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Rudyard Kipling
THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (1891) Victorian Secrets. 2011. Paperback. 216 pages. ISBN-10: 1906469199 (1) biblio.com 11/24/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * * : In 1889 the 23-year old Rudyard settled in London after seven intensely active years as a very young journalist in British India. Before he was 25, verses and stories originally published in India such as the short story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" had been re-issued to acclaim in England and America. And fresh materials poured out, notably 1891's THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. Kipling dashed off that hugely autobiographical novel off within a three-month publisher's deadline. It drew heavily on his first and just then ending romance with painter Florence Garrard which had begun when both were teenagers. Florence became the model for aspiring painter Maisie in THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, as was also Kipling's beloved sister Trix, drawn on for Maisie when very young. Hero of THE LIGHT THAT FAILED is Dick Heldar, talented, rising but more than a little cynical London artist and onetime companion in Africa of famed war correspondent Gilbert Belling Torpenow. During the 1885 Sudan campaign to relieve besieged General Charles Gordon in Khartoum, Dick and Torpenow defended themselves together during a battle when Dick received a blow to the head. Within a few years that fateful saber cut made Dick blind, just after completing his greatest painting, "Melancholia." Without now blind Dick's noticing, but just after it had been admired by a stunned Torpenow, that great painting was destroyed by Heldar's vengeful, low-class scheming young model Bessie Broke. Bessie had made a romantic play for Torpenow, which Dick had put an end to. THE LIGHT THAT FAILED is about art and what makes it good or bad. It was written during the heyday of Oscar Wilde and Wilde's view that life follows art. Kipling is of the opposite view. Not for Kipling, Torpenow or Dick Heldar is there appeal in the effete artistic dandies of London salons who would rather talk about art than paint. Torpenow and other war correspondents write of and Dick at his best paints with honesty he-men soldiers of the Queen dying and doing and suffering unspeakable things in foreign wars. Dick loves Maisie with growing passion, which she never reciprocates, thanks to the baleful influence of her roommate, "the red-headed woman." In the end forever blind Dick returns privately, unponsored and uninvited to a later war in Sudan only, after adventures, to be shot from his saddle about to descent from a camel and die at the front in Torpenow's arms. Critics marvel that THE LIGHT THAT FAILED has never once been out of print, despite its being, in their view, of the third among perhaps five ranks in Kipling's voluminous writings. The novel has been twice transformed into a feature film, most recently in 1939 starring Ronald Colman as Dick Heldar. The book has staying power, even today being studied in university courses in feminism where Kipling's explorations of inter-sex and intra-sex personal relations come to the fore. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/348541484.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 11/25/2011 name of review: "an artist ... will descend live into hell" rating: * * * * * review: A titanic musician descending into deafness? Think Ludwig van Beethoven. A great young painter who knows he will all too soon be blind? Think Dick Heldar of Kipling's 1891 novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED! Working for a London press syndicate during the 1885 campaign in the Sudan to relieve the Mahdi's siege of Khartoum and to rescue thousands of besieged foreign nationals, painter Dick Helgard is struck on the head with a sword. Within a very few years that blow has destroyed his optic nerve and he falls completely blind. THE LIGHT THAT FAILS tells of DIck's youth as an orphan raised on the south England sea coast by a lawyers-selected foster mother. His younger companion is a girl named Maisie. In misery and mistreatment they bond. Before Maisie is sent off to France to study art, they seem even to fall in love. Dick is stricken in the Sudan as early as Chapter Two, years after the youthful events of Chapter One. This short novel, Kipling's first of a handful, takes up only 15 chapters and its ending is unhappy. The blind Heldar is shot in the head by a Sudanese insurgent just as Dick catches up with his war correspondent friends. There is much love, true and false, in THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. After years of separation, Dick by chance encounters Maisie in London. Both are now professional painters, Dick a succesful one, Maisie will, however, struggle in vain to overcome her lack of interest in lines versus colors. Despite Dick's infinite patience, Maisie rejects his overtures and settles back with her roommate, another painter known only as "the red-haired woman." The latter, we learn after Dick has gone blind, has secretly loved Dick and despised Maisie for being so cool to her childhood chum. A third woman, low class but handsome Bessie Broke, tries to make Dick's best friend, war correspondent Gilbert Belling Torpenhow, fall for her and keep her. Dick persuades Torpenhow to cut her off. In revenge, Bessie destroys Dick's final and greatest painting -- of Bessie as Melancholy -- not an hour after he descended into final blindness. Very striking to me is the way Kipling strews THE LIGHT THAT FAILED with little hints or premonitions of disasters to come. I will mention only two: the run-up to Dick Heldar's final blindness and the relation of heavy drinking to creative painting and despair. Omens of Dick's Ultimate Blindness
At story's beginning, young Dick, Maisie and her pet goat are on the seashore practicing shooting with a cheap Belgian pistol. When the goat swallows a couple of explosive cartridges, a startled Maisie wheels and accidentally discharges the pistol almost in Dick's face. He is not shot but is temporarily blinded by gunpowder sprayed in his eyes. As Dick prepared a few minutes later to take his final practice shot over the water, Maisie's long black hair falls across his face "and for a moment he was in the dark, -- a darkness that stung." More hints of coming blindness come later in the text. Drinking
and Artistic Creativity
Dick has recovered from his sword wound and months later is living in Port Said, beside the Suez Canal, spending the last money from his allowance and from earnings from the Syndicate. He receives a telegram from Torpenhow saying to rush back to London at once. For his war sketches are all the rage. Elated, Dick portions out his remaining money to his friends innkeepers Monsieur and Madame Binat, with much of it going for one last blast: drinks all round on him and for the spectacle (which he paints) provided by naked Zanzibari dancing girls. Old Binat is a drunkard, nearly blind himself, but once a great artist. Dick paints his debauched face during the party. On viewing the sketch, Binat tells Dick and his wife Celeste: "'Am I that? ... I too
was once an artist, even I. WIll you take that away with you and show
all the world that it is I, --Binat?' ... Monsieur is an artist, as I
have been. ... In the end ... Monsieur will descend alive into hell, as
I have descended.' And he laughed." (Ch. 3)
Indeed, in the few weeks that precede his relatively quick descent into blindness, Dick Helgar finds that he can only see enough light to paint when he is completely soused. Did his long-time weakness for strong drink to some extent account for Dick's art? Or for his blindness? THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, though not ranked among Kipling's finest writing, has never been out of print. It was made into a fine, text-faithful feature film in 1939 starring Ronald Colman as Dick and young Ida Lupino as the vengeful model Bessie. It was directed by famed William A. Wellman. As a stand-alone novel I personally rank THE LIGHT THAT FAILED as Four Stars. But when complemented by the Colman/Lupino/Wellman master work of a film, I give the combined package Five Stars. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview -Rudyard_Kipling_THE_LIGHT_THAT_FAILED_-74- 1784596-215741-_an_artist_will_descend_live_into _hell_.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 11/26/2011 title of review: Kipling's First Novel: Too cruel and violent for Victorian Critics rating: * * * * review: Posted 11/26/2011: When Rudyard Kipling's first novel THE LIGHT THAT FAILED came out in January 1891, it was immediately compared with Oscar Wilde's almost simultaneously published THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. Both novels chased each other around London bookstores for months in revision upon fresh revision until each finally settled into the "definitive" versions we know today. Both novels were about painters and art but with contrasting views. Did life imitate art (Wilde)? Or did art imitate life (Kipling?) Both novels were criticized as avant garde, dark and in Kipling's case violent and hateful. THE LIGHT THAT FAILED showcases from boyhood to death on a Sudan battlefield Dick Heldar. As early as Chapter One orphan schoolboy Dick is in love with orphaned co-ward Maisie. Her lawyers pull the two youngsters apart and send Maisie to France to study art. Dick, too, will spend two years studying painting in Paris with a master, then send himself off to the 1885 Sudan expedition that narrowly failed to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum. There his sketches of soldiers take the attention of famed war correspondent Gilbert Belling Torpenhow. Torpenhow or Torp takes Dick under his wing, gets his sketches published by Torp's press syndicate and thus sets Heldar's artistic career in motion. A saber cut on Dick's head will a few years later leave him completely blind. But first Dick tries in vain and almost sadistically to rekindle romance in budding artist Maisie. To stave off growing blindness until his masterpiece Melancholia is completed, Dick drinks himself into stupors. His lower class young model Bessie Broke ruins his masterpiece in revenge for Dick's breaking up Torpenhow's infatuation with the young tart. Critics were shocked by the violence of THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, starting with Bessie's destruction of Dick's Melancholia, going on to Torpenhow's hinted at gouging out the eyes of a Sudanese during a life or death battle, Maisie's spurning of Dick's love even after she discovers his blindness and more. Critics were also shocked by Kipling's depiction of "the new woman," professionals like painter Maisie and her presumably lesbian roommate, "the red-haired woman." Nor did critics think much of Kipling's attending to the barbaric side of British soldiers defending their lives in combat. All in all, Kipling's first novel was a worthy newcomer to the decadent or poseur ranks of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm and Audrey Beardsley. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Oscar Wilde - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/light-that-failed -rudyard-kipling/1100089979?ean=9781434418777&itm =1&usri=rudyard+kipling+-+the+light+that+failed =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 11/27/2011 title of review: "Dick's business in life was the study of faces" rating: * * * * review: Rudyard Kipling was 24 when a shortened version of his first novel THE LIGHT THAT FAILED was published in a Philadelphia literary magazine. It included the "happy" ending that the monthly Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science had asked Kipling to send in, rather than his also requested alternative "unhappy" or "sad" ending. Undergoing various revisions until its publication as a book two months later in March 1891 and again later, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED had settled by 1892 into today's longer standard version enjoying Kipling's definitive personal imprimatur. It has 15 chapters and its ending is "sad". The novel has depths, dimensions and slants galore: impossible to probe in a short review. Let me just dwell on one of those aspects: LIGHT.
A recurring Kipling focal point is simply light: light of many hues, at dawn and at dusk, on the sea and in the desert, as refracted by London fogs; how light is necessary to human life, how its reflections from human faces lead gifted observers like Sherlock Holmes to penetrate behind faces to souls; and, finally, what are light's enemies (not just darkness but gunpowder accidentally discharged by a girl into a boy's face at short range, drifting of that girl's hair in front of that boy's eyes, a saber cut on the grown boy's head in an 1885 Sudan battle, and the ruin that total blindness brings to the life of rising painter Dick Heldar, the +/- 25-year old hero of THE LIGHT THAT FAILED). As early as Chapter Three we learn that "Dick's business in life was the study of faces." He used this ability cruelly to browbeat the sick unto dying head of the Syndicate that had published Heldar's wartime drawings during the 1885 Sudan campaign, and force the latter to return 247 sketches that the Syndicate had intended to keep. In Chapter One two young orphans who have only each other, Dick and Maisie, are about to part after four years together in a foster home. For Maisie's lawyers are sending her to France to study. She intends to become a painter. What about Dick? About himself he said to Maisie: "I don't
seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of
the masters. ... I'll be an artist, and I'll do things."
-- Later Dick receives a threatened press
attack on his character as an artist by his good friend the Nilghai,
corpulent master among war correspondents. Dick merely hints that he
might retaliate by sending cartoon sketches of a naked Nilghai to the
newspapers. His friend beats an immediate retreat.
-- A dejected Dick reads in her face Maisie's lack of reciprocal feeling for him. -- On an evening walk along London's Thames Dick began a "study
of the faces flocking past. Some had death written on their features,
and Dick marveled that they could laugh" (Ch 4).
-- When he first lays eyes on starving Bessie Broke in his friend Torpenhow's neighboring flat, he sees in a flash that Bessie will make the perfect model for his planned master painting "Melancolia." He says: "Poor
little wretch! Look at that face! There isn't an ounce of immorality in
it. Only folly, -- slack, fatuous, feeble, futile folly" (Ch. 9).
Yes, given another ten years, Dick Heldar's hard earned mastery of light and line might have placed him among the immortals of painters, including the very different contemporary French Impressionists. But then something bad happened. Dick's light failed. Estimated by London's greatest oculist to have up to one year more of sight, nonetheless, within weeks of hard drinking while furiously painting, Dick Heldar went totally blind. Immediately, his angry model Bessie poured turpentine on Heldar's "Melancolia" and ruined it thoroughly with a knife. To paint, Dick once told Maisie, you must first see something memorable, next remember it even better than when you saw it and finally paint your creative memory. But master paintings require light. And light, alas, can and does fail. There are few sights more pitiable than a blind painter of great talent. Read THE LIGHT THAT FAILED and probe the interactions of light, painter, darkness, blindness and despair. -OOO- =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 11/28/2011 Review Title: 24-Year Old Rudyard's first novel: decadent? Bohemian? cruel? brutal? coarse? callous? Yes! Original? Yes! Product Rating: * * * * * Pros: Original Sin: the purest deeds are evil, the worst hint at the Divine. Cons: Low opinion of every single character, but lowest regarding women. The Bottom Line: "Drink deep or taste not" THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. It probes light and dark, a great painter's descent into blindness, women good and evil and counterbalancing warrior male bonding. aohcapablanca's Full Review: How bad would it be simply to pluck from a shelf Rudyard Kipling's 1891 THE LIGHT THAT FAILED and fall to reading? I mean, with no preparation: using a text boasting of neither glossary, notes, scholarly introduction nor commentary? Or how well might 24-year old Rudyard Kipling's first novel work if you have not first seen the hard to find 1939 movie version starring Ronald Colman as Dick Heldar -- talented painter and novel's hero -- and 21-year old Ida Lupino in a supporting role as Heldar's ex-streetwalker model from life, Bessie Broke? I first read THE LIGHT THAT FAILED in that unprepared way during my early teens. I dimly recall that I found it nothing special. But now it is over 60 years later. -- I have seen good and evil entwined
within more than one soul. I have read Graham Greene.
-- Not to be belittled: I have also recently watched the brilliant but undersung Ronald Colman's movie version of THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (directed by the amazing William A. Wellman), with Walter Huston as Dick Heldar's war correspondent best friend Gilbert BellingTorpenhow, also with long forgotten Muriel Angelus playing Maisie, Heldar's one and only love. This 1939 film is notably true to the original THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. A typical minor difference: in the last couple of scenes Director Wellman, filming in New Mexico, substituted horses for the camels that Dick and his guide rode out from base camp toward a British advanced post in the Sudanese desert. And instead of being shot dead as soon as he reaches the rapidly forming hollow square, Dick rides to glorious death with the British cavalry as they charge the attacking "Fuzzie-Wuzzies." -- And I have also read and profited from the 2011 scholarly edition by Paul Fox (now teaching at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi). Professor Fox does not overwhelm a reader with erudition. But the little that he provides by way of introduction, notes, etc. is illuminating for the intertwined life of author Kipling, for the world of art in 1880s Europe, and for the novel's impact when it was published almost simultaneously and instantly compared with Oscar Wilde's eerily similar THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. -- Kipling's on-again, off-again first romance with artist Florence (Flo) Garrard was finally coming to an end when he dashed off THE LIGHT THAT FAILED to meet a three month deadline for a Philadephia monthly magazine. In no small measure painter Dick Heldar is Rudyard Kipling himself (who feared as a young boy that he was going blind). Most of self-absorbed Maisie flows from real-life Florence Garrard, but Florence as a young girl in Chapter 1, reminds of Kipling's sister Alice (Trix) who with Ruddy lived as virtual orphans for years in a south England seacoast rooming house. As girls, Trix and Flo were friends in the same rooming house, and Trix later saw her brother in London besotted with Flo. -- Paul Fox's Introduction (with appendixed texts and painting reproduction) illuminates the role of James Thomson's long dark poem "The City of Dreadful Night" and Albrecht Duerer's 1519 engraving Melencolia I. Undertalented painter Maisie, reunited in London after ten year separation from Dick, is returning early to Vitry-sur-Marne and the master painter Kami with whom far more talented Dick had once studied for two years. Maisie will enter her own Melancolia for a prize in the Paris Salon. Dick, not to be outdone, will draw a better one but goes fully blind only hours after he has completed it. And an angry model Bessie almost immediately scrubbed Melancolia with turpentine and then slashed it with a knife. -- Perhaps most helpfully of all, the Paul Fox edition of THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (Appendix B) excerpts four contemporary criticisms of the condensed magazine version (with its improbable happy ending) and the three months later full novel with the now definitive "sad" ending. Readers loved THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. Critics were taken off guard. Here was this 24 year old Anglo-Indian Journalist writng a tale right at home in the decadent, avant-garde literary circles of late 19th-Century London. -- Of the magazine
version one critic used words like "pretentious brutality," "calculated
sourness," "obtrusive and cynical coarseness" and "affected
Boemianism." The characters are "callous."
-- Wrote a second critic in April 1891, this time about the just published book version: "... writers of short stories seldom give us good novels." -- Review number three attributes "a suspicion of brutality." But also "a whole series of new and exciting sensations." -- A May 1891 review doubted that THE LIGHT THAT FAILED was "wholly likeable" but had no doubt "as to its originality or its power." It displays "an almost cruel realism." I subscribe to each of these four views. But what is the volcanic force behind all of these qualities? You might call it Original Sin. For no one in this novel is 100% nice, winning or altruistic. And there is something to be said for the cruelest, unkindest deeds by the prima facie unlikeliest characters. -- Decadent Port Said, at the northern end of the Suez Canal, boasts of a French couple, the Binats -- he being art teacher Kami's greatest student -- who appreciate Dick Heldar for his artistic genius. On his last fateful passing through en route to Sudan, now blind Dick puts his faith totally in "the excellent" now widowed Madame Celeste Binat who clearly sees and cherishes unfortunate Dick as her son. She does the necessary to speed him to the death in the desert that he seems to wish for. A good woman? Yes, why not? But the people whom she chose to assist Dick did Madame Binat's bidding not from affection but because their disobedience "might end in being knifed by a stranger in a gambling hell upon surprisingly short provocation" (Ch. 15). -- War correspondent Torpenhow rescues street walker Bessie Broke from hunger, introduces her to his friend Dick Heldar who takes her on as a well-paid model. Later when she repays their many kindnesses by destroying the painting Melancolia, Dick's masterpiece portrait of her, Torpenhow's first reaction when he sees the destroyed painting is a guess as to who did it: "That's Bess, -- the little fiend! Only a woman could have done that!" (Ch. 11). -- For her part, Bessie later justifies to a now blind Dick whom she tells what she had done: "I'm sorry -- I didn't know you'd take on about it; I only meant to do it in fun. ... I did it 'cause I hated you..." Heldar replies: "...dear. Great Heavens! to think that a little piece of dirt like you could throw me out of my stride!" Then Dick almost lovingly forgives her: "You only did what you thought right." -- Dick wrote a last will and testament leaving all his 4,000 Pounds and more to Maisie who had walked away from him in his great need. All this happened only a few days after Torpenhow had brought Maisie back from France to tend her blind friend. Torpenhow goes off to the Sudan, mistakenly thinking that Maisie will marry Dick and care for him. But Maisie on seeing Dick concluded that he was done for and that taking care of him would mean that she would never find herself as an artist. Someday I must find out whether Graham Greene, that great believer in the unity of good and evil, had read THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. If so, in my opinion, he would have recognized a kindred spirit in this avant garde first novel by Rudyard Kipling. This is a novel in which no good deed is ever done for an entirely noble motive. It is a novel in which appallingly cruel people can be the tenderest of lovers. I did not, as some contemporaries now do, find it homo-erotic, but it is certainly homo-social, and the only abiding love, though flawed, is that between men who work together and adventure together, especially Dick Heldar, Torpenhow and their band of like-minded war correspondents including the Nilghai and others with colorful, rollicking, playful Chestertonian nicknames. The more I read THE LIGHT THAT FAILED the more it awes me. I would love to learn your own personal reactions after a first or second reading. And please do not chide me for "spoilers." I have left 99% of the substance of this great first novel to you to dig out and enjoy for yourself. -OOO- Recommended: Yes p.s. Thank you Pestyside Patsy for making this great book reviewable http://www.epinions.com/review/Rudyard_Kipling_and_Paul _Fox_The_Light_That_Failed_epi/content_571590610564 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/kipling_light.html |