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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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You get it with biographers, too. I read a biography of Charles Laughton a few years ago that was perceptive, sympathetic, intelligently analytic of his persona and his person and his career—and almost literally thought Elsa Lanchester was the Devil, which made it completely useless to me. Lanchester and Laughton had a legitimately, documentedly complicated marriage. It wasn't as one-sided as one person driving the other into unhappiness. But Laughton was the biographer's saint and anyone who upset him was cast into the outer darkness. It was hugely aggravating.
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It never ceases to boggle me how Rossetti's 'champions' manage to write Fanny Cornforth out of his life almost completely, yet she stuck by him even through his final descent into insanity.
How dare she be so common and working class?
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Very true. And you get these prejudices handed down, so that people who never met the woman dismiss her. And you have to go back and re-excavate.
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(I always see this as the Great Man and his despised wife, and the reverse is of course rarer because we don't make Great Women very often as a society. But it must be out there too.)
My pet example of a Great Man whose wife we as a society have decided collectively to hate: Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd. How dare she be short and fat? How dare she like to wear pretty dresses with low necklines? How very dare she be bad at being a celebrity wife, or suffer from grief when her sons died (three of their four boys predeceased her), or deal badly with her feelings of jealousy towards women who spent time around her husband, or have what sounds like depression in a time before it could be effectively treated? How, ultimately, dare she try to recoup some of her debts by selling dresses after her husband was murdered?
I like Mary Todd because of her love and support for her husband, because of her flaws, with which I identify, and because of elements that I think her detractors would call flaws and I call interesting character traits. It seems to me that the record has been muddied by prejudices handed down, as you describe, from biographers who, of course, admired Lincoln and despised Mary Todd as unworthy, on no convincing evidence of unworthiness.
Lincoln himself evidently loved her enough to marry her and stay close with her for the rest of his life, and value her support through everything, and I trust Lincoln to know what he wanted from his marriage.
I am such a huge fan of their relationship that I just have to share this part, now I'm on the topic. Either early on the day they went to Ford's Theatre, or a few days prior, the Lincolns took a private carriage ride together. No one knows what they said, but it's likely they just wanted to talk about their plans as a couple for peacetime, and all the pleasant things they wanted to do after his term of office. In their box at Ford's, watching "Our American Cousin," the last thing they said to each other in life was a whispered exchange where Todd giggled about how she didn't know WHAT their friends would think of her, for letting Lincoln (her husband of decades) hold her hand, and Lincoln said no one would think anything at all about it.
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I came into this conversation without animus toward Mary Todd, but I leave firmly on Team Oh My God the Lincolns Should Totally Have Been Allowed to Grow Old and Scandalously Adorable Together Dammit.
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