If

by Christopher Benfey

  Chapter Seven: Adopted by Wolves

  Kipling published The Jungle Book in 1894. He published The Second Jungle Book the following year. The two volumes are often combined and referred to as The Jungle Book (as in this book) or The Jungle Books. On Sir William Henry Sleeman’s pamphlet, An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens (Plymouth, 1852), as a source for Kipling, see Daniel Karlin’s introduction to The Jungle Books (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 14, 16–19. As Karlin notes, “Mowgli is almost the exact inverse of Sleeman’s typical wolf-child” (p. 18). For an example of mass hysteria centering on wolf phobia in the South of France, see Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of the Beast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Smith concludes that the wolf-monster embodied widespread fears of political and religious disruption of village life following the French Revolution. Molly Cabot’s short memoir Kipling in America: 1892–1896 (1911) can be accessed on the Kipling Society website: http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_vermont_cabot.htm. Lockwood Kipling’s view of America as a good place for independent thinkers is quoted in Bryant and Weber, editors, John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London, p. 55. I have made liberal use of Molly Cabot’s Annals of Brattleboro, 1681–1895. Carrie Kipling’s diary was destroyed, but extracts copied by two of Kipling’s biographers (Carrington and Lord Birkenhead) are among the documents in the University of Sussex collection, where I found the mention of Mary Wilkins. On the persecution of wolves in the United States, see Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner, 1978); Lopez quotes Roger Williams and Theodore Roosevelt on p. 142. See also Garry Marvin, Wolf (London: Reaktion, 2012), who discusses The Jungle Book as an example of “lupophilia” on pp. 134–39. Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida, gives close attention to the community’s production of animal traps. On Freud and Kipling, see Peter Gay, Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 98, 105. I am indebted to a conversation with Ulrich Knoepflmacher for the connection between Kipling’s Mowgli and Sendak’s Max, in Where the Wild Things Are. I share Knoepflmacher’s belief that the likely intermediary was the poet-critic Randall Jarrell, a Kipling enthusiast who collaborated with Sendak on several children’s books.

  Chapter Eight: At the Washington Zoo

  The best account of what Henry Adams referred to as the “little Washington gang” is Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Ballantine, 1990). For John Hay’s pursuit of Elizabeth Cameron, see John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), pp. 11, 268–70. For the origins of the National Zoological Park in Washington, see the website of the Smithsonian Archives: https://siarchives.si.edu/history/national-zoological-park. For Spring Rice on Kipling at the zoo, see David H. Burton, Cecil Spring Rice: A Diplomat’s Life (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), p. 103. On the Boone and Crockett Club, see Jonathan Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009); on the Forest Reserve Act, see pp. 54–55. Kipling’s account of the beavers in Yellowstone is in From Sea to Sea. On Phillips in Vermont, see Lycett, p. 375. For a brief history of the Teddy Bear, see the National Park Service website for the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace: https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/storyofteddybear.htm.

  Chapter Nine: A Fishing Trip

  Richard Watson Gilder describes Grover Cleveland as a fisherman in Grover Cleveland: A Record of a Friendship (New York: Century, 1910), pp. 60–62. I rely on David Gilmour’s account of the Venezuela crisis in The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 111–13. “The White Seal” was a favorite story of Antonio Gramsci. Richard Hofstadter, in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948; New York: Vintage, 1973), quotes Roosevelt on the necessity of a war (on p. 275) and gives his assessment of Cleveland on p. 232. Henry Miller referred to the United States as an “air-conditioned nightmare.” On Kipling and Winslow Homer, see Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 226, 229–30. For details of Kipling’s lawsuit against Beatty, I rely on Frederic F. Van De Water, “Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud” (1937), reprinted in Harold Orel, editor, Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 2, pp. 220–30. “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in Ralph Barton Perry, editor, William James, Essays on Faith and Morals (New York: Meridian, 1962), pp. 311–28.

  Chapter Ten: Dharma Bums

  Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums aligns its two main protagonists with the legendary Buddhist monks Han Shan and Shih-te (Hanshan and Shide), just as Kipling models Kim and the Teshoo Lama on Ananda and the Buddha. Kipling’s memories of the Burne-Jones household and environs, and the origins of Kim, are drawn from Something of Myself unless otherwise indicated. The best account of Kipling and the Macdonald family is Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters. Angela Thirkell describes visits with Kipling in Three Houses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931). Hannah Arendt’s brilliant analysis of Kim is in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1985), pp. 216–18. It seems likely that her close friend Randall Jarrell first brought Kim to her attention. Borges linked Kim and Huckleberry Finn in his lecture “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” in Weinberger, editor, Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fiction, p. 424. Mark Twain’s travels in India are recorded in Following the Equator, in Roy Blount Jr., editor, Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels (New York: Library of America, 2010), pp. 641–44, 662, 759.

  Chapter Eleven: War Fever

  For details of the Kipling family in New York, I have drawn on Lycett’s account, pp. 419–24. The best account of Kipling’s support for American empire is Gilmour, The Long Recessional. For historical background, and for the debate about the occupation of the Philippines, see Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2017). Kinzer discusses “The White Man’s Burden” and the Senate vote (p. 120), Senator Lodge on the Philippines as a market for American goods (p. 41), McKinley’s voice from God (p. 87), Hay on the “splendid little war” (p. 58), Roosevelt on San Juan Hill (p. 55), and William James on Roosevelt’s praise of war (p. 22). For Roosevelt’s letter to Kipling about pirates and headhunters, see Kinzer, p. 12. Kipling’s dream diary is included as an appendix, titled “Kipling’s Delirium,” in Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978). Borges compares Kipling and Kafka in a 1946 essay called “Our Poor Individualism,” in Weinberger, editor, Selected Non-Fictions, p. 310. Gilmour discusses the relationship between “The White Man’s Burden” and “Recessional,” “two of the most famous poems in the English language,” on pp. 119–32. On Kipling’s use of Emerson in “Recessional” (a debt first noted by Birkenhead), and the vision of empire extending from Canada to Ceylon, see Gilmour, p. 121. Thirkell describes Kipling after Josephine’s death in Three Houses. On Josephine’s death as inscribed in Just So Stories, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Kipling’s ‘Just-So’ Partner: The Dead Child as Collaborator and Muse,” in Children’s Literature, vol. 25 (1997), pp. 24–49.

  Chapter Twelve: The Flooded Brook

  Mark Twain’s account of receiving an honorary degree from Oxford is in Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, editors, Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 81–84. Some of Kipling’s drawings in the margins of his volumes of Horace are reproduced in Sandra Kemp, “‘An Expert Fellow-Craftsman,’” in Bryant and Weber, editors, John Lockwood Kipling, p. 414. I am grateful to Professor Kemp for conversations at the Victoria and Albert Museum concerning these fascinating drawings, which might be compared to the illuminated manuscripts in Kipling’s story “The Eye of Allah.” Since Kipling claimed
, near the end of his life, that “If—” had been inspired by Jameson’s Raid, it is interesting to find Mark Twain, in Following the Equator, applying an oddly similar volley of conditionals to Jameson’s doomed raid: “If I had been with Jameson the morning after he started, I should have advised him to turn back. That was Monday; it was then that he received his first warning from a Boer source not to violate the friendly soil of the Transvaal. It showed that his invasion was known. If I had been with him on Tuesday morning and afternoon, when he received further warnings, I should have repeated my advice. If I had been with him the next morning—New Year’s—when he received notice that ‘a few hundred’ Boers were waiting for him a few miles ahead, I should not have advised, but commanded him to go back. And if I had been with him two or three hours later—a thing not conceivable to me—I should have retired him by force.” Twain comments on Kipling’s “South Africa” in Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 2 (2013), p. 175; see also p. 544 for Twain’s comments on Kipling’s training and early beliefs. Burne-Jones’s advice about the Puck books is quoted in Carrington, p. 376. I first heard “Harp Song of the Dane Women” in Robert Fitzgerald’s verse-writing class at Harvard, a memorable occasion. “They” inspired a ghostly passage in T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets, in which the “hidden laughter” of children echoes through a rural garden. Kipling’s account of his dream is in the final chapter, “Working-Tools,” of Something of Myself. Mark Twain’s predictive dream about the death of his brother is discussed in Blum, Ghost Hunters, p. 73. Film technology is used to uncanny effect in Kipling’s story “Mrs. Bathgate.”

  Epilogue: American Hustle

  The topic of Kipling and Vietnam is, as far as I am aware, a new one. This epilogue took shape around Kipling’s pervasive presence in Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine, 1977). Vietnam is referred to as a “splendid little war” on p. 63; Kipling’s Tommy Atkins is invoked on p. xx; Caputo reads Kipling’s lines about hustling the East on pp. 92–93. Viet Thanh Nguyen invokes “The White Man’s Burden” in Nothing Ever Died: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 251. “A century later,” he writes, the poem “may as well describe my war and its aftermath in our current American wars in the Middle East.” In Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), Michael Herr refers to those who remember the past on p. 254 and mentions the view that Vietnam would be an easy war on p. 95. For Kipling and the Boy Scouts, see Hugh Brogan, Mowgli’s Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell’s Scouts (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987). Lycett mentions Kermit Roosevelt’s visit at Bateman’s and Allen Dulles’s fondness for Kim, a book that, as Lycett notes, “attained mythical status among American spies” (p. 550). Christian Appy first suggested to me, in conversation, that Edward Lansdale’s enthusiasm for Kipling might be worth pursuing. I am grateful for Appy’s book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Penguin, 2015) for many details (such as Diem’s ties to American Catholics) as well as for his overall portrayal of American deception during the war. Lansdale’s use of Kim is detailed in Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), pp. 385–87. It is widely believed that Lansdale served as the model for Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle in The Quiet American (1955). For Greene, Pyle, with all his schemes and strategies, is another fool who tried to hustle the East. In The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright, 2018), Max Boot notes that Greene had written a draft of the novel before Lansdale arrived in Saigon. “Yet the identification of Lansdale as ‘the Quiet American’ adheres like indelible ink, because the views that Greene ascribes to Alden Pyle are an identifiable caricature of the views held by Lansdale” (p. xliii). My account of the interactions between Harkins and Westmoreland is drawn from Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997). Karnow quotes Harkins on Kipling (p. 291), mentions Lodge’s impatience (p. 267), quotes Dean Rusk (p. 345), quotes Westmoreland on the impending end of the war (p. 779), and raises the question of American deception with regard to the Tet Offensive (p. 543). Mark Twain called the American presence in the Philippines a “quagmire” in “To One Sitting in Darkness” (1901). For John Huston on the contemporary significance of The Man Who Would Be King, see Axel Madsen, John Huston (New York: Doubleday, 1978), p. 244. Ward Just, a novelist who had covered the Vietnam War as a reporter, criticized the famous scene in The Deer Hunter in which an American POW is forced to play Russian roulette while a Vietnamese audience bets on the results. Just called the harrowing scene “a crisp update” of Kipling’s line “Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.” See Steven Biel, “The Deer Hunter Debate: Artistic License and Vietnam War Remembrance,” in Bright Lights Film Journal (July 25, 2016) at brightlightsfilm.com online.

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  INDEX

  The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  “Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens, An” (Sleeman), 115

  Adams, Charles Francis, 129

  Adams, Clover, 63, 127

  Adams, Henry, 2, 51, 59–61, 63, 89, 105–6, 126, 127, 129, 130, 146, 209, 212

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 20, 23–24, 166, 167, 169

  Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain), 29, 186

  Afghanistan, 21, 162, 203, 204, 216–19

  African Americans, 25

  Aguinaldo, Emilio, 172

  Alcott, Louisa May, 27, 35

  Allahabad Pioneer, 15, 20, 21, 30, 41

  Allen, Charles, 6, 101

  Ambler, Eric, 163

  America, see United States

  American Indians, 21, 31, 37, 126, 130, 169

  American Revolution, 34–35

  Angelou, Maya, 4–5

  Apocalypse Now, 215–16

  Arendt, Hannah, 163–64

  Atlantic, 29, 49

  Auden, W. H., 10–11

  Austen, Jane, 95

  “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” (Kipling), 85–86, 95, 96

  Baden-Powell, Robert, Lord, 206, 208

  Baksh, Kadir, 100–101

  Baldwin, Alfred, 98–99

  Baldwin, Louisa, 84–85

  Baldwin, Stanley, 9, 158

  Balestier, Anna, 82

  Balestier, Beatty, 61, 66, 67, 81, 82, 94, 153–54, 171, 177, 191

  Balestier, Charles Wolcott, 48–54, 52, 56, 58–62, 66, 88, 94, 118, 137, 146, 212

  Balestier, Joseph, 94

  Balestier, Josephine, 56–57, 60, 62

  Balestier, Mai, 82

  Balfour, Gerald, 42–44

  “Ballad of Boh Da Thone, The” (Kipling), 216, 217

  “Ballad of East and West, The” (Kipling), 213

  Barr, Robert, 84, 147, 174

  Barrack-Room Ballads (Kipling), 205, 216, 220

  Bateman’s, 191–92, 194–96, 207

  Baudelaire, Charles, 137

  Beard, Charles, 129

  bears, 122, 128–31, 137–39, 139

  Beast and Man in India (J. Lockwood Kipling), 107, 115

  Beato, Felix, 76

  Beaver, Pa., 26–27, 34, 45

  Beaver College for Women, 20, 26–27

  beavers, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139, 194–95

  Beguiling of Merlin, The (Burne-Jones), 158

  Berryman, Clifford, 138, 139

  Blaine, James G., 50–51, 146

  Blavatsky, Madame, 41

  Bliss Cottage, 82, 88, 119, 159

  Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), 93

  Boers, 187, 189, 190 />
  Bombay, 1, 2, 17, 19, 20, 66, 67, 70, 155

  Boone and Crockett Club, 128–29, 137

  Booth, John Wilkes, 43

  Borges, Jorge Luis, 4, 11, 166

  Boston, Mass., 33, 38, 40

  Boston Daily Globe, 154

  Boy Scouts, 137, 206, 220

  Boy’s Will, A (Frost), 374

  Brattleboro, Vt., 2, 48, 50, 65–66, 75, 81–82, 90–92, 119–21, 132, 133, 153–55, 171

  Brattleboro Retreat, 92

  Bread-winners, The (Hay), 129

  Brecht, Bertolt, 4

  “Bridge-Builders, The” (Kipling), 98, 105–9, 164

  Britain, 1, 2, 6

  cotton trade and, 17

  Secret Intelligence Service in, 163

  British Empire, 4, 6, 174, 179

  in India, 1, 12, 19, 98–100, 104, 115–17, 163–64, 166–69, 203, 219

  opium trade and, 98–100

  in South Africa, 187–90, 219

  Venezuela and, 2, 144–46, 171

  British Guiana, 144

  Brockhaus, Albert, 60

  “Broken Oar, The” (Longfellow), 39

  Bronx Zoo, 137

  Brothers Grimm, 17

  “Brother Square-Toes” (Kipling), 193

  Brown, John, 189

  Buddha, 66

  at Kamakura, 75–78, 76

  “Buddha at Kamakura” (Kipling), 77, 160

  Buddhists, 209, 218

  Burne-Jones, Edward, 9, 32, 62, 157–59, 192

  Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 62, 157–59

  Burne-Jones, Margaret, 108

  Burroughs, Edgar Rice, Tarzan of the Apes, 8, 112, 117

  Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 38

  Cable, George Washington, 24–25