And yet Lockwood’s decision to emphasize the dark side—the night side—of the admonition is oddly fitting in Rudyard’s case. The Day’s Work includes several stories that might better be called The Night’s Work, since they explore what Kipling came to think of as the Fourth Dimension, the darker region of experience accessible by means of drugs, dreams, and hallucinations. The title of Kipling’s story “An Error in the Fourth Dimension” alludes to this realm of the unknown, the night world. It is about an American millionaire who settles in the English countryside only to find that he is adrift amid the local customs. The story, Kipling explained to a correspondent, was about the hidden dimension in every country, “in which no one except a lawful native of the land can move without violent collisions.”
To gain access to this Fourth Dimension required a violence of a different kind, what the poet Rimbaud described as a “systematic derangement of the senses.” Despite his reputation as a guardian of traditional values, Kipling was willing to risk physical and psychological side effects in order to reach the Fourth Dimension. And as he continued to explore his own newly adopted country, the United States, he found himself imaginatively reliving, in stories like “The Bridge-Builders,” how he had first gained access to what he had come to consider the real India. What had given him such access was opium.
2.
On a May morning in 1893, Kipling drove his horse-drawn carriage into Brattleboro to pick up the mail, abundant as usual, and found a letter from his uncle Alfred. Alfred Baldwin was a Conservative member of Parliament, and he had a puzzling request for his nephew. Parliament, he explained, had taken up the thorny political issue of opium. The British Empire had fought two cynical wars, the shameful Opium Wars, to maintain the Chinese market for Indian opium, a hugely lucrative export. It could even be said that the British Empire had been founded on the opium trade. And yet there was mounting resistance in England, spearheaded by Quakers and other activists, to opium production, along with increasingly strenuous efforts in Parliament to hasten its abolition. Baldwin wanted an insider’s opinion of the matter, and he thought he knew just the man to ask. His nephew had, after all, written several early stories about opium use, including the widely admired “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.”
Kipling did not disappoint. During his seven years in India, he told his uncle, he had been responsible for some fifty servants, all from “the class most notoriously addicted to drugs.” Only one of these had regularly drugged himself “insensible.” Moderation was the overriding pattern. “The native of India is by nature and environment temperate,” Kipling maintained, “and his dealings with the drug (an excellent thing in itself and in moderation about as harmful as tobacco) are most strictly limited.” He concluded with a dig at the anti-opium faction in England and the writers enlisted to make the case. “The ‘opium den’ as described in the highly colored fiction of the Cause does not exist.”
Uncle Alfred was not the only prominent person to seek Kipling’s opinion about opium during his Vermont sojourn. On one of his periodic visits to New York, Kipling was engaged in conversation at the Authors’ Club by Dr. Robert Dawbarn, a professor of surgery at City Hospital. Dawbarn asked what Kipling thought of opium. “Naturally, from the author of ‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,’ I expected a scathing denunciation of the drug,” Dawbarn reported in a medical journal. “Instead, Kipling spoke of it as the friend, and in certain ways the mainstay of millions there among the natives.”
Kipling proceeded to denounce the “mote-and-beam” hypocrisy of English clergymen who, after a short vacation in India, would “preach rancorously against the opium traffic in India” and its peaceful users, while “overlooking the crying home evil of drunken and quarrelsome men, women, and children upon the streets of every English town.” Kipling insisted on the medical benefits of opium as a treatment for malaria. He claimed “as an indisputable fact” that regular users of opium in India “are strengthened thereby for arduous labors.” He concluded with the warning note that while native users only indulged up to a certain point, “the white habitué of opium generally does not stop,” steadily upping the dosage “until a wrecked life is the result.”
These surprising exchanges hint at Kipling’s own experience with the drug, as an aid to “arduous labors.” They also provide the context for one of Kipling’s greatest stories. In “The Bridge-Builders,” written in Naulakha and published at the end of 1893, Kipling memorialized his own first experience of opium, when a servant prepared a pipe for him during a midnight crisis. The story also registered his experience in Vermont as a builder of a complicated new house. Lockwood Kipling visited Brattleboro just in time to help his son with both the interior design of his new house and with the architecture of one of his most complex stories.
3.
Kipling first took opium—or the “black smoke,” as it was known—in September 1884, when he was eighteen. As a newspaper editor and reporter in Lahore, he was impatient to embark on his real career as a writer of fiction and verse. His family was in Simla, the summer refuge for colonial officials, in the cooler mountains. He himself had endured, alone, a hot and difficult summer. A fever had brought on the kind of visual disorders and hallucinations that he had previously experienced during his difficult years with a foster family in England. On September 16, in the middle of the night, his symptoms suddenly intensified, and he writhed on the floor in pain. His manservant, Kadir Baksh, fled from the house. Desperate, Kipling poured himself “a pretty stiff dose of chlorodyne,” apparently unaware that the medication consisted of opium dissolved in a solution of alcohol, along with cannabis and chloroform.
Baksh returned with an oil lamp, a small bottle, and “a queer looking weapon.” The weapon turned out to be a pipe, along with several opium pills, and Baksh insisted that his master smoke as much as he could. “Presently I felt the cramps in my legs dying out and my tummy more settled,” Kipling wrote, “and a minute or two later it seemed to me that I fell through the floor.” This double dose of opium was the only time that Kipling publicly acknowledged taking drugs, although his letters indicate, as Charles Allen notes, that “he continued to rely on opiates, in the form of opium, morphine and bhang or Indian hemp medicinally taken, to get him through Lahore’s hot summer nights.”
But opiates served Kipling in a more significant way than merely alleviating pain or insomnia. He discovered that night, not day, brought the most promise for the kind of work that interested him. His job as newspaper reporter gave him access to places barred to other Europeans. “Having no position to consider, and my trade enforcing it, I could move at will in the Fourth Dimension,” Kipling wrote in Something of Myself of his nocturnal prowls in Lahore. “Often the night got into my head . . . and I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places—liquor-shops, gambling and opium-dens . . . or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the sheer sake of looking.” He concluded, “Much of real Indian life goes on in the hot weather nights.”
Soon, Kipling was ready to display the triumphant results of his night’s work. Ten days after his opium binge, his short story “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette. It was the first story written for his landmark collection Plain Tales from the Hills and marks the true beginning of Kipling’s career as a fiction writer. The opium den that serves as its setting is among those narrow gullies that Kipling explored at night: “It lies between the Coppersmith’s Gully and the pipe-stem sellers’ quarter, within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan.” The challenge facing Kipling was to give believable voice to an addict sinking to his inevitable end. When he revised the newspaper version for Plain Tales, Kipling appended a frame narrative in which we are told that the events were recounted “between moonset and morning,” a few weeks before the doomed opium user died.
The opium den is a house rather than a gate, and is all but invisible. “You might e
ven go through the very gully it stands in a hundred times, and be none the wiser.” It first belonged to a Chinese man whose coffin, “lacquered black, with red and gold writings on it,” is a conspicuous feature of the house. The speaker, a Eurasian named Gabral Misquitta, identifies three phases of his descent into opium addiction. “How did I take to it?” he asks rhetorically. “I used to try it in my own house, just to see what it was like.” Then he found his way to the gully. “It was a pukka, respectable opium-house,” he insists, with “clean mats and pillows, and the best stuff you could get anywhere.”
Soon, he was hooked, and here Kipling shows off his insider’s knowledge of opium use. He vividly portrays, with a relish that recalls his passion for Whitman’s poetry, the multiethnic character of the clientele—“two Babus [educated Indians] from a Government Office . . . a half-caste woman, and a couple of men who said they had come from the North . . . Persians or Afghans or something”—but his main distinction is between white people and the rest. “Nothing grows on you so much, if you’re white, as the Black Smoke,” Misquitta notes of his five years of addiction. The establishment has declined, in his view, now that the old man’s nephew has assumed control. The nephew favors “cheap stuff” over the high-quality opium provided by his uncle. “I’ve found burnt bran in my pipe over and over again.” Interestingly, Kipling makes little attempt to describe the physical or psychological effects of opium use, other than the visual illusion that the red and black dragons on the coffin seem to writhe under its influence.
4.
If opium was the subject of Kipling’s first story, it was also at the heart of his first serious attempt at writing a novel. “The idea of ‘Mother Maturin’ dawned on me today,” he wrote in his diary on March 7, 1885, a few months after the publication of “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.” By July, he informed his aunt Edith that the novel had grown “like Topsy,” a playful reference, drawn from a character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to family friend William Morris’s expansive girth. “It’s not one bit nice or proper but it carries a grim sort of a moral with it and tries to deal with the unutterable horrors of a lower-class Eurasian and native life as they exist outside the reports.” He had shown the draft to his sister, who found it “awfully horrid,” and to his mother, who pronounced it “nasty but powerful.” But the fullest account comes from Kipling’s American friend Ted Hill, who described it as “the story of an old Irish woman who kept an opium den in Lahore but sent her daughter to be educated in England. She marries a civilian and comes to live in Lahore—hence a story—how Govt. Secrets came to be known in the bazar and vice versa.”
We are clearly in Zola territory here, the lowlife realm of naturalism. The French name of the heroine suggests an affiliation with Zola’s novels of prostitution, alcoholism, and degradation, which Kipling had studied assiduously, even noting, in one of his atmospheric accounts of a typical night prowl in Lahore, titled “The City of Dreadful Night,” how only Zola could do it justice. Such “experiments in misery,” as Kipling’s American disciple Stephen Crane called excursions to see how the poor and the marginalized really lived, became a staple of the next generation of writers inspired by Kipling. These writers sought to demonstrate—with a nod to Darwin—how environmental circumstance determines the evolution of character.
Kipling never published “Mother Maturin,” and the manuscript has vanished. But it remains a striking fact that his first published story and his first serious attempt at a novel were both inspired in part by opium. Moreover, readers of Kim will recognize the survival, in one of Kipling’s greatest works, of some of the narrative threads mentioned by Ted Hill. For Kim, too, is raised by a woman who uses opium, as does his Irish father. And the secrets that the mercurial Kim, as a government spy for the British, traffics in were precisely of the Fourth Dimension kind that “came to be known in the bazar.”
5.
Kipling had been using opium and its derivatives for four years when, in January 1888, he interrupted a railroad journey from Allahabad to Calcutta in order to learn more about the drug. He made arrangements to visit the opium factory on the banks of the Ganges River, in the city of Ghazipur, where a family friend held the lucrative sinecure as opium agent. Downstream from Benares (Varanasi), Ghazipur was one of two locations with huge factories—the other was in Patna—that maintained the Indian government monopoly on opium production. The drug had become an increasingly valuable export commodity, principally to China, since the Revolt of 1857, when Britain tightened its hold on the Indian economy after the native challenge to its rule. The Ghazipur factory remains, to this day, the largest opium production plant in the world.
From its opening sentence, Kipling’s article “In an Opium Factory” emphasizes the value and scale of this cash crop. “On the banks of the Ganges, forty miles below Benares as the crow flies, stands the Ghazipur Factory, an opium mint as it were, whence issue the precious cakes that are to replenish the coffers of the Indian Government.” Everyone who handles the raw material, Kipling notes, treats it “as though it were gold.” Making opium is an art, Kipling insists, as he describes each painstaking step of its manufacture. Despite its characterization as factory-made, there is nothing mechanical about opium production. A skilled worker “tucks in the top of the cone with his hands, brings the fringe of cake over to close the opening, and pastes fresh leaves upon all.” Kipling assumes the point of view of a connoisseur, and possibly consumer. “That is the drug the Chinaman likes.”
6.
In Kipling’s great story “The Bridge-Builders,” written at Naulakha in 1893, access to the real India is again granted by opium. The opening story in Kipling’s Vermont collection The Day’s Work, “The Bridge-Builders” is Kipling’s authoritative statement about the precarious balance between the claims of the day’s work and the counterclaims of the night and the Fourth Dimension. The British-born engineer Findlayson has been working for three years on a railway bridge spanning the Ganges. The bridge stood “before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers—his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka, permanent.”
But those remaining weeks open the way for disaster. Although it is not yet flood season, urgent reports reach Findlayson that the waters of the Ganges are rising. He and his crew work deep into the night to secure building materials, tools, and the bridge itself against the inexorably rising water. “The order in all cases was to stand by the day’s work and wait instructions.” As dusk descends, “the riveters began a night’s work, racing against the flood that was to come.” Such is the desperate rhythm Kipling establishes, as the day’s work alternates with the night’s.
Findlayson’s native foreman, Peroo, is at his side during these feverish preparations. A former sailor, Peroo has come to revere the technical expertise of his employers. When he first entered the engine room of a steamship, we are told, “he prayed to the low-pressure cylinder.” His response anticipates the famous remark of Henry Adams, contemplating dynamos at the world’s fair of 1900: “Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.” Peroo is the kind of loyal native Kipling most admires, a cosmopolitan traveler and jack-of-all-trades who nonetheless submits to the authority of his European masters.
But Peroo also retains native beliefs and practices. Troubled by Findlayson’s refusal to rest as the flood rises, Peroo slips his master a tobacco box and urges him to partake. “It is no more than opium,” he says reassuringly, “clean Malwa opium!” Findlayson shakes a few brownish pellets into his hand and swallows them absentmindedly. “The stuff was at least a good guard against fever,” he reflects, “the fever that was creeping upon him out of the wet mud—and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of Autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.” The scene is both a reenactment of Kipling’s own first experience with opium, when he was a reporter in Lahore, and a r
estatement of his claims to Dr. Dawbarn in New York, regarding the drug’s efficacy against malaria and in support of “arduous labors.”
As the boat Peroo has secured for his safety spins dizzily out of control, so does Findlayson’s opium-addled mind. Trying to focus on one of the supporting piers, he can’t settle his impressions. “The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow in his ears like the deepest note of a double bass—an entrancing sound upon which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed.” Asked if he can swim, he assures Peroo that he can fly instead, “fly as swiftly as the wind.” Findlayson’s response to his drug-induced psychosis is to take still more opium, “staring through the mist at the nothing that was there,” a phrase strangely reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s line, in “The Snow Man,” “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
The biblical language resumes, regarding what is now referred to, with a capital letter, as “the Flood,” but in a different verbal register, a kind of drug-induced magical realism. “In his mind, Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot.” The allusion is to Noah’s first attempt to see if the waters had sufficiently receded for the inhabitants of the Ark to disembark safely. He sends forth a dove. “But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth.” Noah was a builder, too, but Findlayson, spinning down the river toward an abandoned island, is sure that his bridge is long gone: “the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.”
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