King Solomon's Mines (3 page)

Africans are also the subject of some bluff, gross-out humor, such as the gratuitous account of a native whose toe amputation “was a pleasure to see,” followed by the “Kafir” asking after the operation for a white toe to be attached in place of the missing one (p. 33). Perhaps the most low-minded instance of racism in the book occurs when Umbopa, eventually revealed as exiled royalty whose real name is Ignosi, states that “black people” do not “hold life so high as [whites]” (p. 118). By having an African say this, Haggard lends extra authority to this dehumanizing notion. Similarly, the native maiden Foulata declares herself opposed to miscegenation: “‘Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?’” (p. 197). Putting racist sentiments in the mouths of African characters is a particularly insidious form of racist discourse.

Yet the nobility of Umbopa/Ignosi as depicted in King
Solomon’s
Mines is undeniable. Haggard does not have a uniformly low opinion of Africans, at least not much lower than his view of humanity in general. Elephants stampeding during a hunt are described as pushing one another “in their selfish panic, just like so many human beings” (p. 44). Haggard is suggesting that animals at their worst can be as bestial as humans. Africans who are spared the impediments of modern Western culture might be noble, but they can sometimes reveal character flaws as bad as Western man’s.

Similarly, Quatermain’s translations of what certain Africans say in the narrative reflect his view of Africa and Africans. Umpoba speaks of the mountains leading to the treasure as “a strange land there, a land of witchcraft and beautiful things; a land of brave people, and of trees, and streams, and white mountains, and of a great white road” (p. 50). The noble Umbopa’s prose cadences seem to prefigure the style of Ernest Hemingway. Yet elsewhere the ancient, evil African crone Gagaoola intones:
“Blood! blood! blood!
rivers of blood; blood everywhere ...
Footsteps! footsteps! footsteps!
the tread of the white man coming from afar” (p. 100). The thrice-repeated rhythmic incantations are comparable to the Civil War tune, “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! The boys are marching,” by George Frederick Root (1820-1895), as well as ballads by Haggard’s friend Rudyard Kipling, like “Gunga Din”: “It was ‘Din! Din! Din! / ’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ‘is spleen.’”

Haggard applies European history—and not just English prosody—to Africa by having Captain Good, a friend of Sir Henry Curtis, refer to the murderous King Twala as “just like a black Madame Defarge” (p. 110). The French Revolutionary character Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859) is ferociously vengeful and knits the names of her intended victims. Yet in
King Solomon’s Mines
Quatermain and his party, not Africa and King Twala, are, in their plot to overthrow a cruel king, the real revolutionary participants. This curiously layered simile is typical of the complexity and contradictions of
King Solomon’s Mines.

Women too are treated roughly in
King Solomon’s Mines.
Quatermain informs the reader almost casually that “women bring trouble as surely as the night follows the day” (p. 119). Shortly after this misogynistic statement, murder is described as a kind of symbolic rape, when the young maiden Foulata is threatened with ritual execution by a leering aggressor who taps his spear and cries, “She shrinks from the sight of my little plaything even before she has tasted it” (p. 121).

King Solomon’s Mines
reflects an awareness of what may be called the Eros of otherness. In a running gag repeated
ad nauseum,
Captain Good’s bare white legs are the objects of admiration for Africans who “satisfy their aesthetic longings” (p. 127) by staring at them, as Quatermain puts it with heavy ironic humor. Descriptions of Kukuana women fall into racial stereotypes: “the lips are not unpleasantly thick as is the case in most African races” (p. 88). Umbopa is described as a “tall, handsome-looking man, somewhere about thirty years of age, and very light-coloured for a Zulu” (p. 35). Haggard accepts the racist notion that lighter skin is handsomer than dark, and Africans are most beautiful when they look less African and more European in appearance.

Even beautiful Africans are not described in any great admiring detail. Umbopa gets only a passing reference about a period of famine during which he wore “a leather belt strapped so tight round his stomach ... that his waist looked like a girl‘s” (p. 67). This mild observation scarcely has the erotic charge of the words describing a dead athlete who wears a “garland briefer than a girl’s” in A. E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young,” in his classic 1896 collection A
Shropshire Lad.
Some critics have written about homoerotic aspects of
King Solomon’s Mines,
but in truth they are difficult to find.

Still, the descriptions of sexuality in
King Solomon’s Mines
have attracted much critical comment. One critic even noted that H. Rider Haggard and Sigmund Freud were born in the same year, 1856. Thus, when Haggard is described by other critics as “pre-Freudian,” this is not strictly true. Extra-Freudian or Super-Freudian might be a more apt term, as Haggard’s directness in sexual matters almost makes Freudian interpretation seem obsolete.

Instead of being buried in the unconscious, sexuality is right on the surface in Haggard’s world, as in the map leading to King Solomon’s Mines, which names mountains known as Sheba’s Breasts that are on the way to the treasure (p. 22). An accompanying text supposedly written in 1590 by the Portuguese adventurer José da Silvestra when he was “dying of hunger,” also refers to “the north side of the nipple of the southernmost of the two mountains I have named Sheba’s Breasts” (p. 23). Da Silvestra adds that any future treasure seeker must “climb the snow of Sheba’s left breast till he comes to the nipple” (p. 23). In Victorian England, where in sitting rooms, piano legs were prudishly covered by rugs and referred to coyly as “limbs,” this frank description of female body parts must have been powerful. The impact must have been something close to the impact on later generations of nude photographs of African women in
National Geographic
magazines. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room” describes a young girl sitting in a dentist’s office circa 1918, waiting for her Aunt, who is being treated. She looks at the photographs in a
National Geographic
magazine: “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs. / Their breasts were horrifying.” Likewise, Haggard’s young readers, boys and girls both, were confronted by unexpected references to the unadorned female body in
King Solomon’s Mines.

King Solomon’s Mines was an impressive popular success, with more than 30,000 copies sold in Britain in its first year of publication, 1885. Among its enthusiastic readers were the future American president Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), Britain’s prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), and a precocious English eleven-year-old, Winston Churchill (1874-1965).
King Solomon’s Mines
also received generally glowing reviews. The poet and scholar Andrew Lang ( 1844-1912) in the
Saturday Review
praised Haggard’s “very remarkable and uncommon powers of invention and the gift of ‘vision’.” Lang separated Haggard from the “hack book-makers for boys” who wrote books based on other books they had read, instead of real-life experience. However, the London
Church Quarterly Review
dissented, complaining about the narrative, which “trembles on the verge of sensuality” and contains “indiscriminate and individual slaughter, whole corpses and dismembered limbs, skulls and bones, duels and suicide, torture and treachery, witchcraft and madness.”

Some reviews of the American edition of the book, which appeared in 1886, were even more equivocal.
The Dial,
while appreciating the excitement of the tale, complained about the “crudeness of many of Mr. Haggard’s sentences.” A Boston publication,
Literary World,
even made a punning reference to the novelist’s name: “The book reeks with brutality and suffering, and enough to make the reader as haggard as its author.” Affectionate joshing and parodies by Haggard’s friends and readers appeared as a sign of the book’s striking novelty. The minor nineteenth-century poet James Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892) penned “To R. K.” some humorous doggerel that was published in the
Cambridge Review
and later collected in his
Lapsus Calami
(Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes, 1891):

Rudyard Kipling himself, a friend to both Haggard and Andrew Lang, also penned a humorous verse in 1889 in homage to them. As reprinted in
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling
(Vol. 1,
1872-1889,
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), Kipling’s verse, written in the style of the American western author Bret Harte (1836-1902), conjured up the notion of a lecture tour that Haggard and Lang might one day make to the United States:

Sir Henry Chartres Biron (1863-1940) wrote a more ambitious, book-length parody,
King Solomon’s Wives; or, The Phantom Mines,
under the pseudonym Hyder Ragged (London: Vizetelly and Company, 1887). The Hyder Ragged parody describes a trip across a desert and an encounter with King Twosh.
King Solomon’s Treasures,
John De Morgan’s American parody, also appeared in 1887 (New York: N. L. Munro). These and other parodies were reprinted in King
Solomon’s Children
(New York: Arno Press, 1978). Their existence is evidence of the strong and immediate impact of
King Solomon’s Mines
on readers on two continents and beyond.

Haggard quickly found himself a genuine literary celebrity after the success of
King Solomon’s Mines.
He hobnobbed with other literary personalities in London, attending tea parties and dinners at the home of the English poet, author, and critic Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928). A preserved guest book attests that at one such gathering, Haggard rubbed elbows with such literary immortals as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Walter Pater, and Robert Bridges. At another event at the Gosse home, Haggard was a guest alongside Sir Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, and the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Haggard did not permit his renown to interfere with his productivity, and he churned out a series of bestsellers. A partial list of novels he subsequently published includes She (1887), Jess (1887),
Allan Quatermain
(1887),
A Tale of Three Lions
(1887),
Mr. Meeson’s Will
(1888),
Maiwa’s Revenge
(1888),
My Fellow Labourer and the Wreck of the Copeland
(1888),
Colonel Quaritch, V.C.
(1888),
Allan’s Wife
(1889),
Beatrice
(1890),
Eric Brighteyes
(1891),
Nada the Lily
(1892),
Montezuma’s Daughter
(1893),
The People of the Mist
(1894),
Joan
Haste (1895),
Heart of the World
(1895),
The Wizard
(1896),
Doctor Therne
(1898),
The Spring of Lion
(1899),
Lysbeth
(1901),
Pearl-Maiden
(1903),
Stella Fregelius
(1904),
Ayesha: The Return of She
(1905),
Benita: An African Romance
(1906),
Fair Margaret
(1907),
The Ghost Kings
(1908),
The Yellow God
(1909),
The Lady of Blossholme
(1909), and
Queen Sheba’s Ring
(1909).

Despite his continued activity, Haggard’s latter years were not joyful. His nine-year-old son Jock died in 1891, and Haggard’s ensuing depression led to permanent respiratory and digestive problems. In his memoir
The Days of My Life
Haggard admitted that his best novels were “among the first dozen or so” he wrote between
King Solomon’s Mines
and
Montezuma’s Daughter.
Haggard ascribes a falling off in quality of his output to the shock of his son’s death and his own subsequent bad health: “Although from necessity I went on with the writing of stories, and do so still, it has not been with the same zest. Active rather than imaginative life has appealed to me more.”

Part of this active life was a careful study of farming conditions in Britain, which resulted in books like
A Farmer’s Year
(1899) and
Rural England
(1902), as mentioned earlier. In 1902 Haggard was asked to become a commissioner for the British government and report on agricultural labor colonies that had been established in the United States. On his return from America and Canada, he began to concentrate on such agricultural issues as soil erosion. He experimented successfully on his own estate, Kessingland Grange, situated beside the North Sea. Joining the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion and Afforestation, he was also active in helping the Salvation Army and its founder, General William Booth (1829-1912). Bad health after 1909 slowed him down, despite the honor of a knighthood, bestowed in 1912 for services to the British Empire, rather than for literary achievement. A sense of duty made Haggard accept membership on a six-person Royal Commission to visit the various dominions of the British Empire. Starting in 1912, this commission’s activities necessitated trips to Australia and Africa during which Haggard energetically gathered material for future books. As Haggard’s biographer Morton Cohen aptly puts it, “His holidays were inspection tours of the world.”