Chapter Ten

DHARMA BUMS

1.

“In a gloomy, windy autumn Kim came back to me with insistence,” Kipling wrote in Something of Myself, recalling the long gestation of the strange and magical novel that he had begun in Vermont in 1892. He had put the manuscript aside several times before picking it up in earnest, six years later, during the summer of 1898. He and Carrie were living at the time in an old stone house in the isolated village of Rottingdean, four miles down the Sussex coast from the English seaside resort of Brighton. The Rottingdean village green, a mile inland from the sea, was anchored by North End House. This imposing structure served as a summer refuge, furnished by William Morris, for Sir Edward Burne-Jones and his wife, Georgiana, Kipling’s favorite aunt. Originally two houses, North End House had a gap between its two connected structures that allowed huge canvases to be moved in and out. Nearby, there was another opening known as “the Gap,” in the chalk cliffs of Rottingdean, which gave access to a lovely valley and the rolling Sussex Downs beyond.

Over the years, Rottingdean had become a Macdonald family colony, a gathering place for relatives of Kipling’s mother. Rudyard’s cousin Stanley Baldwin had married a Rottingdean neighbor. Meanwhile, Lockwood Kipling, in poor health, had retired from his position in India and settled with Alice in Tisbury, in Wiltshire, an easy train ride from Brighton. The proximity of family members gave the Kiplings abundant reason to settle down in the South of England as well. “Let the child that is coming to you be born in our house,” the Burne-Joneses had generously urged the Kiplings. And so it was that John Kipling, their third child, was born in North End House on a warm August night in 1897.

Finding refuge in the Burne-Jones household, filled with art and exotic furniture—medieval love seats, heavy-legged tables, and a quaintly painted piano with green keys—recalled Kipling’s difficult childhood years when he spent holidays with his uncle and aunt. Burne-Jones was collaborating with William Morris on their illuminated version of The Aeneid, and providing designs, known as “cartoons,” for stained-glass windows. Burne-Jones was also painting The Beguiling of Merlin, in which so much depends on the play of the magician’s shadowed blue eyes, as he is turned into a hawthorn bush by Nimue, the snake-haired Lady of the Lake. The half-finished pictures at the Grange in New York made a strong impression on Kipling. “At bedtime one hastened along the pathways, where unfinished cartoons lay along the walls,” he wrote. “The Uncle often painted in their eyes first, leaving the rest in charcoal—a most effective presentation. Hence our speed to our own top-landing, where we could hang over the stairs and listen to the loveliest sound in the world—deep-voiced men laughing together over dinner.” Now, Kipling himself had joined the deep-voiced men laughing over dinner, even as the memory of those eyes peering from the darkness stayed with him.

The Kiplings stayed on with the Burne-Joneses while looking for a house of their own. They ventured down the coast to Dorset, where Thomas Hardy showed Rudyard around on a bicycle. When a house called “the Elms”—“old, red-tiled, stucco-fronted with worm-eaten stairs”—opposite North End House became available, the Kiplings grabbed it. “It was small, none too well built, but cheap,” Kipling noted, “and so suited us who still remembered a little affair at Yokohama.” Kipling was recalling the banking disaster during their honeymoon, and the refuge they had found in tiny Bliss Cottage in Vermont. Shielded by high flint walls for privacy, the Elms had once served, Kipling learned, as “an old depot for smugglers.” The novelist Angela Thirkell, granddaughter of the Burne-Joneses, fondly recalled evenings when the visiting children would be invited into Kipling’s bow-windowed study, and Kipling would read aloud from his Just So Stories. “There was a ritual about them,” she remembered, “each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same each time and without which the stories were dried husks.”

2.

When Kim first took root in Kipling’s imagination, in Vermont, he envisioned a short story about an English child who helps a Tibetan lama find “a miraculous river that washed away all sin.” The story mushroomed over the years, and Kim became an Irish child instead, “Kim o’ the Rishti,” dialect for “Kim of the Irish,” with the initials K and R reversing Kipling’s own. Once again, as with Mowgli among the wolves, or Harvey Cheyne between luxury liner and fishing boat, Kipling was exploring a central character caught between two worlds. He made frequent visits to Tisbury to go over Indian details of the story with his father. “Under our united tobaccos it grew like the Djinn released from the brass bottle,” Kipling wrote, “and the more we explored its possibilities the more opulence of detail did we discover.” Kipling found it hard to relinquish some of the riches, adopting a metaphor later used by Hemingway: “I do not know what proportion of an iceberg is below the water-line, but Kim as it finally appeared was about one-tenth of what the first lavish specification called for.”

“Nakedly picaresque and plotless,” in Kipling’s assessment, Kim is a string of vivid encounters played out across northern India, as the boy and the priest search for the elusive river. In this twin search, Kim assumes the guise of Ananda, cousin and helper of the Buddha, or Enlightened One, embodied by the Tibetan lama. The search is a pilgrimage; the epigraphs to the first two chapters are drawn from Kipling’s poem about the statue of the Buddha at Kamakura, a destination for pilgrims. Much of the book’s energy and originality are derived from a second search, however: the quest for Kim’s identity.

Kim’s birth parents are a drunken Irish soldier named Kimball O’Hara and the unmarried English nursemaid whom he seduces. When the young mother dies, Kim’s father takes up with a Eurasian prostitute. She introduces him to her own vice of opium, which kills him. Alone in the world, Kim owns nothing but an amulet around his neck, sewn by his father’s lover. Inside are documents left to him by his father: his membership in a Masonic lodge, his regimental papers, and Kim’s birth certificate.

There is one more bequest from Kim’s father. The prostitute shares with him a mysterious prophecy. She informs Kim that he will recognize his destiny when he sees a red bull on a green field. Kim’s quest eventually finds confirmation of the prophecy when he encounters the colors on the banner of his father’s Irish regiment, the Mavericks. The vivid image of red and green exerts a larger gravitational pull on the narrative, however, encompassing both horoscopes and landscape details. In his efforts to decipher images, Kim finds a willing partner in the Tibetan lama. For the lama is himself a master of images, creating vivid representations, in a complex, calligraphic fusion of drawing and writing, of the Wheel of Life.

3.

Kim is a novel of education, with special attention to the proper training of the eyes. The narrative begins at the threshold of an art museum, a place consecrated to informed looking. Kim and his playmates clamber on the great cannon placed opposite the entrance. Kim sits, “in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.” It is there, by the museum, that Kim encounters the mysterious holy man, the Teshoo Lama, who has come on foot from Tibet and sought out the Wonder House as part of his own quest for the Buddha’s sacred river.

The leisurely narrative allows us to consider what the museum might mean to the “keen-eyed” Kim and his devout companion, who “followed and halted amazed” in the entrance hall. The lama marvels at the spectacular Gandharan (i.e., Alexandrian) treasures on view. Kipling shows off his knowledge of these hybrid masterpieces of Buddhist and Greek inspiration, fashioned “by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskillfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch.” The lama’s informed guide is the kindly curator or “Keeper of Images,” modeled on Kipling’s own father. The Keeper gives the lama a gift of crystal spectacles, the better to look at these Buddhist stupas (structures containing relics) and viharas (monastic halls).

Kim is adopted as the elderly lama’s chela, his assistant and pupil, entrusted to beg food for him and provide for his comfort. But with his eager curiosity and shape-shifting talents for camouflage and mimicry, Kim is also drawn into the aims of other schemers, who turn out to be the English officers and their native spies of the British Raj in northern India. Kim delivers secret messages and outmaneuvers the Russian agents on the other side of the “Great Game” (a term Kipling made current) of imperial rivalry. When the kindly British officer Creighton recognizes Kim’s extraordinary intelligence, he persuades the boy to enroll in a school, from which Kim periodically escapes to pursue his own adventures. Like the legendary native Pundits who, disguised as wandering priests, first surveyed the contested border regions dividing Afghanistan and India, Kim is trained to be a surveyor, a chainman, who can draw accurate maps and decipher them as well. He is himself a keeper of images.

4.

If the Lahore Museum is the first stage of Kim’s education in looking, and his training as a surveyor his second, Lurgan Sahib’s mysterious antique shop in Simla, the summer resort of the British colonial establishment in the Himalayan hills, is the culmination of his preparation. “The Lahore Museum was larger,” Kim notes, “but here were more wonders” from all over the world. Kim sees “gilt figures of Buddha and little portable lacquer altars; Russian samovars with turquoises on the lid; egg-shell china sets in quaint octagonal cane boxes; yellow ivory crucifixes—from Japan of all places.” But Lurgan himself is the strangest curiosity on view. “A black-bearded man, with a green shade over his eyes, sat at a table, and, one by one, with short, white hands, picked up globules of light from a tray before him, threaded them on a glancing silken string, and hummed to himself the while.” The description zooms in on the jeweler’s eyes. “He slid off the green shade and looked fixedly at Kim for a full half-minute. The pupils of the eye dilated and closed to pin-pricks, as if at will.” With his elaborate memory games and illusionist tricks, Lurgan, with his “hawk’s eye,” systematically teaches Kim how to look. Eight times in the course of the Play of the Jewels and the other games, Lurgan commands Kim, simply and urgently: “Look!”

Like Kim’s other masters of the Great Game, Lurgan is teaching Kim the skills required of a police spy. And yet this “healer of pearls” seems more a master of some esoteric Glass Bead Game (“The Glass Pearl Game” is the literal translation of Hermann Hesse’s title) than an instructor in weaponry or the proper handling of state secrets. Lurgan’s specialty is the art of repairing broken necklaces. This mysterious necklace mender is a master in discerning how things are linked together. This would seem to be an important skill for young spies to learn. It is at Lurgan’s shop that Kim first meets another of his father-like masters, the Bengali Babu. Reinforcing the point that informed looking is the key to Kim’s activities, the Babu teaches Kim the secret password for recognizing other players of the Great Game. Kim is instructed to bring the conversation around to specific curry dishes, including a vegetable curry known as tarkeean. Then he is to say, “There is no caste when men go to—look for tarkeean.” As the Babu carefully explains, “You stop a little between those words, ‘to—look.’ This is the whole secret.” The whole secret, to put it differently, is to look.

As Kipling details the stages of Kim’s apprenticeship, stringing episodes together to put Kim’s lessons to the test, he is also inventing a new literary genre: the novel of international espionage. The narrative structure of the novel and its characters—the gifted secret agent, his training in spycraft and weaponry, his masters in the game, his disguises, his sinister rivals—will flower in the works of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré. At the same time, Kim may rightly be considered, as Hannah Arendt puts it, the “foundation legend” of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a narrative argument meant to justify the British presence in India.

And yet, as Arendt notes, the Great Game as portrayed in Kipling’s novel is less a matter of political allegiance for Kim than it is the great adventure of life itself. “Since life itself ultimately has to be lived and loved for its own sake, adventure and love of the game for its own sake easily appear to be a most intensely human symbol of life.” Kim relishes the diversity of modern India and refuses to take sides. “It is this underlying passionate humanity that makes Kim the only novel of the imperialist era in which a genuine brotherhood links together the ‘higher and lower breeds,’” Arendt observes. “Kim, ‘a Sahib and the son of a Sahib,’ can rightly talk of ‘us’ when he talks of the ‘chain-men all on one lead-rope.’” She notes that Kim’s use of the collective “us” is “strange in the mouth of a believer in imperialism” like Kipling. And yet “playing the Great Game, a man may feel as though he lives the only life worth while because he has been stripped of everything which may still be considered to be accessory. Life itself seems to be left, in a fantastically intensified purity.” It is this intensity of engagement with life, Arendt suggests, that brings readers back to Kim.

5.

The end of the search is marked by two epiphanies. The lama’s discovery of the River of the Arrow is told rather than shown. The location of the river, which turns out to be a nondescript trickling brook, has come to him, like a cosmic reward, with his release from the things of this world. It is only when he has learned to renounce both his beloved native hills and his chela, his disciple Kim, that he can achieve the supreme detachment of enlightenment. Kim’s own moment of enlightenment, by contrast, is shown rather than told, and involves a reattachment to the things of this world. Fittingly, Kim’s nirvana is achieved by a higher act of looking, a seizing of the world made new after a spate of physical arduousness and fever.

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 anger, 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.