Anyone for a round of golf in Vermont with Sirs Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle?
I just finished reading Julian Barnes’ new recent novel “Arthur and George”, which has a lot of biographical details about Doyle, including the fact that he once swatted golf balls into the Connecticut River with Kipling.
A quick consult with the Internet oracle established that this was at the latter’s American home, and a quick consult with the Google Earth oracle turned up the location – in Vermont, actually, not Connecticut as Barnes says, though the Connecticut River is indeed close enough for the two authors to have sunk a few drives into it.
Seeing to the two giants of early-20th-century British literature smacking balls around the fairway together seems plausible enough right from the start, but in America, and in the snow!? It happened at the same place Kipling wrote his timeless twin “Jungle Books”, “Captains Courageous” and two other adventures drawing on years long gone in faraway India, yet almost all first published in the USA.
The house where Mowgli was born was recently restored by the Landmark Trust, a British non-profit foundation for use as an unconventional guest home.
“Naulakha” – as Kipling called it, Hindi for “precious jewel” – sits on a bluff outside Brattleboro and Dummerston, spacious living quarters with a library and gardens that have been Vermont’s most unusual summer vacation home/winter ski chalet since 1892.
That year Kipling – already famous and wealthy at 27 – followed his new bride, Caroline Balestier, home to her native America. He’d met her while collaborating on a novel of India, “Naulahka” (a misspelling never corrected), with Wolcott Balestier, her brother. Kipling didn’t care for “grotesquely bad” New York City and was soon looking for some greener privacy near Carrie’s family in Vermont. He paid $750 for the 11-acre spread, but was earning $25,000 a year (the equivalent of a quarter-million today), so he could well afford to hand some of it to New York architect Henry Rutgers Marshall to build a rambling “shingle-style” retreat based loosely on the houseboats he’d seen in the East. Here, a newspaper reporter found, “He wears shabby clothes, drives shaggy horses, is always saying, ‘Begad’ and plays with the baby.”
His tennis court was the first one known to have been constructed in Vermont, and the USGA credits Kipling with inventing snow golf here (with Conan Doyle’s help), played with distinctive red balls and tin cans for cups. Sherlock Holmes’ creator also brought him a pair of skis from England, allowing him to introduce that sport to Vermont as well.
Conan Doyle and his son Innes visited during a tour in 1894, sharing a snowy Thanksgiving with the Kiplings. “I had brought up my golf clubs and gave him lessons in a field,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography, “while the New England rustics watched us from afar, wondering what on earth we were at, for golf was unknown in America at that time.”
He was wrong about that, of course, but certainly the locals had never seen anything quite so strange as two Englishmen up to their knees in snow, hacking madly away at little red golf balls.
Kipling was so famous that while in Vermont a separate post office had to be established to handle his mail.
Kipling, Carrie and their infant children quit the US in 1896 after a bitter family squabble that ended in a much-publicised court trial, and their only return to America three years later ended tragically when Josephine, then six, died of pneumonia contracted on the sea crossing: his “little American”, to whom he had recited the “Just-So Stories” in the Naulakha nursery. He would tell friends, “There are only two places in the world where I want to live – Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live at either.”
The house was sold locally but then left to gather dust for 50 years, until the Landmark Trust purchased it in 1993 for $320,000. It has spent an equal sum to restore it. Kipling’s golf clubs still lean against a corner, and in the study are his writing desk and a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1891, a replacement for those given him as a present from Robert Louis Stevenson.
Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. He died in England in 1936.
For more information, there’s Stuart Murray new illustrated book “Rudyard Kipling in Vermont: Birthplace of The Jungle Books” and the Land Trust website, and there’s a detailed account of the estate at National Register.