Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling – an Officer, a Gentleman, and a Very Naughty Boy
Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling, is a collection of stories set at a public school, preparing boys for either British military officer training, or imperial public service. Based on Kipling’s school days at Devon’s United Services College, the stories first appeared in magazines between 1897 and 1899, before publication as a book in 1899. A trio of pupils, Stalky, McTurk and Beetle, feature as the central characters.
This book, and Kipling in general, is somewhat controversial today. But it is interesting that Stalky and Co. was equally controversial when it was first published. Robert Buchanan in The Contemporary Review considered the book vulgar, brutal and savage. Henry James thought it deplorable, Somerset Maugham, odious. Harsh criticism also came from such luminaries as A.C. Benson, Edmund Wilson, and George Sampson, author of the Concise History of English Literature. These reactions do not reflect a once respectable, now outmoded book. It has never been universally well-regarded.
I would suggest that Stalky and Co. might offend now, and when it was published, because it is actually about respectability, presenting an unflinching portrayal of the contradictions that lurk beneath its proper facade.
A ‘good’ pupil at the Stalky school would play cricket, follow the rules, respect authority. There is more than a suggestion that this attitude simply puts boys on a production line, carrying them to a likely death on a foreign field. One master objects to an old boy of the school describing to current pupils the violent end of another old boy during battle. That sort of thing is undermining of morality and good order. You can’t have boys realising what they are signing up for. It might stop them working towards the goals their teachers set for them.
And then there’s all the contradictions involved in a school aiming to produce leaders, while thrashing its students into respectful obedience. One story focuses on a group of boys who are always late for breakfast. Their punishment is to do military drill with an old army veteran. Ironically, this is the only example of actual military activity that goes on here. When a visiting general suggests that the school should have a cadet corp, it is these naughty drill boys who are the only pupils ready to form such a group. And the corp leader is the naughtiest boy of all, Stalky himself. It is Stalky who eventually translates his years of sneaky, frequently vile, school pranks into an highly respectable army career, where tactics of deception and deflection win the day with minimum risk to life, especially his own.
And these ironies around respectability extend to the book’s language – my favourite aspect of Stalky and Co. The dialogue is a complete mishmash of highfalutin Latin, French, quotes from classic authors, and low-brow, local Devon dialect. Stalky and his followers mix all of this language indiscriminately together in an exuberant teenage slang. It’s like the approach the headmaster takes in supporting Beetle’s obvious literary talents, giving him the run of his library, recommending nothing and prohibiting nothing. This is a good training in not being too ready to classify writing into easy categories of respectable or unworthy. Yes, Henry James, Somerset Maugham and people who write fancy histories of English Literature are all correct in their judgements of Stalky and Co. And yet… good writing is often not proper at its heart. It does tend to challenge assumptions in an uncomfortable way. That’s what Stalky and Co. does. I admired it.
