Hesketh Pearson

by The Marrying Americans

  But his ambition now demanded a wider field and he wished to capitalize his reputation in London; so he sold his paperbacked editions to the man who ran the railway bookstalls, his Plain Tales and Departmental Ditties to a publisher, and with a salary for six months in his pocket he started for the west by way of the east, reaching England via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco and New York, with much zigzagging en route. Toward the close of 1889 he arrived in London to find himself famous. Like Dickens before him and Wells after him, he never knew the years of despair, poverty, suspense and struggle endured by authors whose talents are not immediately recognized by the average reader. He hit the public taste, as well as the public lack of taste, at once, never looked back and never moved forward, a man of genius with a boy’s mentality.

  Taking chambers in a building at the embankment end of Villiers Street, Strand, he was soon on friendly terms with critics, editors and publishers, all of whom combined to help him, his reputation with the reading public being made when Soldiers Three came out at the beginning of 1890. He did all the things that blooming authors were supposed to do: dined with such nurses of genius as Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse and Walter Besant; made himself agreeable to magazine magnates, joined the Savile Club, placed his literary affairs in the capable hands of A. P. Watt and Son, and visited George Meredith. Nearly every leading newspaper wanted contributions from him, and early in 1890 a long article in The Times placed him firmly on the map, where he remained unchanged. At the close of his life he displayed not a little of the cheap humor expressive of contempt which is commonly practiced by schoolboys. In his autobiography he says that he took some of his verses “to a monthly review of sorts edited by a Mr. Frank Harris.” The Fortnightly Review was the most distinguished monthly of its time, while Frank Harris and W. E. Henley were the two most remarkable editors of the age; but when Kipling wrote that phrase the monthly had ceased to mean anything while the man had died with a somewhat tarnished reputation. Another notable figure of the nineties received another childish sneer in that last book, where he speaks of “the suburban Toilet-Club school favoured by the late Mr. Oscar Wilde,” a typical bit of fourth-form vulgarism which looks smart and means nothing.

  Kipling was more in his element with W. E. Henley, a man of savage temperament and, as Bernard Shaw put it, “a tragic example of the combination of imposing powers of expression with nothing important to express.” A famous verse of Henley’s was much treasured by Kipling:

  In the fell clutch of circumstance,

  I have not winced nor cried aloud:

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody but unbowed.

  They became friends, and Henley’s weekly, The Scots Observer, published Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Though frequently asked to review books, Kipling prudently made up his mind never to criticize the work of living authors, and thus his popularity remained unimpeded by personal hostility.

  During his first year in Villiers Street he wrote several short stories, many verses, and a novel, The Light That Failed, which appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (January ‘91) and in that form was an innocuous yarn with a happy ending; though when published as a volume in London he changed the whole tone of the work, which ended on a note of tragedy. He had already said some nasty things about the American public, and his action in giving them a pleasant little tale for consumption may have been a comment on their taste. His own taste was held up to scorn by Max Beerbohm when the story was dramatized and put on the stage by Forbes-Robertson. Spotting the juvenility which Kipling never outgrew, Beerbohm said that his men were “feverishly imagined” just as they would be by a woman, though the specifically Kiplingesque atmosphere, “charged pungently with the triple odour of beer, baccy and blood,” determined the sex of the author, whose hero contained within himself the brute and the bounder and spoke “that abrupt jargon of alternate meiosis and hyperbole which is Mr. Kipling’s literary style.” The cruelty of the average schoolboy comes out when the blinded hero, hearing soldiers machine-gunning some Arabs, screams “Give ‘em hell, men! Oh, give ‘em hell!”

  It may be added at this point that most of Kipling’s humor is puerile and derives from the discomfort of others or the practical jokes so beloved by the immature. One of his short stories, “The Mutiny of the Mavericks,” is a good example of the delight he took in the popular adolescent sport of bullying. It describes how a seditious agitator in an Irish regiment tries to get away from two tommies who have guessed his intention. Their brutal treatment drives him mad with fear; he dashes toward the enemy and is shot. One of the tommies regrets that the agitator is no longer alive to be kicked and punched because of the fun he gave them. Had Kipling ever done any soldiering, he would have known that men in action are too much concerned with what is going on to indulge in pastimes of this kind. But his sense of reality was repeatedly betrayed by his rudimentary sense of fun, the fanciful cruelty in some of his tales signifying a spiritually undeveloped nature.

  In the early nineties Kipling suffered much from his sudden popularity in America, because publishers printed his works by the thousand and he never got a cent for them. With the assistance of his agent Watt he fought the pirates tooth and nail but made little headway, and it was therefore a great relief to him when Gosse introduced him to a young American named Wolcott Balestier who represented an American firm for which he wished to buy publication rights of leading British authors. Balestier came of a Huguenot family of New Englanders who had done well, Wolcott’s grandfather, a lawyer, having left over half a million dollars at his death in ‘88. Wolcott was a man of great personal charm, and every English author took to him at once. Kipling became devoted to him, began to follow his advice on literary matters, and actually agreed to collaborate with him on a novel. The young American agent was so successful that his family joined him in London, his mother, two sisters, and a brother. One of the sisters, Josephine, was a beauty; the other, Caroline, was efficient and practical; the brother, Beatty, was talkative, volatile, and so expensive in his habits that Wolcott soon sent him home. But Caroline (known as Carrie) proved extremely useful, took control of Wolcott’s domestic life and became his hostess both in London and the Isle of Wight where he had a cottage. While Wolcott and Kipling wrote their novel together, a friendship between Rudyard and Carrie sprang up; and when the overworked author, just recovering from an attack of influenza, was medically advised to take a trip around the world, the two had probably reached a point where marriage was in the cards. She was three years his senior.

  In the autumn of 1891 he visited Cape Town, New Zealand and Australia; then, hearing that Wolcott Balestier was ill, he started home via Lahore, where a cable told him that Wolcott was dead of typhoid. He hurried back instantly, reached London on January 10, 1892, and married his friend’s sister, Carrie Balestier, eight days later, to the amazement of Henry James, who described her as “a hard devoted capable little person whom I don’t in the least understand his marrying.” But Henry James did not perceive that Kipling felt as defenseless as a child without some protective agency in the background. Up to then he had depended on his father, mother and sister—“the family square,” he called it. Henceforth his wife took their place, and being a natural manager was well qualified for the post.

  Kipling quickly polished off the novel called The Naulahka which he had undertaken with Wolcott, and the newly married pair started off on a journey around the world. They stayed with Beatty Balestier and his wife at Brattleboro in Vermont, and decided to buy some property there on which to build a house. Crossing the continent, they took boat to Yokohama, where they experienced an earthquake and a bank crash. All Rudyard’s savings disappeared and they had to sell their tickets for the rest of the journey, returning to Brattleboro, where they lived temporarily in a cottage. But they were soon having a house erected, a substantial affair on a hillside with a veranda and a view. They called it Naulahka after the book, the slight error of spelling
being corrected. With the birth of a daughter they settled down peacefully in that neighborhood, and it seemed as if they might take permanent root there, Rudyard enjoying the domestic chores as a restful change from the labor of writing. Whether he also enjoyed dressing for dinner every night, a ritual insisted on by his wife to keep the servants in awe, we shall never know. His brother-in-law Beatty was their general factotum, arranging purchases, contracts, horses, labor and so on. Unfortunately Carrie, instead of giving Beatty lump sums for the work he arranged or did, treated him as a child, in fact precisely as she treated her husband, and paid him in driblets. This got on her brother’s nerves, especially as he was a natural spendthrift and always in debt, and friendly relations were rather strained before the actual completion of Beatty’s work for them and the cessation of payments. There came a period when the two households were not on speaking terms. Like many other people, Beatty was thick-skinned in making demands, thin-skinned on being refused.

  Meanwhile Kipling, his health completely restored, was steadily revealing that side of his nature which produced both his best and his silliest work. The boy in him preferred animals to human beings, and the endearing Jungle Books were the result. But the boy in him also found machines more interesting than human beings and wrote poems on pistons, crying “Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the song o’ steam.” If Robbie Burns had lived in the age of steam, he would not have wasted his time writing about it. Having a mature imagination, he was more interested in human nature than hissing vapor. This was Kipling at his worst. He had the adolescent passion for finding out how things worked and why this was that, many of his verses and stories reading like guides or catalogues. He loved to display inside knowledge of all sorts of trades and professions and often mistook erudition for intuition, information for imagination. He liked Captains Courageous, which he wrote during his stay in America, mainly because it dealt with codfishing schooners about which he was able to impart a great variety of carefully acquired technical details. Perhaps it need not be added that his stories about animals and his verses on machines were his most popular works, because people enjoy information rendered in a picturesque or racy form.

  Rudyard and Carrie were not wholly stationary at Brattleboro during these years. They paid visits to his parents, who were living in a house at the edge of a strangely unattractive Wiltshire village called Tisbury, and to Washington, where Rudyard expressed his wonder to Theodore Roosevelt that the American people, “having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done,” yet regarded themselves as a godly community which set an example to the brutal world beyond their frontiers. In effect he felt the atmosphere of America to be hostile and began to think of returning to England before events precipitated their departure.

  The domestic situation was rapidly degenerating. Carrie’s method of dealing with Beatty infuriated the young man, who sank more deeply in debt and started to drink heavily. The situation was not eased by his habit of pinching things from their house, using the money given him to pay bills for his personal needs, and taking umbrage when charged with dishonesty. For a while she tried to rescue him by lending money, but soon she had to stop that, and as he was not the sort of man who remained silent in his cups it became known locally that the family was quarreling. Carrie’s second daughter was born in February 1896, and the following month Beatty went bankrupt. As Kipling was now making large sums from his pen, it was thought disgraceful by Beatty’s friends that he should not be financed by his wealthy relations, and the feeling in the place ran strongly in his favor. Carrie made matters worse by proposing that Beatty should leave the district, and while he was finding a job elsewhere she would maintain him and look after his daughter. This was the final straw. Beatty felt insulted, and soon had the opportunity for revenge.

  Early in May Kipling was riding his bicycle in the neighborhood and fell off it. Just then Beatty came galloping by, pulled up, flourished his whip, and roughly demanded speech. Kipling replied that the other had better talk to his lawyer. But Beatty volleyed forth a barrage of accusations, charged Kipling with spreading false rumors, said he was a liar, a cheat and a coward, threatened to shoot him, and drove off calling him “a little bastard.” Rather foolishly Kipling set the law in motion. Beatty was arrested, brought before the Justice of the Peace, and the case was adjourned. Still more foolishly Kipling offered to stand bail for his brother-in-law, who declined his assistance, obtained a friend for the purpose, and wired to the press that he had an admirable story to sell them. Kipling being now a famous figure, the place soon swarmed with reporters, and money changed hands over the drinking of much whisky. The case came up again at the Town Hall, and the family’s private doings were exposed to the limelight, to Kipling’s intense distress. Although the proceedings resulted in Beatty being sent for trial, the real sufferers were the Kiplings, who decided to leave the country as soon as possible, the papers pouring scorn and ridicule on the distinguished author. Beatty sold various accounts of what had happened to various papers, and in the popular mind he was both victim and victor. The Kiplings had not mixed in the social life of the district and were not liked as a consequence. Beatty was never tried, because his accuser had left for England before the case was due for hearing.{38}

  The first place in England where Kipling and Carrie tried to settle down was near Torquay, but they soon perceived that Rock House, Maidencombe, had an atmosphere of unhappiness that depressed both of them, and the wheezy, wealthy, respectable inhabitants of Torquay inspired a desire in Kipling to dance through it “with nothing on but my spectacles.” Nine months of the place were about eight too many, and they moved to Rottingdean, near Brighton, at the beginning of June 1897, where they lived off and on for five years, firstly at North End House, lent them by Kipling’s aunt, Lady Burne-Jones, and next at The Elms, a stone’s throw away. Here he became friendly with his cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who had married Lucy Ridsdale whose family lived in the other big house on the village green.

  It was the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and Kipling felt that the British people were congratulating themselves on the Empire a little too profusely. He decided to issue a warning in the form of a hymn but did not think much of the result, which he flung into the wastepaper basket. A visitor retrieved it and said it should be published. After some pressure he omitted two of the seven stanzas and “Recessional” appeared in The Times on July 17, 1897. His Wesleyan grandparents spoke through him in the Biblical accents of the hymn, and no poem of that length has ever created such a sensation. For sheer majesty of utterance there is nothing to compare with it in the hymnals, and as a portent it was the most sincerely patriotic thing he wrote. The child in Kipling, not content with a family of his own to make him feel secure, needed a family outside his family as a double-buttress, and this further protection was the British Empire, a family circle surrounding the family square. But the boy needs heroes to maintain the institution of his fancy, and Kipling’s heroes were about as much like life as the ancient gods, his ideal being painted as the Brushwood Boy who is much too good to be true, his appearance and nature being such that everyone, from the butler to the scullery maid, adores him at sight. This utterly impossible being was presumably Kipling’s idea of the born leader. But the schoolboy has also been taught what is called team spirit, which is transposed in the Jungle Books into “the law of the pack,” a soul-imperiling theory exactly suited to a totalitarian state. Kipling did not pause to consider the implications of pack-law, but ratiocination was not his strong point.

  His patriotism at its best came out in a love of the English countryside, an intense expression of his family affections, the love of a mother-country being symbolical of love for a mother. While at Rottingdean he wrote his poem “Sussex” which contains some of his most deeply felt lines. Like every other singer in history, he only wrote poetry at moments. The output of every poet except Shakespeare may be described as a desert of verse with occ
asional oases of poetry, which is the flawless image of a generally felt or easily communicated emotion. Kipling produces this effect more frequently and more movingly than anyone since Shakespeare whenever his emotions are stirred by the sight or memory of the soil and scenery of England, and nowhere more beautifully than in “Sussex”:

  Here through the strong unhampered days

  The tinkling silence thrills;

  Or little, lost, Down churches praise

  The Lord who made the hills...

  That deeper than our speech and thought,

  Beyond our reason’s sway,

  Clay of the pit whence we were wrought

  Yearns to its fellow-clay.

  Still at Rottingdean, with frequent visits to consult his father at Tisbury, he revealed his intimate understanding of boyhood in a tale of adventure without a plot called Kim, a poetic evocation of India unique in the language. It was a great moment for him when Carrie produced a son in August ‘97. The family square was now complete, and they began to winter year by year in South Africa, where the children had the time of their lives and Kipling had long talks with Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner, and Cecil Rhodes, the millionaire Empire-builder, who was largely inarticulate until the poet gave him a tongue.