Kipling & Camouflaged Autobiography

Instead of the book that he intended to write on Kipling and war, William Dillingham has written a study of Kipling’s experiences and beliefs based on Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923). This is a volume that, Dillingham acknowledges, is “somewhere close to last place in the list of Kipling’s most popular and … most important works” (3). It is nevertheless the case, he ably contends, that this neglected volume reveals a great deal about Kipling. Dillingham reads it as “camouflaged autobiography” (10), something that might be said of much that Kipling wrote. But there are several ways Land and Sea Tales is more autobiographical than, say, The Jungle Books; it concludes, for example, with the “overtly autobiographical” essay “An English School” (175).

Dillingham emphasizes Kipling’s desire to be an instructor, especially of boys. Robert Baden-Powell’s encouragement that his friend Rudyard write poems and stories for the Boy Scouts led Kipling to assemble various pieces published over a thirty-year span into Land and Sea Tales and to identify it as “for Scouts and [Girl] Guides.” Kipling also provides comments on the stories that emphasize their moral lessons and offer further clues about their autobiographical significance. Thus, the preface Kipling includes for “An Unqualified Pilot” reiterates the tale’s moral that no one “who thinks he would like to become eminent in his business can do so at a moment’s notice” (Dillingham 49), while the story itself depicts a father-son relationship that is, Dillingham argues, strikingly like the one between Lockwood Kipling and Rudyard. Substitute writing for riverboat piloting, and the autobiographical element becomes apparent.

The chapter titles Dillingham chooses express the key morals he finds in the various pieces in Land and Sea Tales. Besides “camouflaged autobiography,” the volume can be read as a supplement to Baden-Powell’s scouting manuals: “Being Fit,” “Being Modest,” “Being Wary,” “Being Practical,” “Being Heroic,” “Being English,” and so forth. Dillingham proceeds to show how each of these morals relates to Kipling’s personal experience. While he is excellent at ferreting out the autobiographical aspects of Kipling’s anthology, at times it seems a stretch to imagine how Kipling could have intended a particular story to point a moral for his Boy Scout readers. That is, no doubt, Kipling’s rather than Dillingham’s problem. Thus, Dillingham’s chapter “Being English” focuses on the story “The Son of His Father,” in which an Anglo-Indian toddler, the son of “wise, hardworking, shrewd, and courageous” (162) district police superintendent Strickland, feels dishonored when his father whips him in front of an Indian woman; he subsequently finds a way to take revenge. The moral Dillingham finds in this story is to avoid becoming too Indian, as revealed by the toddler’s extravagant sense of honor. But while the boy’s experience of an Edenic India parallels Kipling’s early experience, it seems very unlikely that English Scouts would have read this story as teaching them not to go native—in other words, to remain English.

The reduction of experience—Kipling’s own and others’—to morals like those that conclude Aesop’s fables is one issue Dillingham might have probed more thoroughly. Kipling seems to have had a moral to fit every occasion, such as the double meaning of “unqualified” (53), placing himself and his favored characters on the right side of events. The moral of Kipling’s “Boy Scout’s Patrol Song” is “Look out!” which means almost the same thing as “Be prepared.” But “look out” for what, exactly? Dillingham’s autobiographical reading suggests a range of possibilities, including the most paranoid one: look out for anyone who, like Beatty Balestier, might trap you in a situation in which you come out seeming weak or cowardly (18–20). Dillingham is aware that Kipling’s morals for Boy Scouts sometimes have something adolescent and self-serving about them, but he is too sympathetically inclined to Kipling to question the latter’s tendency to reduce experience to scouting lessons.

Dillingham...