If

by Christopher Benfey

  To travel to London from Bombay, a route via Japan and the United States is not self-evident. The western route, up through the Suez Canal, open since 1869, and into the Mediterranean, is far shorter (some four thousand miles versus more like eighteen thousand). Kipling decided to go the eastern route on impulse. His closest friends, Alexander and Edmonia Hill, of Allahabad, were also heading for London, but for them the Pacific detour made sense. Edmonia, known to her friends as “Ted,” was an American, the daughter of the president of Beaver College, in rural Pennsylvania. Her husband, a kindly Ulster-born professor of science, was a passionate photographer and relished some exotic sightseeing in Rangoon, Hong Kong, and Japan.

  It was almost a family outing for the three globe-trotters. The childless Hills had all but adopted Rudyard Kipling. He rented a room in their house; he adored Ted Hill, tall and elegant and seven years his senior. He later set one of his finest children’s stories, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” a self-portrait as adopted mongoose (Rikki = RK), in the Hills’ bungalow. In San Francisco, the professor and his wife departed for Pennsylvania, where Kipling, who had contracted for a series of travel letters to be published in the Allahabad Pioneer, planned to meet them in a couple of months. The traditional journey across America, for Dickens and other European travelers, began with the crowded cities of the East and found release in the great open spaces of the western plains and the sublimity of the Rocky Mountains. Kipling planned to start in the West instead, where Mark Twain had begun his career, and then make his way gradually, over three thousand miles of rivers, mountains, and prairies, toward what the great man derisively called, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “sivilization.” Kipling’s ragged pilgrimage to Elmira would last two and a half months, and extend across the entire length of the North American continent—“From Sea to Sea,” as he titled his published letters.

  From Twain’s fellow San Francisco bohemian Bret Harte, chronicler of the hardscrabble gold rush towns, Kipling took his epigraph for his American letters: “Serene, indifferent to fate, Thou sittest at the western gate.” A New York native who had moved to California at seventeen, Harte had almost single-handedly revitalized the American short story, bringing earthy dialect and lowlife characters into such wildly popular tales as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Like Twain before him, who learned all that he could from Harte’s pioneering western tales, Kipling had been studying Harte as a model for his own stories, about the British in India. “Why buy Bret Harte,” Kipling had asked his editor at the Pioneer, “when I was prepared to supply home-grown fiction on the hoof?”

  From Twain, Kipling adopted a voice for his travel writing—ironic, hyperbolic, but capable of emotional highs and lows. The journey was also an apprenticeship. This citizen of Anglo-India, a country unto itself, as Kipling conceived of it in Plain Tales from the Hills, was intensely curious about the United States. Both countries, as he saw them, were colonial regimes ruled by an “Anglo-Saxon” elite, and peopled by indigenous inhabitants—“East Indians” in one case, “Red Indians” in the other—in need of discipline, uplift, and administrative leadership. At the same time, he was appalled by American attitudes toward Native Americans. “Some of the men I meet have a notion that we in India are exterminating the native in the same fashion,” he wrote indignantly.

  All across the rugged country, Kipling saw parallels between the two lands. Wasn’t arid Arizona a bit like Afghanistan? And didn’t Chicago, teeming with its “more than a million people,” stand on “the same sort of soil as Calcutta?” As he traveled, Kipling heard a great deal about American “versatility,” but he remained skeptical. A man, he felt, “must serve an apprenticeship to one craft and learn that craft all the days of his life if he wishes to excel therein.” His own craft was writing, and he was learning all he could from the American masters, Bret Harte and Mark Twain, above all.

  4.

  Kipling began his dispatches from America—described by Mark Twain as “dashing, free-handed, brilliant letters”—on a high, almost manic pitch, as though he was afraid the continent might not supply him with sufficiently vibrant material. “San Francisco is a mad city,” he wrote, “inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.” The insanity extended to the unmarked streets, as Kipling found himself “tangled . . . up in a hopeless maze of small wooden houses, dust, street-refuse, and children who play with empty kerosene tins.” The vast Palace Hotel where he stayed was another inscrutable maze, “a seven-storied warren of humanity with a thousand rooms in it.”

  Most terrifying of all was Chinatown. Almost the first thing that Kipling had witnessed in San Francisco, on his first walk through town, was a Chinese man “who had been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding like a pig.” And so it was with some trepidation, and much verbal heightening, that he ventured into a Chinese house of ill repute, and began to explore the “brick-walled and wooden-beamed subterranean galleries, strengthened with iron-framed doors and gates.” As he burrowed down through the levels belowground, he crawled past Chinese men “in bunks, opium-smokers, brothels, and gambling hells, till I had reached the second cellar—was, in fact, in the labyrinths of a warren.”

  Kipling was led downstairs to yet another cellar, unbearably hot, where a game of poker was in full swing. The men at the table were in “semi-European dress,” pigtails curled under their hats; one looked Eurasian, according to Kipling, and turned out on closer inspection to be Mexican. The ghostly scene Kipling describes is dreamlike, uncanny, retrieved, literally and figuratively, from the depths. “We were all deep down under the earth,” he wrote, “and save for the rustle of a blue gown sleeve and the ghostly whisper of the cards as they were shuffled and played, there was no sound.” An argument broke out between the Mexican player and one of the Chinese men. Suddenly a shot rang out. Kipling dove to the floor amid a whirl of smoke. The Mexican had disappeared. “Still gripping the table, the Chinaman said: ‘Ah!’ in the tone that a man would use when, looking up from his work suddenly, he sees a well-known friend in the doorway.” Then he collapsed to the floor, shot through the stomach. Worried that the Chinese card players might mistake him for the murderous Mexican, Kipling, panic-stricken, fled the scene of the crime. “I found the doorway and, my legs trembling under me, reached the protection of the clear cool night, the fog, and the rain.”

  It is all beautifully done, this little anecdote of exotic depravity belowground. And yet the poker game gone awry seems suspiciously close, in setting and narrative detail, to Bret Harte’s popular poem “The Heathen Chinee.” We know that Kipling particularly admired the poem, and so did Mark Twain, who collaborated with Harte on a play based on it. Originally titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” Harte’s poem is about a cardsharp named Nye who is outfoxed by a Chinese gambler named, suggestively, Ah Sin. (Kipling’s Chinese card player, with the blue gown sleeve, says just one word, “Ah.”) Pretending barely to understand the rules of poker, Ah Sin plays the same card that Nye has just drawn from his sleeve. It turns out that Ah Sin is hiding twenty-four cards in his own long sleeves, “which was coming it strong.”

  5.

  Mark Twain was on Kipling’s mind as he ventured up the coast into the Pacific Northwest, hoping to do some leisurely fishing before heading eastward to Chicago. “All I remember is a delightful feeling that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Mississippi Pilot were quite true,” he wrote of a journey by steamboat on the Columbia River, “and that I could almost recognize the very reaches down which Huck and Jim had drifted.” No sooner was the dreamy mood established, however, than it was shattered by the grisly sounds of a salmon lift and a cannery. “At the next bend we sighted a wheel—an infernal arrangement of wire-gauze compartments worked by the current and moved out from a barge in shore to scoop up the salmon as he races up the river.” Into the jaws of the cannery they went, a thousand salmon, to be gutted, beheaded, and de-tailed, cut in
to chunks, and soldered into cans, all at the hands of ghostly Chinese workers, whose nimble fingers were integral parts of the mechanized butchery. “Inside, on a floor ninety by forty, the most civilized and murderous of machinery,” he wrote. “Outside, three footsteps, the thick-growing pines and the immense solitude of the hills.”

  After his Huck Finn adventures on the Columbia River, Kipling returned to San Francisco to begin his long railroad journey eastward. He crossed the Rockies on train trestles that sometimes reached almost three hundred feet into the air. Stopping in Salt Lake City, he snarkily described the Mormon women as so ugly that polygamy must be “a blessed institution.” Turning northward, he made a stopover in Yellowstone, on the Fourth of July, to admire the geysers and “tourist-trampled” hot springs—“greenish grey hot water, and here and there pit-holes dry as a rifled tomb in India.”

  Among the throng at Old Faithful, he met a “very trim maiden” from New Hampshire who seemed to have “just stepped out of one of Mr. James’s novels”—presumably Henry James’s popular novella Daisy Miller. She proceeded to lecture Kipling “on American literature, the nature and inwardness of Washington society, the precise value of Cable’s works as compared with ‘Uncle Remus’ Harris, and a few other things that had nothing whatever to do with geysers, but were altogether delightful.” Aside from his growing admiration for American women, Kipling is inviting us into his own literary workshop here. For he himself was assiduously studying the work of the New Orleans local-color writer George Washington Cable, Mark Twain’s lecture partner during their “Twins of Genius” tour of 1884, and the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris. Both Cable and Harris were centrally concerned with bringing African American voices into their work, as of course was Mark Twain, with sometimes unfortunate results. While Kipling seems barely to have noticed African Americans during his journey, he did increasingly register the complex origins of the American people.

  As he rode trains and spent nights in hotels, Kipling was impressed with the Americans he met. Adopting the celebratory tone of Walt Whitman, he predicted greatness for this raw and diverse populace, destined to be “the biggest, finest, and best people on the surface of the globe.” The “Man of the Future,” he proclaimed, would be “the Anglo-American-German-Jew,” with “just the least little kink in his hair now and again; he’ll carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet that can walk for ever; and he will wave long, thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth to the other.” This ethnically amalgamated American would excel in more than physical prowess. “He’ll be the finest writer, poet, and dramatist, ’specially dramatist, that the world as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue of his Jew blood—just a little, little drop—he’ll be a musician and a painter too,” Kipling predicted. “There is nothing known to man that he will not be, and his country will sway the world with one foot as a man tilts a see-saw plank!” Amid the stereotypes, Kipling is imagining himself, with his own culturally hybrid background, taking part in the great American melting pot of poets and painters.

  For mechanized killing on a gigantic scale, the salmon cannery on the Columbia River proved to be nothing in comparison to the butchery of pigs and cattle that Kipling witnessed in the slaughterhouses of Chicago, another popular tourist destination. The “railway of death” was how Kipling described the unknowing cattle led to slaughter by a designated red Texan steer, the “Judas” of the herd. He watched in horror as this “red devil” enticed one unwitting cow after another. “I saw his broad back jogging in advance of them, up a lime-washed incline where I was forbidden to follow. Then a door shut, and in a minute back came Judas with the air of a virtuous plough-bullock and took up his place in his byre. Somebody laughed across the yard, but I heard no sound of cattle from the big brick building into which the mob had disappeared.”

  Even women came to watch the butchery, Kipling noted, “as they would come to see the slaughter of men.” He examined the women instead, and one woman in particular.

  And there entered that vermilion hall a young woman of large mold, with brilliantly scarlet lips, and heavy eyebrows, and dark hair that came in a “widow’s peak” on the forehead. She was well and healthy and alive, and she was dressed in flaming red and black, and her feet (know you that the feet of American women are like unto the feet of fairies?) her feet, I say, were cased in red leather shoes. She stood in a patch of sunlight, the red blood under her shoes, the vivid carcasses stacked round her, a bullock bleeding its life away not six feet away from her, and the death factory roaring all round her. She looked curiously, with hard, bold eyes, and was not ashamed.

  This painterly study in scarlet is an unsettling mixture of attraction and repulsion.

  6.

  Kipling was able to make a closer study of American women when he arrived in Beaver, Pennsylvania—renamed Musquash (“muskrat”) in From Sea to Sea—to stay with Ted Hill’s family for a couple of idle months. Her father was the president of the Beaver College for Women, a strict Methodist institution, located in a town where dancing and alcohol of any kind were strictly prohibited. “One heard a good deal of this same dread of drink in Musquash,” Kipling noted, “and even the maidens seemed to know too much about its effects upon certain unregenerate youths”—youths much like himself, presumably. Kipling was mesmerized by the maidens, who seemed, despite prohibitions of various kinds, to be far worldlier than their English counterparts. They seemed to have stepped from the pages of Little Women. “I had the honor of meeting in the flesh, even as Miss Louisa Alcott drew them, Meg and Jo and Beth and Amy, whom you ought to know,” he informed his readers back home.

  Kipling ventured an explanation, gleaned from his reading of Henry James, for their forthright manner. “From her fifteenth year the American maiden moves among ‘the boys’ as a sister among brothers,” he wrote.

  As to the maiden, she is taught to respect herself, that her fate is in her own hands, and that she is the more stringently bound by the very measure of the liberty so freely accorded to her. Wherefore, in her own language, “she has a lovely time” with about two or three hundred boys who have sisters of their own. . . . And so time goes till the maiden knows the other side of the house,—knows that a man is not a demi-god nor a mysteriously veiled monster, but an average, egotistical, vain, gluttonous, but on the whole companionable, sort of person, to be soothed, fed, and managed—knowledge that does not come to her sister in England till after a few years of matrimony. And then she makes her choice.

  The whole run of sentences about sisters and self-respect reveals something of Kipling’s emotional life as a young man. For Kipling, it is reasonable to say, had already made his choice during those lazy days in Beaver, at least as far as choosing to marry an American maiden. Ted Hill had been Kipling’s ideal woman for a long time. American maidens were more like sisters than lovers, as he saw it. He promptly managed to fall in love with Ted Hill’s younger sister Caroline and succeeded in extracting from her an informal understanding that he was her choice, too, and that she would eventually join him in England. Such falling in love with sisters would remain the strange and puzzling hallmark of Kipling’s romantic life. He seemed haunted, in particular, by the fear that he might choose the wrong sister, a theme he had explored in his superb early story “False Dawn,” in which a British officer, at a twilight party further darkened by a dust storm, mistakenly proposes to the wrong sister.

  7.

  The major destination of Kipling’s American pilgrimage was not Beaver, Pennsylvania, however. It was Elmira, New York, where he suddenly found himself, that hot August morning, face-to-face with the greatest living American writer of all. “What had I come to do or say?” Kipling asked himself, trying to get his bearings, and struggling to register the sheer momentousness of the encounter. “A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a
woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levellest voice in all the world saying, ‘Well, you think you owe me something, and you’ve come to tell me so. That’s what I call squaring a debt handsomely.’”

  Kipling had to jog himself to listen to what “the oracle” was saying, with “the long, slow surge of the drawl.” International copyright was the first topic, the pirating of American works in England and vice versa. “What I saw with the greatest clearness,” Kipling wrote, “was Mark Twain being forced to fight for the simple proposition that a man has as much right to the work of his brains (think of the heresy of it!) as to the labor of his hands. When the old lion roars, the young whelps growl.” The two writers—the lion known the world over and the whelp, for the moment at least, completely unknown—spoke for two hours. Kipling asked if a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer might be hoped for, with Tom grown up and married to Becky Thatcher. Twain joked that he might write the sequel in two ways. “In one I would make him rise to great honor and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice.” And now it was Kipling who argued, mildly, and in seeming contradiction to the discussion of copyright, that Tom Sawyer belonged to his readers, “was real,” and wasn’t Mark Twain’s property anymore. “He belongs to us.”

  The conversation turned to autobiography. Twain had published reminiscences of his childhood and youth, such as his magnificent “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which appeared in The Atlantic in 1875. Twain described his apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot until the Civil War and the railroads put an end to the great age of steamboats. He had accumulated many false starts on a full-scale autobiography in the years since. By 1885, four years before Kipling’s visit, he had begun experimenting with dictation as a means to release his buried memories, but he was disappointed with the results. “It is not in human nature to write the truth about itself,” Twain told Kipling. As the meeting at Elmira drew to a close, Kipling remembered all the things that he had forgotten to ask Mark Twain. For Twain, too, the encounter was too short. He and Susy, he felt, were like “Eric Ericsons who had discovered a continent but did not suspect the horizonless extent of it.” Kipling “was a stranger to me, and to all the world,” he wrote, “and remained so for twelve months; then he became suddenly known, and universally known.”