The Wish House and Other Stories (3 page)

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):

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.”

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.”

In my audited account of Kipling’s racism, I should like to place this account of the Negro railway conductor in service in the credit column, directly opposite the irritated debit account of the Negro waiter in service of
From Sea to Sea.

In
Something of Myself
, Kipling gives a more decided, less gradualist account of his relationship with William. William isn’t
ever
“the Noble Nigger.” He is “coloured porter, our Nurse, Valet, Seneschal, and Master of Ceremonies.” Here Kipling is mostly interested in William’s vernacular: “bekase” for “because,” “haow” for “how,” “dey” for “they” etc. To this end, Kipling recounts one of William’s anecdotes—about a friend who wants to be a conductor, but thinks he can succeed simply by copying William. He fails dismally, of course, and cries in a cupboard. William has to do the work for him.

Why does Kipling tell this parable, as he calls it? That it
happened
isn’t a reason for inclusion. I think the reason is unconscious. The anecdote is an act of unconscious discrimination on Kipling’s part—he is discriminating between his prejudice and his experience. Prejudice requires Negro incompetence, the caricature crying in the cupboard. Experience requires tribute to the omni-competence of William.

Kipling is undoubtedly prejudiced against the Irish (and, incidentally, the Welsh)—largely because they resist British rule and insist on their national language.

This is from a letter to Andrew Macphail (October 5, 1913): “I had a man the other day from the interior of Wales poisonous-f of his own ‘nationality’ and its tongue and the teaching thereof. But I entirely agreed with him and was prepared to help in giving funds for the teaching of Cymric and Ogham and all the rest—compulsory if need be. Says he gratefully:—‘But I shouldn’t have expected this of you Mr. Kipling.’ ‘Man,’ says I, ‘anything that cripples and diverts and renders more unintelligible the inferior and crippled breeds of the earth has my blessing and support.’”

In
Something of Myself
, Kipling candidly disparages the Irish: “[They] had passed out of the market into ‘politics’ which suited their instincts of secrecy, plunder and anonymous denunciation.”

This and other disparaging anti-Irish remarks scattered through Kipling’s correspondence look racist—and they are, but the racism is an emphasis given to political disagreement. Vis-à-vis the Irish, we can see the absence of true racism in a letter to Andrew Macphail (October 21, 1911). There, Kipling excoriates the Irish for their diminished aesthetic sense, their clinging to “Erse,” their spitting (like U.S. citizens), the manure pit of the station, etc. Then: “We got into the North and the car literally bumped into a new country of decent folk….” Decent folk who are, of course, Irish—but Irish who wish to be part of the United Kingdom.

In
From Sea to Sea
, a variety of verdicts on the Irish are handed down. On a train (vol. 2, p. 139) a drunken actress weeps because the conductor has taken her five-dollar bill to look for change. She fears he will not return. Kipling writes: “He was an Irishman, so I knew he couldn’t steal.” Eventually, the conductor reappears, “the five-dollar bill honestly changed.”