Stalky & Co., Rudyard Kipling (365 Books, Day 337)

[rushthatspeaks]

Read August 1st.

Oh of course Rudyard Kipling wrote a British-boys'-boarding-school book. What was I thinking?

And, of course, the language is magnificent. Kipling has a way with slang and rhythm and cadence that does not fail him here, so that even when the argot is so dense you have no idea what is actually going on you don't actually care because it's so damn colorfully spoken.

I am not sure why the book is called after Stalky, as he is not particularly the protagonist, but he is the only one of his trio of friends whose legally given name we ever find out, so maybe that's it. The three of them are at a school which is a training-ground, mostly, for boys going into various military areas; and they are politely, calmly, and stubbornly determined to do whatever they like to set the place on its head if they are not allowed to do whatever they like. Insulting them has a way of coming back in your face, somehow, and most of the schoolmasters are simply not able to keep up with the sheer deviousness they exhibit.

It's funny, of course, and terrifyingly colonialist, of course, and has basically no women, of course. There is one moment I found politically fascinating, in which a Member of Parliament comes to speak to the school about 'Patriotism'; eighty percent of them were born abroad and seventy-five percent into career military families, and the reception he gets is a stonewalled disbelief that any man can possibly be so stupid as to say the things he is saying. He ends with a flourish of the Union Jack and half of them don't know what it is, because it has never been a matter of practical importance. I enjoyed that; it felt both true and genuinely subversive.

But the meat of this book is in watching its three hellions get a better education than they think they are getting, by raiding the reputable and disreputable literature and techniques of Higher Academia in order to, for instance, learn enough about architecture to put a dead cat under the floorboards of the rival dorm. And the language. Kipling is one of those authors where as long as he keeps talking sometimes I almost don't care what he says. Almost.

I recommend this to Kipling completists, people who like to pick up obscure slang, and people who've read too many books set in boarding schools of the sort that make you want to throw those books, very hard, at the author and explain that children are amoral little hellions. This is specifically working against that last set of tropes. Stalky and friends would fit right in at St. Trinian's, if they were female, although they've a deep-down belief that other human beings are, you know, human beings; otherwise it wouldn't be nearly so pleasant to watch them hell around. I can see why I never encountered this as a kid, but it was worth looking at.

Comments

[sovay]

raiding the reputable and disreputable literature and techniques of Higher Academia in order to, for instance, learn enough about architecture to put a dead cat under the floorboards of the rival dorm.

If you leave out the dead cat, that's how most of the people I know have learned things.

Stalky and friends would fit right in at St. Trinian's, if they were female

Ronald Searle should totally have illustrated them.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Note to self: Must read St. Trinian's.

Stalky--Molesworth, more like it.

[(Anonymous)]

Searle's "Molesworth" books were somewhat reminiscent of "Stalky" but the St. Trinian's stories were more than a little grotesque... here's some other stuff--Splendid essay, but they don't mention the Billy Bunter stories which stole much from Kipling

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_stalky_intro.htm
my essays
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/791406

[larryhammer]

I'm very ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, it was written at the height of his powers, with language and verve to power an entire epic fantasy trilogy. On the other, that colonialism, which is so much more obtrusive than anything else he wrote. I mean, yes, his first 8-or-so collections are all set in the Raj, but the stories are about the people in it rather than the process. Stalky, though, is about training up good little imperialists.

In its way, no doubt in part because the strength of his writing, it's more disturbing than his Boer War stories, most of which are disposable jingoism.

---L.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Stalky, though, is about training up good little imperialists.

I'm not sure about this. The context is training up good little imperialists, yes. But the drive behind the story seems to me to be a wish fulfilment fantasy about little boys being brutalised at school, who instead of being helpless (as in real life) always, always manage to turn the tables on their tormentors. And of course in the end they grow up and Stalky goes off to be a hero, because Kipling was an imperialist, and being an outstanding player in the Great Game is a happy ending, as far as he's concerned. But I don't think the stories are really about how Stalky and co. were trained to be imperialists, it's more a way of giving them the final victory, to let them say to the school and the masters, look, even though we didn't play by your rules, we still came out on top.

[larryhammer]

At one point in I think it was the final story, someone (the narrator?) observes that all those things they learned in school was the perfect training for handling a native uprising like the now-young-men were. Or, that's what I remember -- I'd have to reread again, for it's been a few years.

---L.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what happens. But it's rather tacked on, in the sense that the book isn't exploring "What kind of education would train up a good imperialist? A subversive one!" Instead, it's a way of saying "And this kind of bad, disobedient behaviour wasn't only gratifying, it was actually a Good Thing because, um, because boys like that grow up to be really good spies and soldiers!"

Kipling's an imperialist, no question, and the dgree to which he's too obnoxious to read varies from story to story and from poem to poem. But I don't think Stalky and Co is supposed to show how to train up imperialists, it just sees growing up to be a good imperialist as a happy ending, and rewards its characters accordingly.

[larryhammer]

Hmm -- okay, I see your point. I'll have to reread the book before I can agree or disagree with it, though.

---L.

[larryhammer]

Okay, having reread the book, I disagree. The stories are too well-structured, building on each other incident by incident, with the final story tying together elements from most (though admittedly not all) of them. And it's in that story that Beetle* as the first person narrator explicitly claims that all that social engineering that Stalky did throughout the stories was the perfect training ground for the social engineering he did to get his men out of the Hills. Key here is story where the chaplain gets the trio to use their skills for good, as part of training them up into "civilizers," and the story in Many Inventions that Beetle cross-references, "A Conference of the Powers," where he's the unnamed narrator reporting someone else's story, as so many of Kipling's unnamed first-person narrators -- in this case told by some subalterns fresh home on leave to a senior novelist, and opening his eyes to the ways of imperialism as it is practiced on the ground.

That Beetle claims in the final line that he wrote all this down by way of proving his argument does make it look like a rationalization after the fact. But the book is too well-structured, too deliberate, for it to really be tacked on.

My impression is, actually, that the revenge fantasies were put in there on by way of getting boys to read the stories and thereby drink in his lesson. But I have little by way of evidence for that. And, indeed, the omniscient narrator's apparent relish for that tediously long torture scene suggests there's at least some author appeal involved.

* Whose biography, talents, age, and appearance is suspiciously similar to Kipling's own.

---L.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

That's a good argument. And since we have no way of determining to what extent Kipling went back and imposed the arc of an imperialist Bildingsroman onto a disparate collection of revenge fantasies, or put in the revenge fantasies to make his educational programme more appealing to young readers, I will have to leave th discussion at that. But I'll certainly bear what you've said in mind next time I read Stalky and co, and perhaps it will change my opinion about what's "really" going on (and then I probably won't ever be able to read it again, because I don't actually like any of the three very much, and if I can't see them as using their brains to resist a tyrannical regime, they have no saving graces whatsoever).

[larryhammer]

(Catching up after a week offline.)

I like Beetle more than the other two, but only in the later stories -- it took him a bit to grow up. And even so, I'm not sure "like" quite applies to him.

---L.