(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[V]ermont has always drawn famous people who wished they weren’t quite so well known. Here, they’ve sought peace and privacy, and for the most part have gotten it.
Rudyard Kipling wasn’t so lucky.
The Indian-born Englishman was perhaps the world’s most popular writer when he moved to Vermont in 1892. From all appearances, Kipling and his wife, Caroline, were here to stay. They began building a large house in Dummerston and named it Naulahka, after a priceless jewel in a novel Kipling had written with his beloved brother-in-law, Wolcott Balestier, who had died of typhoid fever months earlier at the age of 29.
But Kipling would last little more than four years in Vermont. He would flee to protect his privacy from the court hearings, news stories and local gossip brought on by a vicious family feud.
Local curiosities
When Kipling alighted at the Brattleboro train station, one of the first sights he glimpsed was the smiling face of his wife’s other brother, Beatty Balestier. The Balestier boys could hardly have been more different. Wolcott had been an urbane sophisticate who took the literary world by storm; Beatty was a big-spending, heavy-drinking, pugnacious gentleman farmer. But Beatty Balestier’s sense of humor won him many friends, including Kipling, for a time.
Whether out of respect or pity, Kipling put Beatty Balestier on his payroll, hiring him to oversee construction of Naulahka and later to order coal and wood and other bulk supplies for the house.
Though Vermonters mostly left the Kiplings alone, the locals couldn’t help discussing their peculiar ways, particularly how the couple insisted on dressing formally for dinner – she in a gown, he in black tie. Kipling bemoaned his dinner ritual when talking to a local farmer, one of the few friends he made in the area. “Mr. Waite, I envy you,” the author said. “Your day’s work is finished. You can go in and wash up and sit right down at the table for supper. I’ve got to go home and put on evening clothes before I can dine.”
Despite his usual detachment, Kipling spent time getting to know local people. But even then, the visits seemed geared toward helping him with his work. Dave Carey, baggage master at the Brattleboro train station, recalled that Kipling would stop by to chat but would grow quiet if someone else entered the office.
“He would sit and listen and never stir,” Carey said. “I could tell what he was after. He was listening for queer turns of speech that he could use. I never saw a man so hungry for information.” Carey claimed that when reading Kipling’s later books, he would find snatches of conversation that had been uttered at the Brattleboro station.
Kipling’s art thrived in the seclusion he found in Vermont. Here he wrote all or parts of “The Jungle Book” and its sequel, as well as “Captains Courageous” and “The Seven Seas.”
Family secrets made public
As Kipling’s career flourished, his relationship with Beatty Balestier withered. Kipling patronized him. At one point, Kipling promised his brother-in-law that if he left town for one year, sobered up and found a job, then he would look after Balestier’s wife and child.
Kipling’s condescension might seem extreme, but consider the source. This, after all, was the man who a few years later would characterize Western colonization as simply “the white man’s burden” to look after “new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child.” Kipling probably saw protecting his brother-in-law as one of his burdens.
Balestier saw it differently. Years later, he said his feud with Kipling began to smolder when the writer started meddling in his life and finally ignited when they quarreled over land. The Kiplings wanted to protect their view, so they bought a field Balestier owned across the road from their home. Balestier said he agreed to sell the field for $1 if he could still hay it.
Over dinner one night at Balestier’s, Caroline Kipling revealed she had other plans for the land; she wanted to plant formal gardens there.
Balestier exploded: “You’re in my house; you’re my guest, but by Christ, once you’ve left it, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.”
He didn’t keep his promise. Months later, word got back to Balestier that Rudyard Kipling had talked about him while drinking at the bar in the Brook House hotel in Brattleboro. Kipling had allegedly said: “Beatty is his own worst enemy. I’ve been obliged to carry him for the last year; to hold him up by the seat of his breeches.”
The next time Balestier ran into Kipling, he almost did it literally. Meeting on a country road, Balestier drove his buggy toward his bicycling brother-in-law, forcing Kipling off the road. As the scraped Kipling dusted himself off, Balestier demanded an apology for the barroom comments. If he didn’t retract the words within a week, Balestier bellowed, “I’ll punch the Goddamned soul out of you.” Or at least that’s Balestier’s version. Kipling said his brother-in-law’s threat was to “blow out your Goddamned brains,” so he had him arrested.
A run-in with the law did nothing to calm Balestier, who quickly turned the ruckus to his advantage.
Hitt forced Kipling to admit he hadn’t been supporting Balestier for the past year and that many of the loans he’d made to his brother-in-law had been repaid. Despite the rising tensions between the men, Kipling said he’d liked Balestier until the run-in on the road and had always been kind to him.
Was it your kindness, Hitt asked, that caused you to have him arrested?
“No,” Kipling snapped. “I have a distinct aversion to being shot at.”
Kipling said he’d been good to Balestier because he’d promised his late brother-in-law he’d keep an eye on him. “Then, taking care of Mr. Balestier has been your chief occupation?” Hitt asked.
“I have also written a thing or two,” Kipling responded icily.
Hitt asked Kipling why he hadn’t tried to make up after the fight.
“This was the first time I had had my life threatened,” Kipling said. “I didn’t know the precise etiquette in such cases.”
The local justice of the peace set a trial date. He might as well have exiled Kipling while he was at it. Seeing his personal life used for entertainment on the front pages was more than the author could bear. He packed up his family and, just before the trial was to start, sailed for England.
With him went the state’s chance to bask in his reflected literary glory. Although Kipling did some of his best work here, few people outside the state associate him with Vermont. Think what might have happened if he’d gotten along better with his brother-in-law. Just as we would adopt poet Robert Frost decades later as our own, maybe we could have done the same with Rudyard Kipling.
