Kipling's Curse

When the twenty-three-year-old Rudyard Kipling entered the literary scene in London, where he arrived in 1889 fresh from six and one-half years of extraordinary creativity in India, he caused a sensation unequaled before or since in the history of British letters. One of Kipling's biographers, Lord Birkenhead, described lyrically how the author's early works written in India affected his readers in Britain: "It was by a fortuitous triumph of timing that these poems and stories came to England, bringing thousands, for the first time, the dusty enchantment of India. 'He went up in the sky like a rocket'—it was said—'a rocket out of the magic East, scattering its many-coloured jewels in the bowl of the night.'" The subject was dramatically new, infinitely fascinating, this "dusty enchantment of India," and this literary roughrider strikingly young and different from the velvet-jacketed aesthetes much in vogue at that time. Edmund Gosse, a critic, poet, and biographer, got carried away as he described how the youthful Kipling reacted to his new surroundings in India: "Everything he sees and hears and smells and feels produces on him an unfamiliar and unwelcome impression! All around is the infinite waste of India, obscure, monotonous, immense, inhabited by black men and pariah dogs, Pathans, and green parrots, kites and crocodiles, and long solitudes of high grass. No writer had ever revealed all this to the British public before Kipling."

Even as the rockets' red glare was bursting in air, sending a cascade of color down to earth, however, some watchers realized that the supply of fireworks was limited. The spectacular performance could end at any time. It was at this point (May 1891) that Gosse addressed Kipling directly in an article published in the Century Magazine. "Go east, Mr Kipling," he advised in the strongest possible terms, "go back to the Far East. Disappear! . . . Come back in ten years' time with another precious and admirable budget of loot out of wonderland." Many of those who followed Kipling's progress probably expected him to do just that, go back to India to replenish his stock of exotic material. Kipling, however, was not about to go, and he thought Gosse something of a fool, but he could not help but sense that what had brought him great success and fame—his being the first British writer to bring India before the British reading public—was also becoming a detriment to a wider, more inclusive renown.

In those early days of his meteoric rise to prominence, Kipling published an extremely odd story about an Englishman who comes to India, becomes intoxicated one evening, and insults the native people by mocking and desecrating an idol especially dear to them. As a consequence he incurs a terrible curse that all but destroys him. No one has quite figured out why Kipling would write such a story as "The Mark of the Beast," which revolted readers and critics with its vivid details of how the curse turns its victim into something different from his cultured, highly civilized fellow Englishmen—a beast that eats raw, or almost raw, meat (he prefers chops, lots of them), exudes a wild odor, and takes on the characteristics of a wolf (shades of Vandover and the Brute by Frank Norris, who could have been influenced by the Kipling story). It is a strikingly bizarre tale. As it turns out, Kipling's lycanthropic hero has the curse removed from him before the end of the work, but it is still a distinctly unpleasant story. That strange curse cries out for interpretation beyond that of its being merely a device to evoke the eerie.

One wonders if deep in the recesses of his consciousness Kipling might have had himself in mind when he wrote "The Mark of the Beast." Could he have thought—just for a moment, perhaps—now that he was away from India but constantly associated with it that what appeared to be his greatest advantage could actually prove...