If

by Christopher Benfey

  3.

  The Kipling family arrived in New York on February 2, three days before the publication of “The White Man’s Burden” in The New York Tribune and other newspapers. At the dock, they were mobbed by reporters, one of whom wrote, in doggerel, “The Mowgli-man we found the greatest pest, / For the bloomin’ sod ’e wouldn’t talk at all.” All three children were suffering from colds caught on the North Atlantic. They settled into the Hotel Grenoble, on Seventh Avenue at Fifty-Sixth Street, to rest, recuperate, and hide from the press. But the colds did not get better. On February 20, Kipling himself, according to an entry in Carrie’s diary, “feels dull and has fever in the night.” Three days later, Josephine was so sick that it was determined that she should be moved—perhaps to distance her from the flock of reporters camped out at the hotel—to the home of Lockwood de Forest’s sister, Julia, on East Thirty-Fifth Street.

  The next few days were dire, with Kipling under the care of his brother-in-law Dr. Theodore Dunham and various nurses. Kipling’s lungs were severely congested, and he raved in a feverish delirium. Meanwhile, Josephine seemed to rally. And then, abruptly, the roles were reversed. Kipling, at the Grenoble, was able to breathe freely and fell into such a deep sleep that the doctor initially feared he was in a coma. Josephine’s condition, meanwhile, suddenly worsened. On March 6, to everyone’s horror, Carrie and Rudyard’s beloved American daughter died. She was eight years old. In order not to endanger Kipling’s own recovery, news of the calamity was withheld from him. The weeks of convalescence that followed were grueling, both physically and emotionally, as Kipling tried to take up the strands of his life again. He couldn’t bear even to speak the name of his lost daughter.

  4.

  The weeks of isolation meant that Kipling missed the drama following the publication of “The White Man’s Burden.” But he left another, stranger memorial to American war fever. As he slowly emerged from his illness, unaware of the dire danger Josephine was in, Kipling recalled his bizarre dreams and hallucinations. Eager to preserve a record of his mental chaos, he summoned a stenographer to his sickbed and recounted all that he had experienced as he lay, in danger of his life, in his room in the Hotel Grenoble. The stenographic record constitutes a surreal pendant to “The White Man’s Burden,” its unconscious underpinning. Theodore Roosevelt was a major inspiration for both.

  The transcript of Kipling’s delirium is an extraordinary document, fascinating both for what it reveals about Kipling’s mental state at this pivotal life-and-death moment and for the fact that he preserved it. The overall plot of the six-page narrative, which shifts between past tense and a more immediate present, is a tale of relentless victimization, as self-pitying in its way as “The White Man’s Burden,” with Kipling himself as the hapless victim. It resembles, in striking ways, two of Kafka’s best-known nightmares. Kipling’s paranoid fantasy prefigures The Trial, and the prosecution of Josef K. for a crime that is never specified. It also shares features with “In the Penal Colony,” in which the victim is held in restraints while a diabolical machine carves the judicial sentence directly into his body. Kipling’s delirium begins with a false and Kafkaesque accusation. “I began by going upstairs to large, empty, marble rooms on top floor of Hotel Grenoble and there finding illustrated paper and newspaper clippings containing letters and correspondence from a New York girl, called—to the best of my recollection—Bailey or Brady—accusing me in great detail of having larked around with a great many girls both before and after marriage; letters couched in vilest personal style.” These, Kipling concluded, “were calculated to make harm between wife and myself.” The newspaper clippings recall Kipling’s humiliating and widely publicized lawsuit with his brother-in-law Beatty, a name that resembles Bailey or Brady.

  At this point a potential rescuer appears on the scene, none other than Theodore Roosevelt himself. “He informs me, with great concern, that Miss Bailey is really a well-wisher of mine and has a wonderful submarine boat which could take me and family in course of night or two to see Robert Louis Stevenson.” But it soon becomes clear that Roosevelt is lying: he is actually “in the pay of Miss Bailey (or Brady) and New York society to be revenged on me for calling her opprobrious names.” Instead of taking Kipling to Samoa, for the long-anticipated meeting with Stevenson, the submarine surfaces instead under the New York town hall, where Kipling is made to lie “on a black iron bed.” At this point, Roosevelt confesses that he is in on the joke and “the nurses reveal themselves as lady reporters for the New York Journal.” To amplify the public humiliation, Kipling is “brought out into the sunshine in the presence of some 80,000 people and then taken away and told that bail is refused.” He is wearing nothing but a nightgown, with no undergarments.

  It is said that Kafka read his stories aloud to his friends over drinks and laughed uproariously. It seems quite possible that Kipling thought his own delirious tale was also funny. As the narrative draws to a feverish close, futile rescue attempts follow Kipling’s display before the crowd. Dr. Conland, his old friend, spirits him away in a “big railway” that takes him, “always lying down,” through the Connecticut countryside, with surprising sights out the window. “I pass my sister, seeing her face for a moment.” It is a poignant glimpse: the delirious brother face-to-face with the bipolar sister. He allows himself to wonder about his own mental equilibrium, “and for a long time I debate whether I am or am not insane because it occurs to me that all insane people have an idea that all their food is drugged and that they are under restraint and that people are after their money.”

  Kipling is then informed that there is a plot to lynch him “on account of my remarks about Miss Bailey.” He finds momentary refuge hiding “with a negro family,” presumably in danger of being lynched themselves. Then, he hides on a ship owned by the Rothschilds “or some firm of equal standing,” presumably also Jewish, another surprising ally in his flight from the lynchers. Presiding over the entire account is the sinister and duplicitous figure of Teddy Roosevelt, the ringleader in Kipling’s systematic humiliation. “I hated Theodore more intensely than I ever hated anyone,” he recalled of the dream. “When it was found out that he had been in league with Miss Bailey and the rest of New York society to play this town hall trick on me, he could come to me and say: ‘I am afraid you must not mind this. I could not help doing it,’ and he would stick things into me. I am very polite to him, meaning later to kill him when I got well.”

  5.

  What might explain this extraordinary hostility directed at Roosevelt? This was, after all, a moment of high promise for Roosevelt. He was leading the charge to expand the United States into the Pacific. Was Kipling having second thoughts about the blustering flag-bearer of American imperialism? One hint comes from a second poem that had its gestation at the same time as “The White Man’s Burden.” While “The White Man’s Burden” is future-oriented, rallying another country to join in spreading civilization across an ungrateful world, “Recessional” looks ruefully backward. Composed as a prayer, it warns against arrogance and imperial overreach.

  God of our fathers, known of old,

  Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

  Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

  Dominion over palm and pine—

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  For this hymn in honor of Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the throne, Kipling again borrows from Emerson, whose couplet “And grant us dwellers with the pine / Dominion o’er the palm and vine” is artfully collapsed into “Dominion over palm and pine,” suggesting the British Empire extending from Ceylon to Canada.

  If Kipling groused about ungrateful natives in “The White Man’s Burden,” in “Recessional” he is anxious instead about the excesses of the imperial masters.

  Far-called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo
, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations spare us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  Kipling is now willing to acknowledge that the imperialist impulse is not restricted to the selfless taking up of “burdens.” He knows that the Great Game appeals to baser instincts as well. For leaders and their followers who, “drunk with sight of power,” “loose wild tongues” in proud “boastings,” Kipling feels nothing but disgust and foreboding. He concludes: “For frantic boast and foolish word—/ Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!” Sending the poem to the London Times on July 16, 1897, he explained, “we’ve been blowing the Trumpets of the New Moon a little too much for White Men, and it’s about time we sobered down.” Despite its warnings, the poem was immensely popular from the moment of publication and sealed Kipling’s reputation as the Laureate of Empire. John Hay summed up the reaction on both sides of imperial question: “It has touched everybody—not merely the critical people—as the one utterance of the year worthwhile.”

  But might the poem have had other implications, other targets, as well? Kipling had always regarded Americans as boastful and reckless, like the monkeys of The Jungle Book who fail to observe the Law of the Jungle. It has often been assumed that the “lesser breeds without the Law” referred to in the poem are the nonwhite races, but the allusion is actually to Saint Paul’s “Gentiles, which have not the law,” in the Epistle to the Romans. In early 1899, Theodore Roosevelt was building his reputation on his boastful charge up San Juan Hill, winning the governorship of New York and already looking, inevitably, to the presidency. Is it possible that unstoppable Roosevelt came to seem—to a delirious Kipling unable to control his conscious admiration for his obstreperous young friend—a cautionary tale and, even worse, a potential menace?

  6.

  Kipling returned to England mostly recovered in body but not in spirit. Even friends with differing political views rallied around him. Charles Eliot Norton, a leader in the anti-imperialist movement, was attentive through Kipling’s illness and its aftermath; Norton’s daughter, Sally, sat by Kipling’s bed and held his hand during the excruciating days after Josephine’s death. Another prominent anti-imperialist, Andrew Carnegie, offered his estate in Scotland during Kipling’s convalescence, which the Kiplings gratefully accepted, even as Kipling quipped to Carnegie that he was eager to convert him to imperialism. Meanwhile, those closest to Kipling could see that something had changed in his emotional world. “Much of the beloved Cousin Ruddy of our childhood died with Josephine,” Angela Thirkell noted. “There was the same charm, the same gift of fascinating speech, the same way of making everyone with whom he talks show their most interesting side, but one was only allowed to see these things from the other side of a barrier.”

  We are given a glimpse of the other side in a passage from Kipling’s Just So Stories written after Josephine’s death, and in her honor. In “How the Alphabet Was Made,” the alphabet is revealed as the big secret of the world, but there are secrets of another kind concealed in the story. These hidden meanings center on the sequence of letters J-K-L, and their reordering in Kipling’s alphabet necklace. The letter K in particular, “the scratchy, hurty Ka-sound,” is in the wrong place. But why “hurty”? Ulrich Knoepflmacher is surely right in suggesting that the hurt inscribed in “How the Alphabet Was Made” is the death of Josephine. In the necklace that takes Tegumai five years to make, as though registering five years of mourning, the letters are in the sequence J-L-K, with this explanation:

  J is a fish-hook in mother-of-pearl.

  L is the broken spear in silver. (K ought to follow J, of course; but the necklace was broken once and they mended it wrong.)

  K is a thin slice of bone scratched and rubbed in black.

  Following the “hurty” death of Josephine, whose name begins with J, the broken necklace is partially mended like a broken heart. Kipling, in mourning, is like “a thin slice of bone scratched and rubbed in black.” The broken spear of L adds to the breakage, which includes the mother’s pain as well, in the hook of mother-of-pearl.

  Two beautiful verse elegies for Josephine-Taffy frame “How the Alphabet Was Made.” The first associates her death with the vanishing wildlife along the Wagai River, when “beavers built in Broadstonebrook / And made a swamp where Bramley stands.” The other poem pictures Taffy as Pocahontas, “in moccasins and deer-skin cloak,” followed—as K should follow J—by her grief-stricken father:

  For far—oh, very far behind,

  So far she cannot call to him,

  Comes Tegumai alone to find

  The daughter that was all to him.

  Josephine’s death also meant the death of something else: Kipling’s decade-long engagement with the United States. To his American friend Ted Hill, he was finally able to say something about what the devastating loss had meant to him. “I don’t think it likely that I shall ever come back to America,” he wrote in July. “My little Maid loved it dearly (she was almost entirely American in her ways of thinking and looking at things) and it was in New York that we lost her. Everybody was more than kind to us and to her but I don’t think I could face the look of the city again without her.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THE FLOODED BROOK

  1.

  Rakishly arrayed in his “surpassingly becoming” scarlet gown, silver-maned Mark Twain relished the procession through the Oxford streets. Those destined for honorary degrees from the famous university, that summer evening in June 1907, marched “between solid walls of the populace,” Twain reported, “very much hurrah’d and limitlessly kodacked.” It was an impressive lineup: the French composer Saint-Saëns, the sculptor Rodin, among other celebrated artists and scientists. Walking immediately behind Twain was Rudyard Kipling. Neither writer had ever attended college. From All Souls, they made their stately way to the Sheldonian Theatre, amid a shower of applause.

  They arrived at the theater walking two by two, as Kipling noted in a letter to his son, John, and were herded into an antechamber. There, the doctors of literature and science were informed, they would have to wait. “And we waited, and we waited, and we waited,” Kipling wrote. Mark Twain asked, in a loud voice, “if a person might smoke here and not get shot.” A horrified official responded, “Not here!” and gestured to an alcove. “So we went out,” Kipling reported, “and Mark Twain came with us and three or four other men followed and we had a smoke like naughty boys, under a big archway.”

  Mark Twain (left) and Kipling (right) at Oxford, 1907.

  It was a reunion of sorts, this gaggle of boisterous boys out of sight of the adoring public. Almost twenty years had elapsed since the first time that Kipling and Twain had chatted amid a cloud of cigar smoke, discussing the limits of autobiographical truth-telling and a possible sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Since that first meeting in Elmira, Kipling and Twain, the undisputed literary lions of the English language, had remained acutely aware of one another, even as their careers sharply diverged, like mirror images of one another. Twain watched Kipling’s fortunes rise as his own declined, the result of ill-fated investment schemes and hurried writing. Kipling had settled in New England even as Twain was leaving it. Kipling gave up restlessly circling the globe just as Mark Twain began his own travels, retracing itineraries that Kipling had taken long before him.

  2.

  For Kipling, the years from 1899 to 1914 were a time of rewards and fairies, to borrow the title of one of his books from the period. What he called his “notoriety” had never been higher, both for the fame that he had won from his writing and for the controversy that surrounded his increasingly reactionary political opinions. A flood of honors was gratefully received or gracefully refused, according to Kipling’s determination to remain, at all costs, a free agent in his writing. The laureateship, repeatedly offered, was out of the question, nor would he consider
, despite invitations, serving in Parliament. That fiercely protected freedom to follow the wayward inner promptings of what he referred to as his Daemon was exploited in the views he expressed—sometimes prophetically, in the elevated key of “Recessional,” and sometimes with extraordinary vulgarity. He alienated many friends and admirers with his jingoistic support for English colonialists in the Boer War in South Africa; in the lead-up to the Great War, he urged the British to resist German expansion at whatever cost, warning, “The Hun is at the gate!”

  Kipling’s lungs had been permanently damaged from the pneumonia he contracted in New York in 1899; doctors urged him to seek, henceforth, a warmer climate for the winter months. He had visited South Africa for the first time the previous year, and returned with regularity like a migratory bird. There, he developed an intense affection for the English settlers and their leaders: Dr. Jameson of the quixotic raid against the Dutch Boers, Alfred Milner, and, above all, Cecil Rhodes, the imposing imperialist who built a rustic house for Kipling’s personal use. Kipling adopted the British cause in South Africa, as he explained in Something of Myself. When Rhodes asked him, “What’s your dream?” Kipling answered, swooningly, that Rhodes “was part of it.” The Dutch he regarded with scorn, as mere pretenders to civilization, or worse. As for black Africans, who had a far greater right to the land than either colonial power, Kipling barely noticed their existence.