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An' because it was so, why, o' course 'e went an' died
I'm reading Charles McGrath's "Rudyard Kipling in America" in the most recent issue of The New Yorker and it contains one of those ordinary facts the finding out of which makes you feel like you've been living under a rock:
Kipling wound up in Brattleboro because, in January, 1892, when he was twenty-six and already famous for tales and poems he had published about India, he married a Vermonter named Carrie Balestier. Theirs was such a perplexing union that you wish that Benfey had gone into more detail about it. He doesn't tell you, for example, just how much Kipling's family and most of his friends disliked Carrie. They thought her unattractive and opinionated, not nearly feminine enough. Kipling's father said she was "a good man spoiled." Most Kipling biographers have depicted her as a nag, a harridan, a ball-breaker. So what did Kipling see in her? Mostly, it seems, he saw her brother, who was Kipling's friend and literary agent.
Wolcott Balestier was a darting, quicksilver figure, who probably deserves a book of his own. Arthur Waugh (Evelyn's father), who briefly worked for him, said he had a "chameleon power with people." After dropping out of Cornell, Wolcott travelled to Colorado and to Mexico, looking for adventure, and then edited a lowbrow New York weekly called Tid-Bits, before settling in London, where he became an enterprising and ambitious agent—the Andrew Wylie of his time. Some people thought him vulgar, but most of literary London was charmed; Henry James and Edmund Gosse were especially smitten. Kipling loved Balestier, too, and their friendship, if it wasn't overtly sexual, had erotic overtones. They even wrote together—something Kipling never did with anyone else—collaborating on a novel, "The Naulahka," an adventure story about a priceless Indian necklace.
In December, 1891, Balestier died suddenly, of typhoid, at the age of twenty-nine. Kipling, who was visiting India, where his parents still lived, raced back to London, and scarcely a week after he returned he married Balestier's younger sister, in a dreary little ceremony that was more like a funeral than a wedding. Henry James gave away the bride, though he said later, "It's a union of which I don't forecast the future." Kipling, for their honeymoon, rewrote a love poem that he had intended for her brother, changing the pronouns and addressing her as "Dear Lass," instead of "Dear Lad."
If I'm going to be earwormed with Oh, passin' the love o' women—you, too, sunshine.
Kipling wound up in Brattleboro because, in January, 1892, when he was twenty-six and already famous for tales and poems he had published about India, he married a Vermonter named Carrie Balestier. Theirs was such a perplexing union that you wish that Benfey had gone into more detail about it. He doesn't tell you, for example, just how much Kipling's family and most of his friends disliked Carrie. They thought her unattractive and opinionated, not nearly feminine enough. Kipling's father said she was "a good man spoiled." Most Kipling biographers have depicted her as a nag, a harridan, a ball-breaker. So what did Kipling see in her? Mostly, it seems, he saw her brother, who was Kipling's friend and literary agent.
Wolcott Balestier was a darting, quicksilver figure, who probably deserves a book of his own. Arthur Waugh (Evelyn's father), who briefly worked for him, said he had a "chameleon power with people." After dropping out of Cornell, Wolcott travelled to Colorado and to Mexico, looking for adventure, and then edited a lowbrow New York weekly called Tid-Bits, before settling in London, where he became an enterprising and ambitious agent—the Andrew Wylie of his time. Some people thought him vulgar, but most of literary London was charmed; Henry James and Edmund Gosse were especially smitten. Kipling loved Balestier, too, and their friendship, if it wasn't overtly sexual, had erotic overtones. They even wrote together—something Kipling never did with anyone else—collaborating on a novel, "The Naulahka," an adventure story about a priceless Indian necklace.
In December, 1891, Balestier died suddenly, of typhoid, at the age of twenty-nine. Kipling, who was visiting India, where his parents still lived, raced back to London, and scarcely a week after he returned he married Balestier's younger sister, in a dreary little ceremony that was more like a funeral than a wedding. Henry James gave away the bride, though he said later, "It's a union of which I don't forecast the future." Kipling, for their honeymoon, rewrote a love poem that he had intended for her brother, changing the pronouns and addressing her as "Dear Lass," instead of "Dear Lad."
If I'm going to be earwormed with Oh, passin' the love o' women—you, too, sunshine.
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I do not think it is a very fair way to marry someone, no.
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The substitution of her pronouns into the poem written for her brother was what inclined me toward a similar interpretation of their relationship. (You can always write someone their own poem! I turned out to have opinions on this front.) I would strongly prefer what you propose.
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She was a strong young woman. There are hints in the record (which is very sparse) that she set her cap at him, rather than the other way round. Kipling's family seem to have thought so.
I reckon she knew what she was doing.
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Possibly there are answers to this available to people who know Kipling's biography more than I (not hard, as I know very very little.)
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My future strongly appears to be trending toward reading first this book about Kipling and then the biography of Carrie Balestier cited in the article and then attempting to report back (duly acknowledging in advance that unless people wrote anything down I may have to report back with that complicated shrug emoticon).
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I don't worry about that at all. I just want her to have been wanted back, which was much less clear from this article.
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The truth is we don't know. All marriages are a mystery to outsiders and the Kipling's marriage is more mysterious than most.
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