If

by Christopher Benfey

  As in “The Bridge-Builders,” opium is the magic elixir that opens the doors of perception for Kim, in a moment of higher looking. “Then he looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops—looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things—stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with his surroundings.” Like a mantra, he repeats to himself the conundrum of personal identity: “I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” The realization that follows is the emotional high point of the novel.

  He did not want to cry—had never felt less like crying in his life—but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor less.

  Two famous passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson undergird Kim’s wondrous awakening. One is the ecstatic evocation, in Nature, of a perfect attunement, or adjustment, between human consciousness and the natural world, as in Kim’s feeling that the wheels of his being are locked up anew on the exterior world. Emerson’s own version of nirvana swept over him as he walked across a village square. “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky . . . I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear,” he wrote. “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” The other passage that Kipling draws on is from Emerson’s “Experience,” written after the tragic death of his young son, and underwrites Kim’s dawning awareness that “men and women [were meant] to be talked to. They were all real and true.” Here, for comparison, is Emerson’s original: “Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.” The expansive spirit of Emerson’s writings pervades Kipling’s novel. Emerson’s injunction that “Everything good is on the highway” could be the epigraph for Kim, in which the phrase “on the road” recurs throughout the novel.

  6.

  There is another classic work of American literature in the background of Kim’s adventures. It seemed self-evident to Jorge Luis Borges that Kim was “written under the influence of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.” The two novels have many features in common. Kim and Huck share their adventures with older companions on purposeful journeys. The goal of the search, for both the mendicant lama and the escaped slave Jim, is freedom: freedom from “attachment” to the things of the world for the lama; freedom from slavery for Jim. Both the lama and Jim owe their liberation to their young companions, who are unimpaired by the prejudices of their elders. Kim saves the lama from all manner of threats, literally carrying him to his final destination, the River of the Arrow. Huck decides he would rather go to hell than betray Jim to slave hunters. Along the way, both Kim and Huck delight in shape-changing disguises, “passing”—like so many heroes of American fiction during the 1890s—for what they are not. “We come to understand the River by seeing it through the eyes of the Boy; but the Boy is also the spirit of the River,” T. S. Eliot wrote of Twain’s masterpiece. Kim’s lama is in search of a river, to be sure, but the real counterpart of the Mississippi River in Kim is the Grand Trunk Road, “such a river of life,” Kipling notes, “as nowhere else exists in the world.”

  Both novels are idylls shadowed by traumatic historical events. Told through the voice of a child, Huckleberry Finn soft-pedals the horrors of slavery, and cruelly plays, in its notorious closing chapters, with Jim’s quest for freedom. Kim is set in the wake of the anti-British Revolt of 1857. An old veteran, a loyalist to the British colonial power, is allowed to interpret the meaning of the civil uprising as a “madness” that descended on the native soldiers, resulting in the murder of English noncombatants in Lucknow, Delhi, and Simla—all sites visited in the course of Kim. An English guide would point out the sites of the “Mutiny” in Lucknow, we are told by the narrator—the House of the Ladies, for example, where English women and children were slaughtered. But Kipling invites us to see the city through Kim’s eyes instead, its gleaming mosques catching the morning sun as it rises behind the bridges spanning the river.

  Lockwood Kipling’s bas-relief illustration of Kim and the lama, On the Road (1901).

  Kim and Huckleberry Finn were to have a meeting of sorts. During the summer of 1895, following his visit to Washington, Kipling alerted friends that he planned to travel to India in the fall. He wanted to refresh his impressions in order to make progress with Kim. Twain was about to embark on a world tour of his own, lecturing to raise money to repay creditors after various get-rich-quick schemes had failed. Twain hoped that a reunion might be arranged in India, with Kipling guiding Twain around his favorite native haunts. About to board a ship in Vancouver, Twain fired off a letter to Kipling.

  “It is reported that you are about to visit India,” he wrote. “This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you.” Twain remembered their first meeting. “Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It has always been my purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day.” Then Twain unleashed a barrage of jokes, as though practicing for his upcoming lectures. “I shall arrive next January and you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.”

  The Indian reunion had to be called off when Carrie found herself pregnant. Kipling never did return to India, as it happened. But Twain traveled through India anyway. Schooled by Kipling, and drawing on the same English authority, Major General Sir William Henry Sleeman, whose tales of Indian children adopted by wolves had inspired The Jungle Book, Twain had nothing but admiration for the colonial rulers. “The handful of English in India govern the Indian myriads with apparent ease, and without discernable friction, through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws—and by keeping their word to the native whenever they give it.” There is a striking passage in Following the Equator in which Twain, horrified by an incident in a Bombay hotel, is reminded of slavery in the American South. The hotelkeeper accompanies Twain and his family to their upper-floor room. There is some trouble with the door, and a native gets down on his knees to remove the impediment. “He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn’t, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him what the defect was.”

  Twain was appalled, as forgotten events from his childhood flooded his memory. “I had not seen the like of this for fifty years,” he wrote. “It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave.” He remembered “that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.” Twain’s father rarely lifted a hand against his own children, “yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave-boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses.” And then: “When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slave-man in a
nger, for merely doing something awkwardly—as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour.” Twain appears to draw a parallel in this passage between the abuses of the British Raj and the slaveholding South. And yet Twain never quite equates the English in India with the slaveholders in Missouri. He makes clear, more than once, that the abusive hotelkeeper in Bombay was German, not English, hence not a true administrator of the Raj. For Twain, the German bully is an intruder, an exception to the general order and good behavior of the ruling class.

  Kim and Huckleberry Finn are uncomfortable reminders that blindness and insight are often oddly combined in our major writers. Mark Twain had nothing good to say about American Indians; Kipling was a great admirer, quick to condemn European settlers for genocide in the Americas. Both writers trafficked in racial stereotypes. The blatant stereotyping of Jim’s character, in which the conventions of minstrelsy are invoked in speech and mannerisms, is matched in Kim by the repeated invocation of supposedly native traits, as when we are told that Kim lied “like an Oriental.” And yet both books may be said to contain their own potential antidote. The hope of the future, in both, lies in the open eyes of children. “Look!” Kim is repeatedly told. Both novels imply that the jaded worlds of adult hatred and division can only be healed by new visions.

  Chapter Eleven

  WAR FEVER

  1.

  In late January 1899, Rudyard and Carrie Kipling began their return journey to the United States, a decade after Kipling had first set foot on the American continent. The traumatic events that had led to their abrupt departure from Vermont three years earlier had eased somewhat. The Venezuelan border dispute, which had opened a dangerous rift between the United States and Britain, had been resolved, in part through the zealous efforts of the Anglophile American ambassador John Hay, one of Kipling’s friends from his Washington days. Beatty Balestier remained a volatile presence in Brattleboro. The main purpose of the trip was not a mission in family peacekeeping, however, but a reunion with Carrie’s mother in New York, to introduce her to the newest member of the family, John, barely a year old. Another incentive for the trip was that Kipling was pleased with political developments in the United States, and eager to take a closer look, or even to lend his voice if appropriate.

  During the momentous summer of 1898, the United States had decisively entered the Great Game of empire building. Using the pretext of an explosion on the American battleship Maine, in Havana harbor, Americans helped liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish rule. Extending the conflict into the Pacific, the United States also freed the Spanish colonies of Guam and the Philippines, while leaving open the question of what such freedom might mean to the inhabitants. Along the way, the United States also seized the previously independent country of Hawaii. Seemingly overnight, the United States had extended its borders beyond the North American continent, with the alluring prospect of new markets for its exports, new refueling ports for its ships, and new outposts of defense for its growing navy. A glorious future of American expansion was in view, as war fever swept the country.

  President McKinley, a Civil War veteran of the killing fields of Antietam, was ambivalent about the national mania surrounding the pressing question of what to do about the Philippines. Should the United States grant the country independence or occupy it instead? An indigenous Filipino resistance movement was already well underway when Admiral Dewey attacked the Spanish fleet in Manila, and assurances of independence seemed—at least to the leader of the insurgents, Emilio Aguinaldo—to have been clearly expressed. But after a series of speeches around the country, McKinley claimed to have had an epiphany on an October night. Uncertain what to do, he went down on his knees and prayed for guidance. “I don’t know how it was,” he later reported. “But it came.”

  God had apparently informed the president that the Filipinos were “unfit for self-government” and that it was thus the duty of the Americans “to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.” He instructed John Hay to inform the American negotiators that the entire Philippine archipelago should pass to American hands. As the Kiplings prepared for their departure, it remained uncertain whether the American Congress, divided between imperialists and their equally ardent foes, would ratify the Treaty of Paris and embrace occupation.

  2.

  Amid the “splendid little war”—as John Hay, named secretary of state in September 1898, famously called the conflict with Spain—a new national hero had emerged. Kipling’s old friend Teddy Roosevelt had skillfully used every stage of the Spanish-American War to his advantage. Under the tutelage of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the leading voice of the imperialist faction, Roosevelt had pushed the cause of expansion at every opportunity. As assistant secretary of the navy, he had taken advantage of the momentary absence of his superior to give the order to Admiral Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet in Manila Harbor. He had resigned his position to lead the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, nicknamed the “Rough Riders,” and achieved a glorious victory in the siege of San Juan Hill. Sporting his swashbuckling cavalry hat and armed with a pistol salvaged from the Maine, he managed to shoot a Spanish soldier. “He doubled up as neatly as a jackrabbit,” Roosevelt boasted.

  Anti-imperialists were predictably appalled. Roosevelt “gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves,” wrote William James in disgust, “and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings.” James was invoking the very question that he had taken up with Kipling in Vermont: how to find some “equivalent” to war for inspiring American youth. But Roosevelt was given a hero’s welcome on his return from Cuba. The only question, for the master manipulator Henry Cabot Lodge, was to chart his protégé’s most efficient path to the presidency. A strategy was quickly adopted and flawlessly executed. Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in November 1898; two years later, he was selected as President McKinley’s running mate, a heartbeat from the presidency, for his second term.

  Kipling felt that he had a major stake in all these developments. Roosevelt, Hay, and Lodge were all personal friends of his. As an experienced hand in the Great Game, Kipling believed that he had lessons to impart to these fledgling players. “Now go in and put all your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole of the Philippines,” he urged Roosevelt. The specific contribution that Kipling himself could make to the cause was an appropriate language for imperial ambition. On January 10, he wrote to his friend Robert Barr about his impending journey. “We’re only going over for a month or six weeks—just to cheer up Teddy who is governor of New York and don’t you forget it,” he wrote. Then he added, “See next McClure’s for a poem about expansion which will make you rejoice.”

  Kipling was referring to “The White Man’s Burden,” an explicit plea for the United States to adopt the Philippines as an American colony. The subtitle was “The United States and the Philippine Islands.” Kipling believed that it was time for the United States to assume its share of the responsibilities of empire, previously carried by Great Britain: “Take up the White Man’s burden—/ Send forth the best ye breed—/ Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.” Kipling argues that the imperialist impulse is strictly humanitarian, that it concerns a burden reluctantly assumed. The poem is silent on the two primary reasons why seizing the Philippines was so attractive to Americans. First, Filipinos would constitute a new market for American goods at a time when American industrial and agricultural production had outpaced American consumers. “With our protective tariff wall around the Philippine Islands,” Lodge calculated, “its ten million inhabitants, as they advance in civilization, would have to buy our goods.” And second, American warships would have a perfect base f
or patrolling the Pacific.

  Self-pity is the dominant emotional note of “The White Man’s Burden.” For Kipling, the colonial powers will never be adequately thanked for all that they have selflessly accomplished for the natives, filling “full the mouth of Famine,” and bidding “the sickness cease.” Instead, “through all the thankless years,” the imperialists will reap the “old reward”: “The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard.” Kipling sent the poem to Theodore Roosevelt, who, in a letter to Lodge, deemed it “good sense from the expansionist standpoint” but “rather poor poetry.” Lodge replied, “I think it is better poetry than you say.” He circulated copies among his fellow senators. The day after the poem appeared in print, the Senate voted as Kipling urged: to occupy the Philippines.

  The title of the poem is unashamedly racist, of course. Filipinos are referred to as “your new-caught, sullen peoples,” as though the American army was in the business of trapping wild game. And yet the challenge Kipling envisions for the technologically advanced nations—of introducing modern medicine, sanitation, and transportation to those less fortunate—is roughly the task that the United States has long professed. If you changed a few words and renamed the poem “The Burden of the Developed World,” you might be describing some of the better intentions of American foreign policy. Roosevelt put the case for occupation and development more crudely. In a letter to Kipling, he dismissed “the jack-fools who seriously think that any group of pirates and head-hunters needs nothing but independence in order that it be turned forthwith into a dark-hued New England town meeting.”