regshoe

I am slowly making my way through most of the classic boarding school books, and Stalky & Co. (it's complicated*), after happening to find it in a bookshop, was therefore next on the list.

I read the Oxford World's Classics edition with an introduction by Isabel Quigley, who I've just realised is the author of that book on school stories that

phantomtomato reviewed a while ago, and it seems odd to me that Quigley would choose to write a whole book about the school story genre because the impression one gets from this introduction is that she thinks the genre was a lot of trash written exclusively by unimaginative hacks until it was uniquely elevated by Kipling's peerless genius. Stalky & Co. is Not Like Other School Stories, says Quigley. Well, she's kind of right, I think. Certainly Kipling is irreverent and contemptuous about elements of school tradition which other stories tend to respect (I was genuinely shocked that the main characters sympathetically find cricket boring and get out of watching matches whenever they can); certainly he values cunning (right there in the title: the main character gets his nickname from a piece of school slang meaning 'clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action') and disrespect for official rules more highly than the usual school ethos tends to; and certainly the level of violence and cruelty portrayed and celebrated in this book rises above even the eyebrow-raising standard of late Victorian public schools. But are they that different, really? Kipling thinks he and Stalky are daring rebels against stuffy conservative authority, but most of his values are the same conventionally masculine Victorian ones—courage, honour, a sense of fair play, 'manliness', being really racist, &c.—that the stuffy conservative authority of the time approves of. Many of the stories revolve around Stalky and his friends getting dramatically violent revenge on teachers, but there is definitely also a sense that this is all part of how the system is supposed to work in the end and to some extent the teachers are kind of in on it. Quigley's view that the book is uniquely concerned with school as a preparation for life is also IMO wrong; The Hill is, in a more conventional way, doing exactly the same thing vis-a-vis education of the rulers of Empire.

What else, then? The school portrayed is based very closely on Kipling's own school, the United Services College, which was not a traditional public school but a recently-founded institution specialising in the education of boys destined for the army; this does make for some interesting differences in culture but I was also surprised by how overtly military the school isn't and how little the curriculum (lots of classics, a spot of maths and English literature, games, no actual military training apart from that one time and it was a big mistake) seems to differ from those portrayed in the more typical public school stories. A couple of the stories contain longer and more detailed accounts of what actually goes on in lessons than school stories tend to, which was interesting and enjoyable. Also interesting were the multiple more-or-less direct (as in, you need to understand period euphemisms but the euphemisms are undeniably being used meaningly) references to homosexuality, albeit mostly in the context of it apparently not existing at this school, and indeed the book isn't particularly slashy. Kipling writes with that kind of style which is extremely dense in references, allusions and specific subcultural slang (the OWC edition has 28 pages of explanatory notes in small type, only some of which are patronisingly unnecessary) and never says a thing directly if it can be said sideways, which is an absolute delight to read when you're in sympathy with the author and gets annoying fast if you're not, and thus I spent the book bouncing between the two extremes depending on how interesting/repulsive the particular story was.** As in Puck of Pook's Hill the stories are interspered with poems, relevant to and commenting upon the stories but not directly about them; once again the poems are very good, technically if not morally, and I really liked this structure. More authors should do that!

Also, I wondered what was going on with the convention of spellings like M‘Turk (one of the main characters here), and the conclusion seems to be that it's a way of approximating the more conventional abbreviation M^c when you haven't actually got a superscript C among your printing equipment—thus explaining what otherwise looks like a puzzlingly backwards apostrophe, so there you go.

*Originally a series of stories published in magazines from 1897-99, after which all but one of them were collected and published in book form; Kipling wrote four more stories between 1917 and 1929, after which a book including all the stories was published, and that's the version I read. Books published in 1929 have only recently come out of US copyright, so e.g. the version on Gutenberg is the incomplete 1899 edition.

**E. W. Hornung's prose does the same thing in a somewhat toned-down way and I can well believe that Kipling was an influence on him, albeit not particularly on Fathers of Men (and of course they disagree extremely about cricket). Of course Hornung titled a novel after a poem by Kipling, though I suspect Kipling wouldn't have allowed that the thousandth person could be a woman, and this is perhaps one of the important differences between them.