If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years

Benfey, a Mount Holyoke English professor, briskly and enjoyably recounts Rudyard Kipling’s romance with the United States. While often associated with India, Kipling’s birthplace and early home, he actually wrote two of his most famous depictions of that country, The Jungle Book and Kim (in its first draft), while living in Brattleboro, Vt., from 1892 to 1896. Benfey asserts that Kipling’s sense of America as a “lawless jungle” informed the first book’s depiction of a human boy being raised in an actual jungle, and that much of Kipling’s philosophy about character (expressed in his famous poem “If”) sprang from his admiration for such American writers as Mark Twain, whom Kipling sought out on his first American visit, in 1889. Kipling also exerted his own influence on Americans, perhaps most significantly in 1899, when Henry Cabot Lodge used Kipling’s imperialist poem “The White Man’s Burden” to convince his fellow U.S. senators to vote for occupying the Philippines. However, Benfey is concerned more with the personal than the political, emphasizing that the poem’s publication coincided with the death of Kipling’s American-born daughter, Josephine, during a visit by the Kiplings (then living in England) to Manhattan, a shattering loss that conclusively cut Kipling’s American ties. This is an admirably concise account of a complex and pivotal period in a famed writer’s career. (July)