Sunrise with Seamonsters (35 page)

In his
Oxford History of the United States,
Samuel Eliot Morison interprets the provocative language as growing out of a suspicion that the British government was procrastinating and that Venezuela, "if further put off, would declare a war, in which the United States must participate." It is true, as Lord Salisbury's biographer said of him, that he could be masterfully inactive, but Morison's is a charitable assessment, a historian's retrospective look at a bewildering piece of intransigence by two great powers over a precinct of South American jungle. Still, it gladdened Americans and it encouraged Latin Americans—the dictator, Porfirio Diaz, crowed his approval in Mexico City (but it was not long before he would be fleeing to safety in Europe). Seeing that the atmosphere had become hostile, Kipling wondered whether he might not be better off in Canada. He wrote hysterically to his friends, with his hopeless reading of the situation. He and his coachman were the only Englishmen in Brattleboro: the "little wooden town, white-cloaked and dumb" had become enemy territory.

For Henry James, still gloomy over the failure of his disastrous stage play,
Guy Domville,
the American belligerence was cause for greater gloom. He compared Cleveland's outburst of militarism to something Bismarck might utter in Germany. He expressed his fears in a letter to his brother, William:

One must hope that sanity and civilization, in both countries, will prevail. But the lurid light the American newspapers seem to project on the quantity of resident Anglophobia in the U.S.—the absolute war-hunger as against this country—is a thing to darken one's meditations. When, why does it, today, explode in such immense volume—in such apparent preponderance, and whither does it tend? It stupefies me—seems to me horribly inferior and vulgar—and I shall never go with it ... I had rather my bones were ground into British powder !

Henry James was ashamed and angry in London. In Brattleboro Kipling was frenzied, and he saw that it might be impossible for him to continue living in this small provincial town.

When the British government finally capitulated, in a face-saving gesture of agreeing to a treaty with Venezuela for submission of the dispute to arbitration, they did so because they were afraid of Germany, rather than out of any apprehension over an American attack. In the early winter of 1896, the German Kaiser had sent a telegram of congratulation to President Kruger of the Transvaal after the Boers frustrated the Jameson raid. It was clear to the British that a war in South Africa was imminent. This also had the effect of chastening what Joseph Pulitzer called the "jingo bugaboo" of President Cleveland. But none of this was any comfort to Kipling, who saw his leonine government provoked from another part of the globe.

It was at this time, from the first rumblings over Venezuela, to a British defeat (with German applause) in South Africa, that Kipling quarrelled with Beatty Balestier, had him arrested on a charge of "threatening murder and assault with opprobrious language," participated in the Brattleboro hearing, and made his decision to leave the United States for good. These unusual events—unusual for Kipling, at any rate—were the subject of my play.

A Grand Jury trial was set for September, but the day after the May hearing the newspapers—which had made a meal of it—carried headlines to the effect that Kipling was leaving.
Goodbye, Green Mountains!
and
The Author, After a Day as Witness, Says He's "Sick of the Whole Business
" were the headlines in the
New York Herald;
and the
New York Times'
s was
Kipling Talks of Leaving the Country to Protect Himself.
The local Brattleboro paper
The Phoenix,
carried no mention of Kipling's plan to leave, and indeed reported the hearing with dignity and impartiality. In an editorial published three days after the hearing, the paper gave Kipling's knuckles a gentle rap: "For reasons which Mr Kipling doubtless knows very well, the reporters have seen here a chance to get even with him." The editorial went on to summarize his behavior:

He has chosen to live his life in his own way, and the Brattleboro community have respected his reserve. Whatever rebuffs ambitious interviewers from the city press may have invited, Mr Kipling's townsfolk have given themselves no occasion for grievance in this respect. He has undertaken no social responsibilities and has made few personal friends, but these few have found him the most genial and delightful of men. What seems to us his unfortunate way of meeting the
well-meant advances of newspaper men and would-be friends of the literary guild when he first came to this country won him a reputation for exceeding brusqueness, and, in the public mind this covered and sunk out of sight the sensitive, appreciative and intense temperament which intimate friends know him to possess, and the mark of which is found on all his best work.

It was blame and praise. It ended with a cordial invitation for Kipling to stay, and the hope that Brattleboro would "long be his home". Kipling did not reply to this; if he commented privately no record survives.

The next newspaper report of Kipling is an item from
The Boston Journal (22
May, 1896) about another visit by him to Gloucester "to afford him material for the story of New England life upon which he is now at work." Two months later,
The Phoenix
reported that
Captains Courageous
was nearly done and that the serial rights had been sold to McClure's magazine. At the end of July there was a tiny paragraph in
The Phoenix
about Kipling planning to build "an additional farm barn" (and under this, "Austin Miller has placed a pop corn and peanut roaster in front of his store"). On the evidence of these newspaper stories it seemed as if Kipling was planning to stay in town for the September trial, and perhaps much longer. The trial was now only a month away.

But the
New York Times
of September 2nd carried a small report on an inside page which settled the question. The headline was
Rudyard Kipling Goes Abroad:

Rudyard Kipling, the novelist, accompanied by his wife and children, sailed yesterday on the North German Lloyd Steamship
Lahn
for Southampton. Mr Kipling will be gone for several years. He goes direct to Torquay, a small fishing village situated in the south of England. Although he has removed all his furniture from his home in Naulakha, Vt., he did not take it with him, but stored it in Rutland, Vt.

Apparently, Kipling told the New York reporters, "I expect to come back when I get ready. I haven't the least idea when that will be."

Three years later, in 1899, Kipling returned to New York, intending to make a visit to Brattleboro. But he fell ill with pneumonia and for many days he was near to death. His small daughter Josephine was also dangerously ill. The papers reported that Beatty Balestier had hurried to New York to bring a court action against Kipling, demanding $50,000 damages for "malicious persecution, false arrest and defamation of character." Within days, little Josephine died; this terrible news was kept from Kipling until he recovered. Sick with grief, he took the remainder of his family away from the United States—without making the one-day journey to Vermont—and he never returned. Thirty seven years later,
Beatty was still talking about his old enemy. "He never has come back to Vermont," he said to one writer. "He never will, while I'm alive."

So Kipling stayed in England. After a few years he found a large isolated house in Sussex. He was just thirty-seven, but already he seemed to the world, and to his family, an old man. The American experience—the shock in Brattleboro, the death of his daughter in New York—had aged and saddened him. He said he had "discovered England" and "at last, I'm one of the gentry." He lived in this house for the rest of his life, and he did not write about America until, at the age of seventy, he described it in his autobiography. He seemed embittered, and people wondered why. An American friend wrote to inquire. Kipling replied, "Remember that I lived in that land for four years as a householder ... As the nigger said in Court: 'If I didn't like de woman, how come I take de trouble to hit her on de haid?'"

Most of the linespeople were nervous wrecks, one linesperson had "Not you again!" screamed at him, the referee—so rattled he was gibbering—retired in the middle of a match the previous night and had to be replaced. Even the spokesperson was a bit puzzled. "It doesn't cost anything to be friendly" said the spokesperson (a clue to this spokesperson's sex was the pair of bulges under the spokesperson's official
$50,000 Smythe Tennis Grand Prix
tee-shirt—the words
Smythe
and
Prix
were levitated and trembling hugely). Another person said, "See, he's real sort of edgy during a match, and sometimes afterwards, too. Last night for example he told all the reporters to go take a flying jump and they had to go home without quotes."

Ten feet away, an off-duty linesperson was saying, "I says to him, 'Here's where I explain the ropes to you.' He says, 'Forget it.' I says, 'I'm supposed to explain the ropes.' He says, 'I know the ropes.' 'But this is the rules,' I says, 'that I'm supposed to explain the ropes.' 'What rules?' he says, so I say to him, 'Look, kid, pretend I'm your father, okay? Give me a break'!"

Over this monologue, the first spokesperson said, "And the most incredible thing is the silence when he serves. Like they know he'll have a tantrum if there's a hiccup or anything. When the other players serve, people are relaxed. But when he serves you can hear, like, a pin drop. It's fantastic. I'm sitting there with a cup of Coke. There's ice-cubes in the cup and I know if I wiggle it the ice-cubes will make a noise and maybe he'll go crazy and shout at me. I've never seen anything like it. It's a kind of fear."

The cause of this funk might well have been Caligula, but was in fact John McEnroe—"Junior" as he is known to his fellow players, "The Kid" to his fans, and "Johnny" to his doting parents. Minutes later, he was prowling the baseline, pawing the "textured" plastic mat of the indoor court, somewhat graceless and podgy, and with a red head-band around his lopsided hairdo, looking like a slightly swollen Shirley Temple playing Hiawatha on the war-path. There was a shudder of pique in his shoulders and then the three thousand people in the Civic Auditorium in San Jose, California, went dead quiet in apprehension. His body changed from a
pudding to a meteorite, became airborne, and he served—a fault. His features tightened at the error and he turned immediately to the spectators. "
Who's talking right there!
" He stared at a wedge of spectators, and there was horror in the silence now. Would he howl, as he had last night? Would he throw down his racket, or perhaps bean someone with a ball? No: he shook his frizzy peruke in dismay, strutted to the baseline again, and aced his second service.

"The Kid's behaving himself tonight," giggled a man in front of me, as a reluctant cheer went up.

And he was. He only threw his racket once (McEnroe seems to have developed a technique for throwing his racket without damaging it, though earlier this year he snapped one in half playing a particularly vicious smash); he threatened the floor with a woodchopper's motion, and he hollered obscurely into his cupped hand numerous times. But not once did he whine, "Oh, no, man! That was out, man! I ain't playing, man!" as he had in London some months before. There were no tantrums tonight. He stamped his feet, pouted, stared spectactors down, and made faces—he has a different but equally twisted face for each call, like separate chunks of malevolent putty. Often he tied and retied his sneakers, and it seems as if he does this for no other reason than to aim his defiant posterior at his opponent, the way the Chinese attempt the ultimate curse on an enemy.

He was playing the lithe but hapless "Butch" Walts, ranked thirty-eighth. Butch was grim, and at no point did Junior smile. There was nothing good-humored about this. It was stern and serious; a piece of inventive destruction on McEnroe's part, punctuated by baboon-like cries from McEnroe when the ball went haywire. No doubt someone like the Maharishi would have a remedy for his colicky temperament, but the fits and the contortions seem to work in his favor and make his play all the more surprising, the leaps more agile, the silences more silent, as he unknots himself and became balletic. The audience was not really on his side—probably because they suspected that McEnroe would reward their cheers by yelling abuse at them. They acknowledge his skill, but McEnroe has a reputation for making everyone who watches him and plays him feel victimized: he has to prove himself with every shot. Nonetheless, he demolished Walts, and afterwards, Walts said sadly, "I didn't expect to win."

What did Walts think of McEnroe's gamesmanship?

"He's got a right to question a point," said Walts. "Everyone does. He just does it a bit louder than everyone else."

I had told the chief spokesperson that I was rather hoping that McEnroe would grant me an interview. After all, that was my sole reason for being here in San-Jose-on-the-Freeway.

"Funny thing," said the spokesperson, who as Barry MacKay had been on the Davis Cup team twenty years ago, "when I was playing tennis we used to hunt around for someone to talk to. But no one cared. These days—forget it. Last night was a fiasco—he wouldn't open his mouth. And the night before, a photographer asked him to pose in front of that picture of Tilden"—there was a blow-up of William ("Big Bill") Tilden, the American tennis star of the 'thirties on the wall—"and all he said was, 'No thanks' and walked out of the room. But I'll try to talk to him—I'll quarterback it for you."

After the singles match, McEnroe, partnered by his friend Peter Fleming, played doubles. In his white samurai headband, and noticeably more relaxed in the buffoonery that is a convention of doubles, McEnroe chaffed Fleming and they gave Bengtson and Menon a pasting. I wondered, after his exhausting five hours, whether McEnroe would keep his appointment with me. His non-appearance would have been a blow; but I did not relish the thought of being savaged by a cantankerous twenty-year-old.