Phillip V. Mallett

Phillip V. Mallett is an eminent Shakespearean scholar at the University of St. Andrews, Fife (Scotland) but he is also a specialist and lectures on literature, culture and society and women's studies. He has authored seven critically acclaimed books including the ones on Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. His works are received with a round of applause from literary critics and readers alike. In his first ever exclusive interview following the release of Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life, Mallett shocks and delights Ashok Patnaik by sharing his deep perception on the bard of the English empire

Q: It is often said that the most challenging aspect for a Kipling biographer is to strike a fine balance between his reputation as an imperialist writer and his actual life? How do you take on this?

My biography is first and foremost a literary life: that is, it explores with the circumstances, including the people, places and ideologies, that shaped Kipling's writings, rather than attempts to investigate his unconscious motives, etc (contrast Martin Seymour-Smith's book). Part of the interest of Kipling's work comes from the fact that unusually among English literary figures he was closely aligned with the politico-military establishment - most novelists and poets of the Victorian age were more concerned with domestic life, and either kept the establishment at arm's length, or took a critical/satirical attitude towards it - so I am interested in Kipling's politics, which reach deeply into his writings. As I point out, many critics read Kipling's 'India' symbolically, as a means to expose the insufficiency of the human mind, but in my view Kipling never forgets the political realities of the British presence in India; in The Bridge-Builders, where if anywhere Kipling sees India in symbolic terms, we are still reminded that the bridge has gun-towers, and Findlayson is a magistrate with whipping powers. But I am also interested in the private spaces Kipling created in his imagination, where he pondered the nature of creativity, the closeness of love and hate, or the processes of healing. I hope - it's for others to say - that I've balanced a narrative of Kipling's life with attention to his political significance (mainly as a gadfly, and encourager of others), and to his poems, stories and novels.

Q: Shortly before Kipling's death (1936), an American newspaper observed that he had become so secluded and remote that to most Englishmen he had become part of "the folk-lore of his country - a silent, shadowy figure of the past", and "a dead Classic", and his reputation has diminished with time

It's true that in the decade of his death, and his final volume of stories -- Limits and Renewals -- that Kipling looked old-fashioned, compared (say) with the first of Eliot's Four Quartets, published just before RK's death. But I've tried to suggest that while Kipling was not a modernist (in my view; David Lodge for example has argued differently), there are affinities between his work and modernism - elliptical narration, unreliable narrators, open rather than closed endings, private symbolism, unexplained and often half-hidden literary allusions.Even if the literary was losing interest in Kipling at the time of his death, the next decade saw major essays on his work from Eliot, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, W H Auden, among others. Since the half-centenary of his death, I think his work has been examined without the need for a preliminary apology. Craig Raine says that Kipling is our greatest short storywriter. I agree.

Q: As a children's writer Kipling was an unsurpassed genius, and as a literary primitivist is never quite adult or seriously matured, in that there is always a togetherness, at times forced, in his relationship with his audience …

I don't see Kipling as in any sense a primitivist. From the first he was a sophisticated literary artist, as well read as any of his contemporaries - as is implicit in the collection Echoes, a set of parables published with his sister. He certainly had an acute sense of audience, but I don't see this as 'togetherness'. I think he wanted sometimes to join his audience (as I point out, this is part of the function of the anecdote, a form of narrative Kipling's early stories often resemble), sometimes to shift their perceptions; but this is far from 'primitive'. With the exception of Kim, I don't think Kipling's writings for children represent him at his best, though I admit that I became more sympathetic to the Just So Stories while writing about them than I ever was as a child.

Q: Personal misfortune haunted his middle years. Kipling's sister became mentally ill; one of his daughters died as a little girl; and his son got killed at the age of 18. All this seemed to have altered Kipling's attitude towards his personal and literary career. Stories such as Mary Postgate and Sea Constables give a clear insight of how angry and bitter Kipling was after having experienced such tragedies …

I discuss all these matters in the book; as I suggest, Kipling was naturally a reticent man - perhaps a consequence of his unhappy childhood at Southsea - but the stories we can most directly associate with his private life, such as They and The Gardener are laceratingly personal.

Q: Kipling refused to be poet laureate, just as he turned down most other official honours, remains a defining voice of British imperialism. He died two days before George V. "The King has gone," it was said, "and taken his trumpeter with him." Kindly elaborate on it?

I think my first reply covers this: Kipling was willing to align himself with the politico-military establishment. However, it is easy to forget that he was usually an awkward presence within this establishment; he was always inclined to spell out the assumptions that it operated on, whereas those who had always belonged to it - Kipling was a latecomer to the caste - preferred to let these assumptions work tacitly. The story A Sahibs' War offers a good example of this, as does Mary Postgate, where Kipling sides with Mary, rather than Wynn (who is, we are told, 'a sportsman', following a code Kipling never wholly respected).

Q: Naulakha was Kipling's pride and joy. He married Caroline, the sister of his friend and literary agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he had written a novel of the same name. It is here, he wrote The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous, A Day's Work, and The Seven Seas. He also began Kim and the Just So Stories but it is said that he was antagonistic towards America. Why was his American Notes sparked off to a commotion?

American Notes is I think very much in the tradition of English writing about America, which stood in the British imagination for the potential lawlessness of unbridled democracy. Kipling's response to America was perhaps as little original as anything in his literary work. His later views of America were of course shaped by two factors: personal ones, mainly his quarrel with his brother-in-law and then the death of Josephine, which made him refuse ever to set foot in the country again; and political ones, beginning with US/British rivalry in the 1890s, and continued by US reluctance to enter the Great War.

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(As told to Ashok Patnaik)