The Wish House and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

below, and your house is unfit for a man to live in until he has been taught a lot of things which I have never learned. Consequently I hate you because I feel myself your inferior, and you despise me and my boots because you know me for a savage.’”
T HE J EWS
    Here Kipling cannot be defended. His remarks are mostly hostile, if unexcited. Because his correspondents so evidently share his views, agreement is taken for granted. On November 14, 1913, discussing the Marconi scandal and his unprintable poem “Gehazi,” Kipling writes to Max Aitken: “I can’t ‘garble’ my ‘Gehazi.’ It’s meant to be for that Jew boy on the Bench….” This is on a par with his disparaging remarks about Hebrew millionaires and Jewish takeovers of the theater.
    And yet. In “The House Surgeon,” Kipling gives us an entirely amiable portrait of the Jewish furrier, L. Maxwell M’Leod—whose unlikely name is the only possible ironic touch in the characterization. His Jewishness is a fact only, quite unremarkable.
    In
From Sea to Sea
, however, we find another surprising complication. On the one hand, there
is
the anticipated candid anti-Semitism, an unpleasant offshoot of anti-Americanism (vol. 1, p. 262): “But the real reason of my wish to return [to India] is because I have met a lump of Chicago Jews and am afraid that I shall meet many more. The ship is full of Americans, but the American-German-Jew boy is the most awful of all.”
    In America, on Independence Day, Kipling meets a German boy whose return to Europe for schooling has lost him his American accent. Kipling comments (vol. 2, p. 73): “But no continental schooling writes German Jew all over a man’s face and nose.”
    And nose.
A facial feature evidently so large that Kipling grants it independence. The nose secedes from the otherwise united features of the face. It sets up on its own. It refuses to assimilate. Anti-Semitism seldom presents itself in so pure a form.
    And yet this is Kipling sixty pages later (vol. 2, p. 131). He is sweetening particular prior criticisms with an overarching declaration of affection for Americans: “I love this People, and if any contemptuous criticism has to be done, I will do it myself.” He imagines the Man of the Future.
    What racial ingredients would you predict?
    “Wait till the Anglo-American-German-Jew—the Man of the Future—is properly equipped. He’ll have the least little kink in his hair now and again; he’ll carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet that can walk for ever; and he will wave long, thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth to the other. He’ll be the finest writer, poet, dramatist, ‘specially dramatist, that the world as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtueof his Jew blood—just a little, little drop—he’ll be a musician and a painter too.”
    As a footnote to this look at Kipling and the Jews, I’d like to draw your attention to “The Burden of Jerusalem”—one of two unpublished Kipling poems discovered in April 1988 by Christopher Hitchens in the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York.
    The poems had been sent to Roosevelt by Churchill on October 17, 1943. They are not included in the published correspondence (three volumes). Let Churchill explain why: “Similar copies were given to me by the President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on the occasion of my admission as an Honorary Fellow of the College…. I understand that Mrs Kipling decided not to publish them in case they should lead to controversy and it is therefore important that their existence should not become known and that there should be no public reference to this gift.”
    The second poem, “A Chapter of Proverbs,” needn’t concern us here. You can find it reprinted in full in Christopher Hitchens’s strangely neglected essay in
Grand Street
(vol. 9, Spring 1990).
    “The Burden of Jerusalem” is a title with two applications. It is a