Back when I was young, when I decided to educate myself because my school certainly wasn’t doing anything towards my education, one of the tools I used to do so was the Longman Companion to English Literature. The Companion pointed me towards writers I would never have read (although I remember the intense disappointment my 15-year-old self felt when I turned to its entry to JRR Tolkien and found him dismissed in a few lines). I owe W Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to its advice and judgement. The edition I had did not mention an editor, but the editor’s tone was unmistakeable: precise, terse and, where he thought warranted, laconically dismissive. The best example of this was his judgement of Kipling’s novel, The Light that Failed: ‘itself a failure’. That I should remember that so many years later tells the impact it had on my young literary imagination.
But in the years since, I have learned that literary judgement, particularly from those entrusted with maintaining the canon, is often not to be trusted. Besides, at that point I had only read Kipling’s Jungle Book (which I loved). Since then, I have read most of his other books, and my appreciation and admiration of his writing has only grown. So, I thought I would turn to the only novel of his that I have not yet read, warned off by that magisterial dismissal read in my youth. I read The Light That Failed and… I must admit that the Companion was quite right: it is itself a failure.
However, it is an interesting failure. It has all Kipling’s abiding interest in the society of men who work together, in this case the new brand of reporter, the war correspondent. It has his facility with dialogue, an uncharacteristic interest in the philosophy of art and what it means to be an artist, which presumably was one of the few occasions when Kipling the man coincided with Kipling the writer, and a profound ability to describe and write of children.
But the story itself. Well, that doesn’t really hold up. Two orphan children, brought up by an unsympathetic foster carer, pledge undying love, then grow up. He goes off, becomes a war artist, returns and finds her, struggling to be an artist herself. She is determined to be an artist, a good artist, but she isn’t and he is. She refuses him to concentrate on her art. An old wound makes him lose his sight. She returns to find him blind. She leaves him. He stumbles blindly back to his old friends, the war correspondents, and dies, shot in battle. The end.
As a love story, it fails. As a picaresque story, it fails. As a portrayal of public-school male friendship during the late Victorian era, it succeeds. But, the thing is, Kipling’s failure is still better than most other writer’s successes, so I am still glad I read it. And I will take on board what he says is necessary to actually produce true art.
