But the big thing, the important thing, was this: Rudyard Kipling, unknown newspaper reporter, had successfully tracked down Mark Twain. “The landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it,” he wrote. “I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal.” He let off a triumphant yell to his readers back home in Allahabad: “You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C. [the Victoria Cross, a high military honor in British India], and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar—no, two cigars—with him, and talked with him for more than two hours!” Beneath the bravado, Kipling meant every word.
Chapter Two
AT LONGFELLOW’S GRAVE
1.
As Kipling’s American journey drew to an end, everything reminded him of home. From Elmira, he zigzagged south for a very hot visit to Washington, D.C. “Simla-ish” was how the city’s wide avenues and “the refined look of the people on the streets” struck Kipling, reminding him of Simla, the summer refuge, in the foothills of the Himalayas, of the British colonial elite. Having covered the military in India, Kipling was curious about its American counterpart. Poking around army headquarters, he met a cavalry officer with a special interest in the Native Americans of Arizona and New Mexico. When Kipling mentioned the folklore of India, a favorite subject of his father’s, he was surprised to learn that the officer had corresponded with ethnological experts in India. During a brief stopover in Philadelphia, he found three Parsis staying at his hotel; another Indian in their party had studied at Lockwood Kipling’s Bombay art school. All knew the name Kipling.
Two days later, Kipling was in New York, tracking down, at his father’s insistence, the artist Lockwood de Forest, who worked with the Tiffany decorating firm. De Forest had traveled to India in 1881 and met the other Lockwood, Kipling’s father; the two men had set up an export business in teak furniture carved by native craftsmen. Kipling was astonished by de Forest’s East Tenth Street house, with its flamboyant teak entryway based on an Indian prototype, “one of the very luxurioustest houses I’ve ever seen.” De Forest urged Kipling to visit Joseph Henry Harper, head of the Harper and Brothers firm, before leaving New York. The visit did not go well. “Young man,” Harper reportedly said, “this house is devoted to the production of literature.” It was a bitter reminder that the success Kipling had achieved in India might not translate so easily into a big career in the United States or in England.
The same day, after “searchings manifold,” Kipling visited his “long lost uncle,” Henry Macdonald, the black sheep of his mother’s siblings, at his Wall Street office. Everything had seemed in place for Uncle Harry—an Oxford degree, close friendships with the artists Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, a future position in the Indian Civil Service, a fiancée—when he bailed out at the last moment and fled, alone and without explanation, to New York. It took him a year to find work, in the lowly position of proofreader for The New York Times. Later, he was employed by a stock brokerage. “It was a queer meeting,” Kipling wrote, “for we had to talk family affairs for an hour with the ticker reeling off the prices of stock in our ear.” Time had “not dealt kindly” with Uncle Harry, Kipling noted, a warning that not all daring schemes turned out well. “I talked to a man who hasn’t seen my mother for 30 years and horrible sensations of age crept over me,” Kipling wrote uneasily, eager to leave New York behind.
2.
A violent storm barreled into coastal New England just as Kipling prepared to leave for Boston, the site of his final literary pilgrimage. It was the “first big equinoctial” of the season, he was told, and its full force struck as he made his way through the flooded streets of New York, in which sewage and seawater were “mingling cheerfully in the washed out bar rooms underground.” Kipling had booked a leisurely steamer, but rough seas forced him to take the train instead, where passengers arrived “with awful stories of hotels knocked down, houses ripped open and breakwaters turned down by the Sea.”
The storm was still at full strength when Kipling’s train pulled into Boston, his tempestuous mood a strange amalgam of anxiety and exultation. “I trembled for the pear trees when I heard it howling among the chimneys of Boston,” he wrote, “and went down to the wharves and saw the battered and strained tramps of the sea sneak into the harbor.” He meant tramp steamers, merchant ships without a fixed schedule. “Yet somehow,” he added, “I caught myself wishing that I had been out in it.” Along with his enthusiastic, faintly suicidal wish to be “out in it,” Kipling felt a sudden inspiration to write poetry. He had brought along a notebook to safeguard his “rough attempts,” as the danger of the stormy seas and the impulse to write verse churned together in his mind.
The storm-tossed journey had taken a physical toll on Kipling. He spent the first day and a half confined in his Boston hotel, too sick to explore the city. “Carry me home in a coffin,” he joked. By September 13 (ominously, a Friday), he was feeling sturdy enough to embark on some gentle sightseeing. For his first destination, he headed straight to a graveyard: “Well, this morn I got up and in what was left of the gale paid a pilgrimage to the tomb of Longfellow.” As he walked among the picturesque hills and majestic trees of Mount Auburn Cemetery, on the outskirts of Cambridge, Kipling was overwhelmed by a dark mood, “an attack of ‘blues,’” as he called it, “insomuch that I could have knocked out my brains against the nearest vault.” He lingered to make a sketch of Longfellow’s tomb. Returning to Cambridge, he stopped at the poet’s stately Georgian house on Brattle Street, with a view down to the Charles River, to pay his respects.
Kipling’s inner weather continued to fluctuate with the waning storm. Increasingly, he felt himself on the verge of something momentous. He detected the stirrings of literary imagination. And he was experiencing other emotions as well. “I am writing this in the back room of a druggist’s store in Wellesley while I wait for my train,” Kipling wrote Ted Hill. He had gone to Wellesley, just west of Boston, in mid-September to visit the famous women’s college where Caroline Taylor, whom he was hoping to marry, was enrolled as a special student. Kipling barely knew Caroline, who was religiously devout, unlike him, and who knew little of the world beyond Beaver, Pennsylvania. That she was Ted Hill’s younger sister seemed sufficient allure. Their tenuous relationship would only last a few more weeks. In the college’s dining hall, Kipling felt conspicuously exposed: “the one man among four hundred girls—and they all looked at me—looked at me good.”
3.
Four days later, Kipling traveled west to nearby Concord, the home of many of the American writers he most admired. Concord was also the site of the first major battlefield of the American Revolution. “This day has more impressed me with the ‘might majesty dominion and power’ of the Great American Nation than any other,” he told Hill, quoting from the Anglican prayer book. As he stood in front of Daniel Chester French’s famous statue of an American rebel, one hand on the plough where he has left his coat, while the other resolutely holds his flintlock rifle—a man visibly leaving one way of life for another, more daring one, and at a minute’s notice—Kipling was once again assailed by a complex mood that he found difficult to describe. He came “very near to choking,” he confessed, as he contemplated the minuteman, realizing that he himself was “standing on the first battlefield in the very beginning of things.” What did it all mean? Kipling hardly knew. “Not even the sight of Hawthorne’s manse, nor his grave nor Emerson’s nor even Louisa M. Alcott’s touched me half so much. And I wonder why.”
Daniel Chester French’s statue, the Minuteman.
Much was at play for Kipling as he contemplated the statue of the minuteman: a future new life with an American wife, replacing his roving bachelor’s existence; a closer relation to the United States, with its ri
ch history of independence and its inspiring writers, in whose company he hoped to assume an honored place; a shifting, vertiginous sense of just who he himself was amid the gale. Again he felt the impulse to write. “My spare moments (they are not many) have been taken up by a Literary Scheme which when settled in my mind I will unfold to you,” he promised Ted Hill. He dropped two clues concerning the nature of the mysterious scheme. First, there was the minuteman statue itself, commemorating “the very beginning of things.” Second, there was Kipling’s silent vigil at Longfellow’s grave.
Why then was Longfellow so insistently on Kipling’s mind that a pilgrimage to the poet’s grave was the first order of business when he felt well enough to walk? A deep personal connection was at work, along with that pressing sense of inspiration. For if there was a poet in Kipling’s American Parnassus to match Mark Twain in prose, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose wide-ranging poems—from nostalgic evocations of growing up in a village on the Maine shore to racy ballads of roving pirates on the Spanish Main—were wildly popular in England and British India. Kipling was hardly alone in placing Longfellow first among American poets. During much of the nineteenth century, before his poems came to seem old-fashioned in comparison with Whitman’s or Emily Dickinson’s, Longfellow’s preeminence was unquestioned. He was the author of national epics like “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline.” Every schoolchild knew “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Village Blacksmith.” Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy was the standard version in English. His antislavery poems were influential in the fight for abolition.
But Kipling admired Longfellow for three things in particular. First, Longfellow’s appeal to a broad range of readers was something that Kipling sought to emulate from the start. Second, Kipling followed Longfellow in repurposing inherited forms like the ballad. One of the first poems that Kipling was drawn to, when he tried his hand at writing verses as a schoolboy, was the seductive meter of “Hiawatha,” which, as he noted wryly in Something of Myself, “saved all the bother about rhyme.” And third, Longfellow was an emphatically cosmopolitan writer, bringing all sorts of national traditions—Italian, Spanish, German, Scandinavian, and even Native American—into his work. Longfellow was a world poet in ways that Bombay-born Kipling aspired to. All three of these literary commitments—to wide popularity, to popular forms, and to diverse national traditions—were mutually reinforcing.
With its multiple debts to other poets and poetic traditions, Longfellow’s poetry was a sophisticated echo chamber. One poem in particular was on Kipling’s mind as he wandered the Boston streets and looked out on the ships in the harbor. This was “My Lost Youth,” one of Longfellow’s most loved poems, which recalls his childhood in Portland, Maine.
Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.
And a verse of a Lapland song
Is haunting my memory still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
The refrain, which gave the title to Robert Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will, comes from an Icelandic poem translated into German by the eighteenth-century writer Johann Gottfried Herder, and then translated from German into English by Longfellow. During the ensuing months, Kipling worked on a story based on the Indian theme of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, while specifically engaging both the themes of Longfellow’s poetry and its very nature as a reverberating echo chamber.
4.
One of Kipling’s most admired stories, “The Finest Story in the World” begins with a chance meeting between an older, established writer and a twenty-year-old bank clerk named Charlie Mears in a London pool hall. Charlie has literary aspirations, and an apprenticeship develops between them. The younger man’s early efforts are naive and unoriginal. “He rhymed ‘dove’ with ‘love’ and ‘moon’ with ‘June’ and devotedly believed that they had never been so rhymed before.” But on one occasion Charlie claims to have a newfound “notion” in his head for what he calls “the most splendid story that was ever written.” Charlie unfolds a tale of a primitive pirate ship, powered by galley slaves chained to the lower deck. The fate of slaves who die on the job has a flat finality: “When a man dies at his oar on that deck he isn’t thrown overboard, but cut up in his chains and stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces.”
Convinced that Charlie is channeling an actual past life as a slave, the writer pays him five pounds to secure the “notion” for his own literary use. Charlie, in turn, buys the poetry books he covets, with ruinous results. Charlie arrives drunk—“Most of all he was drunk with Longfellow”—and begins to read aloud, with great enthusiasm, the opening lines of “My Lost Youth.” The aspiring poet is not immune to other lyrical intoxicants—Byron, for example, or Keats. But overindulgence in these poets leads to “a confused tangle of other voices most like the mutter and hum through a City telephone in the busiest part of the day.” Longfellow’s effect on Charlie is quite different. “Only when the talk turned on Longfellow were the jarring cross-currents dumb.” Longfellow, the narrator specifies, is “the medium in which his memory worked best.”
After sharing a few of his favorite passages from Longfellow—passages that recall Kipling’s own days in Boston tracking down Longfellow’s house and grave—Charlie produces something else. “Well, I was thinking over the story,” he tells the narrator, “and after awhile I got out of bed and wrote down on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men might be supposed to scratch on their oars with the edges of their handcuffs.” The narrator takes the sheet of resulting scratches to a specialist in Greek antiquities at the British Museum. The expert identifies Charlie’s script as “extremely corrupt Greek,” and offers a rough translation: “I have been—many times—overcome with weariness in this particular employment.” For the narrator, Charlie’s scratched message is proof that he is in the presence of something supernatural.
But is the evidence really so persuasive? Although the fact is not revealed in Kipling’s story, it turns out that the line about being “many times overcome with weariness in this particular employment” is actually drawn from a sonnet of Longfellow’s called “The Broken Oar.” In the sonnet, a poet walks along a lonely beach in Iceland, pen in hand. The sun is setting. Seagulls circle above the crashing waves. “Then by the billows at his feet was tossed / A broken oar; and carved thereon he read, / ‘Oft was I weary, when I toiled at thee.’” At this point, the reader is presented with several possible paths of interpretation. The first is that Charlie Mears is a con artist, precisely the sort of underworld cheat to be hanging out at a pool hall. He plays on the writer-narrator’s willful credulity, and his ambition to make a financial killing. The second possibility is that Kipling himself is the con man, and is betting that his readers won’t recognize the source of the telltale line from Longfellow. A third possibility is the hypothesis that similar circumstances produce similar results. This is the premise worked out in Kipling’s later story “Wireless,” in which a druggist suffering from tuberculosis, and hopelessly in love, falls into a trance and channels phrases from Keats’s poem “The Eve of St. Agnes.”
Whatever the correct interpretation of Charlie’s effusions, the specifically biographical confession concealed in “‘The Finest Story in the World’” is undoubtedly Kipling’s own obsession with Longfellow. It was Kipling who was so intoxicated with Longfellow that he sought out the poet’s grave in the midst of the “first big equinoctial” storm of the season. Is it coincidence that one of the first passages Charlie quotes from Longfellow concerns “The gigantic storm-wind of the Equinox?” One of the first things Kipling did in storm-tossed Boston was to visit the wharves in order to watch the seagoing v
essels return to the harbor. This would seem to be an echo of Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth”: “I remember the black wharves and the slips, / And the sea-tides tossing free;” When Kipling writes that Longfellow was Charlie’s special “medium,” stilling the “cross-currents” of other poets, was he confessing his own debt to Longfellow? And was there a buried pun in “galley-slave,” the poet chained to his task of producing poems, which would first appear in galleys, or proofs?
5.
Finally, there is the whole curious matter of Kipling’s long-standing interest in psychical research and the realm of the paranormal. There is an odd interlude in “‘The Finest Story in the World’” when the narrator is tempted to consult a “professional mesmerist.” He wants to see if Charlie might be prompted, under hypnosis, to speak of his past lives. By chance, he encounters a Bengali law student he knows casually, someone familiar with Hindu notions of reincarnation, and seeks his advice. “It is of course an old tale with us,” Grish Chunder remarks, “but to happen to an Englishman . . .”—that would indeed be rare. Chunder suggests that the narrator might “pour the ink-pool into his hand”—a reference to a method of divination known as “scrying,” in which patterns are discerned in tea leaves or a crystal ball—since Charlie is clearly “a seer and he will tell us very many things.”
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