The Wish House and Other Stories

J
OSEPH
Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, to British parents. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and art teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, had moved to India to study and preserve Indian architecture. His mother, Alice Macdonald Kipling, was the sister-in-law of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones. As a young child, Kipling spent his summers at Sir Edward’s house in England, surrounded by some of the greatest artists and writers of the time, including William Morris and Robert Browning. These quintessentially Victorian summer holidays stood in sharp contrast to his exotic Indian upbringing, where he enjoyed the unquestioned privilege of the British ruling class.

In 1871, following the custom of Britons in India, Kipling’s parents sent him and his sister to England to begin their formal education. The first school they attended, Lorne Lodge, in Hampshire, was run by a cruel couple whose mistreatment Kipling later described in his autobiography. Following a visit from his parents in 1877 during which they witnessed the conditions at his school, Rudyard was sent to the more enlightened, though somewhat undistinguished, United Services College in Devon. Here Kipling flourished, reading voraciously and producing his first poems, later collected and published privately by his mother as
Schoolboy Lyrics
(1881).

Kipling left school in 1882. Unfit for a military career and unable to afford further education, he returned to India to begin a seven-year career in journalism, taking a job in Bombay as a writer for the
Civil and Military Gazette.
There he wrote the poems that would be later collected in
Departmental Ditties
(1886) and the short stories that were collected in
Plain Tales from the Hills
(1888).

In 1888, when a series of Kipling’s short stories were published in inexpensive volumes for rail travelers, the author, who was little known outside of India, soon found his stories being read in all corners of the British Empire. In the wake of the popular and financial success of these books, Kipling moved to England by way of China, Japan, and the United States, arriving in London after seven months
of travel. Over the next few years, Kipling wrote many of his most famous poems, including “The Ballad of East and West” and “Gunga Din,” both of which later appeared in
Barrack-Room Ballads
(1892), a collection of poems concerned with the lives and habits of the British soldier. The success of
Barrack-Room Ballads
was immediate and universal, appealing to an England ready and willing to read of the objectives of her Empire in plain and unequivocal terms. Despite his growing fame, Kipling remained steadfastly aloof from the London literary scene, largely avoiding contact with other prominent writers.

In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of his friend Wolcott Balestier, the man who collaborated with Kipling on
The Naulahka
(1892). The couple eventually settled in the county of Sussex, and by 1897 they had two daughters and one son. Their elder daughter, Josephine, died of pneumonia during a trip to the United States in 1899. In the decade following his marriage, Kipling published many of his best-remembered works, including
The Jungle Book
(1894),
Kim
(1901), and the
Just So Stories
(1902). It was during this same time that his writing took the decidedly political turn that would color later perceptions of his work, perhaps most famously exemplified by his poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), written in support of the Philippines being surrendered to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War. He was a staunch proponent of the Boer War, writing poetry and war correspondence in support of British efforts in Africa. He was also an ardent opponent of the home rule movement in Ireland. Despite an ideology that may seem objectionable to a contemporary reader, Kipling received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, becoming the first Englishman to be so honored. His acceptance of the Nobel Prize was striking in light of his firm refusal of all official and political honors, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit.

Kipling had long predicted violence between Germany and England, and his patriotic zeal found a fitting subject with the outbreak of the First World War. In poems such as “For All that We Have and Are” (1914), he exhorted his countrymen to action and duty. But his own son’s battlefield death in 1915 was a devastating blow to Kipling and had a fundamental impact on the tenor of his war poetry. Among his most celebrated poems, praised for their technical virtuosity and purity of sentiment, were his thirty-five “Epitaphs of the War,” which commemorated soldiers from a variety of backgrounds. These were included in the collection
The Years Between
(1919).

The aftermath of the First World War saw a decline in the popularity and quality of Kipling’s poetry, and he was heartbroken to find
that the new order ushered in after the Treaty of Versailles was far less sympathetic to his praise of Empire and martial virtue. Kipling’s writings sank into a period of critical and popular decline that he was not to outlive. He published his last major work, the autobiography
Something of Myself
(1935), a year before he died, after a protracted illness, in 1936. Rudyard Kipling is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

W
AS
Kipling a racist? The last stanza of his poem “We and They” is an impeccable statement of cultural relativism:

You couldn’t have a more complete and enlightened statement of the case for cultural relativity if the poem had been written by Edward Said.

I want to look at Kipling’s racism and its complications. I think that even Kipling’s admirers are prejudiced against him. We
know
he must be a racist—patronizing and condescending at his least obnoxious; loathsome and ugly at his worst. I want to complicate this caricature. Part of me thinks the caricature exists because it is easier for advocates to concede the worst and move on than it is to haggle over detail.

For example, in his introduction to his Oxford Authors selection of Kipling, Daniel Karlin resumes two central mitigating arguments. First, retrospective justice—the
injustice
of retrospective justice—the sense that Kipling must be seen in his historical context and not judged anachronistically by contemporary standards. And, second, the ransom argument—that positive racial portraits sometimes balance negative ones. The example Karlin gives is Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the babu in
Kim
, who can be weighed against Kipling’s incessant libels of the Bengali babu.

Karlin then rejects both arguments completely. For him, the nuances never eliminate the uglinesses,
cannot
eliminate the uglinesses.

And it is true that Kipling’s stories constantly place before us observations that are morally unpalatable. Think of “An Habitation Enforced,” where the obnoxious pushiness of the nouveau riche Mr. Sangres is heightened by the pigment of his skin. Mr. Sangres is Brazilian and therefore “dusky” as well as pushy. Finally, one of the peasants refers to him as “that nigger Sangres.”

At junctures like these, it
does
seem appealing simply to concede Kipling’s racism—so that one can get on and quote the writing.

But we need, for accurate justice, to consider each case. Which is impossible. I propose to avoid the usual instances: “Beyond the Pale,” “Lispeth,” “Without Benefit of Clergy.” “Loot” I have already defended in my 1994 television program, “J’Adore Kipling.” What about the letters? What about the private man in the secrecy of his correspondence? What about the travel writings? I want to concentrate on these two aspects of Kipling. So far, I think neither has been read well by critics. It is partly that, because there is so much of Kipling to read, the travel writings tend to be read once and once only, leaving the biographer with misleading index cards.

This is the only way I can account for the misreading by Harry Ricketts and Andrew Lycett of a passage in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 1, chapter XXIV, p. 489).
^*
This is Kipling. He’s describing a murder in a Chinese gambling den in San Francisco: “Mark how purely man is a creature of instinct. Rarely introduced to the pistol, I saw the Mexican half rise in his chair and at the same instant found myself full length on the floor.” While dropping to the floor, Kipling hears “an intolerable clamour like the discharge of a cannon.” In the great silence following, Kipling gets to his knees. And from there gives us an unforgettably downbeat description of a death. “The Chinaman was gripping the table with both hands and staring in front of him at an empty chair. The Mexican had gone, and a little whirl of smoke was floating near the roof. Still gripping the table, the Chinaman said ‘Ah!’ in the tone a man would use when, looking up from his work suddenly, he sees a well-known friend in the doorway. Then he coughed and fell over to his own right, and I saw that he had been shot in the stomach…. I became aware that, save for two men
leaning over the stricken one, the room was empty.” And Kipling flees.