Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  1915 Six weeks after enlisting in the Irish Guards, Kipling’s son John is killed during the Battle of Loos in France. His death will haunt Kipling for the rest of his life

  1919-1932 Between intermittent travels during the next dozen years.Kipling continues to publish stories, poems, and historical works, including The Graves of the Fallen, and a book of verse, The Years Between, both published in 1919

  1923 He is elected rector of St. Andrews University, Scotland, and publishes The Irish Guards in the Great war.

  1924 He publishes Land and Sea: Tales for Boys and Girls.He appears before 6,000 boy Scouts at the Imperial Jamboree.

  1928 A Book of Words: Selections of speeches and Addresses Delivered Between 1906 and 1927 is published.

  1932 Kipling publishes a volume of stories, Limits and Renewals.

  1936 Kiplings dies on January 18 of peritonitis and is burried in Westminster Abbey.

  1937 Something of Myself, Kipling’s autobiography is published.

  1945 The end of World War II accelerates the decline of the British Empire.

  Introduction

  Rudyard Kipling spoke, thought, and dreamed in Hindi until he was six years old. In his autobiography Something of Myself ( 1937) , he explained why he was uniquely qualified to create the literary image of India that has lasted for more than a century. “Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly seen, friendly gods.” Less friendly was the sinister place where the Parsees left their corpses to be devoured by ravenous birds of prey, which frantically fought for position when a new human meal was served up: “Near our little house on the Bombay Esplanade were the Towers of Silence, where their Dead are exposed to the waiting vultures on the rim of the towers, who scuffle and spread wings when they see the bearers of the Dead below.”1

  Born in Bombay in 1865, the son of an artist and teacher who later became curator of the museum in Lahore (now in Pakistan), Kipling was closely related to two Pre-Raphaelite painters and to the future prime minister Stanley Baldwin. In 1871, three years after the birth of his sister, Alice, the children—following the custom of the country—were sent to England to be educated and anglicized in a healthier climate. They landed in lodgings that Kipling called the “House of Desolation” in Southsea, on the Channel coast near Portsmouth, where he was bullied, beaten, and tormented. His poor eyesight made him especially vulnerable, and he suffered partial blindness and a severe nervous breakdown. He naturally felt abandoned by his parents, who lived in India, but never blamed them for his misery.

  In “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” (1888), a story of unmotivated torment and irreparable loss, Kipling recounted his horrific experiences. As in Franz Kafka’s work, the victim feels a profound sense of guilt but has no understanding of his crime. As they prepare for his departure from India, the servants fear for the child’s future and the family members feel anxious forebodings. In England, tragically bereft of his idyllic home life and full of impotent rage, the child is increasingly isolated by failing eyesight. During his six years of confinement in the hostile household, he attempts to escape from injustice and cruelty by entering the realm of books and the imagination. Habituated to constant punishment, he instinctively cringes, anticipating another blow, when his mother finally arrives to rescue him.

  These traumatic years left a permanent scar on Kipling—a distrust of emotions, a sympathy with suffering, and (perversely) a streak of cruelty; he concluded that “when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.”2 Later, when his beloved aunt asked him why he never told anyone about this ill-treatment, he replied: “Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”3

  Beginning in 1878 Kipling spent four relatively pleasant years at the United Services College in Westward Ho!, North Devon, a second-rate school for the sons of military officers, which he described in the rather comically cruel Stalky Co. In 1882, just before his seventeenth birthday, he returned to India as assistant to the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, a Muslim city (which then had a population of 70,000) in northern India, where Kim begins. In early letters Kipling described the extreme contrast between the delights of the Moghul gardens of Lahore: “Great sheets of still water, inlaid marble colonnades, and carved marble couches at the edge, thick trees and lime bushes and acres of night blooming flowers that scented the whole air,”4 and the devastating effects of the ferocious climate. During the scorching hot season the temperature reached an incredible 160 degrees in the daytime—heating his spectacles and burning a ridge on his nose—and dropped as much as 100 degrees at night. During storms thirty flashes of lightning per minute seemed to disembowel the sky. Life was cheap and easily lost during the raging epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and plague. In “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), Kipling vividly described the effect of the heat—including the sounds and the thirst—with characteristically close observation, precise detail, and sensory immediacy: “It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and called for water.”5

  The young Kipling, born outside England and with a public-school but not a university education, was physically unattractive, unusually dark, extremely nearsighted, personally insecure, and aggressively trying to make his way in the world. In 1886 he published his first book of poems, Departmental Ditties. He spent the next three years working on a more important newspaper, the Pioneer in Allahabad, southeast of Delhi between Lucknow and Benares. In 1888 he made an astonishing impact with two volumes of innovative Indian stories, remarkable for their craftsmanship and economy of implication: Plain Tales from the Hills and Soldiers Three. The aesthete Oscar Wilde, Kipling’s literary antithesis, wrote that Plain Tales gave him the sensation of sitting “under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.”6

  In 1889 Kipling sailed to England via Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and America (a journey later described in From Sea to Sea) and was suddenly transformed from an obscure provincial into a grand celebrity. He continued to push himself very hard and in January 1890 suffered a second nervous breakdown. He described it—as if he were a machine—with astonishing objectivity: “I have broken up. My head has given out and I am forbidden work.... I knew that the smash would come some day.”7 He cured himself with a round-the-world sea voyage, and in 1890 brought out a novel, The Light That Failed, and in 1891 a collection of stories, Life’s Handicap.

  The following year in London he rather impetuously married an American, Caroline Balestier, with the writer Henry James as best man. Caroline was the sister of Wolcott Balestier, Kipling’s close and recently deceased friend, agent, and collaborator on his second novel, The Naulakha: A Story of West and East. Like Barrack-Room Ballads, it appeared in 1892. The Kiplings moved to a grand house in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote Many Inventions (1893), a book of verse, and the two Jungle Books (1894 and 1895) , and where his daughters, Josephine and Elsie, were born. His New England idyll was shattered in 1896 by a violent, scandalous, and humiliating quarrel with his unstable brother-in-law Beatty Balestier (the temperamental opposite of Wolcott), which drove Kipling out of America.

  He settled in Rottingdean, on the Sussex coast, in 1897; that year the couple’s son, John, was born, and Kipling published the novel Captains Courageous. Two years later, on an ill-fated trip to New York, Kipling suffered a near-fatal bout of pneumonia and the sudden death of the six-year-old Josephine. Yet in 1899 he also brought out Stalky Co. and his restless travel book From Sea to Sea. From 1898 to 1907, during the Boer War (1899-1902) an
d afterward, he spent winters in South Africa. He formed a close friendship with Cecil Rhodes, who provided a house on his estate and who seemed to embody his own energetic imperialism. South Africa, Kipling enthusiastically wrote, is “nothing less than a new nation in the throes of birth—a nation with resources behind it of which it hardly dreams now.”8

  Despite his literary fulminations, Kipling was a tame and docile husband, completely under the thumb of his dreadnought of a wife. One friend described his married life as “one of complete surrender. He had handed himself over bodily, financially and spiritually to his spouse,” obeying her commands without “any signs of murmuring or even of incipient mutiny.”9 Caroline, a cross between a possessive nanny and a prison matron, would interrupt him, finish his stories and, when he became too excited after a few bottles of wine, order him to an early bed.

  In 1901 Kipling brought out Kim, his last and greatest novel, and the following year moved permanently to the rather gloomy Jacobean house called Bateman’s, in Burwash, Sussex, and hardened into a national monument. He published the famous children’s books Just So Stories in 1902 and Puck of Pook’s Hill in 1906, and in 1907 became the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The last tragic turning point in his life took place in 1915, when his son John was killed in the Great War, after which Kipling continually suffered from duodenal ulcers. He refused offers of a knighthood and the rare honor of the Order of Merit and began to write more complex and troubling stories that dealt with grief, shell shock, and neurotic states. Kipling died in 1936; his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey.

  In 1901, the year Kim appeared, Queen Victoria died and Edward VII became king; President William McKinley was assassinated and was succeeded by Kipling’s friend Teddy Roosevelt. The Boer War, which began in 1899 and which Kipling reported in South Africa, continued until the British defeat in 1902. The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first wireless messages (Kipling later wrote a story called “Wireless”), and the Trans-Siberian Railway reached Port Arthur in Manchuria. The German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann published Buddenbrooks, Swedish playwright August Strindberg The Dance of Death, and American novelist Frank Norris The Octopus. The Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi and French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died; the French novelist and critic André Malraux and American movie producer and animated-film pioneer Walt Disney were born. The twentieth century had begun.

  In Kim, Kipling creates an exotic atmosphere, full of vivid characters and incidents, and immediately draws the reader into his strange world. The novel concerns a religious quest and a quest for identity, and includes both enlightenment and espionage, tranquillity and violence. It combines social, cultural, and political history with the hardships and goal of a travel book. Like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922), Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944), and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea (1978), it is one of the rare European novels with a Buddhist theme. Kim and the lama, Dharma Bums on the Road, foreshadow the sprawling works of Jack Kerouac. Maugham, a great admirer of Kipling, wrote that he gives you “the tang of the East, the smell of the bazaars, the torpor of the rains, the heat of the sun-scorched earth, the rough life of the barracks.”10

  Kipling achieved his brilliant effects by combining his two great themes, childhood and India, and by creating a bountiful array of characters, subtle modulations of style and speech, and a carefully wrought structure that controls the series of fortuitous encounters and picaresque adventures. Kim, the orphaned son of a drunken Irish sergeant and a nursemaid mother, has been brought up by a Eurasian opium eater, given free run of the narrow streets and back alleys of Lahore, and become completely assimilated to Indian life. The rainbow coalition of indigenous teachers, who lead him to his true identity and real vocation, are increasingly Europeanized; his English teachers, who train him as a spy, are increasingly sophisticated and significant.

  The Tibetan Buddhist lama rejects the world and searches for salvation. Mahbub Ali, the Afghan Muslim horse trader, works with the English but retains his traditional customs. Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the Hindu Bengali and “semi-anglicized product of our Indian colleges,”11 tries to adopt British behavior and speech. The Protestant and Catholic clergymen, Mr. Bennett and Father Victor, try to co-opt Kim into their religions. Lurgan, English but born in India, tests Kim and trains him for the Great Game of espionage. Colonel Creighton, a secret agent masquerading as an ethnologist (Kim, an expert on castes and keen on mimicry, is himself an amateur ethnologist), recognizes Kim’s unique potential and exploits his rare talents. Kim asks: “‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?”’ (p. 140) and is none of the above. But in a brief, touching scene he combines the British, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain elements in his character and culture and forgets “even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan fashion, to touch his master’s feet in the dust of the Jain temple” (p. 185).

  Kim and each of his native mentors have a different and quite idiosyncratic way of speaking. Kipling vividly conveys the flavor of vernacular speech and the formulaic repetitions of unlettered folk by using traditional proverbs and archaic diction from the seventeenth-century English of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. The lama keeps repeating the same solemn banalities in a singsong cadence: “ ‘They are all bound upon the Wheel.... Bound from life after life. To none of these has the Way been shown’ ” (pp. 64-65). Mahbub Ali’s declamatory phrases express his hearty ruffianism: “ ‘God’s curse on all unbelievers! Beg from those of my tail who are of thy faith”’ (p. 22). The babu Hurree, pompous and slightly absurd, drops his definite articles, mispronounces long words, and misuses English idioms: “ ‘I am of opeenion that it is most extraordinary and effeecient performance. Except that you had told me I should have opined that—that—that you were pulling my legs’ ” (p. 156). The seductive Woman of Shamlegh speaks with languid insinuations: “ ‘I do not love Sahibs, but thou wilt make us a charm in return for it. We do not wish little Shamlegh to get a bad name’ ” (p. 245). Kim shifts from stilted English before his formal education: “ ‘Every month I become a year more old’ ” (p. 135), to old-fashioned schoolboy slang after he’s been to St. Xavier’s:“ ‘By Jove! ... This is a dam’-tight place’ ” (p. 235). T. S. Eliot observed the contrast between Kipling’s portrayal of native characters in the early stories and in Kim:

  There are two strata in Kipling’s appreciation of India, the stratum of the child and that of the young man. It was the latter who observed the British in India and wrote the rather cocky and rather acid tales of Delhi and Simla, but it was the former who loved the country and its people.... The Indian characters have the greater reality because they are treated with the understanding of love.... It is the four great Indian characters in Kim who are real: the Lama [not Indian], Mahbub Ali, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, and the wealthy widow from the North.12

  Constantly appealing to the senses, deceptively transparent, and as lucid as the reflection of a lake, Kipling’s rich prose, after more than a hundred years, is still surprisingly fresh and vivid. India springs to life in the bustling activity of men and animals in the crowded Kashmir serai, described in a series of cinematic flashes: “Here were all manner of Northern folk, tending tethered ponies and kneeling camels; loading and unloading bales and bundles; drawing water for the evening meal at the creaking well-windlasses; piling grass before the shrieking, wild-eyed stallions; cuffing the surly caravan dogs; paying off camel-drivers; taking on new grooms; swearing, shouting, arguing, and chaffering in the packed square” (p. 20) . The sun rises on the burning plain in a stunning rainbow of colors: “Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of the keen sun” (p. 34). The enervating heat, in season, produces a chorus of somnolent sounds: “There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields” (p. 56).

  The twisty road
that rises to the hills of Kipling’s beloved Simla brings relief from the heat as well as the pleasures of its ever-changing flora and fauna, its distant prospects up to the towering mountains and down to the retreating plains:

  the wandering road, climbing, dipping, and sweeping about the growing spurs; the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti, tier upon tier on the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water-channels; the chatter of the monkeys; the solemn deodars, climbing one after another with down-drooped branches; the vista of the Plains rolled out far beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga-horns and the wild rush of the led horses when a tonga swung round a curve (p. 143).

  Finally, night comes, with different temperatures, colors, and smells, and a welcome rest from the labors of the day: “Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and catde and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes” (p. 65).

  In a letter Kipling described Kim as “a long leisurely Asiatic yarn in which there are hardly any Englishmen. It has been a labour of great love and I think it is a bit more temperate and wise than much of my stuff.”13 And in his autobiography he said of the novel: “There was a good deal of beauty in it, and not a little wisdom; the best in both sorts being owed to my Father.”14 There was also a great deal of Kipling’s life in it. His alternating cycles of six years in India, eleven school years in England, and seven years as a journalist in India correspond to the tripartite structure of the novel. In chapters 1 to 5 Kim travels with the lama, delivers Mahbub’s message, and (following the prophecy) finds his father’s regiment. In chapters 6 to 10 he’s formally trained with the regiment, at St. Xavier’s school, and by Hurree and Lurgan. In chapters 11 to 15 he is reunited with the lama, defeats the Russians, and finds his real identity as a spy. Kim is Indian in the first part, British (with Indian holidays) in the second, and British disguised as an Indian in the third. He’s oblivious to British life in part 1, rebellious in part 2, acquiescent and most obviously British in part 3.