Kipling Sahib
Page 38
In her first novel, The Heart of a Maid, published under the pseudonym ‘Beatrix Grange’ in 1891 as No. 8 in Wheeler and Co.’s Indian Railway Library series, Trix had written of the incompatible temperaments of the book’s heroine May and her husband Percy: ‘He was naturally self-contained and undemonstrative. May would have liked him to be passionate. She had married him not for her own sake, but for his … Sometimes the very sound of her husband’s slow, monotonous voice made her clasp her hands together in silent, intense irritation. Half this was purely physical, but it was none the less very real and hard to bear.’ It is impossible to judge to what extent this portrayal of a doomed marriage was based on her own, but it is surely no coincidence that in her second novel, A Pinchbeck Goddess, published in 1897, the only character that rings true is Lilian, married to a man who shows no affection towards her and who retreats into sullen silence whenever he is challenged. ‘We don’t speak the same language, he and I,’ Lilian tells a sympathetic friend. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to tell my own people, for they really love me and it would make them unhappy; besides … my husband’s family would say it was all my own fault.’ In the novel Lilian’s unhappiness ends when she becomes pregnant, but for Trix there was no happy ending.
A Fleming relative afterwards came close to confirming the accuracy of Trix’s picture of her marriage:
She and Uncle Jack, though deeply attached, scarcely shared one thought or pleasure. He was Army to the toe-tips and looked on all writing or painting as rather riff-raff stuff … Our family looked down on the marriage as a very Bohemian alliance, an opinion they had to modify later when all her relations, Baldwins, Poynters, Burne-Jones, not to say Kipling himself achieved a good measure of fame … but by then the damage had been done. I think the split in her affections, real love for her husband and real yearning for her own relations and all the fun they had in the world of life and letters[,] was too much for her.30
Suffering from what sounds very like classic bipolar disorder, Trix was brought back to England by her husband to be looked after by her mother in Tisbury, where she then experienced a severe psychotic episode in the late autumn of 1898, alternating between ‘mutism’ and long bouts of ‘almost constant talk … nearly all nonsense’. Alice Kipling seems initially to have been in denial, but in early November she was forced to admit to her son that Trix needed professional care. On 18 November 1898 – just four days before Carrie noted in her diary that a final draft of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ had been completed to her husband’s satisfaction – Ruddy wrote to his uncle Alfred Baldwin explaining that his mother was taking Trix to a Dr Colenso in London where ‘she would be dosed and dieted and generally looked after’ for three weeks: ‘If she does not kill herself before the 22nd we shall at least have the satisfaction of knowing that she will then seriously enter upon the care of herself. I shall then take steps to introduce a specialist … The main point is not to flutter the mother.’31
Trix failed to respond to this course of treatment and had to be installed in a nursing home, where she remained for more than a year, her mother noting that ‘There are times in every day when she is her own bright self and then she suddenly changes and drifts away into a world of her own – always a sad one – into which I cannot follow her.’32 Although Trix recovered sufficiently to be able to return with Jack Fleming to India in 1902 she suffered several relapses, the most serious following the death of her parents in the winter of 1910–11, and she remained in fragile mental health thereafter for much of the rest of her life.
In the gloomy winter months following Trix’s breakdown Ruddy stayed with his parents at The Gables in Tisbury to give his mother support. He also continued to work on Kim with his father: ‘Under our united tobaccos it grew like the Djin released from the brass bottle, and the more we explored its possibilities the more opulence of detail did we discover … Between us, we knew every step, sight, and smell on his casual road, as well as all the persons he met.’ Kim became a refuge, providing therapeutic release for both men, and on his return to his own family at The Elms, Rottingdean, at Christmas Ruddy continued to work on the book: ‘The sou’-westers raged day and night, till the silly windows jiggled their wedges loose. But I was quite unconcerned. I had my Eastern sunlight and if I wanted more I could get it at “The Gables”, Tisbury.’33
The writing of Kim continued into the New Year of 1899, at which point it was decided that rather than proceeding to South Africa as planned the family should instead go to America to see Carrie’s parents. Alice Kipling’s fears for their health in risking a winter crossing of the Atlantic were dismissed, and on 20 January the five Kiplings and a nanny set sail from Liverpool. A fortnight later they docked in New York with everyone in the party suffering from coughs and colds. Almost immediately the condition of little Josephine and Elsie grew worse and they were diagnosed as suffering from whooping cough. Then Ruddy developed pneumonia, which spread to both lungs. By 24 February he had fallen into a delirium. After eight days of hovering on the brink he was declared by the doctors to be out of danger – but as his condition improved, so that of Josephine deteriorated. The death on 6 March of the daughter who was ‘the delight of his heart’ was kept from him by Carrie and his friends for some weeks for fear of the shock killing him.
It took Ruddy the better part of four months to recover his strength and his nerve. Six months after setting out for America he and his depleted family returned to their home at Rottingdean to rebuild their lives. His parents and his Aunt Georgie helped them to readjust, with Lockwood Kipling noting to a friend that ‘The house and garden are full of the lost child and poor Rud told his mother how he saw her when a door opened, when a space was vacant at table – coming out of every green dark corner of the garden – radiant – and heartbreaking.’34
So many letters of condolence and good wishes had been received that Ruddy and Carrie were forced to reply through the press in a general letter of thanks. But among those who wrote and who received a personal letter in return was Mrs Edmonia Hill – their first exchange of letters since the breakup in late 1890. ‘Be thankful that you never had a child to lose,’ Ruddy told her. ‘I thought I knew something of what grief meant till that came to me. My “fame” never was of any use to me anyway, and now it seems more of an irony than ever.’ He spoke of never returning to America but of the possibility of going back to India: ‘There isn’t much news of India in my life. Now and again I hear of an old name – but not often. It has all changed. The Curzons want me to come out and stay with them – but Viceroys are not exactly my line. This fool-sickness of mine which had the bad taste to leave me and take my little Maiden (I wish you could have seen her) makes it I believe impossible for me to stay in England through the winters: so I suppose I may as well try India as any other place.’ He closed his letter with a brief postscript: ‘I am afraid this is rather badly written but the fact is that I don’t do much writing nowadays.’35
What made Ruddy’s loss harder to bear was what he regarded as his betrayal by friends, among them Kay Robinson and George ‘M’Turk’ Beresford. Robinson had made the mistake of publicly quoting at length from Ruddy’s reply, written in Lahore in April 1886 (see Chapter 8, p. 207), after Robinson had urged him to seek literary fame in England. This breach of his privacy provoked Ruddy into demanding the return of the letter, which Robinson did with good grace, promising never again to write another word of their past acquaintance and adding that ‘All that I have written has been in the spirit of the warmest friendship and admiration; and I was naturally proud that, although everyone used to laugh both at Allahabad and Lahore when I said you would be quickly recognised as one of the greatest poets of recent times, my judgement has been so completely justified.’36 Ruddy did not respond, and their friendship ended there.37
It was from this time, according to Kipling’s niece Angela Thirkell, that the shutters came down. Writing in 1932 when her uncle was still alive, she stated that ‘There has been the same charm, the same gift of
fascinating speech, the same way of making everyone with whom he talks show their most interesting side, but one was only allowed to see these things from the other side of a barrier and it was sad for the child who used to be free of the inner courts of his imagination.’38
But the compulsion to write was still there, and in the late summer of 1899 Ruddy resumed work on the Just So Stories. It was a year and a half before he felt able to refer obliquely to his lost daughter, imaged as a half-glimpsed free spirit with eyes ‘bright as diamonds and bluer than the sky above’ roaming the Wealden downs in his poem ‘Merrow Down’, included among the verses in Just So Stories:
For far – oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!
Envoi: ‘In the faith of little children’
KIM AND AFTER, 1899–1936
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need,
Till the Soul that is not man’s soul was lent us to lead.
As the deer breaks – as the steer breaks – from the herd where they graze,
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
Then the wood failed – then the food failed – then the last water dried –
In the faith of little children we laid down and died.
Rudyard Kipling, A Song of the English, 1893
In the late summer of 1899 Ruddy wrote to his agent, A. P. Watt, asking him to return the manuscript of Mother Maturin, which for some years had been lodged with him for safe keeping. Taking what little could be salvaged from the 350 pages written a decade earlier and abandoning the rest, Ruddy returned to work on Kim, knowing now that this was his best chance of fulfilling the task he had set himself many years earlier, to write the great Indian novel. With characteristic candour Alice Kipling had once remarked to her son that ‘You know you couldn’t make a plot to save your soul’, but Ruddy had now stopped worrying about the novel’s structure, having decided that Kim should unfold in the same picaresque style as Cervantes’ Don Quixote. ‘Kim took care of himself,’ he wrote of this final stage of the novel’s development. ‘The only trouble was to keep him in bounds.’ By November of that year Ruddy was able to read an early draft of Kim to his Aunt Georgie over at North End House.
The Boer War now intervened. On 12 October 1899 the British Government declared war on Kruger and his Boers in the Transvaal, and Ruddy at once felt impelled to do his bit by rallying the British public behind the troops. ‘Rud is absorbed with excitement and anxiety over the troops in Africa,’ Carrie noted in her diary. His response appeared in the Daily Mail on 31 October in the form of ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, his barrack-roomstyle ballad about ‘a gentleman in khaki ordered south’. At Ruddy’s request it carried no copyright and within days was being sung in music halls and drawing rooms to a tune ‘guaranteed to pull teeth out of barrel-organs’ composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan. But by mid-December British garrisons at Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith were under siege as British forces suffered a series of reverses in open battle. In January Lord Roberts was called in to take over as Commander-in-Chief, and with his arrival the Indian Army gained a greater say in the running of the campaign.1
As he wintered in Cape Town with his family Ruddy became increasingly caught up in the war, and his determination to be physically involved was finally realised when he joined a group of like-minded gentlemen-journalists who had turned a Bloemfontein newspaper into a propaganda news-sheet. There were those, including his Aunt Georgie and his cousin by marriage Jack Mackail, who were dead set against the war and saw Kipling’s part in it as imperial propagandising at its worst. But for Ruddy it was a case of good colonialism versus bad, and as the Boers were first starved into defeat and then appeased by the Liberal Government elected to power in 1906 his public poetry grew ever more strident and insufferable, to the point where it became, in Henry James’s damning phrase, all ‘steam and patriotism’.2 But on the human level the South African War gave Ruddy the opportunity to assuage his grief through practical effort. At long last he was afforded the opportunity to play the role of special correspondent in a theatre of war, to be the man of action his physical shortcomings had always prevented him from becoming. The war allowed him to stand shoulder to shoulder as a comrade among the military men he most admired, and when he discovered that these same men saw him as their champion, his exhilaration was hard to contain. ‘Never again will there be such a paper,’ he wrote of his few weeks on the Friend of the Free State. ‘Never again such a staff. Such larks.’3
The Boer War helped restore Ruddy in body and mind. He returned to England in April re-energised, and at once sat down in his study at The Elms in Rottingdean to complete the writing of Kim, which he did over the course of the next twelve to fourteen weeks. Entries in Carrie’s diary record that it was finished by 7 August, after which negotiations began immediately for the novel’s publication, initially in serial form chapter by chapter in McClure’s Magazine in America, beginning in December 1900, and in Britain in Cassell’s Magazine from January 1901, with the book publication to follow in the autumn.
What is so bizarre about this final stretch is that Kipling came straight from the front line of a war, his mind filled with images of soldiering, and immediately flung himself into the completion of a novel about a boy’s search for identity. Part of the explanation may lie in the two verses which Kipling wrote on completing the final proof corrections to the text – verses which he then used to head one of the chapters of Kim when published in book form:
Something I owe to the soil that grew –
More to the life that fed –
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.
I would go without shirts or shoes,
Friends, tobacco or bread
Sooner than for an instant lose
Either side of my head.4
A lot has been said about these verses and the way in which they sum up, in Christopher Hitchens’s apt phrase, ‘a man of permanent contradictions’.5 Those contradictions are at their most glaring in Kim, but it is also in Kim that they are successfully resolved. Like his creator, the boy Kimball O’Hara has two separate sides to his head. His being is divided between Britain (bearing in mind that Ireland was at this time part of Great Britain) and India. His father’s papers sewn into the leather amulet case hanging round his neck prove Kim’s Britishness, but in almost every other respect he belongs to India, being ‘burned black as any native’ and speaking the vernacular ‘by preference’ and his mother-tongue only in ‘clipped uncertain sing-song’. Even though he may be joking when he asks the Afghan horse-trader Mahbub Ali if he, Kim, is a Hindu, Kim’s question is part of his search for identity. He does not know what he is, and the need to know becomes increasingly important to him. But as the tale and his quest unfold it becomes apparent that the two aspects of Kim are opposed and seemingly irreconcilable, as are the ruler and the ruled, the brown and the white, the rational and the intuitive. It seems that Kim can be one or the other but not both.
However, Kim goes on to demonstrate his capacity for survival through his extraordinary ability to slip effortlessly from one guise into another – a gift which Mahbub Ali and his employers in the Government of India’s intelligence services recognise and use to their advantage. Then Kim is claimed as one of their kind by two clergymen, a Methodist and a Catholic, and even though he finds them bigoted and ignorant of Indian ways he feels the pull of his race and submits to being schooled as a sahib – until the call of the Indian side of his head becomes irresistible, at which point he resumes his role as the chela or disciple of his Buddhist Lama from Tibet. As Kim journeys across northern India on foot, by train and by bullock cart, he continues to ask himself, ‘What is Kim?’ and he remains a ‘mixture o’ things’, first one thing and then the other – until the final crisis comes. He survives to become – what?
B
iographers and literary critics tend to shy away from the ending of Kim, but most take the line that it has quite deliberately been left open and ambiguous: Kim will most probably become a sahib, or he just might choose to stay with the Lama as his disciple. The question of Kim’s identity remains unresolved.
But the fact is that Kim sprang from the pen of the champion of Britain’s imperial quest, hot from the South African war and deeply frustrated by what he saw as his Government’s failure to defend its hard-won Empire by refusing to equip its armies properly, denying support to its empire-builders and giving succour to its enemies by failing to suppress armed rebellion. Ruddy returned home to Rottingdean determined to put out the message that Britain’s imperial mission was under threat – and nowhere more so than in India, cornerstone of the empire. Like every Anglo-Indian of that era he had been infected by the paranoia of the advance of the Russian bear and the belief that India’s North-West Frontier was its Achilles heel: the gateway through which the Cossack hordes would pour down upon the Indian plains. That paranoia reached fever pitch in the 1890s, thanks to the celebrated encounter between Captain Francis Younghusband and Colonel Grombtcheski high on the Taghdumbash Pamir in the summer of 1889 and the warnings of experts like General Sir Henry Brackenbury, Director of Military Intelligence, who made public his fears that ‘in consequence of the want of a defined policy for meeting further Russian aggression … we shall find Russian troops occupying the passes of the Hindu Kush’.6