William Golding (1911-93):
Lord of Horror, Lord of Awe
Joseph J. Feeney
As a novelist, William Golding had
the gift of terror. It is not the terror of a quick scare--a ghost, a scream, a
slash that catches the breath--but a primal, fearsome sense of human evil and
human mystery. Two of his novels, Lord of the Flies and Darkness
Visible, express this gift unusually well, in scenes of primal power that
show Golding's rare capacity for horror and for awe.
In Lord of the
Flies, the emotion is horror, as a group of schoolboys, marooned on a
Pacific island in World War II, learn to be cruel and discover a "beast." When
they find it, the beast looks "something like a great ape . . . sitting asleep
with its head between its knees. Then the wind roared in the forest, . . . and
the creature lifted its head, holding towards them the ruin of a face." As
horror engenders horror, the boys prepare a gift for the beast. Mounting a
"dripping sow's head" on a stick, they jam it "down on the pointed end of the
stick which pierced through into the mouth . . . . The head hung there, a little
blood dripping down the stick," and flies buzzed "over the spilled guts." In the
silence of the jungle, "the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and
grinned."
In Darkness Visible, the emotion--equally
unforgettable--is awe. As buildings flame and collapse in the London blitz,
suddenly, mysteriously, a child walks "out of a fire that is melting lead and
distorting iron." The firefighters simply gape at this child in awe:
He
was naked, and the miles of light lit him variously. A child's stride is quick;
but this child walked down the very middle of the street with a kind of ritual
gait that in an adult would have been called solemn . . . . The brightness on
his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the
left side of his head. All his hair was gone on that side, and on the other,
shrivelled to peppercorn dots. His face was so swollen he could only glimpse
where he was going through the merest of slits. It was perhaps something animal
that was directing him away from the place where the world was being
consumed.
Such a writer is clearly primal, mythic, even ritual. Yet
Golding also called himself a fable-maker--"a fabulist"--and therefore a
"moralist" who "cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it."
In an essay called "Fable," he once explained Lord of the Flies:
"Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectibility of social man,"
until war showed "what one man could do to another. I am not talking of one man
killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him . . . . I am thinking of
the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian
states." Jews were exterminated. A nation followed Hitler. Another nation
followed Stalin. Realizing "that the condition of man was to be a morally
diseased creation," Golding wrote his postwar fable "to trace the connection
between [man's] diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself
into." And the purpose of Darkness Visible? Here Golding kept his
silence. When questioned about its sources and meaning, he refused to
comment--even in private--and was profoundly disturbed by what he had
created.
Who was this man who could create a book that scared even
himself? Born in 1911 in England's remote and craggy Cornwall, Golding learned
rationalism and scientific wonder from his father (a schoolmaster and atheist)
and storytelling from his mother (a lover of ghosts and phantom ships and
banshee wails). On finishing Oxford, he worked in the provincial theater,
married in 1939 and served in the Royal Navy during World War II. But he mainly
taught schoolboys in Salisbury until he was freed from teaching in 1961 by the
success of Lord of the Flies--a book that shows his observation of
schoolboy cruelties. Curiously, this enormously successful novel was rejected by
15 publishers--some say 21--before it was accepted, edited (to remove a framing
story of a massive air battle) and published in 1954.
Nine more novels followed between 1956 and 1989 (despite the fallow years from 1967 to 1978). Of his 11 novels and eight other books, eight novels are considered major: Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), The Spire (1964), Darkness Visible (1979), and his "Sea Trilogy," Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). The last three novels, revised and published together as To the Ends of the Earth (1991), appeared in the year of Golding's 80th birthday.
Happily, honors rewarded Golding's talent. In 1966, he was made a C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire), and in 1980 Rites of Passage won the prestigious Booker Prize. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.
When he died on June 19 at his home in Cornwall, Golding was working on a new novel and had been hardy enough to attend a dinner party the night before. His age at death was 81, and he was well loved by family and friends. Nor was his life as gloomy as his novels. He once wrote, "I have a much more aspirant, hopeful view of human life in the cosmos than I would dare to put in my novels." In his 1991 preface to the Sea Trilogy, he confirmed that view: "I myself am commonly thought to be a pessimist, a diagnosis with which I heartily disagree."
As for the world beyond the cosmos, Golding had a lifelong fascination with God, and though The Independent called him a "passionate agnostic," a good friend recalled Golding's words in a personal letter: "You see, in what I conceive to be my better moments, I believe passionately in the existence of That not this. Even the elders cast down their crowns, so what should poor Tom do but throw himself?"
William Golding was, with Graham Greene, the finest British novelist of our half-century. His fellow novelist Malcolm Bradbury memorialized him as "a writer who was both impishly difficult, and wonderfully monumental," and a teller of "primal stories--about the birth of speech, the dawn of evil, the strange sources of art." To this I add a simpler tribute. For me, he made a mystery of horror out of a pig's head and fetid flies, and a mystery of awe out of a singed child amid the flames of London. For such terror, and such insight, I am grateful.
