Life's Handicap: Being Stories of My Own People Book

This and P.G. Wodehouse's are among the best of the "school stories" genre--boarding school stories that were enormously popular during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth, with a rapid falling off around WW II.

Most school stories, Wodehouse's included, shroud the boys in eternal youth, their bright star shining at games and being prefects, etc. There is scarce a hint at the prospect of being a grownup--except in Kipling's hilarious, brilliantly written, but violently roustabout series of stories. The intent of all these stories is to show how this school hardened the boys to pain, shaping them for army service--the maneuvering of their pranks furnishing lessons for war maneuvers in future.

I see something else going on even farther underneath that, which is Kipling's deep crush on Stalky (based on the real life L. C. Dunsterville), who makes his appearance in the first written of the stories, "in black tights and doublet, a black silk half-mask on his forehead, whistling lazily where he lay on top of the piano." Though another character--"Dick Four stood firm in the confidence born of well-fitting tights"--is recorded as self-aware of looking good, the brief but telling physical descriptions of Stalky later, in a story where very little physical detail is supplied of the boys, indicates that Beetle was aware of Stalky in his tights if Stalky himself wasn't.

I don't know that Kipling's crush was lust so much as a euphoric admiration for the type of person Dunsterville/Stalky was and he could never be--short, fat, hairy, half-blind with near-sightedness as Kipling was. There was no question of the army as a career for him, but he did his best to get near the others by becoming a journalist in India, where he followed the military life closely.

Many have wondered why Kipling wrote these stories years after he left the school. I wonder if it's because he heard about Dunsterville's exploits; also telling is the fact that though Kipling claimed a life-long friendship with Dunsterville, that did not go two ways. Not that Dunsterville rejected Kipling. He seems to have been a genial man, first to laugh at himself, friendly to all. But his interest in Kipling seems to have been mild, whereas the reverse was not true. And of course much ink has been spilled about Kipling's martial ardor and unstinting love of the glory of empire in his other writings.

It is unnerving to reread "Slaves of the Lamp II" and Kipling's paean to Dunsterville through Stalky's exploits in India and Afghanistan. At the end, the thirty-year-old schoolmates are gathered at the home of one of their number who inherited a baronetcy and wealth, and yet who misses the army. Two of the fellows have had their health ruined, but they show the usual stoic indifference to pain that Kipling heavily underscores through the stories. At the very end, Kipling trumpets with war-like euphoria, through Beetle, his mouthpiece in the stories, ' . . . India's full of Stalkies--Cheltenham and Haileybury and Marlborough chaps--that we don't know anything about, and the surprises will begin when there is a really big row on.'

'Who will be surprised?' said Dick Four.

'The other side. The gentleman who go to the front in first-class carriages. Just imagine Stalky let loose on the south side of Europe with a sufficiency of Sikhs and a reasonable prospect of loot. Consider it quietly.'

These men's sons would be the ones to be shipped to the Somme in WW I a few years later. As Kipling's was in reality, to be shot down at age eighteen, the same age as Everett, so young he looked girlish lying dead in the snow, and the boy glorified in "A Little Prep." The anguish Kipling felt afterward, and recorded, was a far cry from the stories' militant and glorious indifference to such young lives summarily wiped out in service to empire.