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Rudyard
Kipling
STALKY & CO. (1899) Oxford University Press USA. 2009. Paperback. ISBN-10: 0199555036 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 08/11/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. review: Rudyard Kipling was no Franz Kafka. By contrast with the Prague writer, Kipling's narrative genius did not consist in making up characters whole cloth from a vivid imagination. Kipling's men and boys in KIM, THE JUNGLE BOOKS, MULVANEY STORIES and other narratives were based on living three-dimensional people whom he had met, interacted with or whose real-life stories others had told him. Academic and literary careers have been built on tracing Kipling's "originals." One way to look at Kipling's fiction: there is always a lot more Rudyard in it than you might suspect. STALKY & CO (1899) is a hugely successful fictional re-creation of Rudyard Kipling's half dozen years as a boarder at the United Services College on the seacoast of North Devon at Westward Ho! In the novel, Kipling is "Beetle," a disheveled, near-sighted poet, editor of the school newspaper, one of three inseparables which includes Irish aristocrat M'Turk and team leader Stalky. The 1899 edition has nine chapters. Down the years Kipling would write more of their adventures. We focus on Stalky, M'Turk and Beetle in their last two years of school, when they are 15 and 16 years old. United Services College was an almost brand new prep school whose students were mainly born abroad of parents serving Queen Victoria's Empire, especially in India and Burma. Most of them were being prepared to become Subalterns in the army. The three boys are all destined for eccentric greatness when they grow up. They betray signs of this early on. We readers are shown them as deliberate "outsiders" who go their own way (within limits prescribed by loyalty to the school and to the school's beloved Head, Cormell Price -- in real life an old school chum of Kipling's family). The three boys are indulged and their good qualities much appreciated by the Head and by the school's congenial Chaplain, while thoroughly disapproved of by the four rigorously traditional Housemasters. Nor are the three entirely approved of by their fellow students. A constant theme of STALKY & CO is revenge. If wronged, the three will find an appropriate punishment to fit the crime. Thus M'Turk makes friends with a local Irish landowner and receives permission to wander on his estate. Ostensibly this going off campus violates school rules and a house master trespasses in pursuit of them and is punished by the landowner for his sins. And on and on. In a reunion of Old Boys 15 years after graduation, the tale is told of Stalky leading his beloved Sikhs out on the northwest frontier of the Indian Raj. He is besieged by two tribes that normally hate one another. While out on a solitary patrol, Stalky employs on a hostile corpse a form of mutilation characteristic of the other tribe. This was the same carving on a chest after tribesmen had killed Stalky's deputy officer. The ploy saved the besieged. What a book! -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/405966727.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 08/12/2011 name of review: How our teachers "with the toil of their To-day/Bought for us To-morrow!" rating: * * * * * review: It was once more common than now for writers to begin each chapter of their novels with an epigraph, usually a quotation, often very well known, lifted from Shakespeare or the Bible or a poet. The epigraph's function was give a slight anticipation or to act somewhat like a chorus for what was to come in the next few pages. Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper come to mind as masters of this stylistic usage. STALKY & CO. (1899) by Rudyard Kipling is a fictional recreation of the author's five years (1878 - 1882) at a very special boarding school for boys, "United Services College, Westward Ho! Bideford, North Devon," England. In later life, Kipling the boy would add to his fictional counterpart "Beetle" one or two additional years at the College as well as compose from time to time fresh chapters and yarns to STALKY & CO. down the decades of his long writing career. But in 1899 when it first appeared, the novel about school days had only nine chapters. Not one of them is prefaced by an epigraph. But the book as a whole is launched first by a brief dedication to "Cormell Price, Headmaster, United Services College .. 1874 - 1894," followed by a remarkable poem of 13 stanzas, each made up of six short rhyming lines. STALKY & CO. is one of my favorite Kipling books. I find myself returning to it over and over through the years. And each time I pause to savor this haunting introductory poem that begins with a quotation from Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 44.1 "Let us now praise famous men." Rudyard Kipling's introductory poem praises the thinly disguised fictional teachers, dormitory supervisors and other real staff of his beloved United Services College. Those men, few if any married, did a hard, unsung job day in and day out in a dozen buildings spread along the bleak, cold Atlantic coast in north Devon: "(Twelve bleak houses by the shore!
Seven summers by the shore!) 'Mid
two hundred brothers."
Those men taught their boys the classics, mathematics, writing, history and something almost ineffably more, an esprit de corps. Their underlying message taught was that the boys (almost all destined for army or civil service in the British Empire -- but not near-sighted Kipling) took with them into future careers was "Man
must finish off his work --
Right or Wrong, his daily work -- And without excuses." To this end, the teachers did not ignore of play down student infractions. They spared not the rod, "For the love they bore us."
In later memories of boys-become-adults, these Masters morph into "famous men," "Who
declared it was best,
Safest, easiest, and best -- Expeditious, wise, and best -- To obey your orders." The final chapter tells of a small reunion of "old boys" -- 15 years after graduation of the trio making up Stalky & Co. -- of still young fighting men and administrators now scattered throughout the Empire. In whatever role, they have uniformly and with a United Services College flair served their Queen very well, fighting against or diplomatically standing up to alien kings, serving well whatever lands and populations they ruled ("Save he serve, no man may rule").
Whatever the boys had learned by 16 or 17 or 18 at this military oriented boarding school, this they carried over very well and permanently engrained into their adult lives. And slowly it came to them how much they owed their teachers: "Wherefore praise
we famous men
From whose bays we borrow -- They that put aside To-day -- All the joys of their To-day -- And with toil of their To-day Bought for us To-morrow!" Meet Stalky & Co.: Beetle (Kipling) and his two favorite classmates, M'Turk, whose father owned thousands of acres in the west of Ireland and the group's leader, Stalky, from army stock. The boys had other more normal names and we hear them spoken from time to time. The first chapter of STALKY & CO. is called 'In Ambush.' It is summer, their fifth summer together, and they are building in the wild hill-sides behind the college their annual out of doors place of refuge, club house and smoking room, hidden from the eyes of vigilant masters. When one prim and proper Master who dislikes the three youngsters intensely tracks them down onto the estate of an Irish neighbor with large holdings, the boys turn the table. The landowner indignantly sends the trackers back to the College, tails between their legs. To the boys, by contrast, thanks to M'Turk's turning on the Irish brogue, the land owner gives permanent permission to roam his grounds at will. The pattern is set: if other boys or unsympathetic masters try to take Stalky, M'Turk and Beetle unjustly (from the boys' point of view) to task or dare to make them change their ways, they do so at their peril. The boys will always take revenge and also make the punishment fit the offense. And they will emerge stronger than ever before. In one story the three are at great pains to slip a slain rabbit above the ceiling of a dormitory of one of the masters who had sneered at one of them for being dirty. The subsequent odor became unbearable but was not traced by Masters to the three culprits. Mind you, nonetheless, a college servant did pretty well ferret out the facts. But he would not peach on Stalky & Co., because in his eyes the rude Master got what he deserved. The Headmaster, based on Cormell Price, a beloved schooldays friend of Kipling's mother and her brother and sisters, as well as the college's roly-poly Anglican Chaplain ("Padre") (who also teaches French) are the two adults in the college with greatest appreciation of the worth of Stalky & Co. When forced as a matter of principle and school discipline to side with another Master against the boys, the Headmaster usually settles for a brief, promptly administered and thorough caning, which the boys greatly prefer to copying 500 lines of Vergil or Horace. The Chaplain is a frequent and beloved visitor to the boys' study room/lounge and either coaxes them to do their best or, in one story, subtly empowers them to give two overgrown bullies of a new, frail younger lad a vicious dose of their own medicine. Foreign wars are going on throughout Stalky's company's" school years. News of derring-do or death of former students come in regularly. Most of the students are preparing for the army or Indian Civil Service, after further and higher education. It is not clear whether either masters or students remotely understand how what they are teaching or learning at United Services College will be vital to alumni success and happiness in later life. It is enough for all parties simply to be preparing either to pass examinations for admission to a higher follow-on national services academy or to qualify for a job as a newspaperman in Lahore, as was the case with Beetle/Kipling. Any man in 2011 who has gone to an all boys school (day or boarding) will, I think, react favorably and with a sense of deja vu from his own school days to the camaraderie and male bonding of STALKY & CO. Schoolboys form friendships with two or three others of that ilk. Together they size up and make fun of teachers whose strong points they may only grasp a decade later. Vivant Stalky, M'Turk and Beetle! -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview -Rudyard_Kipling_Stalky_Co_-74-1753251-211414- How_our_teachers_with_the_toil_of_their.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 08 13 2011 title of review: Three British Schoolboys "have the fiend's own knack of discovering a man's weak place." rating: * * * * * review: Over his long lifetime Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) published 14 loosely linked "Stalky" stories. The first nine appeared in 1899 as STALKY & CO. A fifteenth manuscript has also appeared, long after Kipling's demise, though dating back to at least 1899. Here is something of the genesis of those tales. In the January 1888 spring term of United Services College (USC) at Westward Ho! outside the town of Bideford, on the north Devon seacost entered student Number 264 Joseph Rudyard Kipling, the future Nobel Prize winner for literature. He was 13. A classmate who had been at the fledgling military prep school since its beginning three years earlier, future Major General Lionel Dunsterville, befriended Rudyard Kipling and began a lifelong friendship. With fellow 13-year old new boy George Beresford, the later world war photographer, the three made up a "triple alliance" that carried them through their school years together. Each boy later recorded his recollections of their school years. Kipling wrote first (1899) and the others much later. By every account their real schooldays were as much riotous fun as those of Kipling's fictional Stalky (Dunsterville), M'Turk (Beresford) and Beetle (Kipling) in STALKY & CO. In 1899 Kipling saw himself, Dunsterville and Beresford as united in a determination to do things their way. They each admired USC headmaster (the real Kipling family friend Cormell Price) and "Padre," the school's Anglican chaplain. To the other masters and staff and to most of the students Stalky & Co. were largely indifferent. But let anyone infringe their God-given rights unjustly, and the three friends would take revenge. The form of such revenge was always well thought out and suited to the crime. Read STALKY & CO. and find out what "crimes" were avenged by hiding a dead cat in the ceiling of a boys' dormitory, or when a village girl was persuaded to kiss a schoolboy in a position of authority or when the school's army drill squad came to an end. There are several scenes set in the faculty lounge where the masters either complain about or mildly justify Stalky & Co., especially rascal poet Beetle/Kipling. In one such meeting over pipes, Padre rebuked school maser Prout for provoking the boys by saying that Beetle did not bathe. The Chaplain: "
... but he, or they -- it comes to the same thing -- have the fiend's
own knack of discovering a man's weak place. I confess I rather go out
of my way to conciliate (their) Number Five study. It may be soft, but
so far, I believe I am the only man here whom they haven't maddened by
their -- well -- attentions" (from the chapter "An Unsavoury
Interlude").
Publishing STALKY & CO. a few years later, Kipling was already lauding United Services College and the school teachers who imparted lessons beyond anything they dreamed. In the book's introductory poem, they were "famous men" (Sirach 44.1) who sacrificed their To-days for their students' To-morrows. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Charles Allen - KIPLING SAHIB: INDIA AND THE MAKING OF RUDYARD KIPLING -- G. C. Beresford - SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING -- Major General Lionel Dunsterville - STALKY'S REMINISCENCES -- David Gilmour - THE LONG RECESSIONAL: THE IMPERIAL LIFE OF RUDYARD KIPLING http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/ review.aspx?reviewid=1805089 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 08/15/2011 title of review: Did Rudyard Kipling's School really aim only "to make men able to make and keep empires?" rating: * * * * * review: I think that lovers of Kipling are already well aware of the schoolboy doings of STALKY & CO. (1899). This book about schoolboys is loved by schoolboys for the inventive, sometimes cruel ways that its three teen-age heroes defend their rights against their boarding school's Head, Masters, Chaplain, Staff and fellow students. Adults, as we all know, find new depths and insights every time we re-read STALKY stories and its great imperial preface, "Let us now praise famous men." We can read STALKY for so many things: for its criticism of British education, for its sketches of north Devon life and dialects, even for its theology. Let me suggest, in addition, that we can also read these tales (originally nine, later 14) as expressions of Rudyard Kipling's evolving politics. That Kipling's politics of imperialism colored all his writing is the thesis of David Gilmour in THE LONG RECESSIONAL: THE IMPERIAL LIFE OF RUDYARD KIPLING (2002). A question that I ask myself is whether Kipling's fascination with and initially blind devotion to British imperialism was already alive during his years (1878 - 1882) at United Services College on the north Devon coast -- or merely latent? Clearly it was alive 17 years after Rudyard left school for newspapering in India -- alive, that is, in 1899 when Kipling prefaced STALKY & CO. with "Let us now praise famous men." The College's old boys "Some
beneath the further stars
Bear the greater burden: Set to serve the lands they rule, (Save he serve no man may rule), Serve and love the lands they rule: Seeking praise nor guerdon." David Gilmour makes it clear enough what Kipling's politics were in 1894 when he returned to the College to take part in ceremonies honoring its beloved Head, Cormell Price (Kipling's "Uncle Corm") on his retirement. The book STALKY & CO., be it remembered, had been dedicated to Price five years earlier. In 1894 Kipling spoke these words: "All
that the College -- all that Mr Price -- has ever aimed at was to make
men able to make and keep empires."
To which David Gilmour wryly adds as comment, "Price must have been surprised. He had
also aimed to educate boys"
(THE LONG RECESSIONAL, Ch. 1 "Ejections from Paradise," p. 11). Read Kipling for his style, for his humor, for his amazing ear for languages, dialect and school-boy jargon. But also read him, from time to time, for the rise and fall of his belief in the British Empire. -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Stalky-Oxford-Worlds -Classics/dp/0199555036/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie= UTF8&qid= 1311934886&sr=1-3 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Stalky-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/ dp/0199555036/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid= 1311934886&sr=1-3 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 08/14/2011 Review Title: Out Of Step British Schoolboys: Underestimate Them At Your Peril Product Rating: * * * * * PROS: Teenage boys in training to run the British Empire. Mistreat them at your peril. CONS: 1870s British schoolboy argot: have a glossary at hand. BOTTOM LINE: Teachers, school esprit de corps, unguided reading, raging hormones all come together in STALKY & CO. to build a new generation of leaders of men. Revenge. Cunning. Humor. aohcapablanca's Full Review: Do you remember the old NEW YORKER joke when one sweet young high society thing asks another: "Do you like Kipling" and hears in reply, "I don't know. How do you kipple?" Well, how you "kipple" at its finest is demonstrated in Rudyard Kipling's 1899 STALKY & CO. The original STALKY has nine stories. Kipling went on to write five more. I have temporarily mislaid my Oxford COMPLETE STALKY & CO. Before me is the original, limited text of 1899. But 't is enough, 't will serve. Though I miss the allusions to Br'er Rabbit of the later tales. People who already love Kipling are generally mad for STALKY & CO. Readers who as a rule don't like Kipling are known to make an exception for the STALKY tales. If you don't believe me, look over the customer reviews at amazon.com. One reader in India says that from his grandfather down through three generations every family member has read and loved STALKY. Another reader says that his father passed these tales to him in his will and the book is almost worn out from decades of re-reading. STALKY & CO. is a book about schoolboys. And schoolboys have always loved it. But be warned: it may be a book about boys, but it has layers of meaning aimed only at adults. It is both critical and in awe of Victorian ways of educating boys. It shows that teachers and students alike can be bullies, cruel and very unpleasant. But it mainly shows how the best aspects of a Victorian military prep school prepared its graduates to go out and help rule the British Empire. They had in hand their Bible, their Horace and their belief that it can't be wrong either to obey a legitimate order or to do your work for the good of the alien people you rule: "Some beneath the further stars
Bear the greater burden: Set to serve the lands they rule, (Save he serve no man may rule), Serve and love the lands they rule; Seeking praise nor guerdon." In January 1888 an enduring friendship was formed among three 13-year old schoolboys of United Services College (USC) at Westward Ho! outside the town of Bideford, on the north Devon seacoast. The three boys were the future Nobel Prize winner for literature Joseph Rudyard Kipling, future Major General Lionel Dunsterville and new boy George Beresford, Kipling's closest friend. Each boy in later life looked back fondly on these school years and wrote them up as fiction or fact. Kipling told their story in STALKY & CO. (1899). In those tales group leader Dunsterville became "Stalky," Beresford "M'Turk" and Kipling "Beetle." Retired Major General Dunsterville laid things out in STALKY'S REMINISCENSES (1928). Beresford wrote many biographic snippets about his old school chum, pulling much of it together in 1936's SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING. There is a universal readership appeal in school boys rebelling against the faults of institutions and teachers. Boys after all are weak. Teachers have the power. When teachers are unfair, pupils have a romantic right to strike back. But they must be clever, subtle and smarter than their opponents. What schoolboy does not identify with that challenge? Take one STALKY story as an example, the very first, "In Ambush." As if often the case, misguided mistreatment of Stalky & Co. began when a teacher, their housemaster Mr. Prout, came upon the three teenagers returning to college for tea in joyous triumph from a forbidden but innocent outing. Prouty had wasted an afternoon waiting to pounce on them in a summertime lair that they had abandoned for the large out-of-bounds estate of Colonel G. M. Dabney, J. P., an Irish landowner of an ample property abutting college grounds. The very sight of the merry lads, with a whiff of beer about them, sent Mr Prout into a rage. For those boys, he inferred, were always laughing at valued institutions such as cricket matches. Stalky's smiles were always signs of personal disrespect of Mr Prouty. The unhappy teacher shared his suspicions with another master, Mr King who positively hated Stalky, M'Turk and Beetle. "And they are so careful to avoid all
overt acts, too. It's sheer calculated insolence. ... They need a sharp
lesson, if only to bring down their over-weening self-conceit. ... One
sharp lesson is what they want."
For their part the boys were happy with recently won permission of Colonel Dabney (won by fellow Irish gentry scion M'Turk) to roam his lands. They had found a secluded ledge on a seaside cliff and there, amid sea birds, foxes and rabbits, they smoke their pipes and read their favorite books. They soon sense that Prout and King are out to catch them, assisted by skilled tracker and college staffer, retired Sergeant Foxy -- a veteran of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. Knowing they are followed, the boys tell their new friend, the Colonel's gamekeeper (promoted to that post thanks to M'Turk) that they have sighted three poachers on the Colonel's land. The gamekeeper captures the two teachers and the sergeant and takes them straightway to the landowner who dresses them down in colorful language, accusing them of setting a bad example through their trespassing to the boys in their charge. The three lads are then summoned to explain themselves to Prout and King, who are prepared to have the Sergeant cane them on the spot. What were the boys actively reinforcing from this impassioned interrogation "...
the lesson of their race, which is to put away all emotion and entrap
the alien at the proper time."
Mr King is virtually foaming at the mouth in rage. He goes too far -- as Stalky & Co. had counted on -- accuses them of "incipient drunkenness," a charge that could get them expelled. The boys immediately appeal to the college Headmaster (in real life an old friend of the Kipling-MacDonald families). Meanwhile they win the worried Sergeant to their cause and he presents their side of the case to the Head Master. The wise and much beloved Master calls the youngsters in, gives sound advice (when faced with the nonconforming, break out of administrative ruts and react unconventionally -- "this will be useful to you in later life" -- and then administers a token six strokes to each. Case closed. The Head then offers them free access to his collection of books, including, to bookish Beetle's delight, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. Finally the Head summons the two masters and they exit his office looking very, very mortified. The sequence of injustice and revenge plays out again and again in the STALKY stories and not just at school. Some outsider (a teacher, two warring tribes of the Indian borders temporarily united against the British Raj) does a member of a group wrong. They give him (or them) back twice as much as he gave them, but without evidence, and in a manner fitting the provocation. Thus, in the final story, some of the boys who had once acted in a school costume farce are together again 15 years later, and sharing tales of derring-do of Stalky in various parts of the globe, but especially on India's northwest frontier and beyond. (I think that, when trapped by the two warring tribes, Stalky may well have drawn on the Head's advice about unconventional responses delivered a decade and a half earlier.) But don't let me spoil your own reading and wild surmises. Nor be too proud to use a glossary or do a bit of googling. After years at the College, the boys are masters of Devon dialect. In "The Last Term" the boys persuade a local girl to kiss an unwilling puritanical student in a position of authority and out to do the three wrong. -- She to her victim: "Where be 'ee gwaine tu, my dearr? Gie I a
kiss! Don't they larn 'ee manners to College?"
A glossary also comes in handy for schoolboy argot: -- "They all sweated; for Stalky led them at
a smart trot west away along the cliffs under the furze-hills, crossing
combe after gorsy combe" (i. e., valley on the flank of a
hill).
-- "If I'd been Dabney I swear I'd ha' quodded (i.e., imprisoned) you." You can read STALKY & CO. again and again and find with delight ever new depths. Always end each session by re-reading the great poem at novel's beginning, inspired by Sirach 44.1 "Let us praise famous men." This is a poem of unremitting praise of the College, its Head, its Masters, its staff and its boys. Not a one of them understood at the time how much value would carry over from the 12 houses on the bleak Devon coast to Egypt, Iraq, India or Burma. But those loving, caring, competent adults worked very hard and sacrificed their "To-days" to create the boys' "To-morrows. -OOO- Recommended: Yes. http://www.epinions.com/review/Book_The_Complete _Stalky_and_Co_Rudyard_Kipling/content_560689548932 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/kipling_stalky.html kipling_stalky |