Kipling Sahib
Page 35
According to their mutual friend Edmund Gosse, Balestier boasted of having made a ‘personal conquest’ of Kipling and of securing his agreement to collaborate with him on his next novel ‘within a week’ – a claim that has encouraged at least one biographer to see Balestier as a predatory homosexual and Kipling as a repressed one unwilling to face the fact.26 This ignores the most remarked upon feature of Balestier, which was the effect he had on people. Henry James wrote of his ‘extraordinary subtlety of putting himself in the place of the men – and quite as easily, when need was, of the women of letters’.27 Arthur Waugh, who worked for him as his assistant, afterwards remembered his ‘chameleon power with people’.28 That power Balestier put to good effect in placing his friendship at Ruddy’s disposal, and his reward was an intimacy at least as close as that which Ruddy had earlier enjoyed with Kay Robinson on the CMG, and probably a great deal closer.
So well did the two get on together that they decided to collaborate on a novel, to be set partly in the American West and partly in India. One account of the writing of The Naulahka: A Story of East and West has Balestier typing away while Kipling paces the room, ‘each composing, suggesting, or criticising in turn, and the mind of each stimulating the other’.29 However, Ruddy’s troubles with The Light That Failed and his other work meant that it was not until the start of 1891 that real progress began to be made, Wolcott reporting to a friend that the book was ‘as American as a roller blade and as Indian as a juggernaut’.30
In its original form the Naulakha was a marbled pavilion in Lahore Fort reputed to have cost nine lakhs of rupees to build. As misspelled in the title of the novel it was a jewelled necklace belonging to the princely state of Rhatore which the American Nicholas Tarvin sets out to steal, partly to influence a railroad boss into building a railway station for his hometown in the Midwest but also to win back his beloved, Kate Sheriff, who has turned him down and is now a medical missionary in Rhatore. Like Maisie in The Light That Failed, Kate is a ‘new woman’ who wants to go her own way. The story ends happily, with Nicholas winning Kate back – but only after she recognises that she is not ready to work with the Indian women whose lot she wants to better. Published in April 1892, The Naulahka was more credible than The Light That Failed, but still a disappointment to readers whose appetites had been whetted by Life’s Handicap. As before, Tarvin and his beloved had failed to come alive on the page. Brilliant at portraying life’s rougher characters in his short stories, Ruddy appeared incapable of working on a larger canvas. Something in his nature or his upbringing – and it is tempting to blame the withdrawal of love and the absence of loving adult role-models in his Southsea years – had left him emotionally stunted, unable to deal with the full range of human feelings. He understood the pleasures of the flesh as found in the arms of Appledore fish girls, Lahore courtesans, Putney tarts and Simla matrons, but shrank from real human intimacy, preferring as his womanly ideal the Maiden, virginal and compliant: Flo Garrard as she ought to be and not as she was. Unable to reconcile the one with the other, Ruddy exalted in his fiction what he was unable to find in his life.
From 1890 onwards Wolcott Balestier was visited in London by members of his family, including his two younger sisters, Carrie and Josephine, both of whom came and went over the months, taking it in turns to act as his housekeeper. Josephine was the prettier of the two, Caroline the clever one, stern-faced and strong-minded. Ruddy met them frequently and was made welcome in their family circle. He flirted with both sisters in a light-hearted way without, it seems, showing a preference for one over the other. But Carrie was the most literary-minded of the two and the most determined, as enthusiastic a literary groupie as Alice Macdonald had been a Pre-Raphaelite groupie a generation earlier. She was, in Henry James’s words, ‘a little person of extraordinary capacity … remarkable in her force, acuteness, capacity, and courage – and in the intense – almost manly nature of her emotion’.31 She took great pleasure in meeting her brother’s famous friends, and as the collaboration on The Naulahka progressed she began to make herself useful to both its authors as a collator, encouraging Ruddy to join ‘the typewriter fold’ and helping him keep his papers in order. At twenty-seven she was two years Ruddy’s senior, not a great age difference but enough for him to see her as an older woman of the sort he could trust and relate to. ‘He is so refreshingly unEnglish,’ wrote Carrie to Josephine in January 1891. ‘And for some unknown reason I have never had any shyness with him and I can be myself when he is about which is a great relief.’32 Although marriage can hardly have been in either party’s mind at that time, it is noteworthy that when Alice Kipling first set eyes on Carrie Balestier that summer she exclaimed, ‘That woman is going to marry our Ruddy.’
For reasons unexplained that may have had to do with Lockwood’s two royal commissions, Alice and Lockwood Kipling were now renting a small flat in Brighton, where Ruddy joined them from time to time, eager for ‘ten hours of hot sunshine’33 – and thinking seriously of returning to India. According to Trix, it was at Brighton as Ruddy sat at their table working on a new poem that he asked rhetorically what it was he was trying to say and was told by his mother, ‘And what should they know of England who only England know?’ The line provided the cornerstone for ‘The English Flag’, which calls on the ‘street-bred people’ of England to remember that their great empire had been won at a price. The four winds of the cardinal points bear witness to the expansion of British hegemony overseas, each calling in turn for the English people to ‘Go forth’ and do their bit. ‘Me men call the Home-Wind for I bring the English home,’ declares the East Wind:
The reeling junks behind me and the racing seas before,
I raped your richest roadstead – I plundered Singapore!
I set my hand on the Hoogli; as a hooded snake she rose,
And I flung your stoutest steamers to roost with the startled crows.
But never the lotos closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England’s sake –
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid –
Because of the bones of the English the English flag is stayed.
It was the first time since ‘Ave Imperatrix’ that Kipling had written a poem that was unashamedly imperialist. The poem’s sentiments accorded perfectly with W. E. Henley’s nationalist views and he ran ‘The English Flag’ in what was now the National Observer, soon afterwards making it the opening poem in a popular anthology entitled Lyra Heroica. By this means ‘The English Flag’ became rooted in the minds of two generations of Victorian and Edwardian schoolchildren. So seductively lyrical is its form that it is easy to overlook the fact that it is essentially a hymn to conquest.
In June 1891 Ruddy joined the Balestier family at a holiday cottage they had taken on the Isle of Wight, where his contact with Wolcott’s two sisters grew more intimate by the day. A month earlier Edmund Gosse, a staunch ally of both Balestier and Kipling, had publicly called on Ruddy to renew himself by returning to his travels. ‘Go east, Mr Kipling,’ he wrote in a critical article in the Century Magazine. ‘Go back to the Far East … Come back in ten years’ time with another precious and admirable budget of loot.’ Ruddy was now fast approaching a point of no return in his relationship with the elder of the two Balestier sisters and he resolved the issue by opting to take Gosse’s advice. ‘My need was to get clean away and re-sort myself,’ was how he explained himself in his autobiography. He evidently hoped that Wolcott Balestier would come with him: the first draft of ‘The Long Trail’, written at this time, shows that the appeal contained in the poem to ‘pull out on the trail again’ was initially directed not to a ‘dear lass’, as subsequently published, but to a ‘dear lad’. ‘Your English summer’s done,’ reads part of the first verse:
Ha’ done with the Tents of Shem, dear lad,
We’ve seen the season through,
And it’s time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
>
Pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail – the trail that is always new!
In the event Ruddy travelled alone, setting sail in mid-August 1891 on board the steamship Moor, bound for the ‘clean sunshine’ of the Cape, the first leg of a world voyage that would take him by way of New Zealand into the South Pacific.
It was a journey made without purpose – other than a vague hope to meet up with Robert Louis Stevenson on Samoa – and without companions – other than a sexual fling with a woman passenger on the leg to Australia. After two weeks in New Zealand, Ruddy had had enough and turned about. In mid-December he disembarked at Colombo, crossed to the Indian mainland, and after four days and nights in trains was back in Lahore, ‘the only real home I had yet known’, where not only his parents but also his old school chum Lionel ‘Stalky’ Dunsterville and his beloved bearer Kadir Baksh, ‘pearl among khitmatgars’, were on hand to greet his return.
Ruddy was back among his own people in the land where he was most himself. The community that only two years earlier had looked down upon him as a young pup now fêted him as a celebrity, and his own paper carried a report on his return. He revisited his old haunts in and around the city – ‘there, arrogant and unashamed was Lalun’s naughty little house’ – and was easily prevailed upon to write an account of his return to Lahore for the CMG. He was less happy to learn that George Chesney, on behalf of the Pioneer’s management in Allahabad, had sold the rights on all his writings in the Pioneer and the Week’s News to his old friend Émile Moreau for £1500. Although George Allen intervened from his retirement in England to make a gift to his former protégé of the copyright to all the short stories and poetry which had appeared in the pages of the Pioneer, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Week’s News (an act of generosity that Allen’s heirs did not appreciate), the matter continued to rankle. A peacemaking suggestion from Chesney that Ruddy might like to stay on in India to write some more ‘Letters of Marque’ for the Pi was rejected out of hand.
Whatever Ruddy’s further plans may have been, they were disrupted by the arrival of a telegram at Bikaner House on Christmas Eve. According to Edmund Gosse, it came from Carrie Balestier and was short and to the point: ‘WOLCOTT DEAD STOP COME BACK TO ME STOP.’
The news that his dearest friend had died of typhoid while on a business trip to Dresden left Ruddy grief-stricken. His Indian years should have hardened him to sudden death, but he had never been able to come to terms with it. Shocked and unnerved, he immediately booked a passage on the first available homeward-bound ship out of Bombay. He left his bewildered parents on Christmas Day and two days later boarded a Lloyd Triestino steamer bound for Europe. It seems entirely fitting that the only person to witness his final departure from the land of his birth was the Goan ayah – ‘so old but so unaltered’ – who had nursed him as a boy, and who bade him farewell ‘with blessings and tears’.34
12
‘Try as he will’
WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS, VERMONT AND SUSSEX, 1892–9
Try as he will, no man breaks wholly loose
From his first love, no matter who she be.
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose
That didn’t settle somewhere near the sea?
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Virginity’, The Years Between, 1914
The day after Ruddy arrived in London he took out a special marriage licence and a week later, on 18 January 1892, in a subdued ceremony witnessed by few friends and fewer relatives, he and Carrie Balestier were married at All Souls Church, Langham Place. According to Edmund Gosse, it was as if Ruddy had been ‘hurried into matrimony, like a rabbit into its hole … At 2.8 the cortège entered the church and at 2.20 left it … Both bridegroom and bride are possessed by a very devil of secrecy and mystery.’1 Henry James, who gave the bride away, was equally mystified. Writing to his brother William, he commended Carrie as ‘a hard devoted 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 at the altar in a dreary little wedding with an attendance simply of four men – her mother and sister prostrate with influenza.’2
After a week’s honeymoon as guests of Brown’s Hotel the newly-weds sailed off to America, although not before Ruddy had tacked two new poems to the beginning and end of his Barrack-Room Ballads: at the front an embarrassing encomium to the memory of Wolcott Balestier – ‘E’en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth, / In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth’ – and as an envoi a revised version of ‘The Long Trail’ complete with sex change, in which he set out his hopes of sharing the future with Carrie:
The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And the Deuce knows what we may do –
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
We’re down, hull down on the Long Trail –
The trail that is always new.
By the time these verses were published in March 1892 the Kiplings were well into the first leg of their honeymoon tour, which took them across America and Canada and then to Japan, where a bank crash and the loss of all Ruddy’s savings forced them to turn about. In June The Naulahka was published, and in August the couple settled in Balestier country at Brattleboro, in the hills of Vermont. For a year they rented a cottage from Carrie’s surviving brother, Beatty, while they set about building a house for themselves – an austere, ark-like structure which Ruddy named Naulakha. ‘I love this People,’ Ruddy had written after his first tour through the United States, and, although the lawlessness and disorder of American society troubled him, he believed these negative qualities to be more than offset by the rugged individualism of the American common man – in particular, those who embodied the American pioneer spirit: frontiersmen, hunters and farmers, whom he labelled ‘captains courageous’. These ‘unhandy men’ were ‘set, silent, indirect in speech, and as impenetrable as that other eastern farmer who is the bedrock of another land’, by which he meant India and the Indian ryot. Indeed, in its tensions and contradictions the United States reminded him of British India, and he convinced himself that he could be as much at home here as he had become in the Punjab. Bliss Cottage was little more than a rustic log cabin, and here he and Carrie lived as pioneers, installing a stove and piling up spruce boughs, so that ‘When winter shut down and sleigh-bells rang all over the white world that tucked us in, we counted ourselves secure.’3
This was a time of uncomplicated joy for both Ruddy and Carrie, made all the sweeter by the birth of a daughter, Josephine, at the end of the year. ‘You can guess how happy we are,’ he wrote to W. E. Henley in London five days later. ‘All things are going so excellently. Her chin is mine and the rest is dough but there’s no doubt about the chin. Nor unluckily about the temper which is anything but civilised.’ He also explained why he had sent his old patron no new work for publication recently: ‘I’ve been neglecting prose for verse and besides I’ve struck a vein of animal yarns that is leading me further afield than I thought.’4
During the summer Ruddy had been too busy travelling to write much fiction, but by the autumn Carrie’s developing pregnancy had set him thinking about children and childhood, reawakening his own inner child, long dormant. In answer to a request for children’s stories from Mary Mapes Dodge, editor of the St Nicholas Magazine, he sent her ‘The Potted Princess’,5 based on his and Trix’s Bombay childhood and their Goan ayah’s talent for soothing her charges through story-telling. In the accompanying letter he asked Mrs Dodge if she was interested in some more children’s tales he was working on. The first of these, subsequently published in the St Nicholas Magazine as ‘Collar-Wallah and the Poison Stick’,6 drew on his observation of a troop of langurs in Simla, strengthened by further insights into monkey behaviour contained in his father’s Beast and Man in India: a Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People – a delightful bestiary, lavishly illustrated with Lockwood Kipling’s own sket
ches, which Ruddy had encouraged Macmillan to publish some months earlier. A second story he proposed to Mrs Dodge would be about ‘a small boy who got a blessing and a ghost-dagger from a Thibetan lama who came down from Thibet in search of a miraculous river that washed away all sin (the river that gushed out when the Bodhisat’s arrow struck in the ground) and how these two went hunting for it together – the old priest with his priestly tam o’shanter hat and the young English child.’7 Within a week the small boy who was to accompany the lama on his search had acquired a name: ‘If the children think fit we’ll try another [story] – the tale of the Thibetan lama and Kim o’ the Rishti[,] for I would sooner make a fair book of stories for children than a new religion or a completely revised framework of our social and political life.’8
These are the earliest known references to Kim. However, from two further surviving letters written over the succeeding weeks it is clear that Ruddy then put Kim and his Tibetan lama to one side – because his mind was now entirely focused on something altogether more atavistic: the Indian jungle and its denizens, human and wild. Every European child raised in India with an ayah heard stories drawn, directly or indirectly, from the much-loved Jatakas, tales of birds and beasts and men, and their interactions, based on ancient Buddhist moral tales. In Lahore Ruddy would have been hard put to avoid recent translations of these tales from the original Pali into English: Rhys Davids’s Buddhist Birth Stories or Jataka Tales had been published in 1880 and Victor Fussboll’s more comprehensive Folktales of India: the Pali Jataka in 1884.