Christopher Benfey - If: The Untold Story of Kiplings American Years

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and educated in England. Readers have always associated this towering writer with colonial India, where he spent his early childhood and his literary apprenticeship, and with England, where he lived, in relative isolation, during the final decades of his life. Few readers are familiar with his exuberant American years, however, during the heart of the American Gilded Age. And yet Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, the first draft of Kim, his first just so stories, and some of his greatest poems on the crest of a Vermont hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view of Mount Monadnock like a gigantic thumbnail pointing heavenward. A principal aim of this book is to introduce todays readers to a largely unfamiliar writer: an American Kipling.

During his astonishingly productive sojourn in New England, the key creative period in his entire career, Kiplings American accent took his English visitors by surprise. Arthur Conan Doyle brought his golf clubs to Vermont; the inventor of Sherlock Holmes taught Kipling to whack a ball around the rolling hills and shared Thanksgiving dinner with his Americanized host. Kipling announced, more than once, that he was preparing to write the Great American Novel. Among his close friends were American luminaries like Mark Twain, William James, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt. Kipling would have remained in Brattleboro, with his American wife and their two daughters, if a family quarrelalong with a pointless dispute between England and the United States over the border of Venezuelahad not cut short his New England idyll. His departure from Brattleboro in 1896, he confessed, was the hardest thing he ever had to do. There are only two places in the world where I want to live, Bombay and Brattleboro, he said. And I cant live in either.

A tantalizing sense of what if hangs over Kiplings American years, and complicates his present cultural status. His vivid creations are among the most familiar in the English language. Children all over the world are familiar with The Jungle Book. They thrill to Mowglis adventures among his adoptive family of wolves or the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavis epic battles with cobras. Tales such as How the Camel Got His Hump and The Elephants Child, from Kiplings Just So Stories, remain beloved bedtime reading. Kim, Kiplings shimmering novel of international intrigue and spiritual quest, is a favorite for countless readers, young and old. And teenagers continue to be exposed to the hammering exhortations of If:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too...

If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;