Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  I think I am an optimistic person, but that night, traveling home to my house on the Cape, I had a dreadfully hollow feeling. Things had not seemed so black since high school. What is going to happen to me? I used to think. I had wanted to write. I did not have the courage to say I was going to be a writer. A doctor, a teacher, a forest ranger—it did not seem to matter what I said, because it would never happen. I knew only one thing for sure. It was this: Nothing will happen to me in Medford—worse, I will fail here. High school was proof of that. Was my brain teeming with schemes and fantasies? I think it was. I had a riotous imagination, but even that worried me into secrecy, for I had done nothing, and I certainly had not used it. Going home now was like going home from high school, and it provoked the same reflection: We are all riding into the dark, alone.

  An October mist hung over the Cape. It was late. We had stayed up drinking and talking until three am. Now I passed a watching raccoon at the roadside. Twenty years ago I would have wanted to put a bullet between his bright yellow eyes. Dead leaves lay thick on the road; there was no other car here to scatter them. I was lonelier than I had been for years. But that was how I had felt in high school—impatient and a bit lost and mournfully horny. In high school I was still ungrown, with my home-made bombs and my gun and a horror of adulthood. The reunion was a celebration of youth and violent innocence that had been in me. I had been right to be fearful in 1959, for everything was about to happen. I had not known—how could I?—that my education was about to begin. I had good friends, but I was nagged by one thought: the world was elsewhere. I left Medford the first chance I had, and Medford became part of the dark beyond, as I converted my memories into fiction. But I was lucky in this brief reunion. It didn't damn me the way dreams do. It was worthwhile and funny and a relief, and I was reassured. Now I knew I could go back. Such, such were the joys.

  Rudyard Kipling: The White Man's Burden

  [1979]

  One of the more grotesque falsifications of taste, and it is usually propounded in schools, is the pious belief that a work of literature must be morally pure and right-minded before it can wholly satisfy us. No villain can enthrall us, the argument runs; no sinful passion can make us happy or inspire us. And yet if this were so, half of literature would be lost to us in our self-denying refusal to see, as Angus Wilson puts it in The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, "the difficult truth that aesthetic satisfaction is not one with ethical satisfaction." There are morally disgusting stories that one reads with absolute enchantment, and from the Jacobeans onward villains who are truer and vastly more enjoyable than saintly heroes who never put a foot wrong.

  Kipling embarrasses critics, and even his biographers have felt the necessity to suppress stories they have found morally untidy or politically dubious. We have had to endure the preposterous suggestions that Kipling wasn't really an imperialist, or vindictive in his fictions, or that he didn't scoff at some races and hate others. But he did believe in the salvation of imperialism, and any number of his stories and poems indicate his hatred for certain races or groups of people. No, not Indians, though he made Kim's companion a Buddhist rather than a Hindu; but apart from his approval of "Fuzzy Wuzzy" in his home in the Sudan he never referred to Africans as other than "Hubshis" (a neat Hindi evasion derived from "Abyssinians") and he believed that the Germans were satanic. These views in fine and subtle works have caused confusion and have made Kipling one of the most misunderstood writers in the language.

  Long before he died (he died comparatively recently, in 1936) he was praised, mocked and hounded in about equal measure. After his death he was ignored for a decade, then pounced upon—so vigorously that a book published in 1945, Hilton Brown's Rudyard Kipling, proclaims that its intention is for Kipling "to be restored to his throne." Orwell's defensive and indignant essay was mainly a response to Eliot's saying (in his selection of Kipling's poems) that Kipling was "a versifier." In America, Randall Jarrell tried with a certain amount of success to make sure that "the Kipling that nobody read" (the title of Edmund Wilson's essay) reached a wide public. In England, Somerset Maugham edited a companion piece to Eliot's, a selection of stories he prefaced with the view that Kipling was the greatest short story writer in English. More recently, V. S. Naipaul has discussed—but not dismissed—Kipling as "a club writer," and Philip Mason in an enormous book of critical chat ( Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire) has directed our interest to the later stories. Charles Carrington's official biography (it appeared in 1955, but has been reissued with corrections) started a new Kipling boom; it is a politely factual book, plodding and reverential, that goes its earnest way, buffing up the slightly tarnished halo. Both J. I. M. Stewart and Angus Wilson have improved our understanding—Mr Wilson in particular—but some bafflements have persisted.

  And no wonder, for Kipling himself was no help. In his lifetime Kipling actively discouraged anyone from invading his privacy. He had a mighty distrust of journalists, and in his poem "The Appeal" he wrote,

  And for the little, little span

  The dead are borne in mind,

  Seek not to question other than

  The books I leave behind.

  Fine, you say, and you pause at the Kipling shelf. Here it is, nearly as long as The Grand Trunk Road and with much the same motley traffic: kiddies' stories and "Mary Postgate" (one of the nastiest stories ever written), poems about Puck and poems about whores and sergeants, fables about immortality and one disagreeable ode about the Kaiser dying of throat cancer; a great knowingness about adultery and divorce and spooks in cupboards, written when he was in his twenties, and some later stories that are positively boyish. There is the precise technical detail of railway engines and radios, and the hilarious photographic gaffe in "The End of the Passage" where a character snaps a picture of the bogeyman printed on a dead man's retina. He never saw Mandalay, and yet it is the title of his best-known poem; he suffered in America, but wrote remarkably little about it. His India, which has become our India (and even many Indians' India—the scholar Nirad Chaudhuri ranks Kim as far greater than Forster's Passage to India), he imagined from just seven years of working on colonial newspapers and mooching in Simla and the bazaar. From year to year he is reassessed. He has never, I think, gone unread; but a wilder combination of traits—philistinism and fine-feeling, vulgarity and clear-sightedness, militarism and mercy, public serenity and private sorrow, fierceness and gentleness—is hard to imagine. Could there be a better subject for a novel or play?

  I wrote a play about Kipling in 1979, calling it "The White Man's Burden." This play seems to me (but I hope to no one else) like the sort of Chinese pot I have seen reassembled in a museum case. A dozen or so fragments of porcelain, big and small, are dug up; they do not make a whole pot, but a careful person studying the breaks and curves in the pieces begins to fathom the design. With new clay and old fragments he makes his vessel, the plain biscuit-colored clay holding the opaline fragments in place. It is the right shape, but a strange mixture of styles and tones, a work of collaboration, the past informing the present. Sometimes, if it is done well, you hardly notice the patches. In a sense, most writing is like this; the writer is usually working with vivid splinters and trying to make their shine indistinguishable in his creation.

  I was lucky in the fragments I found.

  The story began in London, in 1889. Kipling was then twenty-four and living in several small rooms on Villiers Street, next to Charing Cross Station. He had made his reputation with his book of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, and he was regarded as a prodigy. He had recently returned from India; he was hard at work. Not very far away, in Dean's Yard, Westminster, there was an American about Kipling's age, who had just arrived and was energetically writing, signing up authors for a new publishing Venture, and moving in society. This was Wolcott Balestier. He was all bustle—charming, impatient, clever, imaginative, businesslike. He had already written two novels, but now he had a new scheme.

  The American copyright
laws allowed any foreign book to be pirates' loot—Dickens had complained about this some years earlier. The only way an English author could secure copyright in the United States was in collaboration with an author who was an American citizen. Soon after he set up his office in Dean's Yard, Wolcott hired Arthur Waugh (Evelyn's father) as his assistant—it was Arthur Waugh's first job. In his autobiography, One Man's Road (1931), Waugh wrote that Wolcott had "conceived the idea of crossing to England, and setting up a collaboration with some established English writer, say, Mrs Humphry Ward—which would secure that writer the protection of American copyright."

  Waugh was impressed by his young boss. The American was tremendously hard-working and deeply respected. He was, said Waugh, "an inspired leader, and made everybody, or almost everybody, believe in him." Wolcott's motto was that nothing was impossible: you could do anything, meet anyone, go anywhere, change the copyright laws, make a fortune or effect any conquest. "He was not merely one of our conquerors," Edmund Gosse wrote, "but the most successful of them all."

  It was almost inevitable that Wolcott should meet Rudyard Kipling, although the first time he heard of him he said, "Rudyard Kipling—is it a man or a woman? What's its real name?" Very soon Wolcott was discussing the possibility of publishing Kipling in America and—odd for the reclusive and single-minded Englishman—collaborating with him on a novel, to be called The Naulahka (the word was misspelled: Kipling never corrected it). Kipling began visiting Wolcott; he met Wolcott's mother and two sisters, who were very proud of the way Wolcott had made inroads on English society. At the same time, Wolcott was cultivating the friendship of Henry James, and to his occupations of publisher, novelist, collaborator, and party-goer he added one more—he became Henry James's literary agent. "The precious Balestier," James called him, and in a letter to a friend he wrote, "He will probably strike you, as he strikes me, as the perfection of an 'agent'." James was then fifty. He treated Wolcott as his son, and they made trips together—once, they planned to spend a weekend on the Isle of Wight, but it was more than a week before the pair returned to London. "He became in a manner part of my life," James wrote. There can be no doubt that James loved him in the helplessly idealizing way that he did attractive and talented young men.

  Henry James also met Wolcott's sisters. Josephine was very pretty, and perhaps as a consequence of her unapproachable beauty we know almost nothing about her. Caroline, known to everyone as "Carrie", was "a little person of extraordinary capacity," James said. She was small and genial, and capable to the point where a number of people compared her to a man. Kipling's parents were slightly alarmed by her. His father remarked obliquely that she was "a good man spoiled," and his over-protective mother said, "That woman is going to marry our Ruddy."

  It is not known what sort of courtship, if any, went on between Carrie and Kipling. The focus of attention was Wolcott, who was now doing business in Europe. He had joined forces with the English firm of Heinemann in the hope of producing cheap pocket editions of novels, to rival those of Tauchnitz. Kipling meanwhile set off alone, in a state of mental exhaustion brought on by overwork, for a round-the-world cruise. He visited South Africa and New Zealand, and he had given Henry James the impression that he was on his way to Samoa to visit Robert Louis Stevenson. Indeed, Stevenson expected him: "R. K. is planning to visit us," he wrote to James in September, 1891. But Kipling abandoned the Samoa trip and sailed to Australia and Ceylon. In Colombo he had news that Wolcott was dangerously ill; just before Christmas in Lahore he learned that Wolcott had died in early December, in Dresden.

  Henry James had been summoned to Dresden. He dreaded the errand, but managed to play a fatherly role at the bleak funeral ceremony. James was desolated by Wolcott's death, but full of admiration for Carrie's fortitude, "the intense—and almost manly—nature of her emotion." The Balestier women and James returned to England, and they were astonished to see Kipling on the 10th of January—it had taken him just fourteen days to travel from Bombay to London. A week later, Kipling and Carrie were married, at All Souls, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away—"a queer office for me to perform—but it's done—and an odd little marriage."

  A month after their marriage, in the middle of February, 1892, the Kiplings were in America. They stopped at Brattleboro, Vermont, where some of Carrie's relatives lived, and Kipling was overwhelmed by the snow and the isolation. With the haste that characterized his decisions during this first hectic part of his life, Kipling determined to buy some land, build a house and live in Vermont. All this he managed quickly, and then the honeymoon couple crossed America to Vancouver, sailed to Japan (where Carrie's maternal grandfather had been an adviser, twenty years earlier, to the Mikado) and discovered, one afternoon in Yokohama, that their bank had gone bust. Penniless, they returned to Brattleboro. That story is in Kipling's somewhat evasive autobiography, Something of Myself, written when he was seventy.

  No reader of this autobiography can have much idea of what Kipling's American years were like. You get the impression that he has a grievance, but it is impossible to say how it came about. The book is short on particulars—unusual for a writer who could describe down to the last valve and piston ring the workings of a steam engine. But perhaps that was the problem. James described Kipling's writing as a steady diminishing, moving from "the less simple in subject to the more simple—from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish and from the fish to the engines and screws." There is no mention in Kipling's autobiography of the vast amount of work he did in Brattleboro (he doesn't even name the town), but the four years after his marriage—Kipling was filled with optimism and settled for the first time in his life—were the most productive of his literary career. He wrote most of the poems in The Seven Seas, both Jungle Books, all the stories in The Day's Work, the second series of Barrack Room Ballads, worked at Mother Maturin (he was never happy with this novel and finally ditched it), started Kim and wrote most of Captains Courageous —this last was his only strictly American book. He also wrote a number of poems which were subsequently collected. His output was enormous and profitable and within a few years the Yokohama bankruptcy became no more than a funny incident, part of the colorful past.

  Kipling loved the American landscape; he was uncertain of the people. He hated the drinking, the talking, the spitting, the greed, the noise, the illiterate immigrants, the xenophobia—specifically a hurtful anti-British feeling which prevailed in the 1890's. "So far as I was concerned," he wrote in Something of Myself, "I felt the atmosphere was to some extent hostile. The idea seemed to be that I was 'making money' out of America—witness the new house and the horses—and was not sufficiently grateful for my privileges."

  There is no reference in his autobiography to his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, or to the Venezuela-British Guiana boundary dispute which brought America and Britain to the brink of war. The Beatty memory must have been horrible—no human being could have been less like Kipling in character than Beatty. It is not surprising that the two men fought. I am inclined to think that Kipling identified in Beatty all the weaknesses and evils he saw in the United States: Beatty, for him, was the very embodiment of the boasting, irresponsible American. And it is quite likely that Beatty saw in Kipling a young John Bull, imperious, aloof, dedicated to work, unfunny and not particularly friendly. We know Beatty from his shouts of pain and pleasure; he was not immoral, only extravagant, coarsely expressive and loud, with the harum-scarum attitude of Huck Finn. He had Wolcott's energetic presumption, but none of Wolcott's tact or grace. Beatty was popular in town; Kipling was not and, what was worse, Kipling did not give a damn. But when Kipling decided to take on Beatty—breaking all his own rules about settling arguments in a judiciously wolf-like way—he did not know how it would expose and humiliate him, and how it would drive him out of his first real home.

  Kipling placed much of the blame for the anti-British feeling in America on
the national press. From his first visit to the States he was appalled by the state of American newspapers, and it was not long before he was pestered by journalists. He was usually successful at keeping them at bay, but his evasions only convinced them that he would make good copy. They hounded him as he disembarked from ships, they sneaked onto his property, interviewed neighbors and generally made a nuisance of themselves. Kipling never changed his view that the journalists were bums and their papers foolish, trivial and jingoistic. In doing research for my play, I read many American newspapers published in 1895 and 1896 and, with some sadness—the Boston Post was one of the most scabrous of the bunch—I began to see Kipling's point. The front pages were filled with reports of murders, muggings, suicides, gossip, hearsay, "society" rubbish and tub-thumping over Cuba and Venezuela. Kipling saw these same papers. He could have ignored them; he could have dismissed Beatty's ravings as wild talk—it wasn't much more than that. But in the end he brought the journalists to his doorstep and the scorn of the press upon his head. Rashly, in May, 1896, he had Beatty arrested.

  I think he was striking the blow he believed Lord Salisbury should have struck a few months before. Britain had been taunted over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana—Venezuela making the ridiculous claim that well over half the British colony was rightfully her own. This issue had been in the air for about fifty years, but in 1895 the Venezuelans jumped a part of the disputed territory, captured an outpost and fired on a British schooner. When Lord Salisbury demanded their withdrawal, the United States asserted the Monroe Doctrine. Secretary of State Olney provided a clumsy gloss on the Monroe Doctrine by telling Lord Salisbury that "Distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any permanent political union between a European and an American state unnatural and inexpedient." (Some years later, Olney explained his sharp tone by saying that "in English eyes the United States was then so completely a negligible quantity that it was believed only words the equivalent of blows would be really effective.") Olney's message was delivered in July; it was not until November that Lord Salisbury replied. To Olney's charge that union between Britain and British Guiana was "unnatural and inexpedient," Lord Salisbury said, "Her Majesty's Government are prepared emphatically to deny it on behalf of both British and American people who are subject to her Crown." He went on,