A Prize as Good as Golding

By Paul Gray

A new Nobel laureate raises hackles and questions

Q. Name three authors worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose last names start with the letter G.

A. Nadine Gordimer. Guenter Grass.

Graham Greene.

Right, but still incorrect. With traditional quirkiness, the Swedish Academy last week bestowed the Nobel laurel (and approximately $193,000) on English Novelist William Golding. The decision dumbfounded nearly everybody and drove one of the 18 academy members into an unprecedented public complaint. Artur Lundkvist, 77, called the selection of Golding a "coup" and described the new laureate as "decent but hardly in the Nobel Prize class." Lars Gyllensten, permanent secretary of the academy, countered this objection by saying Lundkvist has "the soul of a magpie" and then announced, a day later, that the maverick "has beaten a retreat and acknowledged that Golding is worthy of the prize."

Others may not be so quickly convinced. The academy's lengthy statement explaining its choice notes that Golding's books "can be read with pleasure and profit without the need to make much effort with learning or acumen." The trouble with this statement is that it is both true and something less than a ringing endorsement for the world's most prestigious literary honor.

Golding, 72, should have been spared both the Nobel Prize and the controversy surrounding its unexpected arrival. An amiable, modest man, he once noted that "my books have been written out of a kind of delayed adolescence." The self-evaluation is astute, for the readers who have responded most enthusiastically to his work have been succeeding generations of adolescents.

His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a suffragist, and the Cornish village of his childhood comfortable and insular. His parents wanted him to become a scientist, but after two years at Oxford he decided to study English literature instead. After graduation he held a succession of temporary jobs, including one with a provincial theater company, published a volume of poems when he was 23, and enlisted in the Royal Navy at the onset of World War II. In his early 30s, Golding came of age. "One had one's nose rubbed in the human condition," he recalls. He witnessed the sinking of the Bismarck, took part in the Normandy invasion and decided that the human race was inherently evil.

This revelation, added to postwar years of teaching, produced Lord of the Flies (1954), a taut parable about a group of English schoolboys who are deposited for safekeeping on a coral island while their elders wage nuclear war. Slowly but inexorably, they revert to savagery. "The theme," Golding explained, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." The book sold modestly in both England and the U.S. (2,383 copies), but a paperback reprint issued in 1959 hit pay dirt. It became the desired and then the required reading for millions of high school and college students.

The novel's continuing popularity (it has now sold more than 7 million copies) can easily be explained. Its follow-the-dots symbolism is eminently teachable ("The breaking of a pair of eyeglasses means . . ."), and the heavily underscored message of inescapable depravity is attractive to those who want no responsibility for the state of the world. According to the Swedish Academy, "Golding inveighs against those who think it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depth of man himself--it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive."

This point does not seem to need belaboring, yet the eight novels that Golding wrote after Lord of the Flies relentlessly do so, in frequently venturesome ways. Neanderthals are exterminated by a rapacious new breed of creatures called Homo sapiens (The Inheritors); a shipwrecked survivor clings to a rock in the Atlantic Ocean, wondering (along with the reader) whether he is alive or dead and recalling his wickedness on dry land (Pincher Martin); a towering religious structure is erected on a foundation of slime (The Spire).

The common thread running through all this is a sort of dormitory determinism: we are poor little goats, born helpless and nasty into a world we never made, and we can only do what we were destined to do. Golding's earnestness in portraying this feral landscape is obvious on every page of his books. But the highest art is achieved through surprise, the intimation of a pattern established and then inspiringly broken, the fusion of particulars creating a light in which the familiar looks prophetic. Against such possibilities, Golding must be judged on his accomplishments and pronounced a master of textbook despair.

It is no secret that the Swedish Academy's decisions have often been slanted toward geopolitical rather than literary concerns. This hedge against Western hegemony proved instructive; every so often the world had to confront an unknown writer of an obscure tongue. But the award to Golding, a comfortable Englishman with no extreme political opinions, must give pause even to the staunchest defenders of the Nobel experiment. Can those charged with making the awards tell quality when they see it? Golding is fine, to be sure, but not before Gordimer, Grass and Greene. And, in alphabetical order, not before Kobo Abe, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino . . .

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran around the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch, and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing.

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