Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [5]
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: