The Wish House and Other Stories

by Rudyard Kipling

  In my audited account of Kipling’s racism, I should like to place this account of the Negro railway conductor in service in the credit column, directly opposite the irritated debit account of the Negro waiter in service of From Sea to Sea.

  In Something of Myself, Kipling gives a more decided, less gradualist account of his relationship with William. William isn’t ever “the Noble Nigger.” He is “coloured porter, our Nurse, Valet, Seneschal, and Master of Ceremonies.” Here Kipling is mostly interested in William’s vernacular: “bekase” for “because,” “haow” for “how,” “dey” for “they” etc. To this end, Kipling recounts one of William’s anecdotes—about a friend who wants to be a conductor, but thinks he can succeed simply by copying William. He fails dismally, of course, and cries in a cupboard. William has to do the work for him.

  Why does Kipling tell this parable, as he calls it? That it happened isn’t a reason for inclusion. I think the reason is unconscious. The anecdote is an act of unconscious discrimination on Kipling’s part—he is discriminating between his prejudice and his experience. Prejudice requires Negro incompetence, the caricature crying in the cupboard. Experience requires tribute to the omni-competence of William.

  THE IRISH

  Kipling is undoubtedly prejudiced against the Irish (and, incidentally, the Welsh)—largely because they resist British rule and insist on their national language.

  This is from a letter to Andrew Macphail (October 5, 1913): “I had a man the other day from the interior of Wales poisonous-full of his own ‘nationality’ and its tongue and the teaching thereof. But I entirely agreed with him and was prepared to help in giving funds for the teaching of Cymric and Ogham and all the rest—compulsory if need be. Says he gratefully:—‘But I shouldn’t have expected this of you Mr. Kipling.’ ‘Man,’ says I, ‘anything that cripples and diverts and renders more unintelligible the inferior and crippled breeds of the earth has my blessing and support.’”

  In Something of Myself, Kipling candidly disparages the Irish: “[They] had passed out of the market into ‘politics’ which suited their instincts of secrecy, plunder and anonymous denunciation.”

  This and other disparaging anti-Irish remarks scattered through Kipling’s correspondence look racist—and they are, but the racism is an emphasis given to political disagreement. Vis-à-vis the Irish, we can see the absence of true racism in a letter to Andrew Macphail (October 21, 1911). There, Kipling excoriates the Irish for their diminished aesthetic sense, their clinging to “Erse,” their spitting (like U.S. citizens), the manure pit of the station, etc. Then: “We got into the North and the car literally bumped into a new country of decent folk….” Decent folk who are, of course, Irish—but Irish who wish to be part of the United Kingdom.

  In From Sea to Sea, a variety of verdicts on the Irish are handed down. On a train (vol. 2, p. 139) a drunken actress weeps because the conductor has taken her five-dollar bill to look for change. She fears he will not return. Kipling writes: “He was an Irishman, so I knew he couldn’t steal.” Eventually, the conductor reappears, “the five-dollar bill honestly changed.”

  At the end of the first volume, though, Kipling denounces Irish politics, as usual for being anti-English: “The Irish vote is more important [than the Italian vote]. For this reason the Irishman does not kill himself with overwork. He is made for the cheery dispensing of liquors, for everlasting blarney, and possesses a wonderfully keen appreciation of the weaknesses of lesser human nature. Also he has no sort of conscience, and only one strong conviction—that of deep-rooted hatred toward England.”

  THE YELLOW PERIL

  From Sea to Sea contains ostensibly virulent anti-Chinese remarks, but these are in the persona of the despised globe-trotter. The letters have one reference to “the Yellow Peril.” A postscript to Jules Huret (August 31, 1905) asks “Who launched the phrase?” The answer is Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

  In his recent biography, Harry Ricketts discusses Kipling’s racism in the context of the letters of travel in From Sea to Sea. He quotes several examples of Kipling’s Sinophobia but is curiously equivocal about their status: on the one hand, Kipling is “flagrantly racist”; on the other hand, “the uneasy phrasing and tone suggested that he did not entirely believe in the opinions he was voicing.” Again, Ricketts says, he was “careful while he sent up the Europeanised Japanese to point out his own ignorance and presumption.” Exactly.

  In India, Kipling unaffectedly despised the globe-trotter whose confidence was matched only by his superficiality. Leaving the known Indian subcontinent, Kipling is explicit in his identification with the contemptible globe-trotter: if the globe-trotter libeled India, it was Kipling’s comic role to revenge India by libeling other countries. “It was my destiny to avenge India upon nothing less than three-quarters of the world. The idea necessitated sacrifices—painful sacrifices—for I had to become a Globe-trotter, with a helmet and deck-shoes. In the interests of our little world I would endure these things and more. I would deliver ‘brawling judgements all day long; on all things unashamed’” (vol. 1, p. 208). And this is the persona Kipling adopts for his opinions.

  Since the question of the globe-trotter persona has been presented by recent biographers as problematic, I propose to cite the evidence at some length. The globe-trotter is “the man who ‘does’ kingdoms in days and writes books upon them in weeks” (From Sea to Sea, vol. 1, pp. 1–2). A page or two later: “Once or twice in my life I have seen a Globe-trotter literally gasping with jealous emotion because India was so much larger and more lovely than he had ever dreamed, and because he had only set aside three months to explore it in. My own sojourn in Rangoon was countable by hours, so I may be forgiven when I pranced with impatience because I could not at once secure a full, complete, and accurate idea of everything that was to be seen” (my italics).

  Then (vol. 1, p 241): “I put my twelve-inch rule in my pocket to measure all the world by.” Compare volume 1: “It grieves me that I cannot account for the ideas of a few hundred million men in a few hours.” A hundred pages later, he is undeterred (p. 361): “Thus we talked of the natures and dispositions of men we knew nothing about till we had decided [6 generalisations]” (my italics).

  In volume 1, Kipling notes uneasily that the Chinese work hard despite the climate. Feigning comprehension of the racial hatred of “the lower-caste Anglo-Saxon” for the Chinaman, Kipling adds the crucial parenthetical signal of irony, viz.: “(this has the true Globe-trotter twang to it).”

  Elsewhere, Kipling’s irony relies on the autodestructive excess of his comments. Extremism signals irony.

  He accuses the Chinese of cannibalism: “[the Chinese baby] isn’t as pretty as the pig that Alice nursed in Wonderland, and he lies quite still and never cries. This is because he is afraid of being boiled and eaten. I saw cold boiled babies on a plate being carried through the heart of the town. They said it was only sucking-pig, but I knew better. Dead sucking-pigs don’t grin with their eyes open.”

  The ironic undertow to all Kipling’s “hatred” of the Chinese is an awareness of their possible racial superiority. In Hong Kong, Kipling and his professor companion are impressed by Chinese art and agree that its accuracy makes it superior to Indian art. The professor thinks (p. 275), “They will overwhelm the world.” The globe-trotter Kipling says he hasn’t seen “a single Chinaman asleep while daylight lasted.” And it is this ability to work which evinces his fear and admiration.

  In Canton, Kipling twice says he hates the Chinaman. And he says: “It is justifiable to kill him. It would be quite right to wipe the city of Canton off the face of the earth, and to exterminate all the people who ran away from the shelling. The Chinaman ought not to count.”

  It is astonishing to me that anyone could read this straight, especially when the professor immediately visits deflation on the callow Kipling (p. 306): “Why on earth can’t you look at the lions and enjoy yourself, and leave politics to the men who pretend to understand ’em?” And later Kiplin
g underlines the criticism of his globe-trotter side (p. 311): “The Professor says that I have completely spoiled the foregoing account by what he calls ‘intemperate libels on a hardworking nation.’”

  It is this persona who, in Japan, comes in for frequent strictures from his professor traveling companion: “If you think you can understand Japan from watching it at a railway station you are much mistaken.” And this is Kipling’s rueful, implicit opinion also.

  Underneath the comic globe-trotterese, there is a recognition that the Chinese are workers, unquelled by the climate. They are a force to be reckoned with. And they know it: “They stand high above the crowd and they swagger, unconsciously parting the crowd before them as an Englishman parts the crowd in a native city. There was something in their faces which I could not understand, though it was familiar enough” (my italics). The adopted globe-trotter persona may not know more than “I do not like Chinamen,” but Kipling is aware they are rivals, they are sahibs, as my italics show. He isn’t a simpleton. He’s a subtle and extraordinarily intelligent ironist.

  THE JAPANESE

  By the time Kipling has reached Nagasaki, his globe-trotter’s assumed confident racial superiority is succumbing to a sense of plurality (p. 322): “It’s due to the extraordinary fact that we are not the only people in the world. I began to realise it at Hong Kong. It’s getting plainer now. I shouldn’t be surprised if we turned out to be ordinary human beings, after all.” So much for the English master race.

  It is quite clear that, in From Sea to Sea, Kipling adores the Japanese—for their natural artistry, for their demonstrative love of children, and for their physical smallness. He was a small man himself—but larger than the Japanese. “Japan is a soothing place for a small man. Nobody comes to tower over him, and he looks down upon all the women, as is right and proper.”

  Most of all, though, Kipling admires the Japanese for their Otherness (vol. 1, p. 319): “Then I fell to admiring…the surpassing ‘otherness’ of everything around me.” The one thing he deplores is their attempts to ape European civilization, which he regards as misguided and faintly comic. For instance (vol. 1, p. 447): “It’s enough to make you weep to watch this misdirected effort—this wallowing in unloveliness for the sake of recognition at the hands of men who paint their ceilings white, their grates black, their mantelpieces French grey, and their carriages yellow and red…. And in the face of all these things the country wants to progress towards civilisation!” And here Kipling adds an ironic, exasperated exclamation mark to evaluate the worth of that “civilisation.” (See also vol. 1, p. 335.)

  There are even two expressions of Kipling’s racial inferiority to the Japanese. The first is (vol. 1, p. 376): “Japan is a great people. Her masons play with stone, her carpenters with wood, her smiths with iron, and her artists with life, death, and all the eyes can take in. Mercifully she has been denied the last touch of firmness in her character which would enable her to play with the whole round world. We possess that—We, the nation of the glass flower-shade, the pink worsted mat, the red and green china puppy dog, and the poisonous Brussels carpet. It is our compensation….” You’d have to be unrelentingly obtuse to take that quotation as triumphalist imperialism.

  Now the second example (vol. 1, p. 320): “What I wanted to say was, ‘Look here, you person. You’re much too clean and refined for this life here below, and your house is unfit for a man to live in until he has been taught a lot of things which I have never learned. Consequently I hate you because I feel myself your inferior, and you despise me and my boots because you know me for a savage.’”

  THE JEWS

  Here Kipling cannot be defended. His remarks are mostly hostile, if unexcited. Because his correspondents so evidently share his views, agreement is taken for granted. On November 14, 1913, discussing the Marconi scandal and his unprintable poem “Gehazi,” Kipling writes to Max Aitken: “I can’t ‘garble’ my ‘Gehazi.’ It’s meant to be for that Jew boy on the Bench….” This is on a par with his disparaging remarks about Hebrew millionaires and Jewish takeovers of the theater.

  And yet. In “The House Surgeon,” Kipling gives us an entirely amiable portrait of the Jewish furrier, L. Maxwell M’Leod—whose unlikely name is the only possible ironic touch in the characterization. His Jewishness is a fact only, quite unremarkable.

  In From Sea to Sea, however, we find another surprising complication. On the one hand, there is the anticipated candid anti-Semitism, an unpleasant offshoot of anti-Americanism (vol. 1, p. 262): “But the real reason of my wish to return [to India] is because I have met a lump of Chicago Jews and am afraid that I shall meet many more. The ship is full of Americans, but the American-German-Jew boy is the most awful of all.”

  In America, on Independence Day, Kipling meets a German boy whose return to Europe for schooling has lost him his American accent. Kipling comments (vol. 2, p. 73): “But no continental schooling writes German Jew all over a man’s face and nose.”

  And nose. A facial feature evidently so large that Kipling grants it independence. The nose secedes from the otherwise united features of the face. It sets up on its own. It refuses to assimilate. Anti-Semitism seldom presents itself in so pure a form.

  And yet this is Kipling sixty pages later (vol. 2, p. 131). He is sweetening particular prior criticisms with an overarching declaration of affection for Americans: “I love this People, and if any contemptuous criticism has to be done, I will do it myself.” He imagines the Man of the Future.

  What racial ingredients would you predict?

  “Wait till the Anglo-American-German-Jew—the Man of the Future—is properly equipped. He’ll have the least little kink in his hair now and again; he’ll carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet that can walk for ever; and he will wave long, thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth to the other. He’ll be the finest writer, poet, dramatist, ‘specially dramatist, that the world as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue of his Jew blood—just a little, little drop—he’ll be a musician and a painter too.”

  As a footnote to this look at Kipling and the Jews, I’d like to draw your attention to “The Burden of Jerusalem”—one of two unpublished Kipling poems discovered in April 1988 by Christopher Hitchens in the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York.

  The poems had been sent to Roosevelt by Churchill on October 17, 1943. They are not included in the published correspondence (three volumes). Let Churchill explain why: “Similar copies were given to me by the President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on the occasion of my admission as an Honorary Fellow of the College…. I understand that Mrs Kipling decided not to publish them in case they should lead to controversy and it is therefore important that their existence should not become known and that there should be no public reference to this gift.”

  The second poem, “A Chapter of Proverbs,” needn’t concern us here. You can find it reprinted in full in Christopher Hitchens’s strangely neglected essay in Grand Street (vol. 9, Spring 1990).

  “The Burden of Jerusalem” is a title with two applications. It is a reference to the repeated refrain of Zionists, the burden of Zionists (“Next year in Jerusalem”). And it is a reference to the political burden of Jerusalem on British imperial shoulders, given the British Mandate in Palestine.

  In the penultimate stanza, there is an oblique reference to the Balfour Declaration (1917)—which pledged British support to the Zionist hope for a Jewish national home in Palestine, with the proviso that the rights of non-Jewish communities should be respected. “And burdened Gentile o’er the main, / Must bear the weight of Israel’s hate / Because he is not brought again / In triumph to Jerusalem.” Israel, of course, meaning the Jews of the Diaspora.

  The poem’s argument is that Islam and Judaism are battling and have battled for Jerusalem, Zion, ever since the fatal split between Abraham’s offspring. This is the biblical story from Genesis that Kipling’s poem draws on. Hagar was the Egyptia
n handmaid of Sarah, Abraham’s legitimate wife. When Sarah was no longer able to bear children, she begged Abraham to lie with Hagar, so that she, Sarah, might “obtain children by her.” Ishmael was the son of Hagar by that union.

  It is the first recorded example of surrogacy.

  When Hagar conceives, Sarah decides that she, the barren wife, is held in contempt by her maid. She asks Abraham to intervene. He shifts the responsibility to Sarah—arguing that Hagar is her maid.

  Sarah deals harshly with Hagar who then flees, only to be accosted by an angel of the Lord—who persuades her to return, to submit to Sarah, with the promise of this reward: her seed will be so multiplied “that it shall not be numbered for multitude.” This is Islam.

  Isaac is the legitimate son of Abraham born to Sarah by special dispensation—she was then aged ninety. Hagar and Ishmael are then cast out—Sarah’s preference, which Abraham is advised by God to follow. Ishmael is preserved, however, because he is the son of Abraham and God promises Ishmael that he will be the founder of a great nation (i.e., Arab Islam).

  The burden of Kipling’s poem is the Jewish Diaspora: “Then they were scattered North and West.” Pogroms and persecution follow: “And every realm they wandered through / Rose, far or near, / And robbed and tortured, chased and slew, / The outcasts of Jerusalem.”

  The further burden is Kipling’s sense of the triumphant survival of Zionist aspiration over every oppressor and tyrant: “So ran their doom—half seer, half slave— / And ages past, and at the last / They stood beside each tyrant’s grave, / And whispered of Jerusalem.”