We had been in Rudyard Kipling’s house for less than an hour when I accidentally sliced a chunk out of my finger with a razor. After a panicked ten minutes filling the sink with blood, I let my wife Amy drive me to the nearest emergency room, passing our intended companions– authors David Leff and Mary Fletcher– on the way. An hour of filling out forms, soaking a roll of gauze red, and listening to nurses’ banter followed. They finally looked at the wounded finger, pronounced a grim verdict, and wrapped it in a giant cartoon bandage.
We drove back from Brattleboro through the Vermont countryside as evening fell, finding David and Mary in rocking chairs on the porch with glasses of pinot noir. Amy started dinner and I began chatting with David, trying to ignore the throbbing waves of pain. My finger seemed a herald of woe, of impending disaster. After all, for Kipling this house had been cursed–and maybe it still was.
At first glance, Naulakha seems an odd place for disaster. The house perches perfectly on the side of a knoll overlooking the Connecticut River, wedged somehow into the 19th century. A gravel road leads up from Kipling Road, past the old icehouse and carriage house. The family’s tennis court and gazebo lie at the end of a long, long tunnel of rhododendrons. Lilacs bloom in the garden and their scent wafting through open windows.
The house itself is unique, fantastic, like the offspring of a riverboat and Indian bungalow. It stretches ninety feet by twenty-two feet and rises four stories into the sky. Wood paneling gives it the atmosphere of a well-kept ski lodge, packed with antiques, some of them Kipling’s own. The four of us ate pizza on his dining room table, and bellies full, spent a relaxing evening on the leather couch and lounge chairs in front of the gas fireplace in the author’s office.
It was strange, not just visiting but staying overnight at the house of a famous author more than a century after he had abandoned it. Kipling built this house on his wife’s family property in the 1890s, particularly enjoying a view of Mount Monadnock’s pyramidal peak to the east. After years on the early 20th-century real estate market, it was bought by a wealthy Vermont family who preserved it until the Landmark Trust acquired it– not to use as a traditional museum, but as one that people can rent, sleep in, and enjoy in a way alien to most American preservationists.
It seemed alien to us, too. Upstairs on a long landing above the stairwells, David and Mary retired to Kipling’s room, while Amy and I took the servant’s quarters. We could hear the distant sounds of traffic on I-91, red-winged blackbirds in the meadow, the patter of rain on the roof.
In the morning, I noticed an inscription from the Gospels above the fireplace, apparently placed there by Kipling’s father, “The Night cometh when no man can work.” Great impetus for a writer to get on with it– and that is, after all, why we had come.
After breakfast I sat down in Kipling’s office and set pen to paper, with Amy nearby in a lounge chair. David wrote at the kitchen table and Mary sketched upstairs. For most of that first full day we retreated to separate corners of the house to write, drinking coffee and snacking on summer sausage, olives, and Cotswold cheese. I performed first aid on my wounded finger– an open triangle of congealed blood– before taking an unplanned nap.
Waking with surprise, I took a short walk along the tunnel of rhododendrons to a strange, temple-like structure, complete with stone altar, built by the later owners of the house. In the small gazebo by the tennis courts, I thought of the children who must have played there, now long dead, and pictured Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Kipling smacking tennis balls across the net on the clay court below.
David and I had formed a literary friendship a few years earlier, bonding over our mutual love of New England history. Amy and David had connected over their work as poets, and we had both bonded with his wife Mary – a librarian and artist – over a mutual commitment to education. We had read each other’s books and articles and begun helping each other write more and write better. The four of us often joked about a name for our literary group, maybe “The Deep Localists,” “The Rhizome Initiative,” or “Deep Travelers.” We discussed the need for cooperation among artists and writers, and how difficult that is in a spread-out place like Connecticut rather than in London or New York.
“It is so important to encourage and help emerging writers with their work,” David said. “It’s rewarding to feel part of a continuum.”
Early on in our friendship, after a stop for ice cream in Collinsville, Connecticut, the four of us got caught in the rain walking back to their 1847 Greek Revival home on the village green. David did a little hop-step dance in the downpour. “I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain!” he bellowed. Back at the house, we threw our clothes in the dryer, and sat around in robes and blankets, speaking of our writing projects.
“As writers we have to build the block of marble and then chip it away into a sculpture,” our host said. We also discussed how modern people seemed unable or unwilling to be bored or lonely.
“How else are you going to become yourself, if you’re never alone?” Amy said.
“It’s a new kind of poverty,” agreed Mary.
Now, we had all come together, to paradoxically be alone to write, in the place where Kipling had composed The Jungle Books and Captains Courageous. After a dinner of spicy jambalaya and salad, we played a few games of pool in the open attic, near a small room with Kipling’s golf clubs and other artifacts. None of us were experts, and the match went on for a long time as we joked and scratched and sunk balls. David made lightning-fast, groan-worthy puns, Mary broke her quiet to pronounce something wise and startling, Amy’s melodic voice trilled and rang through the wood-paneled house, and I tried to keep up.
Soon I settled into a happy, comfortable slackening of purpose. The windows let in the cool night air and I sunk the last solid, then the eight ball, ending the game. We headed downstairs to Kipling’s office, turned on the gas fire, and round-robin-style read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” out loud in the very room in which it was written. The exploits of the little mongoose in the bungalow garden, fighting a life-and-death battle against a pair of cobras, have never seemed more magical.
At first the home seemed magical to Kipling, too. He was a young writer on the brink of fame, just married to an American woman Caroline Balestier in the wake of a tragedy – Caroline’s older brother Wolcott, Kipling’s friend, had just died of typhus. One wedding attendee, author Henry James, gave away the bride but privately expressed doubts about the match.
A few months later, Kipling saw the peak of Mount Monadnock from the hillside above Caroline younger brother Beatty’s house on the Balestier estate and decided to make their home there. Caroline agreed, wanting to help her surviving brother, and they bought eleven acres of his farm. They named the house Naulakha, after a novel Rudyard and Wolcott had written together. Later that year, Kipling’s books Plain Tales from the Hills and Barrack Room Ballads became bestsellers. The couple settled into Naulakha, Caroline gave birth to their first daughter, and Kipling wrote the Jungle Books, Captains Courageous, The Seven Seas, and the beginning of Kim.
The little spot above the Connecticut River had all the makings of paradise, but it was cursed from the start. Kipling loved Vermont but felt like an outsider and did little to adjust to the culture, snubbing the locals, and remaining sour about America and its foreign policy. Despite advice from people like Arthur Conan Doyle, he kept caricaturing Americans as braggarts.
His brother-in-law Beatty had drinking and money problems, acted carelessly with the couple’s finances, made scenes, and nearly came to blows with Kipling’s coachman. Caroline gave him overly righteous advice, argued with him about small things, and they became more and more estranged. In 1895 she was burned in a fire and her hair turned prematurely gray. A year later, Beatty went bankrupt.
On May 6, 1896, Kipling cycled down his driveway and met a drunken Beatty, who swerved into his path with a buckboard and team of horses, pointing a whip and accosting him. Kipling fell off his bike and they exchanged threats. Caroline and Rudyard made it worse by reporting the incident to the local sheriff. The resulting arrest and court case became a public relations nightmare, with Beatty playing up to the American reporters. Kipling began carrying a revolver, fearing for his life. Finally, on August 29 the harassed couple fled their beautiful home for England.
After a few years, they ventured back to New York, but Kipling and his daughter contracted whooping cough, then pneumonia. He survived; she did not. This put an end to ideas of returning to Naulakha. The American side of their family grew more estranged, and Caroline retreated into a cold, unhappy isolation. Their only son died in World War I. By then, an unhappy Kipling was often writing nationalistic claptrap rather than the beautiful tales he spun in this house.
In that way, at least, my friend David seemed to me to be the anti-Kipling, having gone through the poisons of divorce, ruined health, and public humiliation and emerged a better man for it. The next morning, while mist hung over the mountains on the far side of the Connecticut River, I watched this bespectacled, bearded counterpart make a breakfast worthy of an Empire-era family: English muffins, scrambled eggs, ham, pears, apples, and date bread. He hummed and lectured while he cooked, perfectly happy in his own skin. Perhaps some people are cliffs that the world breaks itself on.
After this substantial meal, the four of us walked down Kipling Road past huge white farm buildings. David focused on the butterflies, pointing out pearl crescents, tiger swallowtails, and clouded sulfurs. A hummingbird drank from purple irises, a red-tailed hawk circled overhead, and barn swallows perched on overhead wires, cleaning their feathers. In the forest beyond, miles of blue tubing signified a large maple sugaring operation, and David, expert in this field, explained the process.
After a long walk we headed back to the house, where sandwiches and coffee on the porch and an ice pack for my thumb awaited. Amy read a book on palmistry, David reviewed our comments and suggestions for his latest manuscript, and Mary wrote an article about her Open Art Studio for children, where she not only brought art into the town library, but also allowed children to take the initiative in their own art projects.
“This is not about your ideas,” Mary implored her fellow educators. “It is about their ideas.”
That evening, we ate a dinner of creamed fiddleheads, followed by another game of pool on the third floor. Then came one final conversation in the fireplace office, where inspired by the slowly healing scar on my finger, we shared the histories of other scars – scandals and comas, pinched nerves and broken hearts. We could all have drunk the poison of trauma and become toxic, lashed out, hurt others, or hurt ourselves. Instead, we had come to the soft rainstorms of middle age with a dance in our steps and a smile in our hearts. And here we sat, warm and dry by a crackling fire, in a sort of paradise, at least for a little while.
That is one lesson I took from our brief time at Naulakha: a house is only as cursed as the people who inhabit it. We are both the primeval cobras in the garden and the tiny mongoose who confronts them, and it is only a question of who shall prove the stronger.
Near the end of a long evening of talk, I mentioned how Kipling’s damaged relationship with his wife and venomous conflict with his brother-in-law hold warnings and lessons about the limits of family.
“Wouldn’t it be nice sometimes to choose your family, instead?”
“Of course,” David said. “That is just what we have done.”
