Sunrise with Seamonsters (34 page)

I was lucky in the fragments I found.

The story began in London, in 1889. Kipling was then twenty-four and living in several small rooms on Villiers Street, next to Charing Cross Station. He had made his reputation with his book of short stories,
Plain Tales from the Hills,
and he was regarded as a prodigy. He had recently returned from India; he was hard at work. Not very far away, in Dean's Yard, Westminster, there was an American about Kipling's age, who had just arrived and was energetically writing, signing up authors for a new publishing Venture, and moving in society. This was Wolcott Balestier. He was all bustle—charming, impatient, clever, imaginative, businesslike. He had already written two novels, but now he had a new scheme.

The American copyright laws allowed any foreign book to be pirates' loot—Dickens had complained about this some years earlier. The only way an English author could secure copyright in the United States was in collaboration with an author who was an American citizen. Soon after he set up his office in Dean's Yard, Wolcott hired Arthur Waugh (Evelyn's father) as his assistant—it was Arthur Waugh's first job. In his autobiography,
One Man's Road
(1931), Waugh wrote that Wolcott had "conceived the idea of crossing to England, and setting up a collaboration with some established English writer, say, Mrs Humphry Ward—which would secure that writer the protection of American copyright."

Waugh was impressed by his young boss. The American was tremendously hard-working and deeply respected. He was, said Waugh, "an inspired leader, and made everybody, or almost everybody, believe in him." Wolcott's motto was that nothing was impossible: you could do anything, meet anyone, go anywhere, change the copyright laws, make a fortune or effect any conquest. "He was not merely one of our conquerors," Edmund Gosse wrote, "but the most successful of them all."

It was almost inevitable that Wolcott should meet Rudyard Kipling, although the first time he heard of him he said, "Rudyard Kipling—is it a man or a woman? What's its real name?" Very soon Wolcott was discussing the possibility of publishing Kipling in America and—odd for the reclusive and single-minded Englishman—collaborating with him on a novel, to be called
The Naulahka
(the word was misspelled: Kipling never corrected it). Kipling began visiting Wolcott; he met Wolcott's mother and two sisters, who were very proud of the way Wolcott had made inroads on English society. At the same time, Wolcott was cultivating the friendship of Henry James, and to his occupations of publisher, novelist, collaborator, and party-goer he added one more—he became Henry James's literary agent. "The precious Balestier," James called him, and in a letter to a friend he wrote, "He will probably strike you, as he strikes me, as the perfection of an 'agent'." James was then fifty. He treated Wolcott as his son, and they made trips together—once, they planned to spend a weekend on the Isle of Wight, but it was more than a week before the pair returned to London. "He became in a manner part of my life," James wrote. There can be no doubt that James loved him in the helplessly idealizing way that he did attractive and talented young men.

Henry James also met Wolcott's sisters. Josephine was very pretty, and perhaps as a consequence of her unapproachable beauty we know almost nothing about her. Caroline, known to everyone as "Carrie", was "a little person of extraordinary capacity," James said. She was small and genial, and capable to the point where a number of people compared her to a man. Kipling's parents were slightly alarmed by her. His father remarked obliquely that she was "a good man spoiled," and his over-protective mother said, "That woman is going to marry our Ruddy."

It is not known what sort of courtship, if any, went on between Carrie and Kipling. The focus of attention was Wolcott, who was now doing business in Europe. He had joined forces with the English firm of Heinemann in the hope of producing cheap pocket editions of novels, to rival those of Tauchnitz. Kipling meanwhile set off alone, in a state of mental exhaustion brought on by overwork, for a round-the-world cruise. He visited South Africa and New Zealand, and he had given Henry James the impression that he was on his way to Samoa to visit Robert Louis Stevenson. Indeed, Stevenson expected him: "R. K. is planning to visit us," he wrote to James in September, 1891. But Kipling abandoned the Samoa trip and sailed to Australia and Ceylon. In Colombo he had news that Wolcott was dangerously ill; just before Christmas in Lahore he learned that Wolcott had died in early December, in Dresden.

Henry James had been summoned to Dresden. He dreaded the errand, but managed to play a fatherly role at the bleak funeral ceremony. James was desolated by Wolcott's death, but full of admiration for Carrie's
fortitude, "the intense—and almost manly—nature of her emotion." The Balestier women and James returned to England, and they were astonished to see Kipling on the 10th of January—it had taken him just fourteen days to travel from Bombay to London. A week later, Kipling and Carrie were married, at All Souls, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away—"a queer office for
me
to perform—but it's done—and an odd little marriage."

A month after their marriage, in the middle of February, 1892, the Kiplings were in America. They stopped at Brattleboro, Vermont, where some of Carrie's relatives lived, and Kipling was overwhelmed by the snow and the isolation. With the haste that characterized his decisions during this first hectic part of his life, Kipling determined to buy some land, build a house and live in Vermont. All this he managed quickly, and then the honeymoon couple crossed America to Vancouver, sailed to Japan (where Carrie's maternal grandfather had been an adviser, twenty years earlier, to the Mikado) and discovered, one afternoon in Yokohama, that their bank had gone bust. Penniless, they returned to Brattleboro. That story is in Kipling's somewhat evasive autobiography,
Something of Myself,
written when he was seventy.

No reader of this autobiography can have much idea of what Kipling's American years were like. You get the impression that he has a grievance, but it is impossible to say how it came about. The book is short on particulars—unusual for a writer who could describe down to the last valve and piston ring the workings of a steam engine. But perhaps that was the problem. James described Kipling's writing as a steady diminishing, moving from "the less simple in subject to the more simple—from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish and from the fish to the engines and screws." There is no mention in Kipling's autobiography of the vast amount of work he did in Brattleboro (he doesn't even name the town), but the four years after his marriage—Kipling was filled with optimism and settled for the first time in his life—were the most productive of his literary career. He wrote
most
of the poems in
The Seven Seas,
both
Jungle Books,
all the stories in
The Day's Work,
the second series of
Barrack Room Ballads,
worked at
Mother Maturin
(he was never happy with this novel and finally ditched it), started
Kim
and wrote most of
Captains Courageous
—this last was his only strictly American book. He also wrote a number of poems which were subsequently collected. His output was enormous and profitable and within a few years the Yokohama bankruptcy became no more than a funny incident, part of the colorful past.

Kipling loved the American landscape; he was uncertain of the people. He hated the drinking, the talking, the spitting, the greed, the noise, the
illiterate immigrants, the xenophobia—specifically a hurtful anti-British feeling which prevailed in the 1890's. "So far as I was concerned," he wrote in
Something of Myself,
"I felt the atmosphere was to some extent hostile. The idea seemed to be that I was 'making money' out of America—witness the new house and the horses—and was not sufficiently grateful for my privileges."

There is no reference in his autobiography to his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, or to the Venezuela-British Guiana boundary dispute which brought America and Britain to the brink of war. The Beatty memory must have been horrible—no human being could have been less like Kipling in character than Beatty. It is not surprising that the two men fought. I am inclined to think that Kipling identified in Beatty all the weaknesses and evils he saw in the United States: Beatty, for him, was the very embodiment of the boasting, irresponsible American. And it is quite likely that Beatty saw in Kipling a young John Bull, imperious, aloof, dedicated to work, unfunny and not particularly friendly. We know Beatty from his shouts of pain and pleasure; he was not immoral, only extravagant, coarsely expressive and loud, with the harum-scarum attitude of Huck Finn. He had Wolcott's energetic presumption, but none of Wolcott's tact or grace. Beatty was popular in town; Kipling was not and, what was worse, Kipling did not give a damn. But when Kipling decided to take on Beatty—breaking all his own rules about settling arguments in a judiciously wolf-like way—he did not know how it would expose and humiliate him, and how it would drive him out of his first real home.

Kipling placed much of the blame for the anti-British feeling in America on the national press. From his first visit to the States he was appalled by the state of American newspapers, and it was not long before he was pestered by journalists. He was usually successful at keeping them at bay, but his evasions only convinced them that he would make good copy. They hounded him as he disembarked from ships, they sneaked onto his property, interviewed neighbors and generally made a nuisance of themselves. Kipling never changed his view that the journalists were bums and their papers foolish, trivial and jingoistic. In doing research for my play, I read many American newspapers published in 1895 and 1896 and, with some sadness—the
Boston Post
was one of the most scabrous of the bunch—I began to see Kipling's point. The front pages were filled with reports of murders, muggings, suicides, gossip, hearsay, "society" rubbish and tub-thumping over Cuba and Venezuela. Kipling saw these same papers. He could have ignored them; he could have dismissed Beatty's ravings as wild talk—it wasn't much more than that. But in the end he brought the journalists to his doorstep and the scorn of the press upon his head. Rashly, in May, 1896, he had Beatty arrested.

I think he was striking the blow he believed Lord Salisbury should have struck a few months before. Britain had been taunted over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana—Venezuela making the ridiculous claim that well over half the British colony was rightfully her own. This issue had been in the air for about fifty years, but in 1895 the Venezuelans jumped a part of the disputed territory, captured an outpost and fired on a British schooner. When Lord Salisbury demanded their withdrawal, the United States asserted the Monroe Doctrine. Secretary of State Olney provided a clumsy gloss on the Monroe Doctrine by telling Lord Salisbury that "Distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any permanent political union between a European and an American state unnatural and inexpedient." (Some years later, Olney explained his sharp tone by saying that "in English eyes the United States was then so completely a negligible quantity that it was believed only words the equivalent of blows would be really effective.") Olney's message was delivered in July; it was not until November that Lord Salisbury replied. To Olney's charge that union between Britain and British Guiana was "unnatural and inexpedient," Lord Salisbury said, "Her Majesty's Government are prepared emphatically to deny it on behalf of both British and American people who are subject to her Crown." He went on,

Great Britain is imposing no "system" upon Venezuela ... It is a controversy with which the United States have no apparent concern ... It is not a question of the imposition upon the communities of South America of any system of government devised in Europe. It is simply the determination of the frontier of a British possession which belonged to the Throne of England long before the Republic of Venezuela came into existence.

Lord Salisbury called the Monroe Doctrine "a novelty" and said it was not recognized as any part of international law. He implied that he would deal with the Venezuelans in his own way.

This was fierce, but the American response to it was so threatening that it produced panic on Wall Street and an uprush of reckless patriotism that was given voice in anti-British sentiment. The American reply was President Cleveland's Message to Congress of 17 December, 1895. He said that, as Britain had refused to submit the boundary question to arbitration, he would request that Congress set up a commission to determine the true Venezuela-British Guiana frontier. In closing, he said,

When such report is made and accepted it will in my opinion be the duty of the United States to resist by every means in its power as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests the appropriation of
Great Britain of any lands or the exercise of governmental jurisdiction over any territory which after investigation we have determined of right belongs to Venezuela.

In making these recommendations I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow.

I am nevertheless firm in my conviction that while it is a grievous thing to contemplate the two great English-speaking peoples of the world as being otherwise than friendly competitors in the onward march of civilization, and strenuous and worthy rivals in all the arts of peace, there is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness.

Even gracelessly under-punctuated, Cleveland's message was clear: We will fight you if you don't accept our commission's decision.