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

Fig. 1.

Front Cover The Vampire
New York: M. F. Mansfield, 1898

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 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

Fig. 2.

Frontispiece The Vampire
New York: M. F. Mansfield, 1898

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.

Fig. 3.

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 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),

Fig. 4.

Lulu Glaser
Photograph undated and unattributed

Fig. 5.

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 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

Fig. 6.

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:

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."

Fig. 7.

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, 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 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 hardly the first writer who sought to protect his future reputation, but he may not have covered his tracks as well as he thought.