4.
Kipling drew his own illustrations for Just So Stories, another gift for Josephine. These remarkable drawings have a proto-Surrealist energy, combining dream motifs, children’s impressions, and hyper-close attention to observed detail. He signed them with an enigmatic artist’s seal, or maker’s mark. The first time the seal appeared, below an illustration for “How the Camel Got His Hump,” it seemed part of the scenery of the “world so new and all” in which the tale was set. The seal consisted of a small Noah’s Ark perched on a live volcano, with a trail of smoke passing over its roof. This odd image evolved from one illustration to the next, until it morphed into a capital A (the volcano with the line of smoke across it) enclosing a boat. The correct reading of this rebus was that the boat was a Noah’s Ark placed under an A: hence, Ark + A, to be pronounced “RK.” Kipling’s letter A also resembled the gateway, or torii, to a Japanese shrine. “Everyone knows what a torii is,” Kipling wrote in one of his travel letters from Japan. “They have them in Southern India. A great King makes a note of the place where he intends to build a huge arch, but being a King, does so in stone, not ink.” Not being a king, Kipling sketched his own arch, or ark, in ink.
Kipling never explained what the Ark + A insignia meant. In fact, he seemed at pains to suppress any such speculation. “The Elephant’s Child” is a parable of education, in which the young elephant, burdened with “satiable curtiosity,” learns about the dangers of the world and is rewarded for it by his useful trunk. On the following page an illustration of the elephant having its nose pulled by a crocodile, Kipling added an ornamental border and a caption. “Underneath the truly picture are shadows of African animals walking into an African ark,” he explained. “There are two lions, two ostriches, two oxen, two camels, two sheep, and two other things that look like rats, but I think they are rock-rabbits. They don’t mean anything,” he added. “I put them in because I thought they looked pretty.”
A rebus involving an Ark and the letter A is not a self-evident choice for the initials RK. It is, in some obvious sense, reached for. And it would seem to involve at least a double—and perhaps triple—emphasis on beginnings. A is the first letter of the alphabet (a subsequent Just So story will explain the origins of the alphabet), while the Ark signifies a new beginning on a newly consecrated earth. Kipling may also be alluding to the Greek word arche, as in archeology, which also means “beginning.”
How the elephant got his trunk.
5.
Meanwhile, Rudyard and Carrie, long confined to tiny Bliss Cottage, were envisioning a dream house for their family. The plan for the house resembled a houseboat perched on the hillside like Noah’s Ark on Ararat. The house, to be called Naulakha in honor of Wolcott Balestier, would meld memories of India with Kipling’s fresh sense of Vermont. Ninety feet long and a mere thirty feet wide, the width of a single room, the house, as Kipling conceived it, would appear to be “riding on its hillside like a little boat on the flank of a far wave.” Kipling consulted with the designer Lockwood de Forest, a friend of his father’s, who may have suggested an analogy with the narrow houseboats of Kashmir. On his visit to New York in 1889, Kipling had been enthralled with de Forest’s Indian-style town house on East Tenth Street, with its entryway of carved teak. For Naulakha, de Forest gave the Kiplings an Indian sideboard for the dining room, with carved teak panels that suggested the doorways and porticoes of a luxurious bungalow.
Many of the ideas for the house came from Kipling himself, but he needed a sympathetic architect to realize them. He was fortunate to have Henry Rutgers Marshall, a student of the great American architect H. H. Richardson, as his creative partner. “Marshall Sahib is coming to see us early in September I believe,” Kipling wrote Meta de Forest in mid-August. “He will sit on our site and tell us about the house.” A Columbia College classmate of de Forest, Marshall happened to be a prominent psychologist as well as an architect. What he had to say about Naulakha can be surmised from the book, Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics, that he was completing as he drew up the plans. Published in 1894 and judged “almost ‘epoch-making’” by William James, the book was based on an ingenious theory of the emotions. Pleasure, in Marshall’s view, resulted from efficient response to stimuli, while pain derived from inefficient response. For Marshall, the history of art was a progressive “elimination of the ugly,” those inefficient barriers to pleasure. In architecture, he wrote, “Each new work has made it possible to eliminate some form, which had been displeasing in the last effort, to alter some unsatisfactory surface, to change some deficient shadow depth.”
What this meant in practice was an architecture of radical simplicity. Marshall had come closest to his ideals in his majestic design for the First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs. With its expanses of native rock and its line of great pillars, the church radiates a western embrace of the outdoors. Just as Henry Adams had given Richardson an opportunity to experiment with Japanese simplicity—what Frank Lloyd Wright called “elimination of the insignificant”—in his home opposite the White House on Lafayette Square, Kipling gave Marshall a chance to experiment with his own pared-down aesthetic. Naulakha, a house named in memory of a beloved friend and brother, was, to borrow Marshall’s own schema, a house to assuage pain. In this regard, it resembles the Wish House in one of Kipling’s greatest stories, in which clients visit a haunted house to alleviate the pain of loved ones by assuming it themselves.
Naulakha, photograph by Neal Rantoul.
The house perched on the Vermont hillside had healing powers for others as well. A favorite jaunt for Rudyard and Carrie was to drive their horse and carriage across the Connecticut River, from the Brattleboro side to the flanks of Wantastiquet, their “guardian mountain” on the New Hampshire side. On one such excursion, they approached a remote farmhouse and were welcomed by a “wild-eyed” woman who asked fiercely “Be you the new lights ’crost the valley yonder? Ye don’t know what a comfort they’ve been to me this winter. Ye aren’t ever going to shroud ’em up—or be ye?” Kipling assured her that they had no such plans. “So, as long as we lived there, that broad side of ‘Naulakha’ which looked her-ward was always nakedly lit.”
6.
As he acquainted himself with his new surroundings, Kipling discovered that Brattleboro was a safe refuge for other people as well. He would drive into Brattleboro by carriage or sleigh, depending on the weather, to pick up his mail or to have a convivial chat with locals in the basement bar of the Brooks House on Main Street. Notched at the confluence of two rivers, the mighty Connecticut and the smaller West River, Brattleboro had two distinct faces. It was a market town for the region, the hub for encircling farms and forests. The country people drove their horse-drawn wagons into town on Tuesdays to sell their squash and tomatoes, and stopped by the pharmacy for their medications. On Sundays they came again, scrubbed and laundered, to attend the churches downtown. Pious Brattleboro was officially dry, but homemade liquor was easy to come by. “One found in almost every office the water-bottle and thick tooth-glass displayed openly, and in discreet cupboards or drawers the whisky bottle,” Kipling noted. Men drank hard cider on the farms, achieving “almost maniacal forms of drunkenness.”
Brattleboro was also a refuge for summer people. Southerners were drawn to its mild climate. Visitors from Boston and New York came back regularly like migrating birds and began building fanciful second homes—quaint Elizabethan cottages and sumptuous Queen Annes—on the so-called terraces, which ascended like forested stairways from the river. Summer people enjoyed the town’s musical life—Brattleboro boasted a famous organ factory—and the lovely carriage rides up into the surrounding hills and farms. It was easy to feel, in the tree-lined streets and terraces, that the stern dictates of the Puritan religion, which had mushroomed up the Connecticut River, were on the wane. “It is strange to me,” wrote the novelist Fanny Fern, a regular visitor, “that everyone doesn’t live in Brattleboro.”
The third experiment was a luxury hotel devoted to the curative properties of fresh water. The Wesselhoeft Water Cure originated in an act of political violence in Germany. In 1819, a student named Karl Ludwig Sand paid an unannounced visit to the popular German dramatist August von Kotzebue, a political conservative, in his comfortable home in Mannheim. Sand drew a dagger from his sleeve and stabbed Kotzebue in the breast. The first political assassination in modern German history had wide-ranging repercussions. It brought German philosophy to Emerson’s Concord circle. It also, indirectly, brought Rudyard Kipling to Brattleboro.
Sand had been a member of the students’ union in Jena. This circle, under the charismatic leadership of a poet named Karl Follen, was committed to revolutionary German nationalism. In the immediate aftermath of the Kotzebue murder, Count Metternich’s secret police rounded up students, professors, and journalists. Among these was Follen himself, who escaped to the United States, taking up a new career teaching German at Harvard. Follen served as a conduit of German culture to Emerson’s transcendentalist circle, inspiring a new reverence for the natural world.
Another man caught up in Metternich’s dragnet was a young medical student named Robert Wesselhoeft. After serving seven years in prison, he followed Follen to America and opened a medical practice in Cambridge. Wesselhoeft, who had been introduced to the so-called “water cure” by its founder, Vincenz Pressnitz, practiced both hydrotherapy and homeopathy, and opened a water cure establishment in West Roxbury, outside Boston. Patients undergoing the cure were awakened at dawn, wrapped in towels until they perspired, and dipped in cold water to cleanse their pores. They drank only water—coffee, tea, and alcohol were strictly forbidden—and took long walks in the countryside.
The prominent writer and physician Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered a pair of lectures in 1842 in which he denounced the “pretended science” of homeopathy. Wesselhoeft was Holmes’s principal target, one of those dangerous quacks who, according to Holmes, “announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated treasure of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these fantastic theories.” Holmes’s much-noticed attack on Wesselhoeft had interesting repercussions for American literature. Hawthorne based a character in his novel The Blithedale Romance on Wesselhoeft (renamed Westervelt). Finding Cambridge intolerable after Holmes’s attack, Wesselhoeft fled to Brattleboro, where he established his water cure, in the process transforming the sleepy village into a fashionable resort.
To the Wesselhoeft Water Cure came the famous and the once famous. A long list of visitors, documented by Kipling’s friend Molly Cabot, recalls Gatsby’s party guests. Longfellow came to take the waters. So did William Dean Howells and writer Helen Hunt Jackson. And so did “Doctor Kane, the Arctic explorer,” whose name was “carved on the trunk of a mighty pine.” One Charles O. Simpson came “year after year,” and “gave the name Staubbach, after the famous German waterfall, to the nearly perpendicular drop of sixty feet, where the water of Fall Brook on its way to West River, beyond West Dummerston, runs over an abrupt ledge of rock.” After the Civil War came Generals George McClellan and William Tecumseh Sherman. And finally, there were those who became permanent residents, among them “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph N. Balestier.” And thus, it was the water cure that first brought Carrie Balestier’s family to Brattleboro, indirectly bringing Rudyard Kipling there as well.
7.
Soon enough, Naulakha itself became a destination for pilgrims, especially literary ones, eager to pay their respects to Kipling at his hillside refuge. The poet Bliss Carman, known for his songs of a vagabond, arrived, and wrote a sonnet to Kipling that began, “What need have you of praising?” Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, came, too. And so did Frank Doubleday, a young publisher eager to corner the market on Kipling’s works in the United States. Another visitor was Arthur Conan Doyle, who arrived at Naulakha in November 1894. Creator of Sherlock Holmes and a former client of Wolcott Balestier’s, Conan Doyle was invited to Beatty’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. “No man,” Balestier quipped, “would want to keep Thanksgiving in an Englishman’s house.” Conan Doyle was on a lecture tour in support of good relations between Britain and the United States. He brought along his golf clubs, and the two writers enthusiastically swatted their balls around the meadows while puzzled neighbors looked on at the unfamiliar game. Kipling and Conan Doyle talked and smoked on the Naulakha veranda, sharing stories about their interest in telepathy and the paranormal, a passion of Conan Doyle’s and the subject of Kipling’s The Finest Story in the World.
The visit from Conan Doyle activated yet another aspect of Kipling’s fixation on Noah’s Ark. Conan Doyle was a Freemason, and so, as it happened, was Kipling, who had joined the half-secret organization, inspired by medieval guilds of craftsmen, during his early years in India. Conan Doyle’s visit inspired a poem in which Kipling fondly remembered his own initiation in 1886, when he was twenty years old, into the Masonic Lodge in Lahore, his “Mother Lodge.” In Kipling’s dialect poem, caste, religion, and social status were left at the door: “Outside—‘Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!’ / Inside—‘Brother,’ an’ it doesn’t do no ’arm.” “Here I met Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, members of the Araya and Brahmo Samaj,” Kipling later recalled, “and a Jew tyler [an official position in the Lodge], who was priest and butcher to his little community in the city.”
For Kipling, Masonry provided a map of occult symbols against which he plotted his life and work. It was the only church that Kipling believed in (“I haven’t much religion,” says a character in his story “In the Interests of the Brethren,” “but all I had I learnt in Lodge”), and it inspired many of his writings, from the emphasis on personal responsibility in The Jungle Book—prompted, Kipling claimed, by “some memory of the Masonic Lions” in a children’s magazine—to the extraordinary tale “The Janeites,” in which a group of British soldiers on the front, all Masons, form a secret organization based on the arcana of Jane Austen novels.
There are degrees in Freemasonry, and on April 14, 1887, Kipling was promoted to the rank of Royal Ark Mariner, with the Mount Ararat Mariners Lodge No. 98 in Lahore. The Royal Ark is closely allied to the Mark degree, which Kipling received the same day, and which also employs the symbolism of Noah’s Ark. Kipling’s elevation to the status of Royal Ark Mariner coincided with the writing of “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” with its toy Noah’s Ark, and “The Man Who Would Be King,” his parable of imperial overreach, which employs Masonic ritual. It also reinforced the importance of Noah’s Ark as his own private symbol.
Kipling’s personal rebus of an Ark and a capital A is easily solved. The puzzle of his larger self-identification with the story of Noah’s Ark is more complicated. As a very young boy, Kipling suffered the fate that every child fears most: that of being abandoned, without explanation or hope of rescue, by his parents. Placed in the hands of abusive strangers, he decided, perhaps, that his only recourse was to kill himself.
When his mother finally returned, he felt relief, but his outlook on the world was forever darkened by this early betrayal.
Kipling’s writing, early and late, seeks to establish a zone of safety in a precarious world, enlisting three different phases of the biblical figure of Noah. Noah as Survivor presides over the earliest phase of Kipling’s life, as documented in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” Noah as Father informs his relations with Josephine. And Noah as Builder guides the design of Naulakha, his Ark on the Vermont hillside. It is tempting to find Noah’s Ark lurking everywhere in Kipling’s life, a Rosetta Stone that translates his life and work into some coherent pattern. Of course, no human life, especially one as complicated as Rudyard Kipling’s, can be reduced to one overriding pattern or to a single symbol. And yet the story of Noah’s Ark and the dove’s good news remained a promise of protection for Kipling, in an unpredictable world that sometimes violated such promises.
Chapter Six
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
1.
During the summer of 1893, Lockwood Kipling arrived in Vermont for an extended visit and admired the progress on Naulakha. Before returning to England, he added a finishing touch to his son’s study at the south end of the house. With plaster letters over the mantelpiece, he inscribed the words “The night cometh, when no man can work.” Both of Rudyard’s grandfathers were Methodist preachers, but his parents were not religious by temperament. “The hair of the dog,” his mother, Alice, once remarked, as she consigned a lock of hair from Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, to the fire. But the family revered the King James Bible. The full quotation from the Gospel of John (“I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work”) is customarily shortened by clipping the ending and abbreviating what comes before, thus yielding the upbeat message, “Work while it is day.” Kipling’s next book of stories, conceived in Vermont, was titled The Day’s Work.
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