As a literary agent, Balestier combined two talents well suited to the job: a shrewd business sense and great personal charm. He was one of the first to see the literary marketplace as an arena for speculation like any other—mining, say, or pork bellies. The writer Edmund Gosse described Balestier’s data-driven command of English writers, from major figures like Thomas Hardy to “honest purveyors of deciduous fiction.” Gosse wrote that he had never met anyone in the literary trade “who had anything like his power of marshaling before his memory, in due order, all the militant English writers of the moment, small as well as great.” For Balestier, writers “stood in seemly rows, the names that every Englishman honors and never buys, the names that every Englishman buys and never honors. Balestier knew them all . . . knew their current value.”
Wolcott Balestier in his London office.
Gosse experienced the “thrill of attraction” on meeting Balestier, ascribing his charm to a “mixture of suave Colonial French and the strained nervous New England blood.” Balestier blurred other categories as well. He was, according to Gosse, “a carefully dressed young-old man or elderly youth, clean-shaven, with smooth dark hair, thin nose, large sensitive ears, and whimsically mobile mouth.” The biggest contradiction lay in the vitality of his personal presence in contrast with the frail body in which it made its precarious home. Gosse noted “the extreme pallor of the complexion” balanced “by the fire in the deeply-set dark blue eyes.”
Gosse was less enthusiastic about Balestier’s stock-market approach to literature, which he considered typically, and vulgarly, American. Such cold-blooded financial procedures might be familiar in what Gosse called the “whole industrial field,” but in the more gentlemanly profession of publishing they were, in his judgment, “unique.” Balestier brought a “sporting zest” to the literary marketplace, and what Gosse called, uneasily, his “industrial imagination.” Gosse was especially startled by his young friend’s “great dreams of consolidation” among the publishing houses; in this regard, and in his speculative approach to books as commodities, Balestier anticipated today’s world of Amazon, publishing conglomerates, and bestseller lists. Balestier’s other talent was an uncanny ability to cultivate the loyalty of the authors he sought to represent. To the insecure, he conveyed confident reassurance; to those who wished to be flattered, he could be almost insufferable in his praise. Chameleonlike, he was able to fit himself to the expectations of new acquaintances: “to each literary man and woman whom he visited he displayed a tincture of his or her own native color.”
Nowhere was Balestier’s lavish attention more in play than in his courtship of Henry James. “I have lately seen much of the admirably acute & intelligent young Balestier,” James wrote on August 30, 1890. “I think that practically he will soon do ‘everything’ for me.” “Everything” included reassuring James as he embarked on his riskiest venture, as a playwright. Balestier struck the perfect note: “If you will let me ‘assist’ at the first performance of the first play of our first dramatist . . . nothing short of legal proceedings to restrain my liberty can prevent my being present.”
By the summer of 1890, Balestier’s activities extended beyond representing individual authors. With the German-English publisher William Heinemann, he established the firm Heinemann and Balestier, with the intention of cutting into the lucrative paperback empire of the German Tauchnitz publishing operation in Europe. Another director in the firm was the Irish writer Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Meanwhile, Balestier was hot on the trail of a “new Indian writer,” whom Gosse had recommended. Gosse reported Balestier’s dismissive retort when he first heard the exotic name of Rudyard Kipling. “Is it a man or a woman?” he asked. “What’s its real name?” But Balestier quickly realized that Kipling was precisely the kind of author—a writer with international scope and a potentially worldwide audience—that most interested him.
Within a week, according to Gosse, Balestier had added Kipling to his “personal conquests.” Within a year, he had published a volume of Kipling’s Indian stories, Mine Own People, in the United States. He persuaded Henry James to write a preface to help sell the book. James was particularly taken with what he called Kipling’s “excursions” into exotic India, which he thought brought something new and racy to the “woefully stale” precincts of English and American fiction. “A large part of his high spirits,” James wrote, “comes doubtless from the amusement of such vivid, heterogeneous material, from the irresistible magic of scorching suns, subject empires, uncanny religions, uneasy garrisons and smothered-up women—from heat and color and danger and dust.”
3.
Kipling had arrived in London in September 1889, fresh from his American adventures in pursuit of Mark Twain and the ghost of Longfellow. He found bohemian lodgings in Villiers Street, a short, dead-end passage that connects, in a steep descent, the Strand at Charing Cross station with the Thames River. “Primitive and passionate in its habits and population” was how Kipling described the neighborhood in Something of Myself; his rooms on an upper floor were “small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage.” Kipling disliked London, finding it stuffy, cliquish, and cold. He had felt more energized in the United States, where the wide-open spaces and the diversity of the population reminded him of India. As he prepared, like a hero in a Balzac novel, to conquer literary London, Kipling found a kindred spirit in Wolcott Balestier, the young American on the make.
Ever mindful of the marketplace, Balestier encouraged Kipling—already an experienced hand in the writing of short stories—to try his luck with a novel. The Light That Failed, which Kipling dutifully wrote in haste, is the portrait of an artist named Dick Heldar, who shares many characteristics with Kipling himself. Orphaned as a child, Dick is placed in the custody of the cruel Mrs. Jennet, along with a rebellious girl named Maisie. An accident with an old pistol damages one of Dick’s eyes. Both children grow up to be artists. Heldar achieves a lucrative, though journalistic, reputation depicting battle scenes while covering the British campaign in the Sudan. He returns to London to build a career as a professional artist instead, determined to eschew mere commercial success as an illustrator. There, by chance, he meets Maisie again, who lives with a mysterious “red-haired girl.” In flight from London, Dick, his eyesight ruined, makes his way back to North Africa. In the midst of battle he is reunited with his loyal friend Torpenhow, and dies in his arms.
The fictional Maisie is closely modeled on a woman named Florence Garrard, whom Kipling had met through his sister, Trix. He promptly fell in love with her—he was fourteen at the time—and the obsession endured during his years as a journalist in India. The dark ending of the novel reflects both the final break with Flo and an awareness (probably only half-conscious on Kipling’s part) of same-sex desire. Maisie is in love with the red-haired girl; Dick achieves true intimacy only with Torpenhow. Kipling later dismissed the novel as “only a conte”—a story or novella in the French style—and “not a built book,” but it retains a vivid, fragmentary energy. At Balestier’s urging, Kipling wrote a second version of The Light That Failed for the American market, with a happier ending. The book became a cult bible for younger American writers of the 1890s, such as Stephen Crane and Willa Cather, as they attempted to resist mere commercialism in their own careers.
As much for pleasure in each other’s company as for any specific literary ambition, Kipling and Balestier agreed to collaborate on an adventure novel set in the two locales they knew best. It was to be a book “as American as a roller skating rink and as Indian as a juggernaut,” Balestier boasted to William Dean Howells. The title of the novel, The Naulahka, refers to a necklace of great value—literally nine lakhs, or nine hundred thousand rupees—belonging to the ruler of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Nicholas Tarvin, the hero of the book, wants to bring the railroad to his small minin
g town of Topaz, in the Colorado hills. The woman of his dreams, Kate Sheriff, wants to be a medical missionary in India. Tarvin hits on a risky plan to get the railroad and the girl: he will travel to Rajasthan and steal the necklace, which he will then present to the acquisitive wife of the railroad chairman, who has agreed, in exchange, to influence her husband to extend the railroad to Topaz. “Kipling and I have been wading deep into our story lately,” Balestier informed Howells on February 18, 1891, “and have written rather more than two thirds of it. It begins in the West where I have a free hand for several chapters. Then we lock arms and march upon India.” Henry James had been “reading the first part of it,” Balestier added, “and professes himself delighted with the Western atmosphere.”
During all this feverish collaboration, there was often a third presence in the room, Balestier’s twenty-seven-year-old sister, Caroline who kept house in their Kensington rooms. Carrie had traveled in the West with her brother and was capable of many things of which English girls were ignorant. She promptly taught Kipling to type. “It’s so nice to have him in the typewriter fold,” she told her sister, Josephine, back in Vermont, adding that Kipling was “so refreshingly unEnglish.” The three were inseparable. “He keeps his clothes partly here and insists that a place be placed for him always so it is at dinner and supper,” Carrie reported. Soon, Josephine, the younger sister, arrived as well, and was similarly smitten with Kipling, in a replay of his sisters fixation.
Caroline Balestier at the time of her wedding.
4.
“He amazes me by his precocity and various endowments,” Henry James wrote of Kipling that winter. “But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste.” Meanwhile, Kipling was sending out signals to his family that he was suffering from overwork and a recurrence of the kind of psychological symptoms that had plagued him since childhood, when he was prey to hallucinations during his turbulent years away from his parents. That spring, news reached the Macdonald sisters that their brother Harry, the black sheep of the family, was dying of throat cancer in New York. A sea journey for Rudyard, in the company of his uncle Fred Macdonald, a Methodist minister, would combine family duty with a therapeutic respite. Two days before the ship carrying his brother and nephew docked in New York, Harry died at the age of fifty-five. Fred stayed on to deal with his brother’s affairs while Kipling discovered that Balestier’s hard work in promoting his career was paying off in America. Pursued by New York reporters as a rising celebrity, he hurried back to London.
A more satisfying refuge was Wolcott Balestier’s seaside cottage on the Isle of Wight, where Kipling came for a summer visit in July. It is easy to imagine the two young men, collaborating on their ramshackle novel, staring out to sea from the diamond-shaped island—“the little penciled island,” as Henry James called it—where two prominent lighthouses protected ships in the English Channel from running aground. Both men needed rest. Balestier complained that he wasn’t feeling well and left the daily operations of his London business in the care of Will Cabot, a Brattleboro family friend. Heinemann, Balestier’s partner, wasn’t pleased with the arrangement. “Your idea of running a London office from the Isle of Wight is about as sensible as steering a ship in a storm from the top of a lighthouse,” he wrote.
The suggestive image of the lighthouse was on Kipling’s mind as well. Though doctors had told him, during the summer of 1891, to avoid any work of his own, he wrote a strange and powerful story, “The Disturber of Traffic,” about a lighthouse keeper who slowly goes mad. The narrator dons “a pair of black glass spectacles” at the start of the tale and contemplates the blinding warning light. “One star came out over the cliffs,” he notes, “the waters turned lead-color, and St. Cecilia’s light shot out across the sea in eight long pencils that wheeled slowly from right to left, melted into one beam of solid light laid down directly in front of the tower, dissolved again into eight, and passed away.” The long pencils and lead-colored water suggest handwriting, as though an exhausted writer, suffering from eyestrain, is puzzling over his manuscript.
By the late summer, Kipling’s symptoms of overwork—mania, panic, and occasional hallucinations—were sufficiently alarming that his doctor recommended an extended sea voyage to recuperate, something more relaxing than the aborted trip to New York. Meanwhile, his relations with Carrie Balestier seem to have taken a more serious turn, and he needed time and distance to decide what precisely he should do about them. Kipling now envisioned a second voyage around the world, in the opposite direction from his 1889 journey, with a leisurely ramble through the South Seas, where he hoped, at long last, to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, who was rumored to be dying in Samoa.
As he prepared for departure, Kipling wrote a yearning love poem, dedicated to Wolcott Balestier, titled “The Long Trail.”
There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand grey to the sun,
Singing: “Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer’s done.”
If winter was coming to England, Kipling wrote, there were warmer climes elsewhere. “You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind, / And the thresh of the deep-sea rain; / You have heard the song—how long? How long? / Pull out on the trail again!” So it was that on August 22, Rudyard Kipling, having already achieved precocious fame at the age of twenty-five, sailed out of England to begin yet another journey around the world.
Henry James relished the possibility of a meeting between Kipling and Stevenson. “That little black demon of a Kipling,” he wrote Stevenson, “will have perhaps leaped upon your silver strand by the time this reaches you—he publicly left England to embrace you, many weeks ago—carrying literary genius out of the country with him in his pocket.” Henry Adams, the historian who had recently arrived in London from his own Pacific travels, sounded a similar theme. “Except Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, who are both in the South Seas from whence I have only just emerged, I hear of neither poet, novelist, historian, essayist or philosopher of note.”
Visiting Balestier on the Isle of Wight in late August, Henry James was alarmed by his friend’s precarious health. But the publishing empire that Balestier had dreamed up with Heinemann, which they called the English Library, required his attention. He planned to meet Albert Brockhaus, their German associate, in Leipzig. Already suffering from a fever when he arrived in Berlin, Balestier made an unplanned detour to Dresden, to be cared for by friends of the Cabot family of Brattleboro. Meanwhile, his mother and his two sisters, sojourning in Paris, were urgently summoned to his bedside.
Informed by Carrie of the dire situation, Henry James came immediately, arriving just in time for the funeral—Balestier had died on December 6, 1891—arranged in the “bristling alien cemetery” by the amiable American consul, Mr. Knoop. “The English chaplain read the service with sufficient yet not offensive sonority, and the arrangements were of an admirable, decorously grave German kind,” James reported. “The little cemetery,” he added, in a touch reminiscent of Daisy Miller, “is suburbanly dreary, but I have seen worse.”
Among the small knot of mourners, James found Balestier’s mother and his sister Josephine “altogether wonderful and so absolutely composed,” but it was “poor little concentrated, passionate Carrie” who particularly impressed him. The two of them traveled back from the cemetery in a black and silver coach of their own, since, as James pointedly put it, “she wanted to talk to me.” James found Carrie “remarkable in her force, acuteness, capacity and courage—and in the intense—almost manly—nature of her emotion.” She was, he concluded, “a worthy sister of poor dear big-spirited, only-by-death-quenchable Wolcott.” What Carrie Balestier wanted to talk about with Henry James was her plan to marry Rudyard Kipling.
5.
Henry James lingered in the “grey rococo capital,” frequenting Dresden’s great art museum. “Everything human i
s shabby here except Raphael’s Divine Madonna and the bull-necked military,” he wrote. For James, everything was darkened by Balestier’s death. Like Winterbourne in Daisy Miller, keeping vigil in the Protestant cemetery, James had failed to save the young American in his charge, and had ended up, instead, at “his ugly and alien German grave.” He tried to persuade himself that Balestier had gone to Germany on a therapeutic holiday rather than to pump up sales for James’s books. Balestier had taken care of Henry James. Helplessly and much too late, poor Henry James now tried to take care of Balestier, only to find that his sister Carrie—equipped with the will, the skill, and the larger sense of what had to be done—had everything firmly in hand, including her plan to marry, as soon as humanly possible, her brother’s best friend.
Henry Adams set the wintry scene in London on January 13, 1892. “I sat with Henry James an hour or two yesterday afternoon and found him in double trouble between the death of his friend Balestier and the steady decline of his sister,” Adams wrote. “Everyone has influenza, or has had it, or expects to have it.” Kipling had arrived in London three days earlier. He had planned to spend the holidays and his twenty-sixth birthday in Lahore with his parents. But on Christmas Eve, he received the terrible news of Balestier’s death, in a telegram from Carrie, and immediately set sail for London. Meanwhile, rumors had reached Beatty Balestier, in Brattleboro, to the effect that Kipling was going to marry one of his sisters. It wasn’t at all clear to Beatty, or to Kipling’s friends in London, which sister.
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