SOURCE: Park, Clara Claiborne. “The River and the Road: Fashions in Forgiveness.” American Scholar 66 (winter 1997): 43-62.

[In the following essay, Park traces similarities between Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kipling's Kim.]

When Lionel Trilling collected the essays that became The Liberal Imagination, was it chance or subliminal recognition of affinity that caused him to place his discussions of Huckleberry Finn and of Kipling side by side? Five years separated the essays—that on Kipling written in 1943, in response to the then recent essays by Edmund Wilson and T. S. Eliot (“critical attention … friendlier and more interesting than any he has received for a long time”), that on Huckleberry Finn in 1948. No interior references united them. If Trilling remembered Kim (Kipling's “best book” he'd called it in a long and appreciative paragraph) when he identified Huck Finn as a “picaresque novel, or novel of the road” and quoted Pascal's “rivers are roads that move,” he did not say so.

Kim, of course, is also about a road, a road that one of its own characters compares to a river. And on that road journey a boy and a man, separated by race and culture, bonded by love. The end of that journey, too, is problematic, a betrayal, Wilson had called it, of the complex relationship that made the book so much more than a boy's adventure story. No wonder that Christopher Clausen, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, remarks that “a persuasive case can be made for studying” the two novels “together, rather than as the products of two presumably discrete traditions.”

Yet far from being studied together, the novels have only rarely and fleetingly been associated. Eliot, though he wrote important essays on both books, did not link them. Huckleberry Finn had been around for forty-eight years, Kim for over thirty, before anyone noticed in print that the novels might have something in common. An occasional critic, in an isolated phrase, might suggest a connection between their authors. William Lyon Phelps in 1910 had seen in Kipling a debt to Twain's “deliberate, enormous hyperbole”; in 1926 Brander Matthews recalled Tom Sawyer as he wrote of a book in which “Kipling recovers the days of his youth.” But Phelps was thinking of Kipling's farcical “Brugglesmith,” Matthews of the schoolboys of Stalky and Co. Kim and Huck remained unmentioned. It was not until 1932 that Bernard De Voto dropped into his polemic with Van Wyck Brooks a first notice of Huck's affinity with Kim. He accorded it a full sentence. Huckleberry Finn “is the story of a wandering—so provocative a symbol that it moved Rudyard Kipling to discover another sagacious boy beneath a cannon and conduct him down an endless road”—“an enterprise,” he added, “that fell enormously short of its model.”

Seventeen years later the English critic J. M. F. Tompkins devoted three searching pages of a book on Kipling's art to these two “picaresque narratives, with boys as travellers, sweeping in the characteristic scenes and figures, opinions and superstitions of a particular society at a particular time.” I know of no more extensive treatment. Though comparisons have recently begun to proliferate as interest in the literature of colonialism mounts, they are confined to partial sentences and glancing suggestions. Kim and Huck are alike in “trying to evade the clamp of civilization,” notes Irving Howe. To Daniel Bivona the lama's river suggests a Heraclitean Mississippi. S. P. Mohanty finds Kim's relationship with the lama “culturally vacuous” compared with Huck's with Jim, though both boys learn “to value the hardships of an unsheltered life over the privileges of ‘sivilization.’” In his extensive discussion of Kim, Edward Said, tracing the genealogy of novels that celebrate “the friendship of two men in a difficult, and sometimes hostile, environment,” remarks parenthetically that “Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, and The Deerslayer come quickly to mind” but leaves it at that. All of these are in contexts where Kipling, not Twain, is the focus of attention. Although in the astonishing volume of critical writing on Huckleberry Finn there must somewhere be a reference after De Voto's, I have not found it.

Today, with Huck Finn present, or controversially absent, in every American high school, and scarcely a book in the exploding number of studies of imperialism, colonial literatures, and “orientalism” that leaves Kim undiscussed, it seems not only time to make the connection but extraordinary that anyone could have overlooked it. Clausen explains this by “the continuing power of cultural nationalism,” the rigid division of English-department curricula between American and British literature that “tend[s] to define the specialties of literary scholars.” He is certainly right, as my meager American harvest shows. But there are other reasons, less parochial—or parochial in a different way.

The thing is, Kipling simply isn't as important as Twain. In academic language, Kim isn't in anybody's canon. Comparability here is not a function of theme, of treatment, of authorly preoccupations, of imaginative power, of readerly pleasure or admiration; it is a function of status.

Though academics confer status, the status of Huckleberry Finn is more than academic. The very day that Twain began it is “momentous in the history of American literature.” It is not only “the great American novel,” wrote Phelps, “it is America.” Mencken went further: it is “perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English.” And there's Hemingway's judgment, endlessly quoted: “All modern American literature comes from one book called Huckleberry Finn. … There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” In the words of a popular literary pundit of the forties, Clifton Fadiman, Mark Twain is “our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Vergil.” In forty more years, a Washington Post editorialist would call Huck Finn “the Sistine Chapel of our civilization.”

American or English, academic or common reader, no one talks like that about Kim. Something deeper than academic compartmentalization underlies such torrid pronouncements. The rhetoric of cultural nationalism is the rhetoric of national need. As once they needed epics, national literatures now need great originary novels. American literature needs Huck Finn as British literature does not and cannot need Kim. “The great British novel”—the absurdity of the phrase bespeaks the disparity of the cultural need between a young nation and an old one that takes its status for granted.

Yet even if the British had yearned for the coming of a great novel, one that should profoundly tell them who they imagined themselves to be, it could not have been Kim. An adolescent America might recognize its mythical self-image in a book for boys, telling the story of a boy's escape from “sivilization.” England could not. Huckleberry Finn could be felt as central to American experience, psychologically, thematically, even geographically. To English experience, Kim could only be peripheral; part of its charm was that in each of these ways it was as far from England as could be imagined. It was not even, as A Passage to India would be, about the English in India. Its few British characters, though they have their importance to the plot, are as alien to the book's emotional center as the Widow and Aunt Sally are to Huck's relationship with Jim. Kim is overwhelmingly a novel about India—“The Finest Story about India,” N. C. Chaudhuri called it in 1957, ten years after independence, and when he added “—in English” to the title of his essay, it was a statement, not a qualification. But there was a greater obstacle than genre or locale to according Kim a status that could invite, or even admit, comparison with Twain's novel. By mid-century, what Trilling called Kipling's “mindless imperialism” had become notorious. Kipling had won the Nobel Prize in 1907, but in the years in which Huckleberry Finn was becoming America's Sistine Chapel—and India was struggling toward independence—his reputation steadily sank. Auden might write in 1938 that Time that “worships language” had pardoned “Kipling and his views”—pardoned him “for writing well.” But Time was in no such hurry to absolve. Through the thirties, the forties, the fifties, the sixties, Kipling's reputation resisted rehabilitation with extraordinary tenacity. And not only rehabilitation; it resisted any attempt to take his work seriously. Auden tried. Edmund Wilson tried. T. S. Eliot tried. Lionel Trilling tried. Randall Jarrell tried. To no avail. Kipling had written well enough to burn “the White Man's Burden” into the English-speaking memory, and for three generations that phrase was beyond pardon. However deeply—or finely—Kim might be about India, it was wholly at home with empire. Certainly the imperial voice was less strident in this novel, conceived in Vermont and completed in England, than in earlier stories by Kipling. Yet it was still audible, and that was enough. A book wholly at home with empire could not be a great novel.

Time passes, however. Trilling might write in 1943 that “Indians naturally have no patience with Kipling,” but it is Indians, former Indians, and others whose anti-imperialist credentials are impeccable who now take Kipling very seriously indeed. Not only Chaudhuri, but Sara Suleri, S. P. Mohanty, Zohreh T. Sullivan, K. R. S. Iyengar, V. A. Shahane, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said are ready to examine, to challenge, to praise, even, in varying degrees, to pardon. Kim, like Huckleberry Finn, has never been out of print. But in the last ten years it has become available in paperback in Twentieth Century Classics (Penguin), The World Classics (Oxford), and Bantam publications; a Norton Critical Edition inches toward publication. An irresistible comparison need no longer be resisted.

Kipling and Twain, after all, were not merely contemporaries. They were profoundly aware of each other—acquaintances and mutual admirers long before 1907, when Lord Curzon conferred on each of them Oxford's honorary degree. Kipling was a schoolboy in England when he read Tom Sawyer's adventures. In 1888, at twenty-two, he was quoting Huckleberry Finn from memory, though he'd been six years in India and the book had been published only three years before. In 1889 he would return to England—via San Francisco, whence he would make his way to Elmira, New York, to seek out “this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.” Naturally Twain had never heard of the young unknown; Kipling's stories had not yet appeared outside India. Yet the meeting was memorable for both. Kipling sent a reverential account of it to his Indian newspaper; years later, Twain would record his memory of it in his autobiography.

Inside a year Kipling was unknown no longer. Already in 1890 Twain was reading “my splendid Kipling,” and writing a friend that his stories, “plenty good enough on a first reading,” were even better on a second. By 1895 the two most famous—and most popular—authors in the world were on familiar enough terms for Twain, with typical brio, to alert Kipling to his upcoming India trip; he would arrive “riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows.” Letters and occasional visits kept up the friendship. In 1903, when F. N. Doubleday told Twain that Kipling had called him “the great and godlike Clemens,” his response was that he “would rather see [Kipling] than any other man.”

It's no wonder they found each other congenial. I cannot think of two writers in English who had more reasons to understand each other. Both had begun as ink-stained working journalists. Both became popular almost as soon as they began to publish—immensely, internationally, and (it now seems) permanently. Both were geographical and cultural outsiders: Kipling formed by India, where he was born, to which he returned for his most formative years; Twain a raucous voice from far beyond the Hudson. They were academic outsiders as well. Twain was out of school and earning his living at thirteen, Kipling at sixteen, and both kept from that experience a lifelong commitment to “the day's work” and the kind of people that performed it. Both had an extraordinary ear for hearing and a talent for rendering their various voices, “not,” as Twain proudly explained in his introductory note to Huckleberry Finn, “in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.” Out of their working experience, too, came their respect for machines. “Engines and screws,” Henry James regretfully called it—speaking of Kipling. Speaking of Twain, Van Wyck Brooks remarked that “his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machines,” and deplored his “ingrained contempt for the creative life as against the life of sagacious action,” “for the word as against the deed.”

One could make something of an anthology of such unrelated, but virtually reversible critical dicta. “The vernacular style … has been peculiarly useful in expressing a preoccupation with process, with the way things are done,” noted Leo Marx. He was talking about Twain; he could have said the same of Kipling. Reversible, too, is his acute comment on “the chief defect of the vernacular mode—its unremitting anti-intellectualism.” When intellect counterattacks, it is on similar grounds. Thus Brooks complains that about philosophy or history “one would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all,” while Noel Annan must defend Kipling from the often-made “charge that he has no mind.” Kipling, too, is called, as Brooks called Twain, “a victim of arrested development.” When the same things are said less pejoratively, they are equally reversible. For De Voto, Twain was an artist who preferred “experience to metaphysical abstractions and the thing to its symbol.” For T. S. Eliot, Kipling was “an intuitive rather than an intellectual,” his mind not “gifted for abstract thought.”

Out of such affinities grew two extraordinary novels, each described by successive critics as the only successful novel its author achieved—his masterpiece, his one great book. Like their authors, the books generate reversible judgments, arising from one, equally applicable to the other. When Trilling speaks of a novel, part of whose greatness “is that it succeeds as a boys' book,” which read at ten “and then annually thereafter” is each year “as fresh as the year before, … changed only in growing somewhat larger,” he is of course talking about Huck Finn. But when he tells us that “to a middle-class boy he gave a literary sanction for the admiration of the illiterate and shiftless part of humanity,” he is talking about Kipling, about Kim. It hardly seems to matter which book is called “idyllic” or “pastoral,” the adjectives are so frequent, or which is praised for its command of vernacular voices. So, too, with “episodic” and “picaresque.” And these are only the most obvious of the parallels.

Such similarities might seem to suggest direct influence. Twain himself saw none, though he read Kim every year and admired it as much as he admired Kipling, whose “name and … words stir me more than any other living man's.” He thought it “worth the journey to India to qualify myself to read Kim understandingly and to realize how great a book it is.” Yet this tribute, written five years after Kim's publication and four years before Twain's death, contains no suggestion that Kim brought Huck to mind. And Kipling, so much younger, so much aware of himself as a writer? Did he recognize between river and road, between Huck and Kim, between Jim and Teshoo Lama, a kinship he might gracefully have acknowledged? I doubt it. For among the similarities are entwined such differences as might well overwhelm conscious or unconscious recognition of affinity, differences that ensure that each book remains triumphantly itself.

That both Twain and Kipling wrote children's books that adults continue to explore is a similarity at once obvious and deep. The ability—and the need—to access the far shore of childhood, to reenter and to actualize a remembered Eden, is central to the creation of these novels as to no others I can name, and it is not children but adults to whom this return has meaning. Huck and Kim take their imaginative intensity from a boyhood to which their creators could return only in dreams. Prisoners of success—including successful marriages—and perhaps for that very reason, they kept intact their vision of a paradise both past and real. Twain did not take his wife or children back to Missouri; they lived grandly and expensively in New York and Connecticut, and later, less expensively but still grandly, in the grander cities of Europe. Kipling did not take his family to India, though the Kiplings traveled widely and for years wintered in South Africa. Nor did he go back himself. Yet in the autobiography he wrote in his seventieth year, forty-four years after he had seen India for the last time, the idyll returns in a rush of remembrance: “daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder,” visits to “little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste,” he “looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods” as he held a beloved Indian hand.

Huck's idyll is very different from Kim's, not least in its duration. “It's lovely to live on a raft,” with “everybody … satisfied” and “feel[ing] right and kind toward the others,” but all told the loveliness lasts less than three weeks. As Huck and Jim drift naked down the river, their paradise is as temporary, and as isolated, as Eden itself. The incursions of a violent and unjust society shatter the dream of human fellowship, as the steamboat literally wrecks the raft. The raft will be recovered and repaired, but after that there will be only “two or three days” more to slide along “so quiet and smooth and lovely.” Once the Duke and the King come aboard, idyll gives place to boisterous farce, and paradise is lost for good.

Its perfection is dependent on its isolation, as Huck's state of innocence is dependent on his status as a moral and social outsider. To keep his integrity he must remain one; he does not and cannot. Twain advertised him on the title page as “Tom Sawyer's Comrade.” Once back on shore, Tom's world and Tom's values claim him, and the moral idyll is forgotten. Huck may speak up, amusingly if feebly, for common sense against Tom's romantic tricks, but he doesn't speak up for Jim. To reclaim the innocence Twain has insouciantly forfeited, we must steadfastly misread Huck's famous lighting out for the territory. We must, and, out of the intensity of our need, most of us do, ignoring not only the hint that Huck will be only a little “ahead of the others,” but the explicit witness of such sequels as Tom Sawyer Abroad, where Huck, returned to St. Petersburg, continues as Tom Sawyer's loyal subordinate and Jim is in blackface forever.

The idyll of Kim and Teshoo Lama, however, is hardy enough to last out the book. Their journeyings, though interrupted by Kim's “sivilizing” stints in school (where, like Huck, he wears uncomfortable clothes but learns some useful things), cover three full years, in which Kim has time to grow as Huck cannot. And unlike Huck's and Jim's idyll, secure in an isolation in which “nothing ever happened,” Kim's paradise is one of human bustle and noise and continuing event. Unlike the river, or the barely mentioned “territory,” India is peopled, various and rich with human beings, their languages, religions, their social rules and assumptions. The Grand Trunk Road is “as a river,” on which move “all castes and kinds of men … Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters—all the world coming and going,” as social as Huck's actual river is solitary. Kim swims in society. He, like Huck, is fatherless and motherless, socially marginal, even Irish. Yet he is the ultimate insider, at home everywhere and with everyone, the “Little Friend of All the World.” Far from depending on isolation, his relationship with Teshoo Lama is social from the outset, beginning in a boy's social curiosity (“He is new”) and continuing in a boy's expertise, the street smarts that mediate between the Holy One's spirituality and the rich practicalities of the world.

And the world in Kim is not violent but benign. In that respect Kipling's is far more a boy's book than Twain's, though in other ways it is far less so. To reread Huckleberry Finn as an adult is to experience a society so murderous that only selective memory—and the return of Tom Sawyer—can haze it into the eternal summer of Norman Rockwell boyhood. Huck's father nearly succeeds in killing him. Jim is in continual danger of death. We could list corpses, beginning with Pap's, but with the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, we'd lose count, and Colonel Sherburn's point-blank shooting of the town drunk still to come. “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another,” says Huck, oddly enough when the deaths are behind him and it's only a matter of tar and feathers. Yet even in the farcical ending, the lynch mob and the bullets are real.

Whereas in all of Kim there is not a single fatality. In Kipling's Eden as in Milton's, death, though alluded to, is suspended. Danger and risk are asserted rather than experienced, and the single act of violence, in which a brutal Russian knocks down the lama and tears his marvelous drawing of the Wheel of Life, would in Huck's harsh world hardly merit the telling. Kipling's earlier stories had been full of the murder and graphic mayhem that come easy to a young reporter—too full, protested Indian critics, to pretend to a realistic rendition of Indian life. Here he makes another choice. We may recognize reasons of genre—Victorian boys' books minimized or excluded outright violence—unless, of course, they were written by Mark Twain. But in Kim the exclusion has deeper roots. This was the beloved country of his childhood, the secure paradise of sensory awareness and human affection from which he'd been exiled when, at five, his parents had left him without explanation in the chill English hell that he to the end of his life would call The House of Desolation. Not English but Hindustani was the vernacular of paradise, the language of songs and stories, of love. In paradise children had to be reminded to “speak English now to Papa and Mama.” Writing Kim in the “gloomy, windy English autumn,” Kipling “had my Eastern sunlight.” Here he could regain all he'd lost and more, dreaming a world “below the age of caste” in which a boy, white and yet not white, Indian and yet British, could recognize what Zohreh T. Sullivan calls “the underground Indian child who is always unavoidably within him.” Kipling would find a plot that would allow that child to grow out of boyhood, able, by his mastery of language and disguise, to do what, if it had ever been possible, was possible no longer. Though Kim is now sixteen and a sahib, he can enter the temple as the child Ruddy could and find his lama there, and “forgetting his white blood,” gladly make the Indian gesture of reverence, stooping to touch his Holy One's feet. “That night he dreamed in Hindustani, with never an English word.” Even in imagination, Twain could secure no such fullness of return.

Kim is, as Edward Said points out, “an overwhelmingly male novel”—another doubly applicable critical perception. Idylls written, if not only for boys still with boys in mind, are likely to be. De Voto invites another double application, noting that Twain “could create women of only a certain age and class.” Yet crucial differences must qualify both judgments. Both Twain and Kipling are at home with older women, good cooks who can at need nurse back to health the sick or injured male. But the aunts and widows of Huckleberry Finn represent a sivilization not only misspelled but sentimentalized, a civilization (as De Voto notes) that excludes sex. It's a familiar picture. In age, the female is nurturing and prone to tears; in youth, if worthy of male attention, she is prone to tears, beautiful, and in need of male protection. Mary Jane Wilks is “sweet and lovely” and makes Huck's heart swell up like to bust, but at nineteen she is no more to be apprehended sexually than Tom Sawyer's Becky Thatcher.

But as there's more violence in Huck than fits an idyll, there's more sex in Kim than fits a boys' book—certainly one published in 1901. Though the old woman from Kulu nurses Kim as Aunt Sally nurses the wounded Tom, her inventive curses and cheerful sexual innuendos are more likely to recall the Wife of Bath than any female in Huckleberry Finn. Huck's puppyish attachment to Mary Jane would touch Victorian readers and perhaps convince them; Kim's expertise with helpful prostitutes made one contemporary reviewer wish for a “cleaner” hero. And there is his encounter with the Woman of Shamlegh,¹ up in the polyandrous hills. “No common bearer of babes,” as she proudly tells Kim, this masterful woman who gives the orders in her village and holds it directly from the Rajah makes Kim an offer inconceivable for Mary Jane. If he refuses, it is not because he does not understand its nature, though few of Kipling's child readers would have done so. Kim has known about sex “since he could speak”; Huck, so familiar with violence, seems never to have heard of it.

The confident, self-defined women of Kim are in need of no man's protection—or boy's. On the contrary, they control the episodes that contain them, and those episodes are crucial to the novel. Huckleberry Finn could do without Mary Jane, and one Aunt Sally is much like another. In contrast, the unsentimental realism with which Kipling treats his female characters allows us to take them seriously. (I know a traveler in the Himalayan foothills who not long ago received—and like Kim refused—just such an invitation in just such a place from just such a woman.) Because we can take them seriously, Kipling can use them for serious purposes. Women not only provide a protective setting for the novel's concluding episodes but contribute significantly to the defining of its major themes. The Woman of Shamlegh marks a significant stage on Kim's journey to maturity. Mary Jane can only cement Huck's eternal boyhood. She is merely another installment in a novel Hemingway famously advised us not to finish, a novel whose author just as famously warned its readers that “persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

Kipling too called Kim “picaresque and plotless”; he told his mother that “what was good enough for Cervantes was good enough for him.” This looks at first like another reversible judgment, but the similarity dissolves on inspection. Huckleberry Finn is indeed a series of “adventures,” as its title indicates. Sometimes they include Jim; more often he is absent or disastrously peripheral. Teshoo Lama appears in thirteen of Kim's fifteen chapters; he is never long out of Kim's consciousness or ours. Structurally, there is no doubt about what is the novel's center: spatially, the Road (as Huck's River is not, however much we wish it to be); intellectually, psychologically, and humanly, the relationship of Kim and the lama, a relationship that guides the novel from its beginning to its tender and ambiguous end.

As Said has pointed out, Kim is both bildungsroman and quest story. For the lama, it is a quest for release from the Wheel of Being; for Kim a discovery—and creation—of his true identity. Who, what is Kim? By the novel's end, the road will have brought a resourceful boy to the threshold of effective manhood—in his own terms. The lama will—in his own terms—have found his own River, the River of Lord Buddha's Arrow; he will have achieved salvation “for himself and his beloved.” Kipling, having centered his novel on two antithetical figures, young and old, white and colored, worldly and spiritual, can now use the two concluding episodes, each made possible by a woman, to bring their separate quests to a single close. At Shamlegh, the two seemingly irreconcilable plotlines coalesce. At Kulu they are brought to conclusion, a conclusion that at once ensures the novel's artistic coherence and challenges us with questions neither Kipling nor we can answer.

At Shamlegh, the Woman, though a bitter skeptic in matters of religion (readers who remember “Lispeth” will know why), will provide the necessary litter for the weakened lama and order her husbands to carry him to what will prove to be the end point of his quest. At Shamlegh, too, Kim's defense of the lama will enable his full entry into the Great Game as he takes possession of the maps of the Russian spies and throws their surveying instruments into bottomless space. In this climactic episode, he justifies the years of education that have converted a clever street urchin into an effective agent of British intelligence.

Though this is exactly the outcome we have found so difficult to pardon, in the novel's own terms—Said is unquestionably right on this—it is a triumph. Sivilization could promise Huck and Jim no such protective order as Kipling saw in his idealized British Raj, the Raj of bridges and railroads, engines and screws, the benign and active guarantor of an enlightened justice that should understand and respect the multiform beliefs and differences of the governed, their civilization, properly spelled—everything but their ability to govern themselves.

And yet, are the novel's terms so simple? In one of the verses Kipling liked to affix to his chapters, he—or is it Kim?—gives ecumenical thanks to God (for he knew quite well the meaning of “Allah”) “who gave me two / Separate sides to my head.” Two sides. English and Indian. Game and quest, and a quest is not a game. In this bildungsroman in which (Said again) “he has graduated from one brilliant success to another,” there is another kind of education for Kim, not complementary to, but radically at odds with, the first, a kind of education that puts the very concept of success in question. At Shamlegh, Kipling brings to its sharpest concentration the conflict that defines the novel.

Brilliantly double, the episode that is a triumph for Kim is for the lama a Dark Night of the Soul. The detour that has taken him back from the plains to his beloved hills—and Kim more deeply into the Game—has tempted him from his quest, back into the illusory world of desire and anger. At Shamlegh, the lama articulates most fully the Way he has tried to teach Kim and confronts its most difficult challenge. “All the long night,” “torn and wrenched beyond a thousand blows,” he traces “the running grass-roots of evil.” Fifty years past, monk or no monk, the lama was a fighter. He still bears the scar. Now, though the Russian's blow “was but a shadow on a shadow,” it struck with all the power of illusion. “Evil in itself … it met evil in me, anger, rage, and lust to return evil.” More: returned to the hills, the old man had exulted, gloried in his endurance, “desired strong slopes to climb.” The attack, the tearing of the sacred Wheel of Life, “was a sign to me, who am no better than a strayed yak, that my place is not here. … ‘Back to the path,’ says the Blow. ‘The Hills are not for thee. Thou canst not choose Freedom and go in bondage to the delight of life.’” “Just is the Wheel. … Learn the lesson, chela.” It is not the lesson of Kim's Western education.

Kim mutters what we may take as a Western response—or perhaps it is merely a natural one. It is certainly truthful. The lesson “is too high for me. … I am glad I hurt the man.” Reject force? Kim is a boy, and boys are likely to return blow for blow. He is an agent of government—of imperial government—and governments do, perhaps must, use force. Reject the world? The whole novel has celebrated the delight of life.

The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. … This was life as he would have it—bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye.

Edmund Wilson's political reading of the East-West conflict in terms of the Indian independence movement seems transitory and shallow compared with the conflict between the lama's Way and Kim's.

We may see it as a conflict between Eastern quietism and Western activism, but that is too easy. Though Kipling invites such a reading, he pushes us beyond such ready dichotomies. The West has its contemplatives, and not all of them are saints; there is nothing quieter than Huck's and Jim's Mississippi idyll, where every incursion of the active world threatens danger or injustice, and usually both. And Kim's India is full of men of action (we need only consider Kim's alternative father figure, Mahbub Ali), all of them, in the lama's terms, deeply engrossed in the world, cheerfully and energetically bound on the Wheel.

Men of action, and women too. Like the lama, the Sahiba of Kulu is old. Kipling brought her in near the Road's beginning; here, at its end, he needs her again, and not only for his plot. Certainly she provides a haven for Kim, now ill and exhausted, and the failing lama. But more than any single character except Kim himself, she provides the thematic counterweight to the lama's rejection of the delight of life and the needs of the “stupid body.” Her practicality, her vigorous enjoyment, her good food, her healing potions and massage techniques of which, Kipling tells us, Europeans know nothing, carry a heavier weight than Aunt Sally's good grub and tearful care for the wounded Tom. Affirming in age what Kim's alert delight affirms in youth, they define the central conflict that pervades the novel and organizes it.

As Kim teasingly reminds his Holy One, those for whom the world is illusion must depend on the day's work of those for whom it is real. The lama's detachment requires “a chela to prepare tea for him, and to fold a blanket for his head, and to chase out calving cows.” The Sahiba, with her raunchy jokes and her talkative preoccupation with grandchildren, is a persuasive voice for the tasks and pleasures of the ongoing, fertile world. Like the Rissaldar, the old soldier who jokes with the lama, “the despiser of this world,” he who calls children “stumbling blocks upon the Way” yet sings a nursery ditty to comfort a crying baby, she speaks for another kind of river than Lord Buddha's, what the narrator calls “the broad smiling river of life.” That the lama finds his own river in her fields, that the novel ends in her compound, confirms and reaffirms its double pull.

But the strongest voice for the delight of life has been implicit throughout—not only the delight in the Road and its color and variety, but the delight in another human being, the one attachment the lama cannot relinquish, his love for his chela. It is in this relationship that Kipling's Road differs most from Twain's River. Both, indeed, assert the Edenic possibility of affection in difference. And in both unlikely pairings, that love is a powerful educative instrument, as white boy learns from man of color lessons their creators direct not only to the children for whom the books were ostensibly written but also to the adult world. “Learn the lesson, chela.” In Huckleberry Finn, this is overwhelmingly a lesson of the heart. The “good heart” Twain gave Huck allows him to discover what clever, heedless Tom will never know. He learns from Jim that blacks love their families just as white folks do. He learns, though he will all too soon forget it, that folks who play humiliating tricks on friends who love them are trash. He learns that he'd go to hell to save Jim, although he doesn't learn why. And since Twain's irony calls upon adult readers to think things through, we learn from the paradisal raft more than Huck can understand, or at least conceptualize, about the dehumanizing of human beings.

Kim, too, has a good heart, but he swims in deeper waters. In Huckleberry Finn we know what is right and what is wrong, all the more clearly because a slave-owning society has reversed those terms in the name of Christianity. But it is part of Kim's force that it poses questions to which there can be no answers. We cannot imagine Huck questioning his own identity, as Kim does in his frightened isolation, or choosing to travel as a disciple with a despiser of this world. What Kim absorbs from the lama cannot be what Huck absorbs from Jim. What Huck—and we with him—must learn over and over is that Jim is like us and we like him, all human together; what he does not learn, and we must, is that any system that denies that is simply, unequivocally wrong. What Kim—and we—learn from the lama is the possibility of an alternative, valid, and wholly other way of being.

That a resourceful and sociable boy who is, as the lama notes, “something of a small imp” should be attracted to, of all things, an exemplar of holiness is for the novelist an extraordinary creative choice, a choice, literally and figuratively, halfway round the world from Huckleberry Finn. Kipling built that choice into the story from its opening in front of the great Museum of which Kipling's own father was curator, whose astonishing collection of Buddhist sculptures Kipling uses to introduce a novel that, as finely as any in our language, sets out the counter-statement to the values of the imperial West. Who is Kim? What is Kim? What is real and what is illusion? How should life be lived? Huck would not be Huck if he asked such questions.

The waters are deep, and Twain would have found them about as congenial as a bath in the Ganges. When he writes about Benares in Following the Equator, it is the river's filth that strikes him, not its holiness, and though he tries to be respectful, he sprays Hinduism with the same corrosive sarcasm—no more, perhaps, but certainly no less—that he accords Christianity. But Kipling has made metaphysical and religious questions integral to the relationship between Kim and Teshoo Lama, and he treats these questions with full seriousness. The relationship between boy and man is of the rare kind that is founded on respect for what the other is, and the lama is Kim's Holy One. Edward Said types with Western fingers when he writes that “of course,” “there is some mumbo-jumbo” in the lama's final vision of the soul's escape “beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things.” It is a vision that Kipling, having two sides to his head, both understands and honors; his presentation of its dimensions is in turn respected by such Indian critics as Iyengar, Shahane, Chaudhuri, and Bhaskar Rao. Kim will not choose that Way—he will recognize that for him, as for the Widow and the Rissaldar, the world is real, roads are “meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to.” Yet the lama's voice will be unforgotten. Kipling never discounts his vision, nor can India be experienced—or respected—by discounting it. There must be a sense in which the Holy One's search is fulfilled, his cleansing River more than a mere brook.

Here, at least, Kipling's respect is untainted by the racial condescension that manages, apparently without Twain's noticing it, to transform Jim from a moral teacher to whom Huck can willingly humble himself to the superstitious butt of an elaborate practical joke. Both Jim and the lama have been called childlike by critics, but the lama's innocence is very different from what William Lyon Phelps, secure in the white stereotypes of 1910, could praise as Jim's “peculiar harmlessness.” That the lama is unaware that the Western education he paid for prepared his chela for a secret-service career, that he knows nothing of the Great Game, is naïve, but it is not foolish. It is no undeveloped intellect that holds that “to help the ignorant to wisdom is always a merit.” If the lama is a child in the ways of the world and the Raj, it is because he has spent fifty years in a monastery, not because he is what Kipling calls an “Oriental.”

The novel's Orientals—Hurree Babu, Mahbub Ali, and a host of others—are neither childlike nor naïve. And it is no reverent native but Kipling's own narrative voice that offers us the lama “as a scholar removed from vanity, as a Seeker walking in humility, as an old man, wise and temperate, illuminating knowledge with brilliant insight, … till Kim, who had loved him without reason, now loved him for fifty good reasons.” That we must ask what use, in the Game, Kim can make of a wisdom that defines the whole life of action as illusion is central to the tender irony that pervades the novel. But it is a challenge to the lama's Way, not a dismissal of it.

Teshoo Lama is a spiritual presence so compelling that it keeps the love and allegiance even of this savvy street kid turned sahib. On such dignity one does not play jokes. “He had dreamed dreams at school of returning to the lama as a Sahib—of chaffing the old man before he revealed himself—boy's dreams all.” One of the more problematic affinities between Twain and Kipling was their love, in life and in fiction, of the practical joke. Even De Voto, espousing Twain's frontier robustness against Brooks's Eastern genteelism, could not ignore the “inharmonious burlesque” that defaces the last chapters of his novel, and critics from Henry James to Edmund Wilson complained of Stalky and Co. But Kipling could control the tilt toward farce that Twain allowed to mar even his finest work. No contrast is more telling than his decision to make the maturing Kim consider, and reject, exactly the kind of prank most reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn.

Of all the reversible judgments, the least avoidable is the issue that has already insisted on making its way into this exposition, however I tried to hold it back. Of Kim, Said wrote that it is “a rich and absolutely fascinating but nevertheless profoundly embarrassing novel.” Huckleberry Finn, too, continues to fascinate and embarrass, in unequal measure. E. L. Doctorow puts it categorically: “Something terrible happens—terrible for Huck, terrible for American literature,” and Twain “blows his greatest work.” Doctorow makes no excuses. “It is Huck Finn who struggles against the mores of his time to help the black man, Jim, escape from slavery, but it is Huck's progenitor” who brings back Tom, converts Jim's liberation into a protracted, cruel joke, and expects us to enjoy it. “Tom's book and Huck's book,” writes Doctorow, “are conflicting visions of the same past, and at the end one vision prevails, and it is the wrong one.” Huck and Tom. Sahib and Indian. Frederick Crews, writing of Twain, has spoken of “a conflicted authorial will.” A critic such as D. L. Smith, brilliant, generous, and black, may try to save the appearances by reading Huck Finn as an allegory of Reconstruction. But the common reader must read with Hemingway and Doctorow a profoundly embarrassing novel, structurally fissured, ethically riven.

Today's common reader—or critic—is not, however, yesterday's. Time may, as Auden thought, forgive the trespasses of those who write well enough, but more than half a century went by before it was generally noticed that Twain had anything to be forgiven for. “What was principally wrong” with Tom's well-named “Evasion,” thought De Voto, was that “Mark's innocent pleasure thrust it into a great novel.” As late as 1948 Trilling could write of “this almost perfect work” that “only one mistake has ever been charged against it,” and that mistake was an aesthetic, not an ethical lapse. The Evasion was “a falling off,” “too long,” “too elaborate,” though, like Eliot, he defended its “formal aptness.” Neither suggested that there were other grounds for criticism or for defense. It was not until 1953 that Leo Marx, in The American Scholar, called attention to “the glaring lapse of moral imagination in Huckleberry Finn” and set the terms for the debate that still continues.

Against current apologetics we may usefully set the reading experience of the Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale. William Lyon Phelps, too, was defending Twain, whose genius he thought insufficiently recognized in accounts of American literature that gave him less space than Josh Billings and Artemus Ward. He knew Twain, and, closer to him in time and in assumptions about American society, he is arguably a more realistic reader of what is upon the page. Contrasting Huck with Uncle Tom's Cabin, Phelps praises Twain for “giv[ing] us both points of view,” for including, along with “the horror,” “the beautiful side of slavery,” “its wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side.” As Huck rose to the status of cultural icon, the raft's brief idyll was remembered; the beautiful side of slavery, the side that is encoded in Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas and the good food they send the captive Jim, was ignored. Twain, after all, was anti-slavery; was not that enough? Jim was really free all along, and though the Evasion might be an artistic lapse, who would grudge Tom his little joke or Twain his innocent pleasure?

Kipling and his views have been less fortunate. A more conscious thinker than Twain, as well as a more conscious artist, he knew exactly where he stood and why. He could yearn for India, respect its religious thought, love in imagination its multivarious people as far as he knew them, think he knew them better than he did. He could not respect their ability to govern themselves. Today, perhaps, we may be ready to find it astonishing that for so long this has been harder to forgive than an appreciation of slavery's beautiful side.

Auden might pardon such views; Wilson could not. In mid-century, he knew “what the reader tends to expect”: that “Kim will come eventually to realize that he is delivering into bondage to the British invaders those whom he has always considered his own people, and that a struggle between allegiances will result. … It never seems to occur to his creator that this constitutes a betrayal of the lama.” A betrayal of the lama. A betrayal of Jim. “Kipling has committed one of the most serious sins … which are possible for an imaginative writer. He has resisted his own sense of life and discarded his own moral intelligence.” Five years later Leo Marx would write of Twain's lapse of moral imagination. The need for pardon may be where the two books most profoundly connect.

Yet we may pardon differently, and for different things. Kim ends, tenderly and beautifully, with the lama; Huck Finn ends with Jim only in a way that, if we cannot forget it, we cannot endure. Kipling was able to imagine a plot to bring the sides of his head together, to resolve his conflicted authorial will into a dream of love so fully imagined it seems real—love subsisting not only for a few weeks in isolation, but in society and over time. It was, of course, impossible—perhaps the word is inconceivable—in the imperial India he had known to bring Indian and English adults together as equal friends, in actuality or in fiction. Twenty years later Forster would try it, only to conclude that it couldn't yet be done. It is hardly surprising that Mark Twain couldn't keep going a true black-white friendship in America in 1885.

But it is more than personal affection that provides Kipling's resolution, and this is where, as Said has argued, Wilson's anti-imperialism leads him to misjudge the artistic integrity of a novel that, embarrassing as it may be, we are, in Said's words, “entitled to read as belonging to the world's great literature.” (Among Said's few revisions in incorporating the 1986 introduction to Kim into his 1993 Culture and Imperialism was to change “great” to “greatest.”) However flawed the politics, the novel contains no such imaginative fissure as Twain's, since for Kipling it is exactly the British Empire, whose servant Kim has become, that guarantees the continuance of the multiple India he has loved, that protects and holds safe against change the paradise of his youth. In the sacramental moment when Kim lies down in the healing Indian dust—no English grass, “no new herbage that, living, is half-way to death already, but the hopeful dust that holds the seeds of all life”—Kipling has regained his Indian sunlight the only way he can regain it, in memory and art. It shines on British India in full ideality, maintained by the English hierarchy of class and race atop the Indian hierarchy of caste. Hierarchies will seem natural, even necessary, when you are born to them. Benign English power must tame and order that marvelous multiplicity (no immolated widows, no Hindu-Muslim bloodshed), and guarantee it against the aggressor from the North. “Oh, India, Oh, my country!” wrote Kipling when leaving it. Trilling called Huckleberry Finn “a hymn to an older America forever gone.” For Kim, he would have had to change only one word.

After almost a century, we may need to remind ourselves of the power of that imperial ideal. It could, after all, make an imperialist even out of Mark Twain—whose anti-imperialism, based on his opposition to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines, has been greatly exaggerated. Inspired by Kipling to visit India, he returned to rehearse for eager Americans the most sensational British accounts of “the Satanic brotherhood of the thugs,” along with horror stories of suttee, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the “Great Mutiny.” The Mutiny in Kim is accorded an understated page and a half, just enough to make the imperial point. In Following the Equator, Twain milks it for fourteen pages. It was not Twain but Kipling who wrote of Warren Hastings that “he saved to England the Indian Empire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the Indians themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitiless oppression and abuse.” It is in that context that we may hear and pardon Kipling's hymn to the India he could neither transfix nor possess.

Such a hymn will raise, of course, the specter of “essentialism.” There's not much to be done about that, in Twain, in Kipling, in a lot of other writers we are lucky to be able to read. Trilling's phrase, which deliberately echoes Twain's own words about Tom Sawyer, may remind us that hymning the past is something that artists do—sometimes, as Proust did, in its passingness, more often in what the passing, temporal consciousness strives to fix as a timeless essence. That is what an idyll is. Taken in that sense, it is not a minor form, but one of the continuing shapes art gives to our desire.

Nor need Kim and Huckleberry Finn seem as irrevocably past as all that. Huck has still enough to show us about race, and time has brought round even some of Kipling's views that seemed most obsolete. The imperial Russian outrages the lama's map of the moral universe in an act all too prophetic of what other lamas have suffered and are suffering at the hands of another empire, and today there is no Kim and no nation, imperial or otherwise, to come to their defense. And the Russian menace to India, mention of which seemed so retrograde in mid-century, takes on unexpected resonance when, recalling Afghanistan, we read the language of a Zhirinovsky who dreams of Russian soldiers who will “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.” Indeed the world changes. But some things do not change.

The past will always need our forgiveness, as will the passing present. If time indeed worships language, it is not for language alone, but because it preserves the past, in its blindness and its beauty, set down in what Grace Paley calls “the beautiful letters of the alphabet, invented by smart foreigners long ago to fool time and distance.” Huckleberry Finn hymns a peculiarly American past, complete with the moral fissure that is integral to it. Kipling's multicultural idyll, begun in America, finished in England, suffused with India, though it too hymns a vanished past, reaches forward toward the future. Both novels hold up, however imperfectly, the possibility of an intercultural respect and admiration that society would not yet support, that neither Twain nor Kipling could in full consciousness espouse. Twain could take these emotions only so far. If Tom and Huck were the two sides of his head, they were both white. In Kipling's more complexly divided imagination, West and East met and mingled. He was the first to imagine what writers like Salman Rushdie and Homi Bhabha now call for and embody—“culture's hybridity,” in Bhabha's words, the “Third Space” in which, as we explore it, we may “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves,” as we “transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and places, both human and historical.” That hybridity is irreversible, to the immense enrichment of our literature and our language. Twain, perhaps, had dimly seen his way toward it. Kipling took it further. Henry James, Kipling's admirer and antithesis (and witness at his wedding) in 1891 wrote of how he could convey “the sum of the feeling of life as reproduced by innumerable natures; natures that feel through all their differences, testify through their diversities.”

Encouraged by this oddly prescient vocabulary of difference, we may play our own post-modern game as we imagine James singing with Bhabha in anachronistic harmony. If literature needs originary texts, or if we do, Kim may stand in full irony as the great originary post-colonial novel. With Huckleberry Finn, it can help persuade us to pardon the past its pastness, to recognize both what it could not see that is so clear to us and what is invisible to our own blinded eyes. The flaws and insights of our great books challenge us in many ways, not least, today, to free ourselves from the reductive expectation that what the mirror of art should reflect back to us is our own transient face.

Note

1. Those who pick up Kipling's carefully planted clues will recognize her as the touching “Lispeth,” abandoned by her English lover in the story that opens Plain Tales from the Hills, and reflect that Kipling was capable at least once of representing the encounter of native and Englishman as devastating rather than benign.