Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and educated in England. Readers have always associated this towering writer with colonial India, where he spent his early childhood and his literary apprenticeship, and with England, where he lived, in relative isolation, during the final decades of his life. Few readers are familiar with his exuberant American years, however, during the heart of the American Gilded Age. And yet Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, the first draft of Kim, his first “just so stories,” and some of his greatest poems on the crest of a Vermont hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view of Mount Monadnock “like a gigantic thumbnail pointing heavenward.” A principal aim of this book is to introduce today’s readers to a largely unfamiliar writer: an American Kipling.
During his astonishingly productive sojourn in New England, the key creative period in his entire career, Kipling’s American accent took his English visitors by surprise. Arthur Conan Doyle brought his golf clubs to Vermont; the inventor of Sherlock Holmes taught Kipling to whack a ball around the rolling hills and shared Thanksgiving dinner with his Americanized host. Kipling announced, more than once, that he was preparing to write the Great American Novel. Among his close friends were American luminaries like Mark Twain, William James, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt. Kipling would have remained in Brattleboro, with his American wife and their two daughters, if a family quarrel—along with a pointless dispute between England and the United States over the border of Venezuela—had not cut short his New England idyll. His departure from Brattleboro in 1896, he confessed, was the hardest thing he ever had to do. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live, Bombay and Brattleboro,” he said. “And I can’t live in either.”
A tantalizing sense of “what if” hangs over Kipling’s American years, and complicates his present cultural status. His vivid creations are among the most familiar in the English language. Children all over the world are familiar with The Jungle Book. They thrill to Mowgli’s adventures among his adoptive family of wolves or the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’s epic battles with cobras. Tales such as “How the Camel Got His Hump” and “The Elephant’s Child,” from Kipling’s Just So Stories, remain beloved bedtime reading. Kim, Kipling’s shimmering novel of international intrigue and spiritual quest, is a favorite for countless readers, young and old. And teenagers continue to be exposed to the hammering exhortations of “If—”:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too . . .
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same . . .
If you can do all these things, Kipling concludes, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” A favorite of presidents and graduation speakers, of political conservatives and revolutionaries alike, “If—” was recently voted the most beloved poem in Great Britain. It is almost certainly one of the most familiar poems in the world. In 2007, Joni Mitchell released a jazz version of the poem on her album Shine, accompanied by Herbie Hancock on piano. It might surprise the poem’s many admirers that Kipling originally used this plea for stalwart, levelheaded leadership to illustrate a story about George Washington, thus giving it an American setting. When he included it in his collected verse, he placed it opposite an elegy for his good friend Theodore Roosevelt.
From around 1890 to 1920, Rudyard Kipling was the most popular and financially successful writer in the world. At the height of his fame, in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; at forty-one, he was the youngest writer ever to win the prize and the first to write in the English language. That same year, in the company of his idol Mark Twain and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, he was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford, to the raucous applause of an adoring crowd.
At this remove, it is difficult to recover the sheer depth of reverence once accorded Kipling. “He’s more of a Shakespeare than anyone yet in this generation of ours,” wrote the great American psychologist William James. His brother, the novelist Henry James, who gave the bride away at Kipling’s wedding, called Kipling “the most complete man of genius” he had ever known. “Kipling’s name, and Kipling’s words always stir me now,” Mark Twain confessed, “stir me more than do any other living man’s.” The Jungle Book was included on Sigmund Freud’s list of the ten most important books in his life. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht—they all admired Kipling, and drew inspiration from his work. When Kipling died in 1936, at the age of seventy, his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, alongside Shakespeare’s memorial and Chaucer’s grave.
New film versions of The Jungle Book appear regularly, seeking to displace the Disney classic of 1967, one of the most successful movies of all time. Kipling’s incomparable children’s books continue to be read and loved. And yet we are expected to outgrow Kipling. “It was only when I got to secondary school that I realized I wasn’t supposed to like Rudyard Kipling,” the historian Sir Simon Schama has written. Despite the efforts of influential admirers—including major American critics like Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot, Irving Howe, and Randall Jarrell—Kipling has never quite joined the ranks of unquestioned canonical writers, like Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. His reputation has suffered in recent decades in particular. With the rise of postcolonial theory—a view of literature that assesses the human cost of colonial arrangements—Kipling is often treated with unease or hostility in university literature departments, as the jingoist Bard of Empire, a man on the wrong side of history. It was Kipling, after all, who wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” his strident plea for the United States to take up the imperial burden long held by Great Britain. And it was Kipling who wrote, notoriously, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
In July 2018, indignant students at the University of Manchester painted over a mural of the text of “If—,” inscribed on the wall of the students’ union, and replaced it with the African American writer Maya Angelou’s popular 1978 poem “Still I Rise.” Such actions are understandable, especially during a time when the commitments of Britain and the United States to what used to be called the Third World are increasingly in question. And yet the two poems are similar in their defiant spirit. “You may write me down in history / With your bitter twisted lies,” Angelou writes, “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” Kipling’s poem may even have influenced “Still I Rise,” for young Maya, in Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “enjoyed and respected Kipling,” and admired “If—” in particular. Gramsci, who translated “If—” into Italian, recommended it specifically for leftist revolutionaries. “Kipling’s morality is imperialist only to the extent that it is closely linked to a specific historical reality,” Gramsci wrote from one of Mussolini’s prisons, “but there are lessons in the poem for any social group struggling for political power.”
Even some of Kipling’s most articulate critics have recognized the complexity of the case and the necessity to continue to read and understand his works. “Kim is a work of great aesthetic merit,” Edward Said, one of the founding figures of postcolonial theory, proclaimed in his much-cited introduction to the novel; “it cannot be dismissed simply as the racist imagining of one fairly disturbed and ultra-reactionary imperialist.” Confounding his critics, Kipling retained a deep sympathy for the despised, the marginalized, and the powerless. Kim is himself a homeless child, initially cared for by his father, a down-and-out veteran addicted to opium, and a mixed-race prostitute. Kipling’s portrait of the Tibetan holy man in Kim is a wonder of empathy. Early tales like “Lispeth,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” and “Jews in Shushan” assess the cost of racial division and bigotry. “Gunga Din” is an admiring portrait of a lowly Muslim soldier. And “The Man Who Would Be King” remains a powerful parable, as the film director John Huston recognized during the Vietnam War era, of the folly of imperial overreach. “Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” as D. H. Lawrence wrote of Hawthorne, another major writer of sometimes repugnant political views.
We live in a time of rising nationalism, extreme cultural antagonism, and the breakup of empires, when the United States is as ideologically riven as it was in Kipling’s time. This seems an opportune moment, following the 150th anniversary of Kipling’s birth, to take a closer look at a fascinating writer and a complex historical figure. Fifty previously unknown Kipling poems were recently brought to light. A trove of lost personal documents has surfaced in Vermont, and a major exhibition on the career of Kipling’s father, the prominent India-based arts administrator John Lockwood Kipling, was mounted in London and New York. Among contributions to a fuller understanding of Kipling’s vagabond life, Charles Allen’s account of his background in India and Sir David Gilmour’s study of his political relations with the British Empire stand out. Meanwhile, contemporary Indian writers, such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, have shown a renewed interest in this Anglo-Indian author. “No other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it,” Rushdie writes, “and it is this knowledge of place, and procedure, and detail that gives his stories their undeniable authority.”
There is one conspicuous lacuna in serious efforts to make sense of Kipling’s career, however. His intense engagement with the United States—on a personal, political, and aesthetic level—has never received the sustained attention it deserves. The central focus of this book is Kipling’s extraordinary American decade, extending roughly from 1889 to 1899. During the 1890s, the crucial decade for his aesthetic development, Kipling sought, deliberately and with very hard work, to turn himself into a specifically American writer. As a young man, he cultivated American influences like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. A photograph of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Self-Reliance” Kipling adopted as his personal creed, adorned his writing desk. For Kipling, America was a place of promise, of freedom, of experimentation, relatively free, in his view, from the class and caste divisions that marred England and India, a place where he could reinvent himself, as so many American writers had done before him.
If Kipling had his own sense of America, Americans developed their own version of Kipling, independent of what British or Indian readers made of him. He was the most influential writer of his time in the United States. It was largely through Kipling that naturalism, the Darwinian view that environment determines character and that only the fit survive, entered mainstream American literature. It was partly through Kipling that the cult of the strenuous life in the wild—in the jungle or the desert, among soldiers or among wolves—entered American writing.
Kipling urged his friend Theodore Roosevelt to bring this strenuous ethic into American politics; he partnered with his friend William James in conceptualizing what James called the “moral equivalent of war”—a necessary testing ground for American manhood in times of peace. And it was Kipling who introduced to the reading public the romance of the war correspondent and the international spy, those interlocking heroes of twentieth-century popular literature and film. His work profoundly influenced a generation of American writers, including Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Jack London (and, later, Ernest Hemingway). “There is no end of Kipling in my work,” London wrote. “I would never [have] possibly written anywhere near the way I did had Kipling never been.”
This book addresses key moments and encounters during the 1890s, while also offering a fresh perspective—Kipling’s own—on the American Gilded Age, that fraught period first named, indelibly, by Mark Twain. It was an era, like our own, of vast disparities between rich and poor, of corruption on an appalling scale, of large-scale immigration and rampant racism, of disruptive new technologies and new media, of mushrooming factories and abandoned farms, of vanishing wildlife and the depredation of public lands. Kipling took up many of these topics in his writings. In his friend Mark Twain’s view, this was not a Golden Age—that utopian dream of a perfect society in the remote past—but merely a Gilded Age, concealing the dross beneath its glittering facade.
As a historical figure in the American Gilded Age, Kipling is not just fascinating; he is unavoidable. His gravitational pull is detectable everywhere: in politics and literature, in American attitudes toward masculinity, in American preoccupations with the supernatural. In registering this gravitational pull, I have allowed myself the freedom to follow patterns of suggestion and implication wherever they lead. The opening chapters explore Kipling’s relations with major American writers: Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry James, and others. Later chapters pursue certain strands in Kipling’s life: his honeymoon in Japan, his fascination with hallucinogenic drugs, his imaginative engagement with the occult, his impact on the Spanish-American War, and the growth of the American empire. Each chapter supports a single theory: that Kipling became the writer we know, in large part, because of his deep involvement with the United States.
Kipling’s influence on children’s literature remains indelible. Tarzan, to Kipling’s annoyance, was little more than an inferior remake of The Jungle Book; Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was an inspired tribute to it. Kipling’s enduring American presence is not merely literary, however. His ideas and his fictional characters have affected public policy and popular culture in ways that we do not yet fully understand. In registering Kipling’s influence on American culture, I have followed him to the Washington Zoo in the company of Theodore Roosevelt, admiring the beavers and grizzly bears. I have also ventured beyond his death, mapping the surprising invocation of Kipling’s writings—by ordinary soldiers and reporters, generals and movie directors, political hawks and antiwar doves—during and immediately following the Vietnam War. We cannot adequately gauge and critique Kipling’s significance in American cultural and political history if we refuse to acknowledge it.
Kipling’s decade-long engagement with the United States can best be seen as a quest for a lost paradise. The arc of his life, as it unfolds in this book, is that of someone who discovered, when he was too young to digest the devastating news, that the world is a precarious place, and that disaster (one of the two “impostors” dismissed in “If—”) can intrude at any moment. His first six years were idyllic. “My first impression is of daybreak,” he wrote of his early childhood, “light and color and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder.” His parents were creative, supportive, artistically inclined.
Kipling’s family connections were auspicious for a future writer. One of his uncles by marriage was the great Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Another was the painter Sir Edward John Poynter, president of the Royal Academy. Family friends included the visionary writer and designer William Morris and the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A favorite first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, would become prime minister.
Paradise ended abruptly when five-year-old Kipling and his younger sister were farmed out, without explanation, to a sadistic foster mother in the South of England. (Intended to socialize English children born in India and shield them from disease, the practice was not uncommon.) Abandoned as a child, subject to torments both physical and psychological, he found solace in the fantasy world of books. As he matured, Kipling came to believe, as his political views veered to the right, that civilization was a veneer, keeping order over raging instincts and potential invaders. He believed in soldiers and despised comfortable people who amused themselves by “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.” As George Orwell put it, Kipling “sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
Even amid his mounting fame as a writer, Kipling himself suffered so many personal disasters that nothing shook his faith in the need for dire arrangements. These views spoke in turn to American readers and writers in chaotic times, even as Kipling himself took up residence in the United States, in a sustained—and ultimately doomed—attempt to establish a safe haven for himself and for his family. Kipling once wrote that the twentieth century began in 1889. It certainly did for him. The realization that he could leave India struck him with the force of a “revelation,” as he put it in his autobiography. That decisive year, he left India for good and began his nomadic years of circling the globe, in search of his destiny. And that, accordingly, is where this book begins.
Many times over the past few years, I have been asked what in the world possessed me to write a book about Rudyard Kipling. The implication was that I must have had some suitable excuse for adopting such a rash, quixotic, potentially career-killing course of action. One close friend, a writer himself, warned me, again and again, that I should think twice before publishing a book on Kipling. “Don’t you realize,” he said, his voice rising for maximum effect, “that Kipling is the most politically incorrect writer in the canon?” He wondered whether I was prepared for the inevitable consequences, and suggested, darkly, that I had better have a defense in place, some sophisticated scheme of damage control, for the ensuing outrage.
I discovered soon enough that it was no use answering that I wasn’t writing a defense of Kipling, and that my primary interest was historical. I wanted to map the imprint that Kipling had left on his adopted country, and the imprint that the United States had left on him. I certainly wasn’t trying to rehabilitate him—a strange verb that I heard more than once in such conversations, as though Kipling, after years of justified imprisonment, was about to be released (by me!) upon an unsuspecting world.
Of course, it would be surprising indeed if I were the first interpreter of Kipling to be asked to defend himself. It turns out that there is even something of a tradition of such excuses. The best-known formulation comes in W. H. Auden’s elegy for the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, in which he maintains that Time with a capital T “worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives,” adding, “Time that with this strange excuse / Pardoned Kipling and his views.” Auden later excised these lines from the poem. Perhaps he had come to realize, rightly, that readers aren’t called upon to pardon the views of writers they disagree with. Kipling himself was intolerant of excuses, in any case. “If—” is a plea for the self-reliant man who accepts responsibility for his actions, and an indictment of the practice of blaming others for one’s failures. Time, according to Kipling, does not excuse; it is composed of one “unforgiving minute” after another.
Auden was not simply arguing that good writing will survive despite the political or religious views of the writer. He seems to be specifying, instead, that certain writers, among whom he numbers Yeats and Kipling, are part of the lifeblood of language itself. These writers aren’t merely embedded in our language, Auden suggests; our language lives through them and by them. Auden’s claim seems particularly apt for Kipling, who is said to have bequeathed more familiar quotations to the English language (from “East is East and West is West” to “That’s another story”) than any other writer since Shakespeare. According to Orwell, “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.”
Ultimately, it is Kipling’s complexity, as a writer and a historical figure—especially in his relations with the United States—that I hope to convey in this book. Borges was impatient with those who reduced Kipling’s thirty-five volumes to a “mere apologist” for empire. “What is indisputable is that Kipling’s prose and poetic works are infinitely more complex than the theses they elucidate,” he wrote in a review of 1941. “Like all men, Rudyard Kipling was many men (English gentleman, Eurasian journalist, bibliophile, spokesman for soldiers and mountains), but none with more conviction than the artificer.”
Kipling at his uncanny best offers little of the pat solutions, the ringing advice that he is often reputed to supply. Even his declamatory “If—” hangs on one of the oddest, one of the iffiest, words in the English language. Instead, he draws us, word by slippery word, to the very brink, to the ultimate mysteries of language and life. And those mysteries, he leads us to believe, lie somewhere in the specific interlocking of our words and our worlds—our lived experience. Our initials, our given names, our mother tongues, our verbal slips, our hasty ensuing excuses: how strange these are, Kipling tells us in tale after tale, how internal to who we are.
Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea for readers to give Kipling a fresh look, despite his conspicuous liabilities and limitations, comes from Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient. As the Canadian nurse Hana reads Kim aloud to the mysterious patient, whose true identity is as enigmatic as Kim’s own, he gives her a reading lesson. Kim must be read slowly, he tells her, to appreciate Kipling’s rhythms, his sinuous sentence-sounds. “Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses,” he instructs her. And when Kip, the Punjabi mine detector, all too aware of the historical disaster of British colonialism in India, appears in the abandoned villa, he is said to come directly from the pages of Kim, as his nickname, an amalgam of Kipling and Kim, suggests. “As if,” writes Ondaatje, “the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp. A drug of wonders.” Ondaatje implies that there is still potential magic to be found in Kipling’s books, if we only know where to look.