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When fillers were needed for the paper, Kipling wrote them: verse (Departmental Ditties) or prose (Plain Tales from the Hills). Other Indian papers began to buy his stuff; soon there were half a dozen paperbacked books signed Kipling on Indian railway bookstalls. By now Kipling had some money saved up. He turned his back on India and apprenticeship, returned to England to dip his fiery pen into the Thames. Almost immediately the Thames took fire. At 24 Kipling was the literary man of the hour. He cannily steered clear of cliques, ran foul of no colleagues. "I have never directly or indirectly criticized any fellow-craftsman's output, or encouraged any man or woman to do so." He walked into success like a happy somnambulist: "That period was all, as I have said, a dream, in which it seemed that I could push down walls, walk through ramparts and stride across rivers." Kipling's parents; who lived till he was 45, remained his most sympathetic and helpful critics. He credits his mother with one of his best-known lines: "What do they know of England who only England know?" His father helped him plan Kim, illustrated his son's collected works.
Many a U. S. schoolboy knows that Kipling looked like a big-browed, jut-jawed Groucho Marx; but few people anywhere would recognize a picture of his wife. Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Balestier, but readers of Something of Myself are led to infer that she could hardly be considered American. (Kipling does not mention his brother-in-law, Wolcott Balestier, who collaborated with him on the Naulahka, and with whom he quarreled.) The U. S. where he spent four years after his marriage, he mentions often, always in the same tone. "Reporters came from papers in Boston which I presume believed itself to be civilized and demanded interviews. I told them I had nothing to say. 'If ye hevn't, guess we'll make ye say something.' So they went away and lied copiously. . . ." He speaks of the U. S.'s "obedient and instructed Press," of the "overwhelming vacuity of the national life," of the U. S.-Canadian border: "And always the marvel—to which the Canadians seemed insensible—was that on one side of an imaginary line should be Safety, Law, Honor and Obedience, and on the other, frank brutal decivilization." But Theodore Roosevelt he liked.