Rudyard Kipling, The Vampire, and the Actress
Seek not to question other than / The books I leave behind.1
The substantial Rudyard Kipling Collection in Cushing Memorial Library and Archives2 includes three early editions of Kipling's poem "The Vampire"—none of them authorized by Kipling. One was privately printed in Boston in 1898 (Richards E1-23), one in Washington at the Press of W. F. Roberts (Richards E1-25), and one was issued in New York by M[ilburg] F[rancisco] Mansfield (Richards E1-22) (Fig. 1). This last edition first appeared in March 1898 in two variants3 and a second printing of 500 was required by June of that year. Of the three editions, the Cushing Library copy of the New York (Mansfield) version is of particular interest: it is flamboyantly presented in red cloth, lettered in gold, and embellished with bat illustrations by Blanche McManus—Mansfield's wife. The poem was originally intended to stir up some modest publicity for a painting by Kipling's cousin, Philip Burne-Jones (1861-1926), entitled The Vampire, scheduled to go on display at the New Gallery's annual summer exhibition in London's Regent Street in April 1897.4 Neither of the cousins could have predicted the impact of
Front Cover The Vampire
New York: M. F. Mansfield, 1898
[End Page 303]
their joint venture upon the public. The first stanza suffices to capture the flavor of Kipling's sardonic composition:
A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I!) To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair(We called her the woman who did not care), But the fool he called her his lady fair (Even as you and I)
Writing in 1915, R. Thurston Hopkins recalled that the poem "provoked a great deal of adverse criticism" and inspired a number of parodies—" clever retaliations ... by the fair sex."5 One of them that got wide circulation, by Felicia Blake, begins:
A fool there was and she lowered her pride (Even as you and I) To a bunch of conceit in a masculine hideWe saw the faults that could not be denied; But the Fool saw only his manly side— (Even as you and I).6
By contemporary standards, the painting itself was no doubt mildly erotic; it showed a predatory female, with teeth bared, suggestively bestriding the prostrate body of her despairing and—perhaps unconscious—lover (See Mansfield's redrawing of Burne-Jones's painting, Fig. 2). It was also, by all accounts, transparently autobiographical: the infatuated painter's amorous advances towards actress Beatrice Tanner (better known as Mrs. Patrick Campbell) had been firmly and publicly rejected.7 The Vampire was his painterly revenge and would prove to be his most memorable work, although one modern critic has dismissed it as "a piece of vulgar late-Victorian pseudo-profound sexiness" into which "all manner of sado-masochistic fantasies might be read."8 This is somewhat unfair because Burne-Jones's work had antecedents in the eighteenth century, primarily Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (sometimes titled The Incubus) which received wide distribution as an engraving. In any case, the combination of Burne-Jones's provocative painting as frontispiece and Kipling's similarly provocative stanzas precipitated a flurry of unauthorized reproductions of the book in England and the United States.9 In 1902, Burne-Jones took the painting with him for exhibition in New York, only to find his work dismissed by the anonymous New York Times critic: "It is unfortunate that so much pother has been raised in the papers about [End Page 304] Sir Philip and his 'Vampire,' for expectation naturally rose mountains high, and all that appears is a little mouse of a talent, which seems to have lost its way."10 Kipling's "newspaper verses" were given similarly harsh treatment by the same critic: "hack work in verse in the style of Bulwer Lytton, with a coarse touch to make them seem modern." Yet such was the enduring popularity of Kipling's poem that in 1909 it became the inspiration for a Broadway play entitled A Fool There Was and in 1915 for a film with the same title, starring Theda Bara11 as "the Vampire." Noteworthy is the fact that the movie also included strategically placed lines from Kipling's poem on the inter-titles. And thus did Burne-Jones and Kipling unwittingly contribute to the birth of a new cultural phenomenon, "the vamp."12 Brander Matthews recognized this now forgotten role in a Harper's magazine article as long ago as 1920:
Kipling cannot escape the ultimate responsibility for another abbreviated word, which has taken its place in the technical vocabulary of the so-called "silent drama." His biting lyric on the "Vampire," with its corroding characterization of its heroine-villainess as "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair[,]" has brought about a belief that a vampire is always the female of the species; and as a logical result of this unfounded opinion any fascinating adventuress trying to cajole an innocent hero is now entitled a vamp.13
Frontispiece The Vampire
New York: M. F. Mansfield, 1898
[End Page 305]
The main focus of our interest in the Cushing copy, however, is the unique stanza written out in Kipling's small, neat hand on the free endpaper (Fig. 3). The inscription reads as follows, with the first line quoted from the poem itself:
"So some of him lived but the most of him died"— He has never forgot—for he has not triedThe years will come and the years will go— Happiness also, but oh so slow. May 'you and I'—before we die,Again be contented, we must both try.
Kipling's Handwritten "Daydreaming"
Endsheet The Vampire
New York: M. F. Mansfield, 1898
The poem is signed "Daydreaming—", a choice not without significance, as will be shown. Given that these five lines appear nowhere else in the Kipling canon, they surely merit our attention. Harold Orel's comment, in his review of a new edition of Something of Myself, is pertinent here: "Kipling's diffidence about his private life stimulated a morbid interest in his doings and in the possibility of scandal, from the 1890s on, and anything that tells us more about Kipling the human being is worth investigating."14 Of course, it is not uncommon to reproduce a few lines from within a work for an inscription (as Robert Frost, for example, sometimes did), but it is highly unusual to compose something entirely new. Kipling never did it again. Moreover, these lines seem so [End Page 306] personal, conjuring up, as they do, a tantalizingly opaque intimacy. Here the 'you and I' in single quotes self-consciously echoes the poem proper, but differs fundamentally in hinting at suspiciously real-life referents—male and female bonded by some shared experience outside the framework of the poem.
If Kipling is sending a message to someone in particular, who might this secret sharer be? The distinctive bookplate on the pastedown opposite the inscription suggests a ready answer. It belonged to Lulu Glaser (1874-1958), the popular American vaudeville actress (Figs. 4 and 5)15 and was created for her by Sidney Lawton Smith (1845-1929),
Lulu Glaser
Photograph undated and unattributed
Lulu Glaser
Photograph by W. M. Morrison, 1894
an acknowledged master of line engraving.16 This alluring young actress, with "wonderfully luminous eyes," according to Francis Wilson, her costar,17 was just twenty-four years old at the time, and Kipling was thirty-three. It is always possible, of course, that Glaser's bookplate has nothing to do with Kipling's inscription. Yet, were the inscription intended for someone else, who might she have been? Until a better candidate for Kipling's indulgence is identified, Lulu Glaser—for whom there is concrete evidence, albeit by no means conclusive—must remain the favorite. We know that her bookplate was created for her in 189818 and that it is also to be found in the Cushing Library copy of [End Page 307] Charles Eliot Norton's limited edition booklet, Rudyard Kipling: A Biographical Sketch (1899).19 The frontispiece portrait therein of Kipling in his prime may have been an attraction in itself. So we can safely say that Glaser was interested enough in Kipling's life and work to own at least two Kipling books. One of them, it would appear, was specially inscribed for her with the suggestive lines above.
Yet there is no mention of Glaser in any of the six volumes of Kipling letters edited by Thomas Pinney,20 nor is there reference to any sort of link between Glaser and Kipling in biographical studies of Kipling.21 And the Lulu Glaser Archive at Princeton University similarly yields no evidence of contact with Kipling. However, by the time Princeton bought the archive following the death of Glaser's sister-in-law in 1981, some items had obviously escaped from the collection or were sold off separately—notably her books. The sad fact is that, despite its potential value for researchers, an individual's library is all too rarely afforded the same respect as manuscripts and papers and is likely to be disposed of unceremoniously and without any record of its contents. Anyway, who would have expected a comic opera star to have a library worth preserving? Yet according to The Book-lover, "Miss Lulu Glaser is a bookworm, and indulges in all the luxuries of book collecting ... [she] has a de luxe Shakespeare of which but twenty-six sets were printed and for which she paid $10,000."22 Even if the claim about the cost of the Shakespeare edition may be discounted as the hyperbole of a publicist, Glaser did own some books that reinforce her claims as a collector—for example, an early nineteenth-century ten-volume edition of the works of Alexander Pope in full tree calf with marbled endpapers. Could, then, her ardor for Kipling have been confined to collecting? The intimate nature of the inscription suggests otherwise.
The Kipling Collection in Cushing Library also contains some letters to and from Kipling, as well as manuscript material, including the autograph manuscripts for "The Foreloper" and for "The Maltese Cat." Most pertinent here, however, is a fair copy of "The Vampire" in Kipling's small, careful hand, initialed by him at the end, "R. K." (Fig. 6). This copy accords exactly with the printed version of the poem and thus has no textual significance. Nonetheless, it reflects the kind of indulgence Kipling occasionally granted to friends and acquaintances eager to secure a special token of their relationship. On the verso of the same sheet of paper, he has written out a second poem, the significance of which requires some teasing out (Fig. 7). He did not sign or initial this poem—for the very good reason that it was not his. In fact, it is a lyric [End Page 308]
Kipling's Handwritten Copy
"The Vampire"
Cushing Memorial Library and Archives
composition by Matthew Arnold entitled "Longing"—one of the "Faded Leaves" sequence of five poems. These were all composed around 1850 when he was desperately in love with Fanny Lucy Wightman whose father, Sir William, a judge of the Queen's Bench, deemed Arnold an unworthy suitor and had forbidden further meetings. Arnold's biographer, Nicholas Murray, reads the poem as one "whose music is charged with Arnold's frustrated longing for Fanny Lucy."23 It needs to be read in full to grasp its potential importance for Kipling: [End Page 309]
Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again.For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.
Come, as thou cam'st a thousand times, A messenger from radiant climes,And smile on thy new world, and be As kind to others as to me.
Or, as thou never cam'st in sooth, Come now, and let me dream it truth.And part my hair, and kiss my brow, And say—My love! why sufferest thou?
Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again.For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.
Why, we must ask, would Kipling—or any self-respecting author—want to undermine the special status of his own work by including the words of another man as part of his gift to a friend or acquaintance unless he were trying to send a very pointed, essentially private message? It is hard to dismiss the addition of Arnold's poem as inconsequential; rather it is a gesture that calls for explanation. Certainly the invocation, "Come to me in my dreams, and then / By day I shall be well again," echoes the imaginative predisposition of Kipling when he signed himself "Daydreaming—" at the end of the unique stanza appended to "The Vampire."
Kipling's Handwritten Copy
Arnold's "Longing"
Cushing Memorial Library and Archives
Were it possible to demonstrate unequivocally that the fair copy with the Arnold poem had, [End Page 310] along with the copy of "The Vampire," also belonged to Lulu Glaser, the evidence for some sort of intimate relationship—even if only epistolary—would have to be deemed very strong. Alas, what we know of the provenance of the fair copy is insufficient to make such a strong claim: the manuscript was sold at auction in New England in 1999, bought by a well-known manuscript and book dealer in the Northeast, and resold to Cushing Library. The most we can claim at the moment is that nothing in this history is inconsistent with the item originating from Lulu Glaser's home in Connecticut and that it is perhaps more likely that Glaser's copy of "The Vampire" and the fair copy of the poem belong together than not. Otherwise, we have to posit another unknown recipient for whom Kipling's fair copy and Arnold's poem were intended.
In the absence of concrete evidence of a relationship, however innocent and insubstantial, with Lulu Glaser, we must turn to other biographical data that might at least provide a perspective on the plausibility of contact between the two. The first item of evidence is culled from Lord Birkenhead's 1978 biography of Kipling; it is a curious appendix that he calls "Kipling's Delirium." This is a verbatim account, dictated by Kipling as he recovered from a near-death experience, precipitated by pneumonia, in New York in March 1899, of his delirium-induced dreams. One section in particular warrants highlighting:
I began by going upstairs to [a] large empty marble room on [the] top floor of Hotel Grenoble and there finding illustrated paper and newspaper clippings containing letters and correspondence from a New York girl, called—to the best of my recollection—Bailey or Brady—accusing me in great detail of having larked around with a great many girls both before and after marriage: letters couched in violent personal style.24
Most commentators seem to have ignored this rambling account merely as the incoherent by-product of Kipling's delirium and thus without biographical import. We might simply ascribe it to his well-known discomfort with American journalists; but once the italicized portion is read in the context of Lulu Glaser's inscribed copy of The Vampire and the fair copy with Arnold's "Longing" on the verso, it merits further consideration. On the evidence of Kipling's travels and Glaser's career, any meeting or correspondence between the two would have to have begun somewhere between 1891 and 1899. Thus the accusation embedded in Kipling's 1899 dream—of "larking around with a great many girls"—begins to sound suspiciously like the indigestible residue of a still-fresh guilty conscience. A recent or ongoing affair of the heart [End Page 311] with Lulu Glaser would seem to provide a credible basis for Kipling's disturbing, and otherwise seemingly inexplicable, dream.
In many ways Kipling was a cautious, even a wary, man. As Lord Birkenhead notes, "Kipling, throughout his life, shrank from emotional intimacy with women" and "was unlikely to leave signposts for posterity to his own emotional life."25 As a young man, he had after all been unlucky in love. He developed a fixation upon Florence ("Flo") Garrard when he was only fourteen and she was sixteen and, it has been argued, "the adolescent wound Flo inflicted remained the strongest (or most intense) amatory experience of Kipling's life."26 She was certainly the model for Maisie in Kipling's autobiographical novel, The Light that Failed. Angus Wilson also saw her as the catalyst for "The Vampire," thereby representing "la belle dame sans merci, the femme fatale, the vampire that sucks man's life away."27
When he first returned to England as an adult, Kipling lodged in Villiers Street, opposite Gatti's Music Hall, and took full advantage of its proximity, as he memorably records in Something of Myself. His Barrack Room Ballads have their genesis in the kind of songs he heard there (some of which crop up in Stalky & Co.) and he later wrote a story, "My Great and Only," which draws extensively upon his experiences at Gatti's. Peter Keating observes that "his personal connection with music hall was brief, but to the end of his life he retained an interest in it that was essentially historical."28 It is not hard, then, to imagine an ever-vulnerable Kipling encountering Lulu Glaser in a vaudeville show in New York and falling, in some fashion, for the girl with the "wonderfully luminous eyes." If so, he would only have been following in the footsteps of his stagestruck cousin, whose amatory adventures inspired "The Vampire" in the first place.
Absent compelling evidence, of course—a love letter from Glaser to Kipling or indisputable proof that the fair copy of "The Vampire" and the Arnold poem were meant for her—the case for an amatory relationship of any sort between the writer and the actress must remain decidedly speculative. It seems unlikely that any such relevant correspondence will ever be discovered, for it is hard to imagine the cautious Kipling dashing off love letters to an actress. In any case, he tried to ensure that there were no "signposts for posterity." Frank Doubleday, his friend and publisher, once found him burning papers and letters in the fireplace at Bateman's. When challenged, he exclaimed vehemently: "No one's going to make a monkey out of me after I die."29 He was [End Page 312] hardly the first writer who sought to protect his future reputation, but he may not have covered his tracks as well as he thought.
Texas A&M University
Notes
Acknowledgments:
. I'd like to thank Todd Samuelson, Curator of Rare Books, for bringing Kipling's poem to my attention and Cait Coker, Curator of Science Fiction, for helpful comments.
1. The last two lines of "The Appeal," a two-stanza poem written not long before Kipling's death, but published posthumously. It was apparently intended to warn off those who might show too much interest in his private life.
2. The foundation of this collection came from the library of A. W. Yeats, bibliographer of Kipling, acquired by Texas A&M University in 1988. Thus it could not have been included in Thomas Pinney's "Kipling in the Libraries," ELT, 29.1 (1986), 83-90.
3. 500 copies on Enfield deckle-edge paper at 75 cents and 150 copies on Japanese paper at $1.25 were issued on 28 March 1898, according to David Alan Richards, Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2010), 604.
4. If Kipling had ever been at all nonchalant about the fate of this occasional composition, he certainly seems to have changed his mind, on the evidence of his wife Carrie's letter to Augustus Gurlitz, their American copyright lawyer, on 3 August 1903: "It was not a thing he meant, intended, wished or desired to have republished" (TLS, Box 15, Syracuse University Library).
5. R. Thurston Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Appreciation (London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd., 1915), 116.
6. This stanza was cited in Hopkins, 117. The parody by Felicia Blake must have enjoyed wide circulation. Cushing Library owns a contemporary postcard with the poem in full and an image of a young wife leaning impatiently across a table (foreground) while her husband reads a newspaper nonchalantly (background).
7. About the same time, Mrs. Campbell also drew the admiring attentions of George Bernard Shaw for whom, in 1914, she became the original Eliza Doolittle.
8. Martin Fido, Rudyard Kipling (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 86.
9. See C. E. Carrington, The Life of Rudyard Kipling (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1955) for an account of Kipling's "fury of indignation against the American 'pirate' publishers who were making free with his work" (124 ff).
10. "A British Literary Painter: The Picture by Sir Philip Burne-Jones That Suggested 'The Vampire,'" The New York Times, 20 March 1902.
11. The stage name of Theodosia Goodman (1890-1955).
12. The OED entry is hardly satisfactory and makes no mention of Kipling's role. The earliest citation for "vamp" as a noun dates from around 1911 and is attributed to G. K. Chesterton.
13. Brander Matthews, "The Latest Novelties in Language" Harper's, 6 (1920), 83-84.
14. Harold Orel, "Kipling's 'Something of Myself,'" ELT, 35.2 (1992), 214.
15. Her most famous role was in 1901 as the star of Dolly Varden in her own opera company. See further, library.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/tc033.html.
16. Amy G. Smith published an overview of her father's achievements: Sidney Lawton Smith, Designer, Etcher, Engraver, With Extracts from his Diary and a Checklist of his Bookplates (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed & Co., 1931). His papers are in the American Antiquarian Society archives.
17. Cited in The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, Gerald Martin Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, eds., 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 265.
18. The bookplate (#19) is dated by Gardner Teall in Bookplates by Sidney L. Smith: With a Checklist of his Bookplates (Kansas City: Alfred Fowler, 1921), 12. [End Page 313]
19. Charles Eliot Norton, Rudyard Kipling: A Biographical Sketch (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1899).
20. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 6 vols., Thomas Pinney, ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990-2004).
21. In addition to the biographical studies specifically cited in this article, the following were consulted: Thomas N. Cross, East and West: A Biography of Rudyard Kipling (Ann Arbor: Luckystone Press, 1992); David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002); Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999); Philip Mason, The Glass, The Shadow, and The Fire (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999); and Martin Seymour-Smith, Rudyard Kipling (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
22. The Book-lover: A Magazine of Booklore, No. 5 (1904), 218.
23. Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 109.
24. Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (New York: Random House, 1978), 370.
25. Ibid., 51.
26. Martin Fido, Rudyard Kipling, 87.
27. Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 155.
28. Peter Keating, Kipling the Poet (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994), 66.
29. William B. Dillingham, Being Kipling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 32. [End Page 314]