The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book;
Kim; Stalky & Co.; Puck of Pook’s Hill,
The Just So Stories
ACRUCIAL FIGURE IN THE LITERARY SHAPE THAT THIS double movement between self-confidence and anxiety took was Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936): a poet who, even as he celebrated empire in his poem “Recessional,” composed for Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, was able to present a vision of how: “Far-called, our navies melt away; / On dune and headland sinks the fire: / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”
That ambivalence runs through Kipling’s titanic contribution to children’s writing. Along with Beatrix Potter, he bestrode the later part of the nineteenth century, and he continued to write to the brink of the Second World War. His influence has gone far beyond that. Kipling was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, and fabulist with an extraordinary range of voices and styles. He produced one of the greats in the school story genre in Stalky & Co. (1899). He wrote the founding classic of Great Game spy adventures in Kim (1901). He laid, in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), the groundwork for the enchanted Englands of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. He created the rich and resonant home-made fairytales of The Just So Stories (1902). Plus, as Disney would have no hesitation in allowing you to forget, he wrote The Jungle Book (1894).
His stories often see their protagonists caught between two worlds – Kim is half sahib,* half native; Mowgli is the mancub who belongs half to the jungle. To be caught between two worlds and two versions of childhood was Kipling’s own experience as a son of the Raj, and the experience is a defining one in his work. Born in Bombay in 1865 – his parents had met and courted in England before relocating, and he was named for a lake in Staffordshire – in his infancy he absorbed Portuguese and Hindi from the servants who looked after him. It was “the vernacular idiom one thought and dreamed in”; he spoke English, like Kim, only haltingly.
That ended abruptly and traumatically when he was shipped back to the old country to lodge with strangers in Southsea at the age of five. Being shipped halfway around the world and left among strangers seems a startling cruelty to us now, but it was a typical experience for the children of Anglo-Indian families. A version of the same thing is described in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess. The young Kipling spent the next six years, as he later recalled, miserable: bullied and neglected by the couple who had taken him in, relief only coming with Christmas visits to a kind aunt in London. After a brief summer with his mother when she returned to the country in 1877, he was sent to boarding school in Devon – an experience that was to provide the basis for the boarding-school stories in Stalky & Co. Is it any wonder that the old pattern in children’s stories – of the simultaneous yearning for a stable home, and for transformation and independence – was so feelingly limned in Kipling’s work?
I have among the books piled against the wall in my sons’ bedroom a short, board-bound picture book whose cover shows a winsome, tow-haired little boy in red trunks sitting on a rock, companionably arrayed with a cartoon tiger, an orangutan, and a bear laying his friendly paw on a panther. The title says: Disney, The Jungle Book, and a strapline promises: “The Original Magical Story.” Nowhere, not on the copyright page, not on the spine, not even in small print inside the back cover, do the words “Rudyard Kipling” appear. Not only does that Disney picture book in no sense tell the “original story,” but it amounts to the wholesale erasure of the original story – and its author.
The history of children’s literature, mind you, is full of retellings, reboots, bowdlerizations, and outright appropriations. Long before Walt Disney was thought of, we had PG domestications of hard-R folktales, Robinson Crusoe without the economics, Gulliver’s Travels without the politics, and The Pilgrim’s Progress without the Puritanism. To get a clear view of the originals of very many children’s classics these days, there’s a Disney paintjob to be scraped off first. But the Disney version of the Mowgli stories is so pervasive in the culture – your first two Google hits for “Jungle Book” will be the 1967 film and the 2016 film – and so distorted that they really might as well be two wholly separate properties.*
To pick a few instances: Kaa the snake, in Kipling, is an ally rather than an antagonist of Mowgli; King Louie, the jazz-singing orangutan who rules the Bandar-log (the monkey-people who in one episode kidnap Mowgli), was invented by Disney and appears nowhere in Kipling’s stories; Mowgli, in the original, is taken in by Father and Mother Wolf after toddling towards their cave in flight from an attack by the tiger Shere Khan, not discovered by Bagheera abandoned Moses-style in a basket; the final face-off with Shere Khan doesn’t result in the tiger slinking away with a scorched tail, as in Disney, but in Mowgli killing and skinning the predator; and Mowgli’s eventual return to the man-village, accomplished in the film by a saccharine meet-cute with a girl carrying a water-pot, is nothing like that in the original. Mowgli’s return to his own kind, in the books, is never more than provisional. His first stint in the man-village ends with his fellow humans stoning him and accusing him of witchcraft, and he pays them back with the help of his animal allies by razing the human village to the ground. Only much later, as a young adult, does he take up cautiously with a human surrogate mother.
The original stories are more sinewy, more austere, and vastly richer thematically. Though not without Kipling’s humor, they are very far from being obvious candidates to turn into animated musical comedy. Written in a high style of stately formality (there’s a lot of thee-ing and thou-ing among the inhabitants of the jungle), they are concerned above all with ideas of identity, honor, law, and morality. There’s a gravity to them, a tenderness, and a high seriousness, that’s entirely absent from the pantomime world of Disney. But they aren’t dry tracts either; they are, like so much Kipling wrote, fantastic feats of world-building and narrative verve.
Also, it’s easily forgotten, there isn’t one Jungle Book but two. The first, published in 1894, and the second, a year later, are shortstory collections rather than novels – and they’re not all about Mowgli. Come to that, they’re not all about the jungle: you’re stretching any definition of the word if one of your stories is set in the Bering Strait and another among the Inuit of the Arctic Circle. Only three of the seven stories in the first book, and only four of the eight in the second, are about Mowgli – and they tell his story out of sequence. Here he’s a toddler, there he’s a teenager. In “How Fear Came,” he’s not so much a protagonist as the audience for a prototypical Just So story (of which more later) telling how the first tiger got his stripes. Other stories in the collections include the classic “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” – about a mongoose’s blood-feud with a husband-and-wife partnership of cobras – and other stand-alone fables about the relationships between humans and animals both in and outside the Raj.
Also, ironically given that the phrase “the law of the jungle” has come to mean a primal situation of anarchy in which everyone is out for him- or herself, the jungle of the Mowgli stories is a place where law is everything. When Mowgli is first adopted by his wolf family, he must be presented formally at the Council Rock for the approval of the pack. Father Wolf pushes the man-cub into the center of the circle, where, in a lovely image of oblivious childhood, “he sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.” Baloo, “the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle,” speaks up for him, and Bagheera seconds the nomination and buys Mowgli’s acceptance with the carcass of a bull, pointing out that though he has no standing in the wolves’ assembly “the Law of the Jungle says that if there is a doubt that is not a killing matter in regard to a new cub, the life of that cub may be bought at a price. And the Law does not say who may or may not pay that price.” Not just a law, but loopholes.
The jungle is a place of fixed hierarchies, established customs, and elaborate formulaic greetings (“We be of one blood, thou and I’; “Good hunting’). It contrasts with the untrustworthy and bewildering world of the human village, where, as Mowgli reports, “they are idle, senseless and cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill their weaker for food, but for sport. When they are full-fed they would throw their own breed into the Red Flower.”* Shere Khan is a villain not because he’s a predator, but because he disrupts the orderly space of the jungle – hunting man; changing his territory unpredictably; conniving with the younger wolves to depose Akela as rightful ruler of the pack. Quite beneath contempt – almost beneath mention – are the Bandar-log, the boastful and lawless monkey people who abduct Mowgli in “Kaa’s Hunting”: “They have no law. They are outcaste […] Their way is not our way.”*
Baloo’s role as Mowgli’s protector (“teacher of the Law – cubbeater”) is to instil in the man-cub for his own safety the laws and languages and songs of the jungle. He teaches him the “MasterWords,” which command safe passage among other peoples (the one for the Snake-Peoples, anticipating Harry Potter’s mastery of Parseltongue, is “a perfectly indescribable hiss,” and it’s his ability to speak to Chil the Kite that saves him when the Bandar-log carry him off to their ruined palace). Mowgli’s status, though, is at once of the jungle and not of it. He’s still, and always, “man-cub”: he has no fear of fire and he has man’s ability to stare down the animals, even Shere Khan. When it becomes clear that the younger wolves remain suspicious of him, he is “furious with rage and sorrow for, wolf-like, the wolves had never told him how they hated him.”
Those wolves may be right to mistrust him. Blood will out. The savagery in Mowgli – which comes out when he takes extirpatory revenge on the men who cast him out and who threatened to burn Messua, the woman who believes Mowgli is her lost son – comes not from his animal but from his human side: “Bagheera shivered, and cowered down. He could understand, if the worst came to the worst, a quick rush down the village street, and a right and left blow into a crowd, or a crafty killing of men as they ploughed in the twilight, but this scheme for deliberately blotting out an entire village from the eyes of man and beast frightened him.” What’s scary in Mowgli is not his animal nature, but his human one: the jungle is civilization, and the village is savagery. (The English, far offstage in the Mowgli stories, are drily described as “a perfectly mad people, who would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.”)
Uncomprehending, often angry, the adolescent Mowgli is caught between his two mothers, the wolf Raksha and the human Messua, and two natures: “These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring. The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it falls. Why? I am two Mowglis, but the hide of Shere Khan is under my feet.” “Mowgli’s Song” concludes: “Ahae! My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.”
At the same time, Mowgli is, or becomes, a superhero – Tarzan before Tarzan. As he leaps over swampy ground “a man-trained man would have sunk over head in three strides, but Mowgli’s feet had eyes in them and they passed him from tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from the eyes in his head.” He goes from “Man-cub” to “Master of the Jungle,” and “strong, tall and beautiful […] might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend.” After he razes the human village in “Letting in the Jungle,” Mowgli’s state is very finely and ironically described: “He had the good conscience that comes from paying a just debt; and all the Jungle was his friend, for all the Jungle was afraid of him.”
The writing in The Jungle Book is often sublime. Take, for instance, the first appearance of Bagheera at the Council Rock: “A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk.” And here, wonderfully described in a paragraph, is Kipling’s sketch of the routine of the young boys of the village at work and simultaneously at play as they mind the herd for the day:
The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat, and the herd-children hear one kite (never any more) whistling almost out of sight overhead, and they know that if they died, or a cow died, that kite would sweep down, and the next kite miles away would see him drop and follow, and the next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would be a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere. […] Then evening comes and the children call, and the buffaloes lumber up out of the sticky mud with noises like gunshots going off one after the other, and they all string across the gray plain back to the twinkling village lights.
Mowgli, of course, slightly struggles to fit in: “when they made fun of him because he would not play games or fly kites, or because he mispronounced some word, only the knowledge that it was unsportsmanlike to kill little naked cubs kept him from picking them up and breaking them in two.”
The protagonist of Kim is, in his way, no less of an in-between child than Mowgli. The very first words of the novel place him – at play – sitting on an emblem of English rule, the great gun ZamZammah (“always first of the conqueror’s loot”): “He sat, in defiance of municipal orders…” The son of a nursemaid and a young color sergeant in an Irish regiment, Kim has been orphaned as a child after his mother fell to cholera and his father to drink and drugs. He was raised by a “half-caste” opium addict whom his father had befriended before his death. The boy is “burned black as any native […] spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song,” and “consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazaar.”
Kim is a sahib, but he doesn’t know he’s a sahib: intensely streetwise, curious and audacious; a ducker-and-diver, petty thief, errand-boy and beggar on the streets of Lahore, with a head full of cynical native proverbs and a fabulous tongue for insult. He has only a half-remembered, half-understood, jumbled-in-transmission explanation of his own history. He wears in a pouch round his neck documents that his father left him; he believes them to be magical. His father’s regimental emblems – a red bull on a green field – he believes to be figures in a prophecy. Kim is, like Kipling’s India, a jumble of street smarts and superstition.
He falls in with a Tibetan lama in search of a magic river that the lama hopes will free him from the “Wheel” of earthly existence, while running an errand (though he doesn’t know it) for a native asset of the British secret services. The adventure on which he embarks takes him through a dense network of powers and cultures in negotiation with each other, and – appropriately in a spy story – different levels of knowledge and different ways of knowing. When his path happens to cross that of his father’s old regiment, even the regimental chaplain explains the extraordinary coincidence as “kismet.”
Far from being delighted to be taken in by the white man and offered his supposed birthright (a place in a Masonic orphanage, as it turns out), Kim thinks the white men are crazy. “They cannot talk Hindi. They are only uncurried donkeys,” he explains to the lama.
He thinks that once a Sahib is always a Sahib, and between the two of them they purpose to keep me in this regiment or to send me to a madrissah (a school). It has happened before. I have always avoided it. The fat fool is of one mind and the camel-like one of another. But that is no odds. I may spend one night here and perhaps the next. It has happened before. Then I will run away and return to thee.
For Kim, as for Mowgli, the trappings of civilization, especially white civilization, are temporary overlays on a more primal and variegated world: “Sooner or later, if he chose, he could escape into great, grey, formless India, beyond tents and padres and colonels.” Kim’s adoption by the white world and education in Lucknow is what sets him off on his Great Game adventures – but his connection to the lama, and his ability to move between cultures, is his defining grace.
If Kim gave us a hero moving from the bazaar to the world of the sahibs (and back again), Stalky & Co. dramatizes the start of a journey in the opposite direction. The “Coll” in Stalky & Co. is based on the United Services College Kipling attended: a rural private school whose graduates were expected to go on to Sandhurst to serve as officers in the army. Its trio of protagonists, Stalky, M’Turk, and Beetle (the latter, a dab hand with poetic lampoons, being the stand-in for Kipling himself) are sixteen – so it’s a book that is preoccupied with the liminal state between childhood and adulthood. It’s a portrait of adolescent friendship, caught between ostentatiously drawling sophistication and boyish exuberance.
Stalky & Co. spoke to a relatively narrow class. It’s a classic publicschool story: capturing a particular strand in British social history that has taken a large part too in its literary and political history. The writer Nick Duffell, author of Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion: A Psychohistory, wrote in 2014 of boarding school pupils that they develop a “strategic survival personality”: “separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.”* A story as old as boarding schools themselves.
The boys in Stalky & Co. are arrogant, worldly and fabulously cynical. They look down, socially and intellectually, on their teachers. They speak in a macaronic slang full of dog Latin, mangled French, airy quotations and misquotations from books they’ve read, and school abbreviations (“impot paper”; “extra-tu”). Every character has one or more nicknames. Rather than being confined to the structure within which the school supposedly places them – subordinate to the rules and regulations, and judged by the standards, of their elders and betters – they run rings around the masters, especially their pompous housemaster Prout and the sour-tempered Mr King.
Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days was mostly about relations between the boys, with the headmaster a figure of remote but compelling authority. But in Kipling is a model of the school story in which the protagonists are forever getting one over on teacher. When they triumph: “They went to their study in more or less of silence. There they began to laugh – laugh as only boys can. They laughed with their foreheads on the tables, or on the floor; laughed at length, curled over the backs of chairs or clinging to a bookshelf; laughed themselves limp.” Indeed, gloating itself is a formalized activity: “Ti-ra-la-la-I-tu! I gloat! Hear me!”
Doesn’t that just crackle with the electric vitality of a real memory? Even the younger boys – who are generally beneath our heroes’ notice except when a fag is needed* – are sketched with a feeling sense of what boys are like in groups, and how the time passes for them.
The Lower Third had set a guard upon their form-room for the space of a full hour, which to a boy is a lifetime. Now they were busy with their Saturday evening businesses – cooking sparrows over the gas with rusty nibs; brewing unholy drinks in gallipots; skinning moles with pocket-knives: attending to paper trays full of silk-worms, or discussing the iniquities of their elders with a freedom, fluency, and point that would have amazed their parents.
Stalky, M’Turk, and Beetle are often the cause of anarchy, but they are not exactly anarchists. Like the Jungle, the Coll is a ruly place. But there are two sets of rules – the written and the unwritten. It is the delight of its three protagonists to flout (or exploit) the former and twit its pedantic upholders among the school staff, while cleaving to the latter: the code of honor among the boys, and the determination to “pay out” any slight or grievance in kind.
As one of the masters later realizes, the boys plot a punishment in each case to fit the crime. They break bounds in search of somewhere to read and smoke, contriving that the masters determined to catch them at it be, mortifyingly, had up for trespass by the splenetic old colonel who owns the land on which they are skiving off. When King taunts Beetle for not bathing, and the boys in his house start calling them “stinkers,” the three arrange to deposit a dead cat in the rafters of King’s house. When King turns them out of their shared study after the younger boys sneak to him with one of Beetle’s lampoons, Stalky engineers the destruction of King’s own study by a drunken carter. As M’Turk is heard to remark absently: “Everyone paid in full – beautiful feelin.”
The exception to the superiority that the boys feel over the school staff is their respect for the headmaster. He too cleaves to a higher code than the pettifogging school rules – to the extent that from time to time he gives them a good caning because they deserve it rather than because they’ve made it possible for him to pin anything on them. The boys seem to regard that as fair enough.
The quiet but uncompromising seriousness of Stalky & Co. grows as the book goes on. That the boys in Stalky are on the brink of adulthood – and that adulthood, for their school generation, means service in the army – is a gathering presence. In “A Little Prep,” a team of old boys returns to play a match against the school. Many of those old boys are now serving overseas, and these are the ones for whom “the school divided right and left in admiring silence.” One of those young soldiers is billeted to sleep the night in his old dormitory with the boys, and tells them the story of how he saw his school contemporary die after being shot in an ambush in India: “I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and – funny thing, too – he said ‘Hullo, Toffee!’ and I said ‘Hullo, Fat-Sow! Hope you aren’t hurt,’ or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two – never lifted his head off my knees…”
It’s in that same story that the boys discover that the head has risked his own life by sucking the gunk out of the throat of a pupil stricken by diphtheria, thus saving the boy’s life. “Pretty average heroic,” is Beetle’s high compliment. “The Head ought to get the vC,” says Stalky. There’s a sense here of how relationships and hierarchies bedded in at school will carry out into the big world – how even for the Old Boys, the head remains a father figure, and how short the distance between the rugby pitch and the battlefield really is.
Later we see the boys drilling on the parade-ground, and Kipling drops in some deadly little prolepses. One boy, Hogan, grumbles about marching in public, “not foreseeing that three years later he should die in the Burmese sunlight outside Minhla Fort”; of another, Perowne, we’re told in a deadly set of brackets: “(This is that Perowne who was shot in Equatorial Africa by his own men.) ”
The very final story in the book jumps forward in time and finds M’Turk and Beetle (who narrates this tale in the first person) and a handful of other Old Boys in the country house of their schoolmate “The Infant.” Now in their twenties, they swap tales of their adventures. Piecemeal, through glancing encounters that those present have had with him as they rattled around the empire as soldiers or administrators, we get glimpses of Stalky in adult life.
He is a trickster and subversive in the army just as at school – “a great man for orders – when they suit his book.” He’s suspicious of the authority of the “Politicals” who cost the lives of ordinary soldiers by making foolish treaties with forces who can’t be trusted. He’s defiant of command. He’s brave, he’s insouciant, he’s ingenious – he breaks a siege by fooling two factions in the enemy force into starting to fight with each-other; a version of a prank he played at school – and he’s funny (“You’ve forgotten him playin’ ‘Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby’ on the bugle to hurry us up”). Our last glimpse of him is in a Sikh village, “a dozen Sikh babies on his knees, an old harridan clappin’ him on the shoulder, and a garland of flowers round his neck. Told me he was recruitin’.”)
“There’s nobody like Stalky,” says one of the company. Beetle – aka Kipling – sets him right:
‘That’s just where you make the mistake,’ I said. ‘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 really a big row on.’
‘Who will be surprised?’ said Dick Four.
‘The other side. The gentlemen 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.’
Stalky & Co., then, is romantic and cynical, childish and adult, wildly funny and unexpectedly serious, in some ways propagandistic and in others savagely debunking of conventional authority and imperial chauvinism. It complicates, as does all Kipling’s work read in the round, the ways in which his reputation has suffered in our own age.
One of the most memorable chapters is one in which a conceited MP called Raymond Martin hopes to make a bit of political capital by visiting the school to deliver a cantingly patriotic speech. The boys’ initial scorn gives way to a more profound offense as they see their inward feelings for country, and for the male relatives who have perished in defense of that country, made the stuff of vulgar oratory: “He profaned the most secret places of their souls with outcries and gesticulations.”
Afterwards, “They discussed the speech in the dormitories. There was not one dissentient voice. Mr. Raymond Martin, beyond question, was born in a gutter, and bred in a Board-school, where they played marbles. He was further (I give the barest handful from great store) a Flopshus Cad, an Outrageous Stinker, a Jelly-bellied Flag-flapper (this was Stalky’s contribution), and several other things which it is not seemly to put down.” It is easy to imagine what Kipling would have made of Nigel Farage.
Supporter of the imperial project though he undoubtedly was, Kipling was not the “jingo imperialist” Orwell described him as. His is not the white-supremacist sahib’s-eye view that saw the empire’s subject peoples as an undifferentiated brown mass. Kipling’s patriotism is mournful, mystical, and bottom-up rather than top-down, and he had a far from chauvinistic curiosity about the cultures, customs, worldviews, and languages of the indigenous peoples among whom his stories are set.
At the heart of his literary gift was his extraordinary ear for different languages and forms and registers. His mythology draws on Inuit, Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Afrikaans folk traditions, and his vocabulary is spackled with loan-words. Stalky, in adulthood, is marked out as an effective officer not because he scorns the natives alongside whom he serves but because he goes native. He defies or ignores orders from on high. Like Kim, it’s his ability to straddle cultures that makes him what he is. In The Second Jungle Book, the wholly admirable protagonist of “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” is a British-educated, Indian-born servant of empire who opts out of the hierarchies of “civilized” society altogether to become an itinerant holy man or sunnyasi. Purun is a greater man for putting away the pomp of empire, and it is a failing of the white world that in so doing “as far as the world’s affairs went, he died.”
If Kim and Stalky can be seen as being at the young adult end of Kipling’s range – books about teenagers and young men – he also produced, in The Just So Stories, right at the beginning of the Edwardian age, a picture book to be read aloud for very young children, and an immortal classic of fairytale or myth. If these other books dramatized a sense of his own dislocated Anglo-Indian childhood, the Just So stories tell you something about Kipling as a father.
They were written, or at least collected for publication, in grief. Kipling’s daughter Josephine, known as “Effie,” was the original audience for these fables – so called because when he told them to her as bedtime stories Effie insisted that they had to be told word for word, or “just so” – which is something every parent who has tried to skip a line or two in a picture book with a punctilious child will recognize. She died of pneumonia in 1899, aged only six. She is the “Best Beloved” to whom the stories are narrated, and in the tenderness and wit and silliness of them you can still hear the loving connection between father and daughter, given torque by the knowledge that that connection has been severed.
The stories are origin stories or creation myths, and not noticeably Christian or even Western ones. The original trio, first in the book, were “How the Whale Got His Throat,” “How the Camel Got His Hump,” and “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin.” Tonally, Kipling just had incredible fun with these – it’s the closest he gets to the territory of Hilaire Belloc or Dr. Seuss. This is absolutely a text intended to be read aloud, complete with rhetorical questions, skittish little digressions and interpolations, and the formulaic patterning characteristic of the folktale tradition.
There’s a great aural delight in Homeric epithets – “Dingo” is never just “Dingo,” but “Yellow-Dog Dingo,” and again and again (in “The Elephant’s Child”) we meet “the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees.” Episodes and epithets fall into groups of three. Dingo is “grinning like a coal-scuttle,” then he’s “grinning like a rat-trap,” then he’s “grinning like a horsecollar” as he chases Kangaroo. In “How the Leopard Got His Spots” we meet animals visible “like ripe bananas in a smokehouse,” “like a bar of soap in a coal scuttle,” “like a mustard-plaster on a sack of coals.” In “How the First Letter Was Written” Taffy is “a very wonderful child,” then “a very, very wonderful child,” then “a very, very, very wonderful child.” The patternings are those of an oral tale where half the pleasure is in anticipation: if you know what’s going to happen to the whale, you’re going to enjoy all the more the reminders that, among the possessions of the shipwrecked Mariner (“a man of infinite resource-and-sagacity”), “you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved.”
The original and many subsequent editions contained Kipling’s own very accomplished illustrations. They have a stylistic flavor of Beardsley. The pictures, and even the very lengthy picture captions, work in a dynamic way with the text. The Just So Stories is Kipling’s contribution to the picture-book tradition that was to take such a large role in publishing for pre-school children and, unlike the linguistically challenging Stalky & Co. and the fey and rococo Puck of Pook’s Hill, it has, to my ear, barely dated: it has the out-of-time quality that goes with its mythological aspect.
The pleasure in sheer language, in these stories, is undimmed by the passage of more than a century. Nobody has a meeting when they can have a “palaver and an indaba and a punchayet, and a pow-wow.” Their jokey baby-talk (the Elephant’s Child is full of “satiable curtiosity,” “inciting” is a routine mistake for “exciting,” and “berangement” for “arrangement”), is that of a child’s mispronunciations being fed back to her. What family doesn’t have a handful of private words that survive from the faltering early language of their children?
Kipling’s model of fatherhood was a doting one. Tender, teasing, and affectionate father-and-daughter relationships feature in the stories. In the creation myth “The Crab That Played with the Sea,” the first Man approaches the Eldest Magician “with his own best beloved little girl-daughter sitting upon his shoulder.” The only recurring characters are the caveman Tegumai and his daughter Taffy.* There’s nothing of the remote victorian patriarch in this caveman dad: “From that day to this (and I suppose it is all Taffy’s fault), very few little girls have ever liked learning to read or write. Most of them prefer to draw pictures and play about with their Daddies – just like Taffy.”
Perhaps the most moving line in all of Kipling comes in one of the book’s interstitial poems, where he imagines how thousands of years after the events of the story, in spirit, “comes Taffy dancing through the fern / To lead the Surrey spring again”:
In moccasins and deer-skin cloak.
Unfearing, free and fair she flits.
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.
For far – oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him.
* A Hindi term of respect, not generally racialized, but which Kipling frequently uses to refer to Europeans.
* The Wikipedia page for the first doesn’t even have the courtesy to link to a disambiguation page; though if you do find the page for the Kipling book the first thing it says, as if you might have arrived there by accident, is “For other uses, see: The Jungle Book (disambiguation).” Pff.
* i.e. fire.
* It’s an open question, and a potentially hot one, given the charge of racism against Kipling, what if anything this distinction is meant to allegorize. Are the Bandar-log representatives of savage peoples and the jungle animals of (white) civilization? Are the villagers feckless and superstitious because they are natives, or because they are humans? Kipling in later life did not discourage the idea that the Bandar-log could stand for American populist politicians, and the phrase “outcaste,” as applied to them, seems to differentiate them from native hierarchies rather than Western ones. Perhaps they are just monkeys.
* Nick Duffell, “Why boarding schools produce bad leaders,” Guardian, 9 June 2014.
* Not a cigarette or the other thing: a temporary servant.
* Their names, we’re told solemnly, mean “Man-who-does-not-put-his-footforward-in-a-hurry” and “Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-bespanked.” But we’re also told that, being Tegumai’s Best Beloved, “she was not spanked half as much as was good for her.”