight and proud in his uniform, but without the glasses that might have kept him alive in the trenches of France. Kipling’s centennial passed unnoticed in 1965, but the biographers are still conducting their uneasy negotiations between disapproval and admiration.
Still, it needs more than unsettled opinions, or even new sources, to justify a new biography. The recent ones offer new theses as well. Seymour-Smith argues for repressed homosexuality, questioning Kipling’s odd collaboration with Carrie’s brother Wolcott, his literary agent and close friend, on the little-read novel The Naulahka, and his precipitate return from what was to have been a leisurely family reunion in India on the sudden news of Wolcott’s death. He married Carrie eight days after he got back, in what might be perceived as an unconscious substitution. Gilmour and Ricketts are less psychological and less speculative, but they have their theses too.
Ricketts turned to Kipling from an academic formation in which his work was “one of those half-guilty pleasures, a holiday from the more ‘mature’ worlds of Forster or Sartre or Grass.” He is out to claim Kipling not for gay studies but for modernism. But he has another, warmer agenda; he likes, and can therefore hope to understand, Kipling both as an artist and as a human being. It is, he notes, the “extra-literary quality, this sense of relationship which turns certain authors into friends.” Gilmour’s attitude toward his subject is less intimate and less literary. His purpose is not to write a life-and-work, or even a full biography. For him Kipling is a Cassandra worth listening to today, and he is eager to take on even his most unsettling aspects. He will write about “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as prophet of national decline,” focusing his book on exactly the years previous biographers have found least rewarding and hardest to handle. There is thus relatively little overlap between these two books. Those interested in Kipling (his sixteen titles available in paperback suggests there are many) should welcome both.
II
["Mrs Bathurst”] in effect, is the first modernist text in English.
Deliberate obliqueness, formal fragmentation, intense literary
self-consciousness, lack of closure—all the defining qualities
of modernism were present and correct.
—Harry Ricketts, Rudyard Kipling: A Life
Kipling was right, of course, though
at the time few people believed him.
—David Gilmour, The Long Recessional:
The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling
Edmund Wilson, writes Ricketts, “was the first to spot Kipling’s modernist affiliations and influence.” He quotes a 1926 review of Debits and Credits in which Wilson observed that Kipling had created “the whole genre of vernacular stories, in which we are made to see some comedy or tragedy through the half-obscuring veil of the special slang and technical vocabulary of the person who is telling it. . . . I cannot believe . . . that James Joyce . . . would ever have written the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses if he had never read Kipling.”3 Ricketts presses further: Kipling might have got his “mixture of the mandarin and the demotic” from reading Pound; Wilson “might also have made a connection between Debits and Credits and . . . The Waste Land . . . published the same year as Ulysses.”
He did not, however. It is left to Ricketts to point out Kipling’s “intense literary self-consciousness, . . . his constant allusions to earlier writers,” his “subversive games” as Jane Austen, Swinburne, Browning, Shakespeare were “placed in conventionally unliterary contexts” and “mixed up with unofficial literature (Uncle Remus, limericks, hymns).” Kipling was indeed “the subtlest of highbrows,” as Christopher Morley called him, juxtaposing music-hall verses and “To His Coy Mistress” in The Light That Failed, putting Jane Austen into the trenches in “The Janeites.” He was indeed oblique to the point of obscurity; P. G. Wodehouse was not the only reader baffled by “Mrs Bathurst.” He did invite interpretation on different levels; “Yes,” he told an inquiring friend, “‘The Eye of Allah’ was an allegory,” adding innocently, “Several of my tales are.” He did “insert continual parody and pastiche of past writers,” though one might contest as an overdose of Waste Land Ricketts’ claim for a “sense that everything was running down and fragmenting—that after the war all a writer could do was recycle the past.” Though obliquity grew on him with age, parody had been one of his amusements since boyhood. Literary allusiveness had always been a feature of his style since the 1880s. And though “If—” is still valued by many who would not perhaps admit it, few would assent to it as “a latter-day metaphysical poem.”
It is not, however, Ricketts’ literary criticism that makes his book valuable, but his fine combination of biographical accuracy with imaginative warmth. Like Edmund Wilson, he has the ability to feel his way into the experiences that gave Kipling’s life meaning and determined its direction. Research has discovered more than Wilson could know in 1941. Ricketts can be judicious in assessing the actualities underlying Kipling’s accounts of the House of Desolation, without discounting their emotional truth. It is no meager praise to note that he has arrived at some of Wilson’s most significant insights without, apparently, having referred to his seminal essay.
In 1899, at the height of his fame, Kipling took his more than half-American family back to the America they had fled. The Atlantic was cold and rough in February. Everybody got sick. Kipling’s illness was reported all over the world, but it was Josephine who died. Ricketts quotes Kipling’s sister: “After his almost fatal illness & Josephine’s death, he was a sadder & a harder man.” Though Gilmour, less concerned with the personal, does not quote Trix’s words, they are even more relevant to the Kipling of The Long Recessional.
Josephine died in 1899. That year the Boer War began. As Gilmour makes clear, for Kipling the years between 1900 and 1914 were no long Edwardian summer, but a time of unspoken grief and articulate, angry preoccupation with Boer successes, German imperial rivalry, and English unpreparedness. South Africa was in danger—White South Africa, for the Boers hardly counted as white. Germany, he suspected, was already aiding them or soon would be; already in 1902 he was writing of “the Goth and the shameless Hun.” Liberal politicians, when they were not neglecting the military and coddling the Boers, seemed bent on giving Ireland Home Rule. Hostility and ugly contempt replaced the sympathy for Irish Catholics shown in the Mulvaney stories and Kim. Incapable of self-rule, the Irish were “the Orientals of the West.” “Terror, threats, and dread” menaced Protestants in the North: “We know the hells declared / On such as serve not Rome.” There would be civil war, a flood of refugees from Ulster: “We perish if we yield.” Kipling’s attention was only deflected by the outbreak of the European war he had so long predicted.
Ten days after its declaration, John Kipling, one week short of his seventeenth birthday, was at the War Office applying for a commission. He had grown up his father’s son. In prose and verse Kipling had honored the soldier—even Stalky & Co., easily dismissed as a schoolboy romp, was described by its author as a “tract” on the education of future defenders of empire. He had written in The Light That Failed of “the sacred call of the war trumpets” with all the enthusiasm of a natural noncombatant, small, unathletic, and helpless without his glasses. It was natural that John too could think of war as a “lark.” But he had already failed the Army and Navy physicals; he had inherited his father’s eyes. Kipling had hoped that pince-nez would get him through, but only the imperial poet’s influence got his son a commission. John went into training with the Irish Guards; his father redoubled his patriotic efforts, making speeches, writing articles, visiting the troops, even calling on Lord Curzon, once Viceroy of India, now Chancellor of Oxford, to “close down the university and give its undergraduates military training.”
John was killed in 1915, a few hours into his first battle. His father wrote General Dunsterville, his oldest friend, “John had his heart’s desire. . . . I’m sorry that all the year’s work ended in that afternoon, but it’s something to have bred a man.” Rider Haggard never told him what he’d heard from a soldier who “could swear” he saw John trying to fasten a field dressing round his shattered face and crying with the pain.
Such griefs were not for public sharing. Only after years could the father transmute them into art. Like Wilson, Ricketts retells those two stories—“They” for Josephine, for John, “The Gardener.” Gilmour touches on them too, though his strict focus allows him little space for Kipling’s fiction. They are essential for an understanding of the man Kipling became.
Yet John had his public memorial, though his name was barely mentioned in it—The Irish Guards in the Great War, two volumes, five years’ work, “done with agony and bloody sweat,” as Kipling told Dorothy Ponton, the secretary who typed draft after draft. “This will be my great work,” he said. In 1922 it was finished, leaving him, Carrie noted, “yellow and shrunken.” The royalties “went to a fund for the widows of those who had served in the regiment.”
There is no better illustration of the contrasting strengths of these two biographers than their approach to The Irish Guards. Ricketts looks for the emotional importance. Gilmour reads it as a historian, and though his bibliography lists 227 titles, Miss Ponton’s book is not among them. For him the Guards is “two volumes of relentless chronological history,” “a methodical work of restrained prose and narrative detail.” The agony and bloody sweat must go without saying.
But if Kipling cannot be understood without uncovering his private traces, it’s equally important to examine what he said openly and often. Kipling is not Kipling without his politics. Not that Ricketts leaves politics out. But Gilmour is soaked in the history that Kipling lived through (he has written a biography of Lord Curzon); combining historical thoroughness with narrative grace, he provides contexts which are missing, or only touched on, in other Lives. Here at last is a full explanation of the Venezuela Affair, which along with Carrie’s feckless brother drove Kipling from his Vermont home. Here is the Kaiser’s New Year’s Day proclamation that “Germany was now a world empire”; here is his telegram congratulating the Boer leader, Paul Kruger, that “converted Kipling to relentless Germanophobia,” here is the ill-judged Jameson Raid that started the war, led by that Dr. Jameson on whom Kipling modeled “If —.” Here are, not only Liberals and Conservatives, whom we think we know about, but Unionists and Liberal Unionists, with their differences on Free Trade and Imperial Preference. Here is more than most of us knew about Cecil Rhodes, whose imperial dreams Rhodesia once commemorated, and who built a house in South Africa for the Kiplings to escape the English winter. Here is Woodrow Wilson, outraging Kipling by delaying America’s entrance into “Armageddon,” and the first Roosevelt, whom Kipling commemorated as “Greatheart.” Here are Lord Salisbury and Lord Milner and many others who to American readers are merely names, but to Kipling were friends and heroes, or the reverse.
History is only dry—politics is only dry—if you don’t care. Kipling cared deeply about both. So does Gilmour, as deeply as Ricketts cares about literature. But when history and literature are linked (and many argue they are so always), we cannot understand one in depth without the other. And with Kipling the links are not a matter of vague “historical background”—the rise of nationalism, the Industrial Revolution, the assumption of European hegemony—but of day-to-day, read-the-newspapers events. He wrote about them (mostly against them) in widely-read articles and speeches (all his speeches were from written texts); more surprisingly, he wrote about them in poetry.4 Gilmour points out that “some three quarters of the forty-five poems in The Years Between, which he regarded as his most important collection, have political or imperial themes.” My old copy of the “Inclusive” collection of his poetry has 773 pages, though it does not go beyond 1918. Reading it along with Gilmour the “current events” of the past regain emotional life as poems wholly obscure become intelligible, familiar poems acquire new meanings, or rather the meanings their contemporaries recognized but we do not.
Gilmour is out to right the “curious imbalance” he notes in previous biographers. “Most of their work has concentrated on the prose, much of it on the life, a little on the poetry, and virtually none on his public role.” Gilmour’s brave choice is to reverse these concentrations.
This reversal involves risk. Poetry was Kipling’s preferred means of political expression, and Kipling’s politics are not easily made attractive. Ricketts can palliate them with sensitive appreciations of his fiction and intimate evocations of the loving son, faithful husband, grieving father, warm friend. Gilmour’s focus is more exigent. It requires exclusions of which he is fully aware: Kipling’s late stories, for instance, “are at the summit of [his] art,” but “they are not alas relevant to the themes of this book.” And it requires him to read the poetry with a thoroughness even Eliot would not have cared to match.
Fortunately Gilmour respects it too much to treat it merely as a historical quarry. Though his examination is exhaustive—surely no one else has read all these poems—it is not exhausting. Gilmour really likes Kipling’s poetry, and an intelligent man’s admiration (and occasional dismissal) is illuminating in itself. I was glad to be sent back to “The Mary Gloster” and “McAndrew’s Hymn,” long dramatic monologues “recalling Browning at his best.” Since 9/11/01 we do well to be a little more open to such “tributes to hard work, duty, self-sacrifice, and reverence.” The assertion that “no one can hear ‘The Harp Song of the Dane Women’ . . . without seeing the Viking wives on the shore as their men’s longboats set off across the North Sea,” certainly has its dangers, but I would rather own up to such archaic directness of response than dishonor myself with a sophomoric “I can.” I don’t agree that the poem that accompanies “The Gardener” is “as tender and magnificent” as the story itself nor that the little-known “Gethsemane” places Kipling “in the front rank of war poets.” But I’m glad he quotes the whole poem. It bears witness to a kind of engagement with poetry that has become all too rare. It is not only because Gilmour knows how few of his readers will be familiar with the poems that he quotes so liberally; he quotes for his own satisfaction. Though “Recessional” and “The White Man’s Burden” are two of the most famous poems in English, they are here in full. Significantly, there are three errors in the “Burden,” which I mention not to carp, but to honor the lost habit of learning by heart poems that we value, misquotation the sure sign of language known so long and well that even so scrupulous a writer as Gilmour feels no need to check the text.
Gilmour is not afraid to take on “The White Man’s Burden.” It is important, of course, to correct the common impression that by “lesser breeds without the law” Kipling meant Britain’s colonial subjects. Rather, the phrase was aimed at European imperialists (probably German) less responsible than the British. For “in spite of the prejudice and violence of expression, the message of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is idealistic.”
Take up the White Man’s Burden,
The savage wars of peace,
Fill full the mouth of famine,
And bid the sickness cease . . .
Long before, barely out of his teens, Kipling had written from India a passionate reply to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, who had asked, “Do the English as a rule feel the welfare of the natives at heart?” “For what else do the best men . . . die from overwork and disease, if not to keep the people alive in the first place and healthy in the second [?] . . . Do you know how many Englishmen, Oxford men expensively educated, are turned off . . . to make their own arrangements for the cholera camps; for the prevention of disorder; or for famine relief, to pull the business through or die, whichever God wills [?]” Gilmour reminds us that Kipling wrote in a world “without Oxfam or the United Nations”; he leaves it to us to substitute AIDS for cholera, and to recall the disorder unprevented in Nigeria, in Kashmir, and in other places that maps once tinted red—not least Zimbabwe, the land once part of Cecil Rhodes’s dream and now its own people’s nightmare.
Nobody now writes about Kipling without recognizing the need for apology. Friends can be “irritating and dismaying,” prophets “provocative and unpleasant.” Either way, excuses must be made. Yet Ricketts’ openly acknowledged personal sympathy does not blunt his perceptions or soften his judgments. Gilmour’s political sympathy is less explicit, and it is far from general in its application, but it is there. He can be harsh in his judgments, harsher, often, than Ricketts (he titles one chapter “In Defense of Privilege”). He goes out of his way to correct Kipling’s simplistic and ill-informed opinions on Ireland, or the Kaiser’s villainy, or the actual origins of the Boer War. It is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say, that turns judgment into apology. He is judicious: Kipling’s predictions concerning the Boers were “unattractive in tone and assumption, but as so often they turned out to be accurate. . . . Neither Kipling nor Milner championed the cause of coloured or black Africans. But they were concerned that they be ruled justly, and they knew that a Boer-dominated Union would mean—in Milner’s words—‘the abandonment of the black races,’ and—in Kipling’s—permission for the Boers ‘to uphold and expand their primitive lust for racial domination.’ The road to apartheid was now open.” Gilmour quotes Kipling’s complaint that the British, having won the war, had “handed over absolute control . . . to another race.” He does not note the implication, explicit in Kipling’s letters, that the Dutch, after 200 years, were no longer pure white. But it puts an ugly spin on his conviction (also quoted from a letter) that the Liberals had not only handed over South Africa to another race, but “a higher civilisation to a lower one.”
The Boer War poems, too, do not always confirm what Gilmour says about them. “In spite of [Kipling’s] political beliefs, much of the poetry was compassionate and sympathetic to both sides.” The poems cited, however, weaken the claim. Though in “Piet,” Tommy Atkins does muse unexpectedly, “What is the sense of ’ating those / ’Oom you are paid to kill?,” the Tommy who speaks “Boots” makes no mention of the enemy. “The Dirge of Dead Sisters” is a dirge for British, not Boer, nurses. “The Settler” does indeed suggest reconciliation (while encouraging increased British immigration), but it is not Gilmour but Ricketts who quotes Kipling’s excuse to Lord Milner: “I have made—God forgive me!—a peaceful and reconciliatory poem of the situation as it ought to be.”
Ricketts is better at facing up to what he doesn’t like. Both agree, for example, that “Mary Postgate,” in which a repressed spinster has an orgasm while watching a downed German pilot die, is one of Kipling’s finest stories, and since it is clearly political, Gilmour too discusses it at some length. Both quote Kipling’s cousin Oliver Baldwin (the Prime Minister’s son), who called it “the wickedest story ever written.”
Ricketts confronts the shocking actuality of the story—his defense is on literary grounds. Gilmour, through “multiple readings,” manages to conclude that “in fact the aviator may not have been German at all, he may not even have existed, and the bomb with which he is supposed to have killed a child may also belong to Miss Postgate’s imagination.” Both also discuss “Swept and Garnished,” in which a delirious German housewife is visited by the ghosts of Belgian children. But only Ricketts relates the story to Kipling’s willingness to believe the worst of the reports of German atrocities: the much publicized charge that the Germans cut off the right hands of Belgian boys so they could not grow up to fight. In the story one ghost-boy has an empty sleeve. A ghost-girl pulls at it, and “Frau Ebermann looked and saw.” Kipling says no more than that, but Ricketts does: “Most English [and many American] readers would have known exactly what she saw and, Kipling must have hoped, would have had their anti-German animus reaffirmed.”
But it is in relation to Kipling’s anti-Semitism that Gilmour’s silences are most troubling. He refers to the subject only twice, once to minimize and once to deny. Near the end of The Long Recessional occurs a paragraph focused not on Kipling’s attitude toward Jews but on his “ferocious” opposition to the Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George’s India policy. Always informative, Gilmour takes care to situate Kipling’s “rare burst of anti-semitic hysteria” before he quotes it: Kipling was denouncing the Montagu Report advocating increased Indian self-government. Montagu was Lloyd George’s secretary of state and a Jew; Kipling’s denunciation was appropriately Biblical. “Racially, the minister did not care for [the Empire] any more than Caiaphas cared for Pilate: and psychologically he [couldn’t] comprehend it.” The hysteria may be rare, but the anti-Semitism is not. Later Gilmour himself quotes a 1922 letter to Lord Northcliffe: what Kipling considered a campaign to paint post-Versailles France as “militaristic” must have had “an enormous amount of Hun and Hebrew money behind it.” Gilmour focuses on the “Germanophobia”; the irony of the juxtaposition of Hebrew and Hun passes without comment.
Kipling said such things again and again. In Something of Myself, written in his last years, the attitude persists in his comment on the America he remembered: “At this time they were still more or less connected with the English tradition . . . and the Semitic strain had not yet been uplifted in a too-much-at-ease Zion.”
Again, we need to hear what Gilmour does not say. Though he, like Ricketts, makes good use of Thomas Pinney’s monumental edition of Kipling’s letters, he does not note the increasing incidence of slurs against “the Irish and the Yids.” For him, “Gehazi,” in which Kipling, in an eloquent Biblical parallel, likens Sir Rufus Isaacs to “a leper white as snow,” is worth quoting in full as “one of the greatest of all hymns of hate.” “It has often been condemned as evil and anti-semitic. It is neither. Kipling’s judgment if not his vitriol was in any case partly justified by the circumstances.” For Ricketts, the poem, “as nasty as the nastiest of Pope,” “could only have been written by a deeply troubled man.” One makes excuses for friends, perhaps also for prophets, but not before hearing what they have to say.
To give Kipling his due, he did spot The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as “some sort of fake.” But he continued to believe in Jewish plotting. Ricketts quotes Haggard’s diary: “Kipling . . . is of opinion that we owe all our Russian troubles, and many others, to the machinations of the Jews.” By 1923 Kipling “was encouraging Haggard to write a trilogy about the Wandering Jew, who would turn out to have been responsible for most of Europe’s troubles over the past 2000 years, and one can increasingly see anti-Semitic elements beginning to enter his own work.” Ricketts also quotes “The Waster,” from 1930, a witty but racist satire on how English public schools inculcate an awareness of “the things no fellow can do”—a lesson which “isn’t set to, etc.,” the reader being expected to supply the rhyme. In a later poem Kipling is less coy: “We do not know what God attends / The Unloved Race in every place / From Riga to Jerusalem, / But all the course of Time makes clear / To everyone (except the Hun) / It does not pay to interfere / With Cohen from Jerusalem.” Fortunately, Ricketts tells us, this was not intended for publication.
More confirmation comes from the stories dealing with St. Paul. “‘The Church That Was at Antioch’ was at heart deeply anti-Semitic,” writes Ricketts. In it the Roman Chief of Police declares, “Israel is a race to leave alone. It abets disorder,” and the story proves him right. Ricketts sees Kipling in the perspective of the harder man he became. “Before the war,” he notes, “Kipling had not on the whole (despite ‘Gehazi’) been anti-Semitic.” He cites Angus Wilson, who mentions the sympathetic presence in Puck of Pook’s Hill of Kadmiel, who tells the listening children of Christian persecution. But the story is deeply ambiguous; Kadmiel also speaks of King John’s dependence on Jewish moneylenders: “There can be no war without gold, and we Jews know how the world’s gold moves . . . a wonderful underground river. . . . Such power have we Jews among the Gentiles.” The children might have been sorry for Kadmiel, but adults would hardly have thought of equal rights when reading that “We sought Power—Power—Power! That is our God in our captivity.” Ricketts points to a sympathetic portrait of a Jew in “The House Surgeon.” More convincing would have been the very early “Jews in Shushan,” a touching story of a dying Jewish enclave in India, which even at the end of his life Kipling was pleased to remember with “the Jew tyler,” or doorkeeper, of his Masonic lodge, who was “priest and butcher to his little community” in Lahore. There is also “The Prayer of Miriam Cohen,” a puzzling but not anti-Semitic poem I would be glad to hear either Gilmour or Ricketts explain.
It is true that (except for Germans) Kipling does not condemn whole peoples. Even among the Boers there are exceptions: Piet, the common soldier, General Joubert, “who gave his life / To a lost cause, and knew the gift was vain.” Kipling in age may refer to “the Irish, whose other creed is Hate,” but readers know Mulvaney is more than a stereotypic drunk, and remember that an Irish padre is infinitely preferable to a cold and unimaginative representative of the Church of England.
But that is in Kim, and Kim is everybody’s great exception, the answer, writes Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “to nine-tenths of most of the charges leveled against Kipling and the refutation of most of the generalizations about him.” Gilmour doesn’t agree—not quite. Kim “does not quite answer the charge of racism”—”unless,” he adds, “racial disparagement (which was almost universal at the time) is withdrawn from the sheet and the charge is restricted to feelings of racial superiority.” Quotations from Tennyson and Ruskin further dilute the charge, until it is reduced to “the much less contentious view that at that time the British were more capable of performing certain tasks than the Indians.”
The charges are thoroughly rehearsed in the Norton Kim, indeed they are largely its reason for being. It is best to leave Gilmour’s important and useful book at its most convincing, with Kipling the prophet. “Far-called, our navies melt away....”
Kipling was a prophet whose prophecies were fulfilled too often to be mere coincidences: the Boers and apartheid, the Kaiser and a war, Hitler and another war, the Hindu-Muslim strife whenever Britain decided to withdraw from India—these and many other things were predicted by Kipling years, sometimes decades, before they happened. . . . Other people accepted that the Empire was in transition or in decline, but Kipling knew it was going to disappear.
And was Kipling’s moral code, his Law, too simple? “If you can keep your head . . .” “The spirit of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain owed much to Kipling. . . . [His] spirit infused a vigorous new Government no longer dominated by appeasers.” The British won the war with it, “and though they were unable to preserve the Empire for long, they kept their country alive.”
It is a strong conclusion.
III
I’ve nearly done a long, leisurely Asiatic tale in which
there are hardly any Englishmen. It has been a labour
of great love and I think it is a bit more temperate and
wise than much of my stuff.
—Rudyard Kipling, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton
Temperate and wise, lit with the Eastern sunlight Kipling so yearned for in England, crammed not with Englishmen but with Indians, many of whom are intelligent and brave, and—this from Kipling—pervaded with the Buddhist nonviolence his father understood so well and which we don’t expect the son to understand at all. And in the center of it all, Kim O’Rishti, the Irish street-urchin, white yet not white, Indian yet British, in whom Kipling recognized and re-created what Zohreh T. Sullivan calls “the underground Indian child who is always within him.”5
That piercing insight is not included in her Critical Edition,6 though it is implicit in the pages reprinted from her own perceptive book. Inexplicably delayed since its announcement in 1997 (because Kipling’s account is still unsettled?), this Kim is worth the wait. Priced competitively with the three inexpensive paperbacks from Penguin, Oxford, and Ballantine (Kim has never been out of print), it is an invaluable companion to Ricketts and Gilmour, and indispensable for readers who want to do more than merely (merely!) enjoy.
This Kim is very much an edition for today. It has the notes that 102 years have made necessary. It has the chronology of Kipling’s life we need as we search out the dates buried in the smooth narratives of biographers. Its maps diagram Kipling’s India with place names that resonate still, now, daily. It reprints “Lispeth” and “To Be Filed for Reference,” stories bearing directly on Orientalism, or stereotyping, or just plain racism, in Kim in particular and Kipling in general. It gives us Kipling on the writing of Kim. It provides early (and already conflicting) reviews. It even gives the Nobel citation. And it provides fifteen critical essays.
In order, however, to focus attention on today’s Kim, Sullivan must sacrifice voices from the long years when Kipling’s reputation was in recession. Missing are some illustrious names—Eliot, Auden, C. S. Lewis, Orwell, Jarrell. She explicitly regrets the absence of N. C. Chaudhuri’s “The Finest Story about India—in English”7 and Wilson’s “Kipling That Nobody Read.”
After Chaudhuri’s appreciative essay, no one could say, with Trilling, that “Indians naturally have no patience whatever with Kipling,” something Sullivan’s collection itself refutes, most clearly in Suvir Kaul’s “How to Be Young, Male, and British in Kipling’s India,” and Parama Roy’s careful examination of “The Myth of the Nation” in what he calls “Kipling’s great novel about India.” Though Wilson is present only in quotation, Sullivan insists on his importance: his was “the first major essay that, by drawing attention to Kipling’s dark psychological complexity, jarred readers into another approach to texts they had written off as the product of an imperial age from which they wished to disassociate themselves.”
But the big names are available elsewhere. This is a post-colonial Kim, its emphasis not on the novel’s literary excellence (most of the essays take that for granted) but on its relation to the politics and values of the British Raj. Gilmour, who has little space for Kim and dismisses the boy’s confrontation with the Russian spy as “an improbable and unconvincing subplot,” would have taken the novel’s politics more seriously could he have read Michael Matin’s “Invasion-Scare Literature, and the Russian Threat to British India” (1999). Similarly out of reach was Blair Kling’s informative “Kim in Historical Context,” written especially for this edition. Ann Parry’s redating of Kim’s adventures to the 1890s would also have been of use, making it possible to connect the writing of Kim with Kipling’s preoccupation with South Africa and the Boers.
Noel Annan and Irving Howe speak up from 1959 and 1977. But it is on the last two decades that the emphasis falls. Ten of the essays appeared after 1986. Professor Sullivan has taken care to include perspectives from the Indian subcontinent. Three of the contributors have roots there; she herself was educated in Lahore; and surely Edward Said should count as an honorary “Oriental.” These perspectives are of particular value; those who know Chaudhuri’s essay will be unsurprised that among the various postcolonial critics it is in general those with the least experience of colonialism (or India) who deal most harshly with Kim.
Edmund Wilson had no experience of India—or rather, like most Americans of his time, except for occasional news of Gandhi, his experience was through Kipling. His praise was not exactly faint—the novel was “enchanting”—but it was diluted: “almost a first-rate book.” Enchantment and diamond-bright possibility had little to offer a writer whose interest was in “dark psychological complexity,” and Wilson had little space for Kim. One sentence, however, reverberates throughout these essays: “Now what the reader tends to expect is that Kim will eventually come to realize that he is delivering into bondage to the British invaders those whom he has always considered his own people, and that a struggle of allegiances will result.”
Professor Sullivan makes sure we will encounter these words early. Both Annan and Howe quote them, and for most of the contributors this is the inescapable issue, pointing straight to the novel’s tender and ambiguous ending.
“What Happens at the End of Kim?” This is Sullivan’s own question, the title of the selection from her own book on Kipling that concludes this edition—rightly, since it is a question to which so many of the contributors have already given answers. They don’t agree.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect them to; if they did, it wouldn’t still be an issue after half a century. But it isn’t only that changing times throw up new questions. Kipling himself didn’t provide an answer. When he told his father, whose knowledge and wisdom had contributed so much to the making of Kim, that it was at last finished, John Lockwood asked, “Did it stop, or you?” Rudyard had thought a lot about writing;8 the Daemon was his name for—well, instead of flat psychospeak, let him say it, in words Sullivan has made sure we have. “When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.” The Daemon, he knew, was with him in Kim. The story stopped of itself, “with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.” It stopped, however, without telling us what Kim was going to do.
We can’t escape some summary. It has been three years since thirteen-year-old Kim met his Lama at the Wonder House in Lahore, and the boy took him inside to see the white-bearded curator. Even while Kim has unwillingly been put to school, they have remained in contact, since the Lama has paid for his English-speaking education. Now, in the closing chapters of the novel, they are on the road again, this time bound for the high hills from which the Lama came in search of the River which broke out where Buddha shot his arrow, which frees from all sin. It fell in the plains, not the hills, but Kim’s varied talents have already made him an apprentice spy in the Great Game of empire, and the hills are the frontier of Russian penetration. So he diverts the Lama from his quest, all too easily since the old man, after fruitless searching, yearns for the “hills of [his] delight.” Kim is traveling for pleasure, certainly, for the freedom and variety of the road, and the deeper pleasure of being with his Lama—for Kim is among other things a love story. But he has another reason for taking him out of his way. He is also putting him in danger; there is insult, even a blow from the Russian they encounter, and though Kim repels it handily, the Lama, temporarily overcome by the Red Tide of Anger, is spiritually and physically shaken. It’s a hard journey down, Kim burdened by incriminating papers stolen from the Russian, but far more by the care of a frail old man. Arrived at a safe haven, he collapses in exhaustion. While he lies ill, for two days and nights the Lama meditates. “I took no food. I drank no water.” And “upon the second night, the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free,” “passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and Things” and reached nirvana.
Yet then, “with strivings and yearnings and retchings and agonies not to be told,” the Lama wrenched himself back to the world of illusion. “I must return to my chela [disciple], lest he miss the Way.” It is only then he finds his River; in fact, he stumbles into it. He can now tell the recovering Kim,
“Certain is our deliverance. Come!”
He crossed his hands upon his lap, as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved.
It is the book’s last sentence.
But has he? Deliverance for a sixteen-year-old? For this sixteen-year-old, so fully, joyously alive to the world of Things? Kim’s response to Teshoo Lama’s news that he has found the River of Salvation is only to inquire about the state of the silly Body: “Wast thou very wet?” The “lack of closure,” Ricketts’ defining quality of modernism, elicits conflicting answers, not only on the level of event—will Kim continue as a spy—but the level of value—what does this entail for this attractive adolescent, and for the meaning of the book?
Wilson set the stage with “what the reader tends to expect.” He expected Kim to realize he couldn’t be at once Indian and white, a chela and a spy, and opt for . . . he doesn’t quite say, but clearly he was disappointed. Kim is going to choose the Great Game; he’s already a successful player, and the Game is a lot of fun. There’ll be no struggle of allegiances; he’ll deliver his people into bondage. Too bad; it was an enchanting book, it’s not what should have happened. So the Eastern sunlight darkens, the diamond brightness is, retrospectively, discovered as empty glitter. The “overwhelmingly positive atmosphere” that Said sees “irradiating the pages of Kim” is a fraudulent illusion. The reality is tragedy, “the tragedy of Kim’s annihilation” as Ian Baucom puts it. His freedom is only apparent; he must and will, as Sara Suleri confirms, “transmogrify from adolescent mobility into the inflexibility represented by colonial knowledge.”
It gets worse. For Suleri, Kim is “an imperial casualty of more tragic proportions than he is usually granted.” We read of his “colonial imprisonment,” his “unavoidable extinction” as “victim of colonial education”; finally, in the book’s “chilling conclusion,” “Kim must be killed.” “What happens” is that, in Sullivan’s words, “Kim has been transformed from a youthful, reckless, happy adventurer into a cog of the imperialist wheel.” The negatives mount: “horrendous” cost, losses which “doom . . . him to endless aloneness, disappointment, and alienation,” to dehumanization and “a pathology of selves.” “Split by irreconcilable loyalties and loves . . . Kim will eventually have to deny the lama” (inconsistent capitalization among contributors: I go with Kipling’s L) making the old man’s certainty both “ironic” and “materially false,” his touching certainty a confidence trick on the reader and (Sullivan is an extraordinarily perceptive critic) on Kipling himself.
But is it Kim, or the postcolonial critic, for whom the costs of these doom-laden readings are horrendous? Will Kim eventually have to deny the Lama? Kipling planted his clues well before the Daemon turned off the tap. The Lama is old and frail. He had to be carried down from the hills in a litter. He will not live long. None of these essayists mentions the scene where the Russian not only strikes the Lama but tears his marvelous drawing of the Wheel of Being. “Look!” says the Lama to his chela. “There remains untorn by the idolater no more than the breadth of my fingernail. . . . So much, then, is the span of my life in this body.” There is no need for denial and there will be none.
Kim has already made his choice. Except for Kinkead-Weekes (“We should need very strong evidence to support the idea that Kim could return to the Game . . . and there is no such evidence”) everyone thinks Kim will be a spy for empire. There is a reason for such unanimity. It is a testimony, not to Kipling’s politics, or even his lifelong commitment to the life of action, but to his commitment, equally lifelong, to the craft of fiction.
Admittedly, the writer’s craft is not the focus of these essays. Only Said discusses Kim at any length in aesthetic terms, associating him “with Thomas Hardy, with Henry James, . . . Flaubert and Zola, even Proust and the early Gide.” Yet however little attention they pay to how Kipling puts his novel together, there is one word they share, not only with each other but with most others who have written on Kim: picaresque.
There is nothing surprising in this; they are only repeating Kipling’s own adjective. He told his mother “what was good enough for Cervantes was good enough for him”; she told him not to make excuses: “You know. you couldn’t make a plot to save your soul.” He agreed. “Kim, of course, was nakedly picaresque and plotless.”
Of course! Did he, in the hands of his Daemon, really not know what he was doing as he guided his characters to the end of their journey? He always undervalued his work (“Recessional” was rescued from his wastebasket). But we should have learned by now to trust the tale, not the teller. I’ll quote Said to lighten the darkness: “By the end of the novel [Kim] is at the beginning of a new and satisfying life, having helped the lama achieve his dream of redemption, the British to foil a serious plot,” and (Said is good at taking a novel on its own terms) “the Indians to continue enjoying prosperity under Britain.” The book’s direction has been clear from the opening chapter, when Kim is attracted to the Lama because “He is new.” It is clear throughout, reinforced in every scene, every episode, every brilliant description. Kim’s commitment is to the bright, sharp-edged world the Lama does not see, “the great, good-tempered world,” “this broad smiling river of life.” Inconceivable that he could choose the Lama’s Way. Not inconceivable, however, that an orphan boy could respond to a loving and guileless sanctity. Still, he will go with Mother Earth and her good currents; much as he loves the Lama, he has never once assented to the idea that the world is illusion. His choice—or his direction, if, as a prisoner, he is denied a choice—is implicit from the beginning.
It would be implicit if there were no such thing as a British Empire. “Would it in any case make much difference,” Irving Howe asks, “if Kim were to join an incipient nationalist movement [the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885] instead of the British Secret Service? Would he still not have to undergo a similar apprenticement in stratagems and devices? Would he still not be torn between the irreconcilable claims of this world and another?”
I would take it further. So much has been said, here and elsewhere, of divided loyalties, so little of the greater conflict between the World and the Way. Loyalties? Is Kim loyal to the Game and the white sahibs who run it as he is loyal to, loves, his Lama? If Kim is “polemical,” as Matin claims, the terms of the polemic are strangely muted. Kipling’s marvelous boy never once expresses loyalty to, or even awareness of the British Empire as a political or value-laden entity, as any kind of entity at all. Kipling appends to an early chapter some verses about the Prodigal Son, but a prodigal who rejects the family reunion to return to his pigs. Though orphan Kim finds the object of his quest, the Red Bull on a Green Field of his Irish father’s regiment, he finds no father there, and his one idea is to get back to the road again. Never does he show the slightest interest in anything outside India; this boy so curious about the world never asks a question about Ireland or England. They are foreign countries he knows only by their Urdu name, “Belait.” Kim would have had a satisfying life if the British had never held India; if they hadn’t, someone else would have, and he would have found games to play, under another Shah Jehan perhaps, who had plenty of white men working for him.
Kipling, of course, speaks up for the Empire if Kim does not, though only briefly, and only through minor characters. How not? When Kipling wrote, Said reminds us (in a passage Sullivan does not include), “there were no appreciable deterrents to the imperialist world view.” Simple historical awareness affirms the novel’s aesthetic integrity, ending and all:
There is no resolution to the conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions because for Kipling there was no conflict [all emphases Said’s]. For him it was India’s best destiny to be ruled by England. . . . If one reads Kipling . . . as someone who had read Frantz Fanon, met Gandhi, absorbed their lessons, but had remained stubbornly unconvinced . . . then one seriously distorts the defining context in which Kipling wrote.
For us, of course, the deterrents to the imperialist worldview are appreciable, to say the least. Current history, however, gives some weight to Gilmour’s observation that “when all appropriate qualifications are made, minorities usually fare better within imperial or multinational systems than in nations dominated by the ethos or ethnicity of a majority,” particularly when we are thinking about Bosnia, or Saudi Arabia—or India and Pakistan. It is therefore doubly encouraging to encounter here a critic whose name suggests he brings direct experience to bear. Suvir Kaul can see the Lama, not like some other contributors, as feminized and passive, but as a strong, effective role model of commitment to his Way, above all to its difficult ethic of non-violence. That commitment “is exemplary for Kim, and indeed for the novel itself,” which “features virtually no violence.” “A fantasy of fusion,” it gives us a Kim who will become, not a soldier, but a civilian member of the Secret Service, the Ethnological Survey,” “gatherers of information and local knowledge” who “use their intellect, not their brawn, to effect their ends.” Looked at one way, says Kaul, the Lama is their anti-type. His knowledge is as different from theirs as it could well be. Yet it is he who has opened to Kim the Gates of both kinds of Learning, and “Kim inherits his way of being in the world—a Searcher and a Seeker after Knowledge—from both. And that is the suture between the world of transcendent spirit and the world of colonial men.”
That suture is an unexpected and original way of safeguarding the novel’s integrity. It is, I think, enormously worth safeguarding. For there is a price to be paid for these postcolonial readings, as there is for all readings which subordinate a work to the particular objections to be found to it. The horrendous cost to Kim himself envisaged by these dark readings is matched by the cost to us who read. Enchantment cannot survive their chilling conclusions, nor can pleasure. And not only pleasure, but wider understanding. Postcolonial preoccupations risk submerging—as it is certainly submerged in most of these essays—the perennial, the obvious conflict. World and spirit—these represent, in Irving Howe’s words, “not two systems of political beliefs, or social orders, but two ways of apprehending human existence, each of which is seen to have its own irreducible claims.” We should be grateful that Professor Sullivan has placed Howe’s essay early, before darkness falls. For that opposition, after all, is what the novel is about.
Surely it is worth some emphasis, since it is a major theme in Kipling’s work. Contemplative versus Active; Mary versus Martha; Mary who chose to sit at her Lord’s feet and hear the Word while Martha got the dinner. Kipling had already written that poem, already written the beautiful “Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” where the choice is presented in Hindu terms. He would write about it again and again. Always, as in Kim, he would tip the balance toward Action. But only in Kim and “The Miracle” would he honor the other Way.
Current critical opinion, however, calls on us to suspect even so fundamental a conflict. Professor Sullivan warns us (not here, but in Narratives of Empire) of a “curious trait,” shared, oddly, by “Kim, the Lama, and the narrator”: “their efforts to universalize the experience of Kim and the Lama so that they come to represent . . . the reliance of the world of contemplation on the world of action, or some other dubious universal truth.” Is the possibility of universal truth, is the conflict between contemplative and active, central to three world religions, really dismissable with a single adjective? If so, it is at a cost payable in a deeper alienation than any that threatens Kim, alienation not only from the experience of ordinary people the world over, but from the thinking, also worldwide, of some of the deepest minds human beings have known. “Two irreducible ways of apprehending human existence.” Most of us will go with Kim—there will always be more Marthas than Marys. But Howe has one more question. Whatever becomes of Kim, whatever his success or unsuccess in the world of action, “would not the lama still remain before him as a loving apparition of a ‘Way’ never to be accepted wholly but never to be abandoned wholly?” And before us as well?
1 Revising his essay for his Culture and Imperialism, he changed “great” to “greatest.”
2 RUDYARD KIPLING: A Life (published in England as The Unforgiving Minute), by Harry Ricketts. Carroll & Graf. $16.00p. THE LONG RECESSIONAL: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, by David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26.00.
3 Wilson incorporated these remarks into “The Kipling That Nobody Read” in The Wound and the Bow, which Ricketts does not cite.
4 Neither Ricketts nor Gilmour follows Eliot‘s coy insistence on the term “verse.”
5 NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, by Zohreh T. Sullivan. Cambridge University Press. $65.00.
6 KIM, by Rudyard Kipling. Ed. by Zohreh T. Sullivan. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. $8.00.
7 She sacrifices more by omitting from Chaudhuri‘s carefully chosen title the unexpected and significant dash.
8 WRITINGS ON WRITING, by Rudyard Kipling. Ed. by S. Kemp and L. Lewis. Cambridge University Press. $70.00.