Rudyard Kipling in Vermont: Birthplace of the Jungle Books

by Stuart Murray

Overview

Kipling's four productive years in Vermont comprise one of the most fascinating chapters in American literary history. Murray tells the tale with a splendid selection of Kipling's poems which help to bring his subjects to life. His generous use of quotations from letters, diaries, the press, and sundry other sources puts the reader personally into the vivid tapestry of the most productive period in the life of this world-renowned poet, novelist, teller of children's tales, essayist, and proud father.
- John A. Wallace, former Director of the School for International Training, Kipling Road, Brattleboro, Vermont

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781884592058
Publisher:	Images From The Past, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/01/1997
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Stuart Murray has written twelve works of fiction and ten of nonfiction. Murray's nonfiction 'America's Song,' the story of 'Yankee Doodle,' was in Booklist's top ten books on music for 1999 and was awarded third place in the history category as ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year for 1999. 'Rudyard Kipling in Vermont' was selected a national finalist in Independent Publisher's biography category in 1997. Having served as fiction editor for a leading book producer, Murray has worked on more than twenty historical novels, and with a number of best-selling authors.

A journalist, editor, and writer for more than twenty-five years, Murray loves with his family in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Letters of Travel

Embarking from Liverpool on February 3, 1892, the newlywed Kiplings were happy and secure, with new books soon to be published, more than 2,000 pounds sterling in the bank, and berths on the North German ship S.S. Teutonic bound for New York. Thus began their "long trail," evoked in a poem Rudyard dedicated to Carrie.

    They were seen off at the docks by their acquaintance, Bram Stoker, soon to write his horror novel, Dracula, and by Henry James. A keen admirer and patron of Kipling, James had supported his election to the Savile Club, the meeting place of literary society. He had written about Kipling to his friend, popular Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who was living in the South Pacific, on Samoa.

    James told Stevenson that Kipling was "the star of the hour" and Stevenson's "nascent rival." Stevenson replied, "Kipling is too clever to live." And: "Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since—ahem—I appeared."

    As the Kiplings crossed the wintry, gale-tossed Atlantic, Rudyard expected the journey to take him eventually to Samoa and Stevenson, whose work he liked so much. This was the second time he had set out to meet Stevenson, the first being an aborted world voyage the previous summer, in 1891.

    At that time, Kipling had broken down from overwork, suffering from chronically weak lungs that often ached in the damp English weather. He had taken a long sea journey for his health, departing England in August and heading southaroundAfrica, then eastward to Asia. He had wanted Carrie to come along as his wife, but she had not been ready to marry.

    He had traveled alone to South Africa, Australia, and on to New Zealand with hopes of taking a ship to Stevenson, who lived in the warm climate because of his own poor health. Difficulties with sailing schedules to Samoa had prevented that visit and Kipling had gone to India.

    By December he was in Lahore, visiting his parents, Alice and Lockwood Kipling. It was a happy homecoming.

The elder Kiplings were "Anglo-Indians," as British nationals residing in the crown colony were called. Since 1865, the year Rudyard was born in Bombay, Lockwood had been an art instructor and museum curator employed by the colonial government.

    As was common practice with Anglo-Indians, the Kiplings sent their son to England at the age of six for his elementary education. There, Rudyard lived unhappily with foster parents until he was twelve, then went to boarding school.

    He returned to India at seventeen to work hard for seven years on provincial newspapers, rising to become a special correspondent with the freedom to rove the subcontinent, writing what he wished. From Bombay to the Himalayan foothills, Kipling followed frontier campaigns and engineering projects. He journeyed alone through dangerous unconquered country and endured the brutally hot climate that sometimes drove Europeans mad.

    He once recklessly defied a local chieftain who tried to bribe him to write favorable articles that would make the chieftain look good to the British rulers. Kipling's refusal could have cost his life, but in the end the chieftain delighted in the young sahib's courage. Working long grueling hours as an editor in the sweltering newspaper plant, he more than once came down with fever that also brought him close to death.

    In India, Kipling made his first mark as an author. Poems, essays, and short stories he wrote for the Pioneer, a newspaper based in the city of Allahabad, were collected and published as books back in Britain. He wrote insightfully about the most current and controversial topics of the day: the moral obligations of ruling the empire, the mistreatment of common soldiers by the upper classes, the true character of native peoples in the colonies, and the sometimes scandalous secret lives of Anglo-Indians and military men in India.

    Kipling's fresh voice, revealing intimate details about a fascinating scene, won him a small but enthusiastic following, which included London's literary elite. He loved India, especially Bombay, but his restless ambition took him around the world to London. Upon his return to England late in 1889, he was sought out by publishers who wanted his work and by writers who wanted to know him.

    Writing prolifically, Kipling burst upon the scene in early 1890. He became the rage in both the United States and the British Empire, his readers fascinated by his strong and irreverent writing, which crackled with anti-establishment humor.

Most famous for his short stories and galloping verses about the harsh life of lowly redcoats and devoted civil servants in the ranks of Her Majesty's colonial administration, Kipling often expressed himself in the crude, blunt voice of a private soldier—as no leading English author ever had before.

    A recurring theme was the government's duty to the common man, British or colonial, white or native. Both intellectual society and music hall ruffians loved Kipling's poems and short stories. No one since Charles Dickens of three decades previous had so appealed to rich and poor alike.

    Fired by lofty ideals, but cynical about the shortcomings of the often-blundering imperial administration he had seen firsthand, Kipling's opinions shook the foundations of the political establishment and infuriated even prime ministers. He composed inspirational, sometimes stinging, "public poetry" such as "The English Flag," which made the empire-building British look at themselves in a new and revealing mirror:

Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro— And what should they know of England who only England know?— The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!

    Alfred Lord Tennyson, the aged British poet laureate (also known as a poet of the soldier and famous for his "The Charge of the Light Brigade") compared Kipling to the rest of the new generation of writers, saying he was "the only one of them with the divine fire." It was rumored that, on Tennyson's death, Kipling would be offered the title of poet laureate of the empire, an unprecedented honor, for he was much younger than any other leading man of letters.

    Supremely confident in his powers as writer, social commentator, and poet, Kipling described in "Song of the Banjo" the spell he could weave:

And the tunes that mean so much to you alone—
Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose,
Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan—
I can rip your very heartstrings out with those;
With the feasting and the folly and the fun—
And the lying and the lusting and the drink,
And the merry play that drops you when you're done,
To the thoughts that burn like irons if you think.

    Filled with the same hunger for accomplishment that was urging the British Empire to reach its zenith in the next ten years, Kipling dreamed of the Anglo-Saxon race taming and civilizing the rest of the world—for what he considered to be the world's own good. The United States, he hoped, would be an ally of the British Empire. Until now, however, little of his work was calculated to win Americans to his point of view.

In 1889, when Kipling made that first globe-trotting journey from India to America, he paid his way by writing "letters of travel" essays for the Pioneer. In a glib and light-hearted style he told what he saw from Burma to China, Japan to California and the Wild West, from western Canada to Niagara Falls and the East Coast. The letters were also published by a Chicago newspaper, and soon were pirated by other papers and read everywhere in the United States.

    Though Kipling liked Americans, he could not stand to hear them boast—as so many invariably and loudly did in those freewheeling days of expansion, speculation, gold rushes, and ready money. The first thing he did upon arriving in San Francisco was to write a letter of travel that made fun of the city's harbor defenses.

    "... I saw with great joy that the block-house which guarded the mouth of the 'finest harbor in the world, Sir,' could be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong with safety, comfort and despatch."

    In another letter, Kipling quoted an anonymous American who supposedly told him that in the United States, "The whole system is rotten from top to bottom, as rotten as rotten can be." As for American politics, Kipling's American said, "No one but a low-down man will run for Congress.... If I had money enough I could buy the Senate of the United States, the Eagle and the Star-Spangled Banner complete." And: "With us our better classes are corrupt and our lower classes are lawless."

    Another anonymous American warned Kipling not to carry a revolver unless he knew how to use it, or he might be drawn into deadly gunplay. Indeed, after some months touring the West, Kipling came to believe that in saloons he was safer keeping his hands always in sight than risk being shot by a drunk who might think he was going for a concealed revolver.

    Of Chicago's lower depths, Kipling wrote, "Except in London ... I had never seen such a collection of miserables." That he included the British capital in his critique did not count for much with annoyed American readers.

    Kipling even twitted the American way of speaking: "They delude themselves into the belief that they talk English." He sneered at the small standing army: "When one hears so much of the nation that can whip the earth, it is ... surprising to find her so temptingly spankable." As for the lack of forts on the lakeshore near Buffalo: "... an unarmoured gunboat guarding Toronto could ravage the towns on the lakes."

    Kipling described a well-dressed American lady at Chicago's slaughterhouses, eagerly watching the butchery. He wrote that Salt Lake City's Mormons were lower-class practitioners of "tawdry mysticism" who borrowed from Freemasonry. And on reaching the East Coast, he guffawed in print that "three first-class ironclads would account for New York, Bartholdi's statue and all."

    In fact, Kipling had cause for resentment of the United States, for American publishers had printed his books without his permission, and with no intention to remunerate him though his work sold even better there than in Britain. First published in England and India, his work was unprotected in the States because no international copyright law was yet in force.

    Early in the 1889 visit, he admitted his remarks "may sound blood-thirsty, but remember, I had come with a grievance upon me—the grievance of pirated English books."

    Though Kipling had plenty of good things to say about the States, such comments were either in personal letters or (because they were not controversial) were not reprinted by American papers. He especially admired American women: "I am hopelessly in love with about eight American maidens—all perfectly delightful till the next one comes into the room." He said, "They possess, moreover, a life among themselves, independent of any masculine associations ... (and) they can take care of themselves."

    Indeed, Kipling had for years been enchanted by an American woman who was living in India and was interested in his writing. She was, however, happily married. Later, he was informally and briefly engaged to a second American woman before marrying a third, Carrie Balestier.

Kipling was interested in all he could learn about Americans.

    An excellent listener, he soaked up local color, dialects, mannerisms, and attitudes. His memory was uncanny, his powers of observation springing from a fascination with everything around him. Relentlessly striving for what he believed to be authenticity was a crucial aspect of his art.

    Kipling took particular pride in honesty, cultivating an ability to look at things from opposite points of view, as he said in "The Two-sided Man":

Much I owe to the Lands that grew—
More to the Lives that fed—
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.

* * *

I would go without shirt or shoe,
Friend, tobacco or bread,
Sooner than lose for a minute the two
Separate sides of my head!

    Despite his high standard of honesty—or perhaps because of it—the 1889 letters of travel too often made Kipling sound like a young know-it-all. His frank but shallow comments on the United States were resented as only an Englishman's comments could be resented by a nation which, more than a century after the Revolution, still had plenty of citizens who considered Britain an adversary.

    During his visit, he spoke brashly to American reporters, naïvely providing controversial copy that sold newspapers. In a letter of travel he said the most persistent reporter "overwhelmed me not so much by his poignant audacity as by his beautiful ignorance." Talking to American reporters was "exactly like talking to a child—a very rude little child." No matter how an answer was given, he said, the reporter simply could not understand it.

    When one in San Francisco asked, "Have you got reporters anything like our reporters on Indian newspapers?" Kipling said no. "They would die."

    American newspaper editors gleefully quoted his most outrageous letters of travel. Sometimes, false passages were inserted to make Kipling all the more arrogant and despicable in American eyes. With much fanfare these editors played on anti-British sentiment for all it was worth and published editorials and letters that attacked Kipling ferociously. Angered, he eventually refused to be interviewed, further irritating American journalists.

    In the spring of 1891, Kipling made his second visit to the States, a brief holiday in New York City to visit an uncle who lived there. The moment he landed, he again was sought by reporters who wanted interviews more than ever now that he was famous. He refused, infuriating reporters and editors, who swore to get even if he ever came back.

    The years 1890-91 in England were a whirlwind of work and triumph, which left Kipling ill and exhausted, on the verge of a nervous collapse by the time he went on that sea voyage in 1891.

    At the end of December, while with his mother and father in India, he received a telegram from Carrie with the devastating news that Wolcott had died in Germany. Kipling cut short his world trip, rushing back to London, and on the way telegraphed a proposal of marriage to Carrie. He reached England on January 10, 1892, and eight days later, with a special license permitting a shorter waiting period, they took their vows in All Souls'.

    Now, in early February, Kipling's next journey around the world did include Carrie, and this time they surely would get to Samoa and Robert Louis Stevenson, who also had an American wife.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Prologue	1
Chapter 1 Letters of Travel	7
Chapter 2 In Sight of Monadnock	15
Chapter 3 The Last Time East of Suez	23
Chapter 4 Time, Light, and Quiet	33
Chapter 5 The Stillness of Winter	45
Chapter 6 Fame, Family, and Life in a Fairy Tale	55
Chapter 7 "Barbarism Plus Telephone: I Like It"	65
Chapter 8 The Pater and Naulakha	75
Chapter 9 The Day's Work	89
Chapter 10 Homesick	99
Chapter 11 Spacious and Friendly Days	109
Chapter 12 Quarrels	121
Chapter 13 If Trouble Comes	131
Chapter 14 The Native Born	139
Chapter 15 Bombay and Brattleboro	149
Chapter 16 Departure and Loss	161
Epilogue	173
Acknowledgements	179
Bibliography	181
Kipling Sites	185
Sources of Illustrations & Permissions	187
Index	188
List of Kipling Works Quoted in Text	196

What People are Saying About This

M. Enamul Karim

Well-documented with insighful research and persuasive analysis, this well-written gbook is a pleasure to read...Each chapter is filled with detailed and useful information with primary and secondary sources as supporting evidence...I would strongly recommend this book to both Kipling scholars and lovers so that one may get a well-rounded and full picture of Rudyard Kipling's growth and accomplishments
(Dr. M. Enamul Karim, Professor English, Rockford College)

J. Birjepatil

It fills a gap [and provides] the missing links in the bittersweet story that haunts the portals of Naulakha...Murray tells the story in a crisply intelligent style that characterizes so much of Kipling's own writing...Page after page one comes across little nuggets of information that should warm the cockles of every Kiplingite.
(J. Birjepatil, Professor of English, Marlboro College)