Towards the end of 1890 an event occurred that might have changed the course of Kipling’s life and it is worth pondering precisely because it did not change him. Professor Alex Hill died suddenly in India on 23 September. While the grief of a family to which he had been close would affect Kipling, it would be impossible for him not to note that now the beloved Edmonia – Ted – Hill was available and able to marry a young man who had chastely paid court to her in all the years of their acquaintance.
When Ted and her sister Caroline passed through London on their way back to America in December, they saw Kipling at least twice, when he called on them at the Hotel Metropole, but his relationship with Ted did not take off, and it was nine years before they resumed even a warm exchange of letters. When love was available to be grasped, Kipling turned away from it.
However, Kipling’s friendship with the Hills in India had started a long and beneficial relationship with the United States, both in personal and professional terms. In addition to The Light that Failed, two books were published in America in spring 1891: an authorised book called Mine Own People and a collection of stories collected from various magazines by Harpers and published as The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories. Kipling was furious at the latter as he had not been consulted, or permitted to revise the stories, and had negotiated no payment. In an insulting aside they sent him a £10 note as recompense.
He was enraged not only that his work should be thus taken, but that it should be done by Harpers who had sent him on his way with a cursory rejection when he had called on them in New York and offered his stories. He stormed in the literary magazine The Athenaeum: Messrs Harper & Brothers appropriated my tales without asking my permission, had not the courtesy to allow me to revise proofs before jamming those tales into a job-work volume, and sent me a ten pound note as notification of outrage perpetrated.104
Harpers’ defence was that Kipling was ungracious: they had fairly bought serial (though not book) rights and other publishers would just have appropriated the stories without even sending Kipling the £10. Kipling resentfully acknowledged this – the real problem was the unprofessional state of copyright law between the US and UK which meant any work could be pirated. This was a wretched set of affairs that had long needed resolution. A sterling attempt was made by Wolcott Balestier, British agent for the US firm of Lovell, who set out to make payments to authors in order to create goodwill in this murky situation. The rewards of magnanimous behaviour now, it was believed, would be garnered in the future when the inevitable international copyright agreement would be imposed on the pirates.
He had, for example, published The Light that Failed in book form in the US a few days before its magazine publication (by Lippincott’s) in order to establish precedence; and organised an ‘Authorised Version’ of Kipling’s stories for the US market which would hopefully undercut the pirates.
Balestier, four years older than Kipling and living in London only a little longer, was a man of prodigious energy and charm who was quickly to become friends not only with Kipling but with Henry James, Edmund Gosse, George Meredith, Mrs Humphrey Ward and other literary leading lights of the day.
Hailing from Brattleboro, Vermont, he was educated at Cornell University, and trained as a journalist before working in publishing, though he always wanted to be a writer and had written three short novels. Probably in summer 1890, he and Kipling discussed an adventure story set in America and India and resolved to write a novel in collaboration. They were deep into the work by February 1891, Balestier mainly writing the first four chapters, which were set in the American West, while Kipling concentrated on the following chapters in India.
A critic in Vermont who presumably had first-hand information from the family, described their methods: ‘the work was done by the two friends – Balestier who is an accomplished typewriter, sitting at the machine and dashing off the sentences and chapters while Kipling paced the room, each composing, suggesting, or criticising in turn, and the mind of each stimulating the other to its best work.’105
The Naulahka is another working of some of the themes from The Light that Failed, with the hero, American engineer Nicholas Tarvin, enjoying adventures while the heroine, missionary Kate Sheriff, has to choose whether to renounce her career for marriage. Tarvin’s life’s work is to bring the railway to his small Colorado town while Kate learns of the sufferings of Indian women and trains as a nurse to work with them. Subtitled as ‘A story of West and East’, it is an adventure story with the exotic settings of the American west and princely India. The Naulahka is a necklace of legendary beauty which is the object of a subplot that brings Nicholas to India, whence Kate has preceded him. It is taken as an indication of Kipling’s affection for Balestier, who had control of the setting and publication of the story while Kipling was travelling, that he tolerated his friend’s misspelling of the Indian word Naulakha and allowed both serial and book publication with the wrong spelling once Balestier had made the mistake. Kipling spelled the word correctly in his letters.
As is clear from Kipling’s willingness to collaborate with Balestier, his influence on Kipling was profound, though little written evidence remains of their relationship, which gives the editor of Kipling’s letters to believe that it was deliberately destroyed. It may have been, however, that they spent so much time together that letters were superfluous. Balestier’s sister Josephine wrote home, ‘After the authors’ dinner the other night Wolcott and young Kipling talked until four in the morning. They are growing fast friends; they are very congenial, dove-tail finely. I think it rather picturesque that the two London literary infants should play so prettily together.’106
A later friend, the American novelist, academic and sometime secretary to Mark Twain, Charles Stoddard, said Balestier had ‘found and nourished [Kipling’s] fainting spirit. Perhaps there never was a more beautiful friendship than theirs, or a sadder one.’107 Kipling found in Wolcott Balestier a friend as close as any family member, his best friend. There has been conjecture that they had a physical relationship. Not only is there no explicit evidence for this but, implicitly, it is unlikely in the extreme as it would go against all known facts about the sexual behaviour of Kipling and (rather more importantly) his literary behaviour: such an important event in his life would have been reflected in his work had it taken place.
With his family together, Kipling’s 25th birthday party in December 1890 was a celebration of hardships endured and overcome, of the young man crowned with laurels. His parents Lockwood and Alice Kipling had returned from India temporarily and now lived in the Earls Court Road with Trix and her husband, so the family square was again united when Kipling visited, which he did increasingly often. Other members of the Balestier family also joined Wolcott in London and it was natural for the two families to meet. The Balestiers included his younger sister Caroline, a small, plain woman three years older than Kipling with a strong sense of determination and organisation. It was these supposedly masculine qualities that led Lockwood Kipling to call her ‘a good man spoiled’. Alice Kipling with her usual quick-witted intuition said: ‘That woman is going to marry our Ruddy’ and was reported to be unenthusiastic about the prospect.108 There was said to be an understanding between Kipling and Carrie Balestier before he left London for a world tour in August 1891.
Kipling’s call to imperial service, ‘The English Flag’, was published in April 1891 and was almost immediately given pride of place in Henley’s anthology of verse Lyra Heroica, which quickly became the most popular collection of verse for children, particularly as it was often given as a prize to stimulate imperial responsibility. It was by this means, and by his later stories for children, that Kipling began to conquer a new generation of readers.
Kipling felt he had poured a great deal into his work and needed his usual panacea, which was travel. He may also have been heeding warnings from those who felt he was writing himself out and needed a new intake of exotic experiences. He therefore set off for South Africa, then called at Australia and New Zealand. He was in India with his parents, who had returned to Lahore, when he received a telegram from Caroline Balestier saying that her brother was dead.
Wolcott had gone to Germany on business and had died of typhoid in Dresden on 6 December; it was believed that he had been ill when he left London and had travelled despite his infection. His mother and sisters, visiting Paris, had been contacted by a business partner and had hastened to be present at Wolcott’s bed. He was buried in Germany with his mother and sisters present, but only Henry James of his literary friends. James drove back from the cemetery with Carrie, describing her as ‘remarkable in her force, acuteness, capacity and courage – and in the intense – almost manly nature of her emotion. She is a worthy sister of poor dear big-spirited, only-by-death-quenched Wolcott.’109
Kipling returned to England, seeing Carrie in London on 10 January 1892. Probably at this meeting they agreed to be married, and took out a special licence the following day so the ceremony could be conducted in just over a week. The wedding took place at All Soul’s, Langham Place. Few were told and fewer still came: London was in the grip of a flu epidemic affecting all the members of Carrie’s family who were in the city and most of Kipling’s. Only Kipling’s cousin Ambrose (always known as Ambro’) Poynter was present from his family, and literary friends Edmund Gosse and William Heinemann (with whom Wolcott had been in a business relationship). Henry James gave away the bride without much evident joy, he wrote to his brother, ‘[she] is a hard devoted capable little person whom I don’t in the least understand his marrying. It is a union of which I don’t forecast the future though I gave her away in a dreary little wedding with an attendance simply of four men.’110
Why did he marry Carrie, and why so fast? The family story is that before he died Wolcott charged Kipling with the care of his family. This is very likely: he was head of the family as Mrs Balestier was a widow; and his younger brother Beatty was not a man to be relied upon. Whether in a delirium of fever or not, the dying man would certainly have feared for the future of his loved ones and could well have suggested his successful friend Kipling as their guardian. Family tradition also has it that Carrie and Kipling were close to being engaged before Kipling’s departure so marriage was not altogether a surprise. Doubtless in the weeks of bereavement the thought of planning for a large society wedding later in the year was more than they could bear and, having decided to do it, the couple felt they might as well do it fast.
The groom described the conflicting emotions he felt in letters to his aunt Louisa Baldwin and to his old headmaster Cormell Price: I am riotously happy but we have gone through deep waters together . . . this is inexpressibly awful and I ought to feel bad but I am in a state of sinful joy.111
Kipling was a literary lion and could easily have had a pretty young ‘trophy’ wife. That he did not is testament to his recognition that he needed a strong, capable woman, that all those he had loved in the past, including his mother, were in this mould. There was also his shock at losing his friend and perhaps a feeling that making a commitment of his life to Balestier’s family was the finest thing he could do. As it turned out, marriage to Carrie Balestier was the best emotional decision of Kipling’s life, giving him an intelligent companion, mother to three children, a capable business manager and a protector from the intrusions of the world.
Going West
Carrie, who had been her brother’s office manager, now wound up his business affairs. Kipling was eager to leave London and doubtless Carrie too felt miserable in a city she associated with her brother. Kipling had £2,000 in his bank account and there was no reason the couple should not go off on a world trip. Their first port of call was to the Balestier family home, to which Mrs Balestier and sister Josephine accompanied them in sailing from Liverpool for New York.
Before he left, Kipling published Barrack-Room Ballads, a collection of his soldier and empire poems, many of which had previously appeared in Henley’s National Observer. The first collection of mature verse from Kipling available to the English public, it was an immediate best-seller, running through three editions and selling 7,000 copies in the first year.
He dedicated the volume to Wolcott Balestier and on his journey across the Atlantic completed The Naulahka, which was lacking one or more of its nine instalments. It was already being serialised monthly in the Century Magazine, leaving Kipling the painful task of completing alone the work conceived jointly with his friend. It is charitable to think it was the difficult circumstances of writing which led to the crude execution of the book’s ending. It had always been part of the plan to have Kate see the error of her manner of thinking and settle down to marriage with Nicholas, but Kipling’s rendering of her total capitulation is not credible:
‘It was a mistake’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Everything. My coming. My thinking I could do it. It’s not a girl’s work. It’s my work, perhaps; but it’s not for me. I have given it up, Nick. Take me home.’
Later she reflects on her surrender to gender type, In that hour, luxuriously disposed upon many cushions, she realised nothing more than a woman’s complete contentment with the fact that there was a man in the world to do things for her.112
The Kipling family group went by train to Vermont where they alighted to a North American winter, Thirty below freezing! Kipling wrote. It was inconceivable until one stepped out into it at midnight, and the first shock of that clear, still air took away the breath as a plunge into sea water does. A walrus sitting on a woolpack [Beatty Balestier] was our host in his sleigh, and he wrapped us in hairy goatskin coats, caps that came down over the ears, buffalo robes and blankets, and yet more buffalo-robes, till we, too, looked like walruses and moved almost as gracefully.113
Kipling found the climate and the scenery entrancing and he decided with his bride that they would build a house on some of the Balestier land at Brattleboro, within sight of Mount Monadnock. Beatty Balestier gave them about ten acres of his farm in return for $750, retaining pasture and some other rights.
The couple now proceeded on their honeymoon: west to Chicago, Winnipeg and Vancouver and off to Japan. From April to June they were in Yokohama, where Kipling used the local branch of the Oriental Banking Company. He called in one morning to collect a small amount of cash and the manager suggested he take some more. Kipling did not take the hint; when he called back that afternoon the door was locked: the bank had collapsed, and with it the entire proceeds of Kipling’s labours.
The couple’s assets were now a return ticket to Vancouver and $100 in a New York bank. To contribute to their change in fortunes, Carrie must have been certain by now that she was pregnant. Kipling said, There was an instant Committee of Ways and Means, which advanced our understanding of each other more than a cycle of solvent matrimony.114 They cancelled the forward advance of their honeymoon and Kipling’s celebrity doubtless eased the refund from Thomas Cook of their cancelled reservations. They therefore had some ready money and stayed in Japan before making the trip home. Kipling was a man who found petty obstacles harder to confront than great ones, and he sailed through this disaster with a dignity he found himself unable to muster when faced, for example, with questions from reporters, which always made him querulous.
They were back in Vermont by late July 1892, staying with Beatty Balestier and appealing to Carrie’s wealthy grandmother for help. She gave them Bliss Cottage, a labourer’s house on the estate. It was a severe test of character: Kipling’s fortune was all but wiped out, and now he with his heavily pregnant wife were living in a labourer’s cottage miles from anywhere with the additional responsibility of Wolcott’s family to look out for. He had little time for writing in the first year, when he had to work to make the house weatherproof before the severe winter, but Bliss Cottage lived up to its name. As he described it: When winter shut down and sleigh-bells rang all over the white world that tucked us in, we counted ourselves secure. Sometimes we had a servant. Sometimes she would find the solitude too much for her and flee without warning, one even leaving her trunk . . .When our lead pipe froze, we would slip on our coon-skin coats and thaw it out with a lighted candle. There was no space in the bedroom for a cradle, so we decided that a trunk-tray would be just as good. We envied no one – not even when skunks wandered into our cellar and, knowing the nature of the beasts, we immobilised ourselves till it should please them to depart.115
Kipling’s neighbours found something odd about their new acquaintance, who was reported to make as much as a hundred dollars out of a ten-cent bottle of ink but it was as well that Kipling could make more money.116 He was borne out by the arrival of royalties for The Naulahka and Barrack-Room Ballads, which started at $150 in September but rose to $3,888 in November.
The couple had already been planning the house they wanted to have built on the land they had bought from Beatty, which they had designed by a New York architect to their specifications. They called it Naulakha (spelling the name correctly, as it had not been in the title of the novel), which is an indication of the importance of the novel to Kipling and of the fact that it was the advance on the book that paid for the land. The name was also a coded reference to Wolcott, coded because Kipling would not allow his name to be mentioned and no photographs of him were permitted in the house, so painful did he find the memory of his lost friend. A link to Wolcott was also necessarily a token of his bond to Carrie. The Naulahka had also been the novel in which Flo/Maisie, in the person of Kate Sheriff, finally capitulated and submitted herself and her career to male will, giving Kipling a completion of that part of his life.
Beatty acted as agent for the building of Naulakha, taking a commission on the work which was paid for by Carrie in small sums. She liked to keep control over Beatty, the youngest of four Balestier children, who had been a spoiled child and had never really grown up. In the early years relations were good between the Kiplings and their near neighbours Beatty and his wife Mai, who gave country parties with home-brewed cider and a fiddler for entertainment. Kipling wrote to friends that he had sunshine and peace of mind.
Kipling did his best around the house but he was completely incompetent at anything technical – even putting screens on windows would defeat him. This makes his virtuosity in describing technical terms in his writing all the more remarkable. It was in Vermont that he wrote the finest of these, ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, the Scots engineer’s consecration of his machine to the Almighty:
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God – Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’-rod.
Kipling was paid $500 for the poem by Scribner’s Magazine, an American record. Kipling became entranced by the notion of machinery talking to itself and later wrote ‘The Ship that Found Herself’ about a ship discovering her ‘soul’ on a trans-Atlantic maiden voyage, and the similar ‘.007’ about a train.
The Kiplings’ first child was born at Bliss Cottage on 29 December 1892. As Kipling’s birthday was on the 30th and Carrie’s on 31 December, he remarked we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things, and she throve in her trunk-tray in the sunshine on the little plank veranda.117 They called her Josephine, after Carrie’s younger sister.
The Kiplings moved into Naulakha in late summer 1893; the house had cost them $11,000. Carrie ran the household with a determined and rather austere hand. She liked to have her own way and once lost both of her servants over a triviality: the cook because she refused to wear a cap, which was part of the uniform Carrie ordained, and the maid who left in sympathy with the cook. Kipling worked in his study from nine to one each day while Carrie sat in an anteroom outside with her account books and needlework, forbidding anyone entrance to the master’s study.
Over the years they were there Kipling’s old friend from the Civil and Military Gazette Kay Robinson visited, as did Conan Doyle and Lockwood Kipling, but space for guests was limited and the couple normally enjoyed the early years of their married life alone. Kipling confided to Carrie, and she wrote in her diary, that he had the ‘return of a feeling of great strength, such as he had when he first came to London and met the men he was pitted against.’118 This vigour, a high point in his creative life, coincided with his joy at having his own home, wife and child.
Josephine in particular gave him endless delight. Though Kipling could be difficult with adults, he never was with children, who could always command his attention. Josephine, called Joss, was a charming child with large blue eyes and fair hair. Kipling used to write delightful letters in her name when relatives gave her presents: I want to thank you for my White Seal slippers. They are good to eat though hairy . . .119
Kipling would tell her stories at night and she would be found repeating them to her dolls the next morning. She quickly became the equal of her cousin, Beatty and Mai’s child, who was two years older than her. As she grew, while Kipling was working and she knew he could not be disturbed, she would approach him silently and put her hand in his.
In his creative life it was as if having children had opened a spring flowing with narrative. Part of this was the creation of fictional children, but they were not the sickening children of Victorian fiction. His most sympathetic characters, Kim and Mowgli, were resourceful orphans; Harvey in Captains Courageous becomes an orphan for his voyage; and Kipling frequently returned to the theme of children in an adult world as he had in ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ and ‘Tods’ Amendment’, in both of which the child shows superior wisdom. Six was a frequent age for Kipling’s child characters – the age he was when he was left in the House of Desolation.
At his time of his greatest happiness, in the early years in Vermont, it was as if he was working out the suffering of childhood by rewriting it, something he did with the littleknown story ‘The Potted Princess’ of summer 1892. Two children, the Punch and Judy from ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, are not sent to the House of Desolation in England but stay in India with their devoted parents, surrounded by adoring servants and speaking Hindustani because they understood it better than English.120 While children had often occurred in his writing, in the books following Josephine’s birth children and stories for children predominated. Kim, Captains Courageous, Stalky & Co and the two Jungle Books have children as central characters, while Just So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies were written for children.
In November 1892 while still at Bliss Cottage, he was writing ‘a wolf-story’ called ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ for the St Nicholas Magazine with a character called Mowgli who was raised by wolves. Before this was published a Mowgli story written later, ‘In the Rukh’, with Mowgli as a grown man looking back over his life, came out in the book of stories Many Inventions. Mowgli stories continued until spring 1895, telling of the man-child fully at home in neither the jungle nor the town, amid neither people nor animals, thus reflecting Kipling’s own ambivalence.
Mowgli is effectively orphaned twice: by being abandoned and left when his parents flee the tiger; and then being thrown out of the wolf pack. Mowgli encounters a cast of unforgettable creatures: Shere Khan the tiger with his vile sidekick Tabaqui the jackal; Akela the wolf; Baloo the bear; Bagheera the panther; Kaa the python and the Monkey-People who recognise no authority and believe that by chattering about something they have achieved it. Giving unity to this cast of characters is a sense of place, a jungle of central India, and The Law of the Jungle, an ethical code that owes nothing to Christianity – or any of the religions of the East, for that matter.
Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunks the Law runneth forward and back –
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
. . . Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle – the Tiger, the Panther, the Bear;
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar in his lair.
When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken – it may be fair words shall prevail.
When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be diminished by war.
The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, and where he has made him his home,
Not even the Head Wolf may enter, not even the Council may come . . .
The Law was not a piece of exotic window-dressing but was integral to the work: Kipling once explained to a literary admirer of The Jungle Book: When I had once found the Law of the Jungle, then all the rest followed as a matter of course.121
References to a generalised deity – to God or Allah – recur through Kipling’s work and letters, but he was far less distinct on the central message of Christianity. He had written, to Caroline Taylor when she enquired about his faith, that he believed in a personal God, in the Ten Commandments, but could not believe in eternal punishment or reward. As far as Christianity was concerned he was far from orthodox, being unable to believe in the Trinity or the doctrine of redemption. The nearest he could come to accepting Jesus as Christ was to say he did voluntarily die in the belief that the human race would be spiritually bettered thereby, which falls short of the belief required by any but the most extreme liberal sects.122 He had certainly rejected the narrow evangelicalism of Mrs Holloway, but also the Methodism of his own family.
The Brattleboro townspeople knew he went neither to church nor chapel but felt their distinguished neighbour could not be irreligious so declared that he wrote hymns on a Sunday morning. This was not entirely fanciful, for he wrote his poems to hymn tunes that had formed the standard musical repertory in a Methodist family such as his and in the Calvinist household in Mrs Holloway’s house. He certainly felt the need to thank God for his present happiness. At the end of 1893 he wrote in Carrie’s diary, Another perfect year ended. The Lord has been very good to us. Amen.123
Kipling, Carrie and Josephine returned to England in 1894 to visit his parents, now in retirement in Tisbury, Wiltshire. He was already the supreme literary figure, widely feted and invited to join aristocratic and military circles as well as literary ones, a real distinction for a man still only 29. He had been ‘sounded’ for the position of poet laureate, vacant following the death of Tennyson in 1892, but declared he had no interest in the post, the first of many times he was to refuse a national honour.
The Jungle Book was published in May 1894 when he was in Britain. He delighted that he had confounded the critics who could not understand what kind of a book it was. The reviews are rather funny, he wrote, They don’t know how or at which end to pick the thing up.124
He looked with mild curiosity at The Yellow Book, first published this year, but was more interested in meeting Aubrey Beardsley with whom he struck up an acquaintance. Kipling’s own drawings were significantly similar to Beardsley’s; they had developed quite independently but, like Beardsley, had started under Pre-Raphaelite influence.
He made a rare appearance on a public platform as guest of honour at his old school, the United Services College, on the retirement of Cormell Price. While he had a gift for communicating with younger children, he lacked the right touch with teenagers with whom he tried to communicate in inappropriate schoolboy slang. The head prefect who took him around recollected that ‘he seemed to be silently looking into the past, and didn’t speak for longish periods.’125 He was, in fact, thinking about a book set in his schooldays.
Back in Brattleboro, as his fame grew, the Kiplings had to contend with sightseers and with ever-resourceful and determined journalists eager to obtain any scrap of information about the reclusive writer. Perhaps surprisingly considering his own early profession of journalism (and Balestier’s) and his continuing relationship with publications such as Henley’s National Observer, Kipling hated journalists. He was churlish about their questions and resented their intrusion into his life, as if he feared the disclosure of real secrets.
He described his method of dealing with a reporter: It was exactly like talking to a child – a very rude little child. He would begin every sentence with ‘Now tell me something about India’ and would turn aimlessly from one question to the other without the least continuity. I was very angry, but keenly interested. The man was a revelation to me. To his questions I returned answers mendacious and evasive. After all it really did not matter what I said. He could not understand.126 One young woman reporter from a major New York newspaper struggled through snow drifts in a sleigh and called at the door of Naulakha. Thinking her a lost traveller, Carrie Kipling gave her every hospitality until she announced her aim: ‘I have come to interview Rudyard Kipling!’ Carrie called the butler and said, ‘Johnson, see that this lady’s conveyance is at the door at once’ and wished her good day.127
In December 1894 Carrie’s accounts show Kipling had made $25,000 that year. A second collection off Mowgli stories was produced in 1895, making Kipling another fortune. Macmillan published 35,000 copies for the day of publication on the strength of advance orders alone. He was not interested in milking success, however, and when he had no further inspiration for writing these stories, he stopped doing so. In November 1895 he wrote, That ends up Mowgli and there isn’t going to be any more to him.128 Kipling had no apparent fear of his imagination drying up, he seemed to have an inexhaustible fount of ideas for stories, and was only limited by the time he had to spend writing them.
Kipling’s next big project, in 1896, was Captains Courageous, his only book in which all the characters and settings are American, something he was able to achieve with the confidence of four years residence in the US. Kipling had encountered a spoiled American child, the son of a millionaire, on his trip from Calcutta to San Francisco with the Hills in 1889. He had kept this character in his mind and developed him into Harvey, a rich youngster who falls overboard from an Atlantic passenger ship, is picked up by a fishing boat and is forced to live and work on the boat until they return to harbour. His character is reformed by the company of the tough but wise sea fishermen and the doctrine of hard work.
Kipling was given local colour and information from Dr James Conland, a neighbour who had delivered Josephine and himself had a close connection to the sea, having been rescued from a shipwreck as a baby. Conland brought Kipling a dead haddock, which he eviscerated in front of the writer in the manner of the cod-fishers off Newfoundland, which became part of the vivid description of gutting cod in the book. Kipling and the doctor went on a field trip to the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. There he attended the Annual Memorial Service to the men lost in the cod-fishing schooner fleet.
While Captains Courageous was presented as a novel, the novel form continued to elude Kipling. It is really a long short story about a boy growing up and learning the lessons of life, albeit in particularly colourful surroundings. As Kipling himself recognised, There ain’t two cents worth of plot in the blessed novel – it’s all business.129 The book, however, had action, colour and simple character development that made it well suited to screen treatment. A successful film was made with Spencer Tracey in 1937 and it was filmed again in 1996.
Kipling had been thinking of taking out American citizenship and was said to be developing an American accent. He had met President Cleveland, whose standards of public life he deplored, a colossal agglomeration of reeking bounders and the future President Theodore Roosevelt, who was much more to his liking as a vigorous man of action.130 Two towns were named after Kipling in Michigan in 1895, Rudyard and Kipling, marking the high point of his public acclaim in the US. Their second child, Elsie, was born on 2 February 1896.
The Family Feud
Kipling never got over the notion he developed on his first travels in America that the land was a place of lawless violence. While he did meet some refined, literary Americans, the American he saw most frequently was Beatty Balestier, who was a drunken and often reckless character, but for all his cherished reputation as a wild man, his ever-helpful and generous character endeared him to his farming neighbours.
As the Kiplings became wealthier, Carrie became more English in her habits, dressing for dinner even when only the two of them were present and driving around in her elegant two-horse carriage with a straight-backed English groom in attendance. This was in keeping with the aspirations of the Balestier family in general, with the exception of their boisterous neighbour Beatty, who was the opposite of the conservative, temperate and privacy-loving Kiplings.
While the roots of the problem that split the Balestier family and led to Kipling’s departure from America could be put down to simple mutual incompatibility, it is as well to remark that not many people would have wanted Beatty Balestier as a neighbour. As Frederic van de Water, an American journalist wrote, ‘Beatty had horses and cattle, a hired man and a hired girl, a daughter, his first wife and a mighty thirst when he welcomed the Kiplings to Vermont. One by one in the years that followed, he lost them all but the last.’131
Beatty was well on the way through the first fortune he had inherited when Naulakha was completed. He had been kept by the Kiplings as their agent, superintending the construction and bulk-buying coal and other supplies for the establishment. Carrie directly accused Beatty of appropriating money he had been given for paying Naulakha workmen. As an older sister she tried to keep him on a tight rein, giving him money in small amounts and lecturing him about his wayward lifestyle. It is an example of her unsubtle methods that she tried to persuade Mrs Balestier to join her in removing their names from the backing of Beatty’s mortgage, which would have rendered him bankrupt and, so Carrie seemed to believe, would have taught him a lesson. Mrs Balestier refused, remarking with more wisdom than her daughter, ‘Beatty is a gentleman, drunk or sober.’132
Finally the respectable couple, probably at Carrie’s behest, formulated a plan for the reformation of the wastrel, which was taken to Beatty by Kipling. If Beatty would leave his drinking cronies in Vermont and devote himself to work elsewhere, Kipling would support Beatty’s wife and child for a year. Beatty was the opposite of grateful. He explained in the most explicit terms what his brother-in-law could do with his charity, and the relationship between them was cool thereafter. As early as May 1895 Carrie records in her diary that the Balestiers ‘slammed and locked front door in my face.’
A second cause of conflict was land. Kipling had worried that a small piece of land opposite Naulakha might fall into the hands of someone who would build on it and block his view. Beatty had no intention of selling; he wanted the land for hay for his stock, giving it to Kipling for a dollar if Kipling would allow him to keep mowing it.
Beatty then heard that the Kiplings had had a landscape architect up and were going to turn the mowing land into a formal garden. He invited them to dinner and asked about it, and Carrie said it was true. Beatty told his sister, ‘You are in my house; you’re my guest but by Christ, once you’ve left it, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.’
For the next year Beatty did no more work for the Kiplings and his fortunes fell as Kipling’s rose. They were no longer friendly, but by common consent, it was a failure of reticence on Kipling’s part that heated enmity into battle. Kipling stopped by for a drink in a hotel, Brooks House, and spoke to a Colonel Goodhue. The conversation turned to Beatty and Kipling said, Beatty is his own worst enemy. I’ve been obliged to carry him for the last year; to hold him up by the seat of his breeches.
The words got back to Beatty and he confronted Kipling on the road to Brattleboro where Kipling was riding his bicycle and he was driving his trap. Kipling heard him out and said, Let’s get this straight. Do you mean personal violence? Beatty confirmed that he did indeed, unless Kipling retracted the remarks he had made about Beatty he would do something – quite what he threatened was disputed. Kipling said it was to shoot his brains out; Beatty said it was ‘the licking of his life.’ Kipling would only respond, You will have only yourself to blame for the consequences.133
Kipling returned to Naulakha to consult Carrie, whose counsel could be relied upon in everything except matters affecting Beatty. The following Saturday while Beatty was out in Brattleboro with his wife and daughter, he was arrested for ‘assault with indecent and opprobrious names and epithets and threatening to kill’ Kipling. If Kipling hoped the dispute would be thus contained and Beatty would accept a warning, he had poorly misjudged the man. Beatty did not crave the quiet life as did Kipling; he loved being the centre of attention and the bigger the audience for his vindication the better. As Kipling was now one of the most famous writers in the world, and the world had hitherto been starved of personal information about him, the audience for this squabble could be very large indeed.
Beatty was brought to court to face his accuser in front of the Justice of the Peace and Town Clerk William S Newton. He admitted calling Kipling various names and threatening him with a licking. With a prima facie admission of the offence, the Justice had no alternative but to hold Beatty against a surety, but Beatty was not willing to put up a surety, he asked only for some time to say goodbye to his wife and child before they put him in jail.
A man with far less imagination than Kipling could by now see how this would look: an impecunious native of this town was being torn from the bosom of his family at the instigation of his rich and famous but cruel foreign kinsman. Kipling produced his cheque book and said he would be happy to supply the bail. Beatty refused. He was finally released on his own recognisance. He did not look like a man who was being beaten into seeing the error of his ways.
The case was scheduled to be heard on 12 May 1896, two days hence, giving the local correspondents ample time to file reports and reporters from national newspapers all the time they needed to descend on Brattleboro. Kipling’s surly behaviour towards journalists, his failure to endear himself to the townspeople and his generally negative attitude towards American culture told against him. Now the journalists, the townspeople and robust American culture rounded. The town took on the air of a festival, with all the locals coming to enjoy the show, with curious outsiders and the ranks of the press augmenting the crowd. Beatty had met pressmen at the station and driven them to his house to be entertained within sight of Naulakha. The courthouse was overwhelmed and the hearing had to be adjourned to the town hall.
Under relentless questioning from Beatty’s counsel Kipling had to admit that he and Beatty had not spoken for a year before the angry encounter; that he had uttered the provocative insults about Beatty; that he had never known Beatty to go about armed; that even at the height of his rage Beatty had not got down from his carriage to make a threat manifest; and that he had given Kipling time to make an apology before the matter proceeded any further.
Kipling was further obliged to admit that for the previous year he had not been supporting his brother-in-law and any loans he had given Beatty had been repaid in full, so even the substance of the remarks he had made, which had enraged Beatty, were not true. He insisted, however, that he felt in danger of his life at Beatty’s hands. His defence that all he did was in Beatty’s own interest seemed thin and insincere: I came here for that purpose – to help that boy all I could: if Beatty would stop drinking and go to work. It’s what I stayed here for, the reason I settled here in preference to anywhere else in America.134 Kipling refused to acknowledge what now seemed glaringly obvious, what Beatty’s counsel urged upon him: if Kipling had only publicly apologised to Beatty, none of this would have happened.
The hearing lasted all day and found there was sufficient in the case to set it before a Grand Jury, which would be held in September. Beatty was bailed for $400 and bound over to keep the peace. This was supposedly a victory for Kipling but he had lost the peace he had previously enjoyed at Naulakha, and he had been held up to public ridicule. It was, as any literate observer could tell, an utterly Kiplingesque tale: the reclusive and somewhat pompous outsider trying to teach his wayward brother-in-law some respect. The brother-in-law calmly let his instructor puff himself up to the full extent of his powers and then slowly deflate in front of an amused crowd.
The day following the trial, 13 May 1896, Carrie’s diary showed Kipling literally prostrate with misery: ‘Rud a total wreck. Sleeps all the time, dull and listless and dreary. These are dark days for us.’135 Four days after the trial, however, he was writing, as to the ‘nightmare’ it is behind me, and I find myself slowly recovering.136
As Kipling was now to discover, America is not lawless, but suffers from the opposite complaint: stoked by armies of lawyers, litigation never ends. Kipling was now going to have to give court testimony twice: in front of a Grand Jury in September and then publicly again at the trial if the Grand Jury ordained there should be one.
In the following months Kipling did not venture out, even on to his own land, without the protection of a friend. It became obvious that he was mentally unfit to face a public trial. The peace of Naulakha was shattered, the atmosphere irrevocably poisoned and the Kiplings’ life overrun with reporters and sightseers. As Kipling wrote, I prefer to run my own life and do not care for beats on ten dollars a week calling themselves brother-journalists and investigating my back yard and under clothing on the strength of it.137
It is by no means clear how the decision to leave was made; it was probably done jointly. Kipling was writing on 19 August that their passage to England was booked on the first day of September. The family gathered up a small amount of personal possessions and hastened away out of Brattleboro, then Vermont, then the United States. He would never again see the beloved home he had built.