Christopher Benfey's “If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years” draws its title from Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem, which Benfey aptly describes as a “favorite of presidents and graduation speakers, of political conservatives and revolutionaries alike.” If none of this rings a bell, then the opening stanza probably will:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise...
Three stanzas later the poem concludes with what awaits the diligent soul who can navigate all those “ifs”:
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And – which is more – you'll be a Man, my son!
Kipling's poem seems to reflect the basic virtues that informed Kipling's life and work as a Victorian Englishman. Born in colonial India to English parents in 1865, Kipling spent his early childhood there before going to England, the country where he died in 1936. India informed iconic Kipling works such as his “Jungle Books,” the children's stories adapted into a blockbuster movie franchise.
But as Benfey points out, despite the celebrated author's British pedigree, Kipling's “If—” was meant as a homage to George Washington. Like much of his work, it was inspired by America, where Kipling spent some of the most creative years of his life. Benfey tells this little-known story of Kipling's handful of years in Brattleboro, Vermont, an interlude he calls “the key creative period in his entire career.” (Although they were about India, the “Jungle Books” were written in Vermont.)
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