Phillip V. Mallett is primarily an eminent Shakespearean scholar. In this interview following the release of his book, “Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life,” Mallett shares his ideas about the famous writer.

Q: The biggest challenge for a Kipling biographer is to strike the balance between his reputation as an imperialist writer and his actual life. How do you react to this?

A: My biography is first and foremost a literary life: that is, it explores the circumstances, including the people, places and ideologies, that shaped Kipling’s writings rather than attempting to investigate his unconscious motives. Part of the interest in Kipling’s work is that unusually among English literary figures, he was closely aligned with the establishment.

I am interested in Kipling’s politics which permeate his writings. As I point out, many critics read Kipling’s ‘India’ symbolically but in my view, Kipling never forgets the political realities of the British presence in India. I am also interested in the private spaces Kipling created in his imagination where he pondered the nature of creativity, the nearness of love and hate and the processes of healing. I hope that I’ve balanced the narrative of Kipling’s life with attention to his political significance, his poems, stories and novels.

Q: Shortly before Kipling’s death in 1936, someone observed that he had become so secluded and remote and that his reputation had diminished.” How do you respond to that?

A: It’s true that in the 1930’s Kipling may have looked old-fashioned compared to some writers. But I’ve tried to suggest that while Kipling was not a modernist, 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 world was losing interest in him at the time of his death, the next decade saw major essays by Eliot, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell and Auden on his work. Craig Raine says that Kipling is our greatest short storywriter and I agree.

Q: As a children’s writer Kipling was unsurpassed but as a literary primitivist is never quite adult in that we sense a sometimes forced togetherness with his audience.

A: I don’t see Kipling in any sense as a primitivist. From the first, he was a sophisticated literary artist, as well-read as any of his contemporaries.

He certainly had an acute sense of audience but I don’t see this as ‘togetherness.’ I think he often wanted to join his audience, 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 misfortunes haunted Kipling’s middle years. His sister became mentally ill; one of his daughters died and his son was killed at 18. This seemed to alter his attitude towards career. Do you think that “Mary Postgate” and “Sea Constables” give a clear insight into how angry and bitter Kipling became?

A: I discuss all these matters in the book. As I suggest, Kipling was naturally a reticent man — perhaps a consequence of his unhappy childhood — 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 and also turned down most official honors. As he died within days of George V, it was said, “The King has gone and taken his trumpeter with him.” Can you elaborate?

A: I think my first reply covers this. Kipling was willing to align himself with the establishment. However, it is easy to forget that he was usually an awkward presence within the establishment and he was always inclined to spell out the assumptions that it operated on whereas those, unlike him, who had always belonged to it preferred to let the assumptions remain tacit. The story “A Sahibs’ War” offers a good example of this as does “Mary Postgate.”

Q: It is said that Kipling was antagonistic to America. Why did “American Notes” set off such a commotion?

A: “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 unoriginal as anything in his work.

His later views of America were of course shaped by personal factors which made him refuse to set foot in the country again and political ones, beginning with US/British rivalry in the 1890s, and continuing with US reluctance to enter the First World War.

- Arab News Features 21 August 2003