![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Kipling, who turned thirty in 1895, would likely have stayed in Brattleboro had not a bitter quarrel with his drunken lout of a brother-in-law put an abrupt end to his New England idyll. The Kiplings had built a beautiful Indian-style bungalow high above the Connecticut River (it is still there), and had hired Carrie’s boorish brother, Beatty Balestier, to care for the meadows and build a tennis court (also still there). “The night cometh,” his father ominously wrote over their mantelpiece, “when no man can work.” Carrie was pregnant and Kipling was broke. The leisurely around-the-world honeymoon that he and his wife, Carrie, had planned-with visits to India, where Kipling had first worked as a newspaperman, and to Samoa, to pay their respects to his idol, Robert Louis Stevenson-was aborted in Yokohama by two earthquakes: one actual, the other an international bank failure that wiped out Kipling’s savings. Kipling had his reasons for working hard. Kipling’s four-year sojourn in Vermont, from 1892 to 1896, was a remarkably productive period for this versatile poet and short-story writer, and established patterns, aesthetic and political, for much that came later. ![]()
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