The Wish House and Other Stories Read online

  Of course, there is an ironic tinge in that Sphinx-like silence, given the Bengali babu’s legendary loquacity—“celebrated” in From Sea to Sea (vol. 2, p. 219), where Sir Steuart Bayley endures Bengali bombast by the hour—but nevertheless Kipling’s final, judiciously particular verdict is clear. “The Babu is a great man”—when he is a clerk.

  A verdict that is, of course, sufficient reason now to convict Kipling of racism. He is well disposed to the Indian, the indictment goes, only so long as the Indian knows his place. So the babu is a great man if he sticks to clerical work. The Indian, though, isn’t interested in Kipling’s benevolent disposition. It is irrelevant. The Indian rather wants justice. Ergo, Kipling is essentially racist.

  I want to argue strongly against this. For several reasons. First, compared to the worst imperialist racists, Kipling is indeed benevolent and enlightened. There are degrees of racism. Hitler’s anti-Semitism is clearly far worse than that of T. S. Eliot, supposing you happen to believe Eliot was anti-Semitic. Which I incline to disbelieve. Second, there is an injustice inherent in the retrospective application of the standards of 2002. No one at the time would have recognized them as valid. In fact, the application of racial and class categories was universal until the end of the Second World War. The war completely broke down accepted ways of categorization. Up to that date, working-class men and women would have described themselves as working-class, the middle class as middle-class. And so on. Categorization, however deplorable, was then a matter of fact and a fact of life.

  In his second letter to Margaret Burne-Jones, Kipling addresses her central question. She had asked if the English and the natives had interests in common: “d-d few,” Kipling replies—adding, “faith if you knew in what inconceivable filth of mind the peoples of India were brought up from their cradle; if you realised the views—or one tenth of the views—they hold about women and their absolute incapacity for speaking the truth as we understand it—the immeasurable gulf that lies between the two races in all things, you would see how it comes to pass that the Englishman is prone to despise the natives—(I must use that misleading term for brevity’s sake)—and how, except in the matter of trade, to have little or nothing in common with him.”

  And that is where Andrew Lycett leaves the quotation and the question of Kipling’s attitude to Indians.

  At which point, Kipling sounds like an authentic pukka sahib. But Andrew Lycett has reversed the order of Kipling’s paragraphs to make this beginning Kipling’s conclusion. Lycett writes: “At the end of the day, he admitted that the British in India had very little in common with their subjects” (my italics). True, but misleading. Because Kipling goes on, amazingly, to deplore this gulf and to show his ambition to penetrate Indian society.

  The letter continues:

  Now this is a wholly wrong attitude of mind [my italics] but it’s one that a Briton who washes, and don’t take bribes, and who thinks of other things besides intrigue and seduction most naturally falls into.

  When he does [fall into this wrong attitude of mind] [Kipling’s italics]—goodbye to his chances of attempting to understand the people of the land.

  Kipling then describes his novel Mother Maturin as an attempt to penetrate the authentic native life, which is unaffected by British rule. “The result has been to interest me immensely and keenly in the people and to show me how little an Englishman can hope to understand ’em.” Of this life, Kipling avers that “our rule, so long as no one steals too flagrantly or murders too openly, affects it in no way whatever…”—which could be a gloss on “The Head of the District.” The letter continues with a remark often quoted against him—that the Indians are a cross between children and men, “touchy as children, obstinate as men.”

  But Kipling goes on: “The proper way to handle ’em is not by looking on ’em ‘as excitable masses of barbarism’ (I speak for the Punjab only) or the ‘down trodden millions of Ind groaning under the heel of an alien and unsympathetic despotism,’ but as men with a language of their own which it is your business to understand; and proverbs which it is your business to quote (this is a land of proverbs) and byewords and allusions which it is your business to master; and feelings which it is your business to enter into and sympathise with” (my italics and bold).

  This scarcely sounds like a racist to me.

  Later in the same letter, discussing Ram Dass, his printer, Kipling again writes something frequently quoted against him: “Remember Wop in spite of what good lies in the native he is utterly unable to do anything finished or clean, or neat unless he has the Englishman at his elbow to guide and direct and put straight.”

  Here, importantly, we should note that, writing to W. E. Henley (January 18–19, 1893), Kipling makes the identical criticism of white Americans. He says that, in America, “a certain defect runs through everything—workmanship, roads, bridges, contracts, barter and sale and so forth—all inaccurate, all slovenly, all out of plumb and untrue. So far the immense natural wealth of the land holds this ineptitude up; and the slovenly plenty hides their sins unless you look for them. Au fond it’s barbarism—barbarism plus telephone, electric light, rail and suffrage but all the more terrible for that very reason.”

  Odd, isn’t it, that Kipling should equate native Indians and white Americans as essentially barbarous? However eccentric, the judgment begins to look impartial rather than racist. And one finds the same kind of cross-racial equation made in Letters of Travel (1892–1913), where Kipling notes the slovenliness of New York’s streets and declares them “first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore, or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal….” Kipling’s comparison is intended to shock by its initial unlikeliness. The barbarity of the Zulu is taken for granted, as the barbarity of the American is not. But this could be described as racist only if one were not prepared to concede that there might be something primitive in a Zulu kraal.

  Given his reputation as a racist, it is equally odd to find Kipling rebuking a clergyman for ethnic insensitivity (October 16, 1895): “It is my fortune to have been born and to a large extent brought up among those whom white men call ‘heathen’; and while I recognise the paramount duty of every white man to follow the teachings of his creed and conscience as ‘a debtor to do the whole law,’ it seems to me cruel that white men, whose governments are armed with the most murderous weapons known to science, should amaze and confound their fellow creatures with a doctrine of salvation imperfectly understood by themselves and a code of ethics foreign to the climate and instincts of those races whose most cherished customs they outrage and whose gods they insult.”

  Kipling returns to this idea in From Sea to Sea (vol. 2, p. 61): “Very many Americans have an offensive habit of referring to natives as ‘heathen.’ Mahometans and Hindus are heathen alike in their eyes….”

  Which seems almost enlightened—were not the protester Kipling.

  Nevertheless, Kipling’s idea of the white man’s burden is predicated on a self-pitying gloss on imperialism—seen not as economic exploitation but as the fatiguing exercise of authority and enlightenment. It also seems to be predicated on the idea of “lower races,” however much sympathy Kipling would like to bring to their administration.

  But even this is complicated. The poem “The White Man’s Burden” has been widely misread. In effect, critics have stopped, affronted, at the first stanza: “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” It is the imputation of childishness that lodges in the throat—and, alas, in the brain. Has anyone, I wonder, read to the end of the poem and understood it?

  The reward for taking up the white man’s burden is stated in the last line: “The judgment of your peers!” Who are those “peers,” those equals? Since the poem is addressed to the United States, you might think that “peers” refers to British imperialists. But you would be wrong. The “peers” in question are the “new-caught, sullen peoples”—raised to equality. As the previous three stanzas make clear (my italics throughout):

  Ta
ke up the White Man’s burden—

  And reap his old reward:

  The blame of those ye better,

  The hate of those ye guard—

  The cry of hosts ye humour

  (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—

  “Why brought ye us from bondage,

  “Our loved Egyptian night?”

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Ye dare not stoop to less—

  Nor call too loud on Freedom

  To cloak your weariness;

  By all ye cry or whisper,

  By all ye leave or do,

  The silent, sullen peoples

  Shall weigh your Gods and you.

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Have done with childish days—

  The lightly proffered laurel,

  The easy, ungrudged praise.

  Comes now, to search your manhood

  Through all the thankless years,

  Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

  The judgment of your peers!

  In this account, the imperialist aim, which mustn’t be rushed, is eventual independence: “Nor call too loud on Freedom / To cloak your weariness.” In other words, grant freedom at the proper juncture, when the moment is ripe—and not because fatigue makes you want to rest.

  Kipling’s penultimate stanza ends explicitly with the judgment of the colonized on the colonizers: “The silent, sullen peoples / Shall weigh your Gods and you.” But Kipling waits until the last line of the poem to spring his surprise—a surprise marked by an exclamation point. There he makes it clear that, in the end, the judgment of the colonized on the colonizers will be the judgment of equals, “the judgment of your peers.”

  The aim, then, is not subjection and exploitation in perpetuity, but “Freedom” with a capital “F” and elevation to equality.

  Ah yes. Those “lower races”…As we shall see, Kipling was capable on occasion of seeing Oriental races—the Japanese, the Chinese—as racially superior.

  While Kipling can respect another race, he seems to reserve a special dislike/distaste for the half-breed. In a letter to Andrew Macphail (November 20 to December 7, 1908), he refers to the Afrikaner—post–Boer War, of course—as “a race largely tainted with native blood.”

  Yet consider Kipling’s humane comment on Eurasians in From Sea to Sea (vol. 2, p. 262 ff): “We know nothing about their life which touches so intimately the White on the one hand and the Black on the other…. Wanted, therefore, a writer from among the Eurasians, who shall write so that men shall be pleased to read a story of Eurasian life; then outsiders will be interested in the People of India, and will admit that the race has possibilities.”

  It could almost be George Eliot, who believed the novel’s moral purpose was to extend our moral sympathies, who wrote of those hidden lives and “that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

  NEGROES

  Margaret Peller Feeley in “The Kim that Nobody Reads” has shown how Kipling altered the drafts of his novel to tone down the glamour of the English and eliminate casual racist remarks. Of course, there will always be criminographers for whom the most damning interpretation of evidence is the truth—here, that Kipling’s first thoughts were his true thoughts. Casual racist remarks, then, are what came naturally to Kipling.

  But it is surely the case that what is considered—those alterations, those tonings down—should itself be taken into consideration.

  The letters yield a further example. On January 11, 1904, Kipling composes an inscription for the Shanghai Memorial and sends it to Sir Lewis Mitchell. Mitchell objected to the phrase “in fight against savages,” “as likely to hurt Native feeling a century hence. Kipling at once agreed to my substituted words ‘the Matabele.’”

  If this is evidence of Kipling’s insensitivity, it is equally evidence of his sensitivity.

  But consider this difficult, unpleasant passage in From Sea to Sea (vol. 2, p. 9 ff): “Now let me draw breath and curse the negro waiter and through him the negro in service generally. He has been made a citizen with a vote; consequently both political parties play with him. But that is neither here nor there. He will commit in one meal every bétise that a scullion fresh from the plough-tail is capable of, and he will continue to repeat those faults.”

  Kipling’s target here isn’t simply “the negro in service,” though he continues in this irritated-diner vein for a few more sentences, until he is flagrantly, unforgivably racist: “Now God and his father’s Kismet made him intellectually inferior to the oriental.”

  And here Kipling has no excuse.

  He cannot hide behind the persona of the brash globe-trotter, as he does successfully elsewhere. The person opining is unmistakably Kipling himself, in propria persona. And if he isn’t asserting white racial superiority, but oriental racial superiority, he is insisting on black racial inferiority.

  “He is a big, black, vain baby and a man rolled into one. A coloured gentleman who insisted on getting me pie when I wanted something else, demanded information about India. I gave him some facts about wages. ‘Oh hell,’ said he cheerfully, ‘that wouldn’t keep me in cigars for a month.’ Then he fawned on me for a ten-cent piece. Later he took it on himself to pity the natives of India—‘heathen’ he called them, this Woolly One whose race has been the butt of every comedy on the Asiatic stage since the beginning.”

  It doesn’t help that Kipling is offended on behalf of the Indian, nor that he shares an Indian race prejudice.

  He identifies the Negro’s head as Yoruba: “He did his thinking in English, but he was a Yoruba negro, and the race type had remained the same throughout his generations. And the room was full of other races—some that looked exactly like Gallas (but the trade was never recruited from that side of Africa), some duplicates of Cameroon heads, and some Kroomen, if ever Kroomen wore evening dress.”

  So what is Kipling’s message here? It is this. The persistence of racial type will survive evening dress and “thinking in English.” That is the message.

  And the type is inferior in perpetuity: “The American does not consider little matters of descent, though by this time he ought to know all about ‘damnable heredity.’ As a general rule he keeps himself pretty far from the negro and says unpretty things about him. There are six million negroes more or less in the States, and they are increasing. The Americans once having made them citizens cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying this: but it is like to be a long job, because black blood is much more adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets a religion, he returns, directly as a hiving bee, to the first instincts of his people.”

  And Kipling then describes his attendance at an African-American church: “The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners’ bench. The motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were those of a Zanzibar stick-dance, such as you see at Aden on the coal-boats; and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one and I saw before me—the hubshi (the Woolly One) praying to a God he did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the benches, the grey-headed elder by the window, were savages—neither more nor less.”

  Phew. “The hubshi praying to a God he did not understand.”

  And Kipling concludes with a question and a dire prediction, which has proved lamentable but not inaccurate: “What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal offence. The North is every year less and less in need of his services. And he will not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His friends will urge that he is as good as the white man. His enemies…it is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  My quotation here comes from the 1914 edition of From Sea to Sea. The earlier edition of 1900 has no ellipsis at “His enemies.�
�� The text runs thus: “His enemies—well, you can guess what his enemies will do from a little incident that followed on a recent appointment by the President. He made a negro an assistant in a post office where—think of it!—he had to work at the next desk to a white girl, the daughter of a colonel, one of the first families of Georgia’s modern chivalry, and all the weary, weary rest of it [italics mine]. The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged or burned someone in effigy. Perhaps it was the President, and perhaps it was the negro—but the principle remains the same. They said it was an insult. It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We don’t know why Kipling excised this passage. Perhaps because it proved apocryphal. Whatever the factual status of Kipling’s reported anecdote, his sympathies are clearly against the wearisome bogus chivalry, against segregation, and with the negro. His ironic interjection, “think of it!,” is incredulous. He had no time for segregationist cant. There were limits to his prejudice.

  Kipling’s personal relations are germane to the question of his racism—or rather the gap between the reflex assumptions of his class and his considered experiential views. In September 1907, Kipling and Carrie, his wife, went on a tour of Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, and were given the use of their own railway car, with their own attendant—initially designated “the Noble Nigger” in letters to the Kipling children—who “would be our guide, philosopher and friend.” In the next letter, Kipling reports that “our porter William (a negro) became a friend of the family.” He is “William (our William)” by the end of the letter, telling Kipling touching anecdotes. In a letter to a friend, William is “the Negro Potentate in charge” and “negro King” who “entertains us with stories.”