This is a continuation of "Lord of the Flies: William Golding: Part I"-Ron Price, Australia
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In than novel Golding divides his own personality between two characters, one a yachtsman with ‘a capacity for supernatural experiences’, a peaceful, rather fat man with a spiritual insight into evil; the other an ineffective, underpaid schoolmaster with an interest in prehistory, a longing for fame and a drink problem. He was, of course, both these characters, but the first was the one he thought well of. I, too, could divide my personality into at least two characters due to my bipolar disorder. I have written a 350 page account of that personality in what I call my "chaos narrative." In my memoirs I have also written about several other of my personalities and roles, persona and character orientations which I have exhibited over my 72 year lifespan.
Part 5:
Golding acknowledged a belief in original sin as necessary to any explanation of the darkness of the human lot. Many episodes in his fiction as well as in his life called for both a supernaturalism remote from that offered by official religions, and a language to deal with dreadful and despairing aspects of life. In the decade after the publication in 1954 of
Lord of the Flies he published: The
Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall and
The Spire. These were four novels of extraordinary originality and power, which brought him fame and eventually the Nobel Prize.
Lord of the Flies, despite its good reception and virtually unprecedented later success, encountered some hostile comment, perhaps because some read it as if it really should have been turned down as it was by Faber’s first reader. Thanks to Faber's first reader of his now famous novel, it stood a good chance of never being published at all. Had it been scrapped, it seems possible that it would have had no successors.
Golding and I have, and have had, very different theologies not only in relation to original sin but also in relation to the concept of theophany. To expatiate in detail on our varied theologies and apologetics would lead this prose-poem into a prolixity far beyond what I have already produced. I had no success at writing novels, and so I have never had to deal with the kind of critical comment Golding received in relation to his literary works, at least not to the extent that Golding's writings have elicited. I have become a small time, minor, player in the vast internet commentariat and bloggosphere with criticisms received and measured in nanoseconds.
Part 5.1:
Eventually, and thanks mostly to the mad success of
Lord of the Flies, Golding became so rich that his problem was what to do with money that refused to be burned even by lavish expenditure on boats, cars and travel. His way of life was transformed. He even joined the chorus of the rich in protesting about the level of income tax. His rate of production slowed; after
Free Fall there was a two-year gap in which he did nothing in the way of fiction, and he sometimes feared there was no more to say. It doesn’t appear that he enjoyed his years of intermission, his ‘gap'.
He took pleasure, though not to excess, in his celebrity; he was uneasy with ideas of fame that were not natural to him, or which attributed to him powers he did not claim. He wrote novels about very large and important subjects but insisted he was not a sage, not a guru, not a prophet. Golding allowed himself to be treated as the sort of sage he had no ambition to be. As he wrote in one of the pieces in
A Moving Target he was, when all was said and done, ‘an ageing novelist, a mere story-teller, floundering in all the complexities of 20th-century living, all the muddle of part beliefs.' Better still, he was just an artist; that was his job.
I knew, too, that I was no sage, guru or prophet, and I certainly had no ambition to be any of these increasingly ubiquitous characters on society's stage. I did not have to deal with the problems of celebrity although, like Golding, the complexities of the 20th century kept me busy. Money has always been sufficient for my needs and those of my family, but the problems of being rich, or famous, have never concerned me, although I have nothing personally against either fame or wealth.
Part 6:
Carey thinks Golding was inspired by fear. Kermode agrees. It was not simply a fear of God or the devil or even of the supernatural as he had experienced it, says Kermode who goes on to state that Golding knew fear in a simpler and perhaps more urgent form, a variety more familiar to people of his age who went through WW2. Golding knew the war at sea, the long ordeal of the Atlantic convoys; he became an efficient officer and commanded a warship, and a rocket-ship, small but very powerfully armed and dangerous to friend as well as enemy. Golding played an active part in the Normandy landings and again in the important action at Walcheren, of which Carey provides a skilfully reconstructed account.
Things went awry there, and there were heavy casualties. ‘Memories of Walcheren haunted him for the rest of his life.’ He had to live, like many of his contemporaries, with memories of dead friends and the knowledge that he had probably killed a number of people. His courage was an essential part of the terror with which he contemplated the beauty of his private world. When one looks at the list of his novels, including the remarkable late trilogy beginning with Rites of Passage, one is again struck by the originality and power of his mind, the variety of his invention. That he was a profoundly religious man may now be held against him, writes Kermode, but it remains a cause of wonder that modern English literature has been so diffident about establishing him among the greatest.1
I, too, have had my fears and I write about them in great detail in what I call 'my chaos narrative'. This narrative is the personal account of my bipolar disorder over more than seven decades. The war that has been my life has been so very different than Golding's. His life has provided for me a useful comparison and contrast, a source of some sense of just who I am, and have been in life. Comparisons may be odious, as it is often said, but they are, it seems to me, inevitable and perhaps necessary aspects of our life at this climacteric in history which we are all living through and have lived through, perhaps, for more than 100 years since that war to end wars. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Frank Kermode, "Theophany,"
London Review of Books, 5/11/'09.
You've made millions, William,
before you died in '93 just when
I was beginning to eye my years
of retirement from employment,
an intense engagement in family
and community life; years that
had kept me busy for half of a
century, from 1949 to 1999, &
.....
yes, and, now I am free, thank
God Almighty I'm free at last
to reinvent myself as a writer
and author, poet & publisher,
editor & researcher, an online
blogger & journalist, a reader
and scholar. I won't make any
millions, William; it's indeed
a delight, though, to have the
millions of readers now that
I am going through my 70s &,
thanks to my medications I'm
also free to enjoy life far away
from those rigours of bipolar I
disorder, and the cyclothymia
that hit me for six back in my
late teens and early 20s while
I was at university: '63 to '67.
Ron Price
12/3/'15.