If

by Christopher Benfey

  Terrified, the Kiplings rushed out of the house and into the garden, “where a tall cryptomeria waggled its insane head back and forth with an ‘I told you so’ expression: though not a breath was stirring.” The servants in the garden laughed at the terrified visitors, an unwelcome reminder, for Kipling, of the embarrassing episode with the temple bell. “Then came the news, swift borne from the business quarters below the hill, that the coolies of certain factories had fled shrieking at the first shock, and that all the tea in the pans was burned to a crisp.” That, Kipling reflected, was consolation for “undignified panic.” Again, Kipling summoned all of his verbal resources to give an adequate frame to his response. “To preserve an equal mind when things are hard is good,” he wrote, “but he who has fumbled desperately at bolted jalousies [Venetian blinds] that will not open while a whole room is being tossed in a blanket does not know how hard it is to find any sort of mind at all.”

  The first part of the sentence—“To preserve an equal mind when things are hard is good”—was a loose translation from the Roman poet Horace, one of Kipling’s favorite writers. Horace strikes a stoic note: “Aequam memento rebus in arduis / servare mentem.” The challenge of preserving an equal mind in perilous circumstances would become one of Kipling’s greatest themes. “If—,” his most popular poem, praises those who can “keep their heads” when others, less levelheaded, are “losing theirs and blaming it on you.”

  7.

  Kipling’s third Japanese earthquake, a figurative one this time, struck just six days later, on June 9. It was a date he would never forget. It was raining, raining hard, and the narrow streets were brimming, as Kipling put it, with “gruelly mud.” He made his way down the Bluff, as usual, and across the canal to the Bund and the Overseas Club, to read the newspapers with the Outside Men. Then, he proceeded to the Yokohama branch of his bank to withdraw money for one of his sightseeing excursions. “Why not take more?” asked the manager, with a gently insinuating tone. “It will be just as easy.”

  Worried about the wisdom of carrying too much cash on his person, Kipling missed the manager’s hint. When he returned to the Bund later in the day, there was an alarming notice on the door informing customers that the bank had suspended payment. “The noise of barring up continued, the rain fell, and the notice stared down the wet street.” Afraid of a thief, Kipling was waylaid instead by a colossal bank failure.

  Like a tsunami, news of the financial disaster “came out of the sea unheralded,” Kipling wrote, “an evil born with all its teeth.” He was deeply impressed with the equanimity—the equal mind—with which the Outside Men at the club greeted the loss of their life savings. “A man passed stiffly and some one of the group turned to ask lightly, ‘Hit, old man?’ ‘Like hell,’ he said, and went on biting his unlit cigar.” For the Kiplings, there was the additional irony that Carrie’s own grandfather had established the foundations of Japanese banking. And now, those foundations were shaken to the core. The tremor of 1892, and the global instability that culminated in the Panic of 1893, reverberated around the world. “It is wholesome and tonic to realize the powerlessness of man in the face of these little accidents,” Kipling concluded. “The heir of all the ages, the annihilator of time and space, who politely doubts the existence of his Maker, hears the roof-beams crack and strain above him and scuttles about like a rabbit in a stoppered warren.”

  Kipling’s entire fortune was in the bank. Flat broke, he was about to be a father. It was time for the honeymooners, however reluctantly, to cut their journey short. “Retreat—flight if you like—was indicated,” as Kipling wrote dryly. Thomas Cook’s travel agency generously granted them two return vouchers to Vancouver, en route to Vermont.

  8.

  Before their departure, Rudyard and Carrie made a pilgrimage to the great bronze statue of the Buddha at Kamakura—the model for their snow Buddha in Brattleboro—twenty miles distant from Yokohama through the carefully ordered grid of rice fields. The colossal Buddha, seated in a lotus position, was himself a monument of survival amid accidents and disasters. Cast in the thirteenth century, the statue weighed ninety-three tons. (The Great Bell of Kyoto, that other marvel of cast bronze, weighed seventy-four tons.) It was originally protected by a wooden hall, which was destroyed by a storm in 1334, rebuilt, and again damaged by another storm in 1369. Finally, a tsunami—induced by yet another earthquake—washed away the entire building in 1498, never to be rebuilt after the flood. Henceforth, the statue was left unprotected from the elements, “facing the sea,” as Kipling wrote, “to hear the centuries go by.”

  For Kipling, the Great Buddha, sitting in silence through storm and flood, embodied the “equal mind” that Horace had praised. Now, the statue, “a visible god sitting in the garden of a world made new,” endured, with equal stoicism, a flood of tourists from all nations, buying photographs of themselves “standing on his thumbnail.” To his prose evocation of the long-suffering Buddha, Kipling appended a poem.

  The Buddha at Kamakura, photograph by Felix Beato (c. 1867–69).

  Kipling’s poem, “Buddha at Kamakura,” was a plea for intolerant Christians—who invoked the “Narrow Way,” and envisioned sinners sacrificed at Tophet and on the Day of Judgment—to show respect to the Buddha:

  O ye who tread the Narrow Way

  By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,

  Be gentle when “the heathen” pray

  To Buddha at Kamakura!

  As an additional sign of respect, Kipling placed the accent correctly on “Kamakura,” with a light emphasis on the second syllable rather than, in the English manner, on the first and third.

  The grey-robed, gay-sashed butterflies

  That flit beneath the Master’s eyes.

  He is beyond the Mysteries

  But loves them at Kamakura.

  Rejecting the Crucifixion and the harsh tenets of Calvinism, under which he himself had suffered as a foster child in England, Kipling ended the poem with a probing question:

  But when the morning prayer is prayed,

  Think, ere ye pass to strife and trade,

  Is God in human image made

  No nearer than Kamakura?

  These verses in praise of the Buddha at Kamakura, hastily written to fill out a newspaper column, would remain, for Kipling, the lasting gift of his second journey to Japan. They expressed, more fully than anything he had found in Christian liturgy or practice, his maturing view of how to respond to the vicissitudes of life, whether triumph or disaster. A decade later, he would use stanzas from the poem as epigraphs to the opening chapters of his great novel Kim. The book is structured as a pilgrimage, in which a Tibetan lama goes in search of the river where the Buddha’s arrow landed.

  Kipling’s own experience in Japan could hardly be compared with what the bronze Buddha at Kamakura had endured, from storm and tsunami. He himself had survived three earthquakes—one imaginary, one real, and one metaphorical. But the Buddha gave him an inspiring emblem. And now, like the Buddha at Kamakura, Kipling resolutely faced the Pacific, and contemplated fatherhood and the future with an equal mind.

  II

  Chapter Five

  AN ARK FOR JOSEPHINE

  1.

  The recent earthquakes in Japan—the shaking hillside in Yokohama followed by the devastating bank failure—weighed on Kipling’s mind during the long train ride from Vancouver back to Vermont in July of 1892. “We had received the first shock of our young lives,” he wrote. The shock was partly financial; it had wiped out his savings. But the tremor had struck more deeply, at an emotional and even existential level. In February, he had bought, on impulse, ten acres of land near the Brattleboro-Dummerston line from his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, with a view to a vacation home at some future time. With the interrupted honeymoon, what had once seemed a harmless lark was now in deadly earnest. Kipling needed a secure place to work; he needed a s
afe place for his wife and child; he needed a way to make money, and fast.

  The Balestiers in Brattleboro had been alerted to the crisis in Japan. A telegram was waiting in Montreal from Anna Balestier, Carrie’s mother, with the encouraging news that an empty cottage was available at Bliss Farm, down the road from Maplewood, the big farmhouse where Beatty, his wife, Mai, and their baby daughter lived. Abandoned houses abounded in the economically depressed neighborhood, Kipling soon learned, “some decaying where they stood; others already reduced to a stone chimneystack or mere green dimples still held by an undefeated lilac-bush.” Bliss Cottage had served as temporary lodging for a hired man and then as a writing studio for a playwright named Steele MacKaye. Kipling’s new workroom, he reported, “was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill.” For three weeks, the Kiplings worked nonstop to winterize the house. They bought, secondhand, a furnace for the damp cellar, cutting holes in the thin floors for its eight-inch pipes. “Why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand,” Kipling remarked.

  Kipling’s memories of Bliss Cottage during that first winter have a ritualistic feel, as though, with a wizard’s wand, he was warding off evil spirits to keep his family safe. He lined the drafty windowsills with spruce boughs. When the lead pipe froze, he and Carrie slipped down to the basement in their coonskin coats and warmed it with a candle.

  As they outfitted the cottage with furniture bought on a quick trip to New York, they found themselves living in a miniature abode seemingly built for fairies rather than people. The attic bedroom was too small for a cradle, so they laid out a trunk-tray instead. Two days before New Year’s Eve, in three feet of snow, Josephine Kipling was born.

  2.

  Soon after his arrival in Brattleboro, Kipling wrote to Mary Mapes Dodge, editor of the popular American children’s magazine St. Nicholas, to propose a batch of new stories, destined for an eventual book, under the title Noah’s Ark Tales. The biblical story of Noah—that epic of devastation on a grand scale followed, under the sign of the rainbow, by new and hopeful beginnings—had crystallized in Kipling’s mind as singularly appropriate to his own precarious situation in his newly adopted country. And besides, a collection of animal tales, under the comforting aegis of Noah’s Ark, seemed just the right gift for a newborn child.

  The first of the Noah’s Ark Tales that Kipling was writing for little Josephine were “Mowgli’s Brothers” and “Toomai of the Elephants.” Both stories would become chapters in The Jungle Book, completed during the following year. Kipling submitted three other tales to St. Nicholas, about a camel, a whale, and a rhinoceros, the first installments of what would eventually become his Just So Stories. The stories were so named not because they were about how certain odd animals had ended up “just so,” but because Josephine insisted that each story be told exactly the same way—hence, “just so.” Kipling’s narrative style, packed with playful rhymes and puns, preserved the illusion of a parent reading or improvising, aloud. “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes,” he would begin. “He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.”

  Kipling’s Noah’s Ark Tales had thus split in two, with one stream of animal stories entering The Jungle Book while another stream turned into his Just So Stories. Yet a third narrative current came out of the original concept of the Noah’s Ark Tales. Kipling playfully asked Dodge if she had ever heard the story of “the small boy who made himself a Noah’s ark on an Indian tank and filled it with animals, and how they wouldn’t agree, and how the dove wouldn’t fly for the olive branch, and how Noah was ingloriously lugged to the bank with all his ark and spanked.” Or had she heard “of the small boy who got a blessing and a ghost-dagger from a Tibetan lama who came down from Tibet in search of a miraculous river that washed away all sin (the river that gushed out when the Bodhisat’s arrow struck the ground) and how these two went hunting for it together—the old priest with his priestly tam o’shanter hat and the young English child?”

  Despite the parallel wording about the small boy, Kipling seems to be referring here to two different stories. The first is about a boy who gets into trouble when he plays with a toy Noah’s Ark in a tank, or pond. The other story is the first reference to what would become Kipling’s great novel Kim, about an English (later Irish) child who spies for the British colonial authorities while he accompanies a Tibetan Buddhist priest on his pilgrimage across India. The dawning concept of Kim was apparently associated, for Kipling, with the story of Noah’s Ark. One can easily imagine the clever and resourceful Kim himself trying, as a young boy, to make the toy Ark float and the toy dove fly. The novel that emerged a decade later was, as Edward Said noted, so full of the diverse population of India that it might itself be considered a “veritable Noah’s Ark.”

  3.

  Josephine Kipling was given an actual toy Noah’s Ark, accompanied by 126 animal and human figures, when she was eighteen months old. It soon became her favorite plaything. Made by hand in Germany, such toy Arks were a fixture of Victorian childhood, a reminder, perhaps, that there was an alternative explanation for animal survival to Darwin’s. The roof could be opened to reveal the colorfully painted animals inside. The dove, with an olive branch in her mouth, often perched on top of the Ark. Kipling was fascinated by how such toys were made. “Do you know how the beasts are profiled and cut out of a revolving hollow disc of wood?” he asked his Canadian friend Robert Barr, a journalist and editor. “One animal to each section without waste.”

  Josephine’s Ark was a gift from Kipling’s aunt Louisa Baldwin, presented on a visit the Kiplings made to England to visit his parents, during the summer of 1894. Kipling sent his aunt profuse thanks: “The first thing I did after unpacking was to arrange them two by two in the proper way and then with paternal foresight I sucked a red and white moo-cow hard,” he wrote. “After much sucking she turned slightly paler and so to make all certain the Pater varnished the whole hundred and twenty six of ’em and the Doctor looked in and he must needs play with them while they were lying all sticky on the window seat and then I arranged them scientifically once more and said how amusing a thing a Noah’s Ark must be for such as cared for childish things.” The assembled adults decided that baby Jo was too small for “so much natural history all of a heap,” but Jo had other ideas. According to Kipling, she “gathered them to her heart as many as she could hold and put the cows to bed in a spare shoe.” The other grown-ups there—not quite behaving like grown-ups—were Kipling’s father (“the Pater”) and a family doctor. They seem to have worried about possibly toxic lead paint on the brightly colored animals, hence the sucking on the toy cows.

  A toy Noah’s Ark much like Josephine’s appears in Kipling’s devastating early story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” The story was widely assumed to be fictional (although Aunt Louie would have known the truth) until the posthumous publication of Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself. There, Kipling makes clear that “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” is a lightly disguised account of the abuse he suffered when he and his sister, Trix, were abandoned for five and a half years to the care of a cruel guardian while their parents returned to India. “The real tragedy sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us,” Trix wrote of the ordeal. “It was like a double death, or rather like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar.” Their mother, informed that little Rudyard was showing alarming symptoms we would now characterize as psychotic, eventually showed up to retrieve him. “She told me afterward,” he remembered, “that when she first came up to my room to kiss me good-night, I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff that I had been trained to expect.”

  “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” ends with the rescue of the abused children, called Punch (or
, alternatively, Black Sheep) and Judy. The little boy assures his sister that “we are just as much Mother’s as if she had never gone.” But the closing lines tell a different, darker story: “Not altogether . . . for when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge, though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light.” At the lowest emotional point in the story, abandoned and desperate, Black Sheep decides to kill himself. “A knife would hurt,” he reflects, “but Aunty Rosa had told him, a year ago, that if he sucked paint he would die. He went into the nursery, unearthed the now disused Noah’s Ark and sucked the paint off as many animals as remained. It tasted abominable, but he had licked Noah’s Dove clean by the time Aunty Rosa and Judy returned.” He doesn’t die, however. “It may be, that the makers of Noah’s Arks know that their animals are likely to find their way into young mouths, and paint them accordingly.”

  Kipling mentions no suicide attempt in Something of Myself. Did the episode with the Noah’s Ark toy actually happen? The question, unanswerable, is less significant than Kipling’s imaginative use of the Ark. When Punch licks the paint clean from Noah’s dove, he is about to be rescued, Noah-like, from the scene of disaster—by his mother, as it happens. Literally ingesting the paint suggests two infantile connections to the lost mother: the comfort of nursing and, alternatively, of licking the plate clean. The detail of how Kipling, now a father, “sucked a red and white moo-cow hard” confirms the association with nursing.