The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling Read online

  All the characters here, apart from the star singer ’Dal Benzaguen, come from a man’s world. This is true of many late Kipling stories: servicemen recall destructive passions over their beer in ‘Mrs Bathurst’; the Masons in ‘The Janeites’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ clean their paraphernalia and reminisce about the war; and ancient Roman sailors talk naval shop in ‘The Manner of Men’. These tales communicate the charm of male companionship enhanced by the pleasure of craftsmanship beautifully executed: a Mason polishing the Emblems of Mortality to the exact shade ‘betwixt the colour of ripe apricots an’ a half-smoked meerschaum [pipe]’ in ‘The Janeites’; Mr Marsh in ‘His Gift’ expertly breaking an egg into hot fat; the Roman port inspector telling a young captain how not to over-ballast his ship in ‘The Manner of Men’. Yet the other side of this all-male social world is an increasing fascination with women as sources of emotional or psychic power. The fact that there is nothing remotely feminist about Kipling’s treatment of women (he was after all the man for whom, notoriously ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male’) makes his representation of their powerful, often numinous ‘otherness’ the more interesting. One kind of powerful woman is the enigmatic Mrs Bathurst, not responsible for her self-destructive lover’s death in the Bulawayo forest and yet somehow implicated in the lightning that charred all his body except the false teeth; or the shadowy Bella Armine in ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, glimpsed only through her nephew’s traumatic vision of her ghost gazing at a middle-aged sergeant, ‘’e was lookin’ at ’er as though he could ’ave et ’er, an’ she was lookin’ at ’im the same way’, before he calls her into the hut where he will suffocate himself to join her in death – or the even more elusive woman in ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ whose defiled memory Manallace sets himself to revenge through years of ingenious plotting.

  While these femmes fatales are the focus of men’s transcendent or destructive passions, another kind of woman disturbs the order of things by the power of her own desire. This happens most benignly in ‘They’, where the blind and childless clairvoyante’s yearning calls the ghosts of children to her enchanted house, most spookily in ‘The House Surgeon’ where an old woman’s concentrated brooding on what she believes to be her sister’s damnable suicide in their old home feels to those living in it like a ‘burning-glass’ turned on them, most terribly in Mary Postgate’s vengeful orgasmic ‘rapture’ over the dying German pilot (who may not even exist) as she burns the effects of the beloved bullying Wynn, and most powerfully of all perhaps in ‘The Wish House’ when Grace Ashcroft chooses pain and slow death in order to keep her ex-lover alive and single. Increasingly, these late stories foreground the subjectivities of women, with occasional exceptions like the viciously ‘unappetising’ Lady Castorley who is not directly shown until the very end of ‘Dayspring Mishandled’. In ‘Mary Postgate’ and ‘The Gardener’ we see just what the repressed, matter-of-fact Mary and the disingenuously ‘open’ Helen, see – except perhaps when Mary tells herself, ‘falling back on the teaching that had made her what she was’, not to let herself ‘dwell on these things’, and when Helen encounters Christ’s miraculous directness in the last resonant words of ‘The Gardener’. As with most of Kipling’s lower-class characters, Grace Ashcroft’s point of view in ‘The Wish House’ is dramatized in dialect speech rather than being made the story’s narrative focus; but the listener Liz confirms the truth of her words (‘I lay you’re further off lyin’ now than in all your life’) as Grace gradually unbandages first the story of her own love and loss, and finally the cancer by which she has taken on herself her lover’s death – and, she believes or hopes, his capacity for loving anyone else: ‘It do count, don’t it – de pain?’ The early Kipling with all his power could not have made a character ask that unanswered question.

  Jan Montefiore 2011

  NOTES

  1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Penguin, 1945), p. 101; John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (Eyre Methuen, 1959, rev. edn. 1977), p.91; Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (Hamish Hamilton, 1979); Martin Scofield, T. S. Eliot: The Poems (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jan Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling (Northcote House, 2007).

  2. For criticism of Kipling’s prose as mechanical, see Dixon Scott’s 1912 essay in Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); for admiration of its delicate precision, see Randall Jarrell’s ‘On Preparing to read Kipling’, repr. in his Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935–1965 (Carcanet, 1982). Graham Greene’s ‘Goats and Incense’, in his Collected Essays (Bodley Head, 1969) finds both qualities.

  3. Robert Buchanan’s 1899 essay ‘The Voice of the Hooligan’, repr. in Lancelyn Green, Critical Heritage, attacks Kipling for vulgarity and jingoism; Benita Parry’s ‘The Content and Discontents of Kipling’s Imperialism’ (New Formations, 6, 1988) attacks him as a reactionary racist. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (Methuen, 1959, 2nd edn. 1965) praises Kipling’s humanity. Danny Karlin admires the perceptiveness of ‘On the City Wall’ and ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ as allegories of the limitations of Empire, in Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Edition of the Major Work (Oxford University Press, 1999). Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (St Martin’s Press and Croom Helm, 1986), Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago University Press, 1992), Zohreh T. Sullivan’s Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Routledge, 1993) and Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Verso, 1993) read Kipling’s work as symptomatic of colonial fantasies and insecurities.

  4. J. Lockwood Kipling, letter to Edith Plowden, quoted in Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (Chatto and Windus, 1999), p. 164.

  5. Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling That Nobody Read’, in his The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 1941; repr. Methuen, 1961), p. 94.

  6. K. Paustovsky, Story of a Life IV: Years of Hope, trans. Maya Harai and A. Thomson (Harvill Press, 1968), p. 119.

  7. Something of Myself and other Autobiographical Writings, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 121.

  8. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 70.

  9. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’.

  10. Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling, p. 134.

  11. Quoted in Paustovsky, Years of Hope, p. 165.

  12. Letter to E. K. Robinson, 30 April 1886, Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney (Macmillan, 1990), vol. 1, p. 127.

  13. Diary-letter to Margaret Burne-Jones, 1 June 1886, Letters, ed. Pinney, vol. 1, p. 131.

  14. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire, p. 110.

  15. Quoted in Lancelyn Green, Critical Heritage, p. 137.

  Note on the Text

  The earliest of these stories first appeared in Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later The Week’s News and the Pioneer in Allahabad; many were also reissued in the paper-cover 1888 Indian Railway Library series. Kipling later republished them in subsequent collections of stories which appeared in London. After Kipling’s arrival in London in 1890 his stories usually appeared in British and American magazines before being published in permanent collections, where they remained in later collected editions including the Sussex Edition (1937–9), the last uniform edition to be supervised by Kipling, which is followed here.

  Details of the date and place of each story’s first appearance, and the collection in which it was eventually placed, are given in the notes at the end of the book.

  Jan Montefiore 2011

  Further Reading

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Richards, David A., Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography (Yale University Press, 2009). Comprehensive, revised and updated.

  Stewart J. M., Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catologue (Dalhousie University Press, 1959).

  REFERENCE

  Harbord, R. E., A Reader’s Guid
e to Rudyard Kipling, 8 vols. (Canterbury: privately printed, 1955–65).

  Radcliffe, John (gen. ed.), New Reader’s Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling. An online Reader’s Guide, updating Harbord; available through the Kipling Society’s website.

  Yule, Henry, and Burnell, A. C. (eds.), Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms: Etymological Historical Geographical and Discursive (John Murray, 1886); repr. as Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Wordsworth, 1996).

  BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS

  Allen, Charles, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling (Little, Brown, 2007).

  Carrington, Charles, The Life of Rudyard Kipling, with epilogue (Macmillan, 1955). Memoir by Kipling’s daughter Elsie Bambridge.

  Cohen, Morton (ed.), Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship (Hutchinson, 1965).

  Flanders, Judith, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, Emily Baldwin (Viking, 2001).

  Gilbert, Elliott L. (ed.), ‘O Beloved Kids’: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).

  Gilmour, David, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (John Murray, 2002).

  Holt, Tone, and Holt Valmai, My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (Pen & Sword, 1998).

  Kemp, Sandra, and Lewis, Lisa (eds.), Rudyard Kipling: Writings on Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  Kipling, Rudyard, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney, 6 vols. (Macmillan, 1990–2004).

  Lycett, Andrew, Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999).

  Nicolson, Adam, The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862–1939 (Faber and Faber, 2001).

  Orel, H. (ed.), Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1983).

  Ricketts, Harry, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (Chatto and Windus, 1999).

  Wilson, Angus, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (Secker and Warburg, 1975).

  CRITICISM

  Bodelsen, C. A., Aspects of Kipling’s Art (Manchester University Press, 1964).

  Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1839–1940 (Cornell University Press, 1988).

  —— ‘Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and its Afterlives’, English Literature in Transition 50/2 (2007), repr. in Kipling Journal, 328 (September 2007).

  Bristow, Joseph, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (HarperCollins, 1991).

  Brogan, Hugh, Mowgli’s Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell’s Scouts (Jonathan Cape, 1987).

  —— ‘The Great War and Rudyard Kipling’, Kipling Journal, 286 (June 1998).

  Cheyette, Bryan, ‘Empire and Anarchy: John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling’, in his Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society (Routledge, 1993).

  Crook, Nora, Kipling’s Myths of Love and Death (Macmillan, 1990).

  Gilbert, Elliott L. (ed.), Kipling and the Critics (Boston, Owen, 1966). Includes essays by Henry James, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Randall Jarrell.

  —— The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story (1971; Ohio University Press, 1985).

  Havholm, Peter, Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction (Ashgate, 2008).

  Hitchens, Christopher, ‘The Bard of Empires’, in his Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (Atlantic, 2004).

  Hynes, Samuel, War Imagined: The First World War in English Culture (Bodley Head, 1990).

  Islam, Shamsul, Kipling’s ‘Law’: A Study of his Philosophy of Life (Unwin, 1975).

  JanMohammed, Abdul, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Radical Difference in Colonialist Literature’, Critical Inquiry, 12/1 (1985).

  Jarrell, Randall, ‘On Preparing to Read Kipling’, in his A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (Doubleday, 1962; repr. Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935–1965 (Carcanet, 1982).

  Kemp, Sandra, Kipling’s Hidden Narratives (Blackwell, 1988).

  Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, ‘Vision in Kipling’s novels’, in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Kipling’s Mind and Art (Stanford University Press and Oliver & Boyd, 1964).

  Kipling, John Lockwood, Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Animals in their Relations with the People (1892; repr. Kessinger, Montana, 2005).

  Knoepflmacher, U. C., ‘Female Power and Male Self-Assertion: Kipling and the Maternal’, Children’s Literature, 20 (1992).

  —— ‘Kipling’s Just So Partner: The Dead Child as Collaborator and Muse’, Children’s Literature, 25 (1997).

  Kutzer, Daphne, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (Garland, 2000).

  Lancelyn Green, Roger (ed.), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).

  —— Kipling and the Children (Elek, 1965).

  Lewis, C. S. ‘Kipling’s World’, in his They Asked for a Paper (Geoffrey Bles, 1961); repr. in Elliott L. Gilbert (ed.), Kipling and the Critics (Boston, Owen, 1966).

  McBratney, John, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born (Ohio State University Press, 2002).

  McClure, John, Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1981).

  Mallett, Philip (ed.), Kipling Considered (St Martin’s Press, 1989).

  Mason, Philip, Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire (Macmillan, 1975).

  Menand, Louis, ‘Kipling in the History of Forms’, in Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (eds.), High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1996).

  Montefiore, Jan, ‘Latin, Arithmetic and Pedagogy: A Reading of Two Kipling Fictions’, in Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (eds.), Modernism and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2000).

  —— Rudyard Kipling (Northcote House, 2007).

  Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (St Martin’s Press and Croom Helm, 1986).

  —— (ed.), Writing India 1757–1990 (Manchester University Press, 1996).

  Nagai, Kaori, Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork University Press, 2006).

  Orel, Harold (ed.), Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling (G. K. Hall & Co., 1989).

  Park, Clara Claiborne, ‘The River and the Road: Fashions in Forgiveness’, American Scholar, 66/1 (1997), repr. Kipling Journal, 309 (June 2003).

  Parry, Benita, ‘The Content and Discontent of Kipling’s Imperialism’, New Formations, 6 (1988).

  Randall, Don, Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (Palgrave, 2000).

  Rao, K. Bhaskara, Rudyard Kipling’s India (University of Oklahoma Press, 1967).

  Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Verso, 1993).

  Rushdie, Salman, ‘Kipling’, in his Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (Granta, 1991).

  Rutherford, Andrew (ed.), Kipling’s Mind and Art (Stanford University Press and Oliver & Boyd, 1964). Includes essays by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Noel Annan, W. W. Robson and Alan Sandison.

  Said, Edward, Orientalism (Vintage, 1978).

  —— ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’, in his Culture and Imperialism (Viking, 1992).

  Sandison, Alan, The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea (Macmillan, 1967).

  Stewart, J. I. M., Rudyard Kipling (Gollancz, 1966).

  Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of British India (Chicago University Press, 1992).

  Sullivan, Zohreh T., Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Routledge, 1993).

  Tate, Trudi, ‘War Neurotics’, in her Modernism, History and the Great War (Manchester University Press, 1998).

  Tompkins, J. M. S., The Art of Rudyard Kipling (Methuen, 1959, 2nd edn., 1965).

  Trotter, David, The English Novel in History 1885
–1920 (Routledge, 1993).

  Williams, Patrick, ‘Kim and Orientalism’, in Philip Mallett (ed.), Kipling Considered (St Martin’s Press, 1989).

  Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  Jan Montefiore 2011

  THE GATE OF THE HUNDRED SORROWS

  If I can attain Heaven for a pice,1 why should you be envious?

  Opium-Smoker’s Proverb

  This is no work of mine. My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste,2 spoke it all, between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died; and I took it down from his mouth as he answered my questions. So:

  It lies between the Coppersmith’s Gully and the pipe-stem-sellers’ quarter, within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan.3 I don’t mind telling any one this much, but I defy him to find the Gate, however well he may think he knows the City. You might even go through the very gully it stands in a hundred times, and be none the wiser. We used to call the gully ‘The Gully of the Black Smoke’, but its native name is altogether different, of course. A loaded donkey couldn’t pass between the walls; and, at one point, just before you reach the Gate, a bulged house-front makes people go along all sideways.

  It isn’t really a gate, though. It’s a house. Old Fung-Tching had it first five years ago. He was a boot-maker in Calcutta. They say that he murdered his wife there when he was drunk. That was why he dropped bazar-rum and took to the Black Smoke instead. Later on, he came up North and opened the Gate as a house where you could get your smoke in peace and quiet. Mind you, it was a pukka,4 respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas5 that you can find all over the City. No; the old man knew his business thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone. All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen. Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and night, night and day, was a caution. I’ve been at it five years, and I can do my fair share of the Smoke with any one; but I was a child to Fung-Tching that way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money: very keen; and that’s what I can’t understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his nephew has got all that now; and the old man’s gone back to China to be buried.