Another voice
Tale of two authors
Auberon Waugh
William Golding becomes the sixth or possibly seventh Briton to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, depending upon whether you count Shaw as a Briton or an Irishman, as he preferred. At any rate, Golding is the first to win it since the mysterious award to Winston Churchill 30 years ago. Whatever other qualities Chur- chill may have had, he was a shockingly bad writer. Before Churchill, British laureates were Kipling (1907), Galsworthy (1932), Eliot (1948) and Bertrand Russell (1950). The Irish, by contrast, can claim Yeats (1923), possibly Shaw (1925) and possibly Beckett (1969) although the last two have about as much claim to have won the Literature Prize for Ireland as Mother Teresa has to have won the Peace Prize for Yugoslavia.
None of us, I fancy, is in much of a posi- tion to judge how well deserved the awards were to the various Hebrew, Guatemalan, Icelandic and Swedish writers who have been honoured in recent years, but it seems generally agreed that of the various English- speaking laureates the most ridiculous by far — even taking Steinbeck and Bellow in- to account — was the award given to Pearl Buck in 1938.
By whatever process the Swedish Academy decided that Pearl, Buck made the most significant contribution to literature of all authors living in 1938, the choice had 1 a strangely liberating effect on the whole 'prize system. There was always something i !odious n the idea that a group of Swedes I sitting in solemn conclave was in a position ; to decide who was the best writer of English, or the one most worthy to be ; honoured. After Pearl Buck one saw it as a !lottery. If she could win it, anyone could. I Hunter Davies need not despair, nor David Pryce-Jones, nor Rachel Billington nor ; Florence Place.
So one tends to greet the news that William Golding has won the award rather as one might read of some grinning housewife who has won the Daily Express's bingo prize. This is no time to point out that she is a rotten housewife, always leaves her vacuum cleaner in the drawing room, that her idea of cooking is to warm up a pot noodle from Spar, that her next-door neighbour is much more deserving. It may be true that Golding has written only one good novel — his first, Lord of the Flies, published in 1954. It may be that there are half a dozen better and more deserving writers in Britain, let alone in Finland and Tasmania. But so long as one accepts there is no damned merit in it, there is no reason to be anything but happy that the money has come to Britain. Among the scores of thousands of writers who never won the Nobel Prize was Walter Lionel (W. L.) George, who was born in 1882 and who died most horribly of creep- ing paralysis at the age of 43 on 30 January 1926. He was born of lower-middle-class parents in Paris and could not speak English at all until he was 20 and then always with a strong French accent. Although his parents were British subjects — his mother was Jewish — he did not come to England until 1905, having served in the French army. In 1911 — the year of Golding's birth — he published his first novel, A Bed of Roses, which was about a prostitute and won immediate success.
Early in 1925 the creeping paralysis started in his right hand. Spreading, it soon made him completely helpless. His last year seems to have been spent dictating three books to his third wife and a secretary who alone could understand his almost unintelligible speech. All appeared posthumously. The second of these, called Children of the Morning, was published in 1926 by Chapman and Hall whose chair- man and managing director at that time, as it happened, was my grandfather, Arthur Waugh. William Golding was by now 15 years old.
Children of the Morning tells of a group of children shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island. They split up, after a certain amount of time, when an arrogant, red- haired bully called Tsarlie of The Tsarl leads away a group of them to become hunters and killers. The natural leader of the peaceful section, called Djon, who is chosen democratically from among his fellows, finds that his peaceful existence is threatened by violent raids from the Tsarlie faction. Might and savagery triumph in a violent abduction, after which general fighting breaks out and everything is set ablaze. The hero and another are rescued by an American cruiser whose crew produce a memorable line in back-chat: ' "Dagoes, sir," said the young officer . . . But at last the commander said: "Jameson, these aren't savages. These people are white."
'I think it's a stripped pine plantation.' 'As they approached the island, they saw figures running upon the beaches. Home City had been fired, and smoke rose from most of the huts. Some of the figures pur- sued one another as if determined to slay.
"Looks like a revolution," said the of- ficer, as the boat grew close to the beach. "In these latitudes revolutions occur even on uninhabited islands." '
Golding's Lord of the Flies may not con- tain any lines which are as memorable as that, but it seems to follow the main struc- ture of this story, if not its theme. W. L. George was chiefly concerned with evolu- tion rather than the breakdown of human society — his children talk to each other in a new, primal language — and oddly enough this is a theme which Golding adopted in his second and much less good novels The Inheritors, published in 1955. His third, Pincher Martin, concerns the ef- forts of a seaman to survive on a rocky islet during World War Two, after which he seems to have found his inspiration elsewhere.
Those who have forgotten Lord of the Flies should perhaps be reminded. A group of boys (not mixed, as in Children of the Morning) is stranded on an uninhabited tropical island. They become superstitious, fearing the presence of a Beast (in Children of the Morning it is called Onkel, who later becomes a sort of a god). One of their number, Simon (in Children of the Morn- ing he is called Zulien), becomes a sort of priest, interpreting God's Messages (in Lord of the Flies, a pig's head, in Children of the Morning,Onkel) and knowing what the God wants. In Lord of the Flies a red-haired bully called Jack becomes leader of the hunters and killers, taking them on raids against the peaceful section whose democratically elected leader is called Ralph. Savagery triumphs and general mayhem and incendiarism break out after a violent raid by Jack's gang to steal a pair of spectacles (rather than a girl, as in Children of the Morning) and Ralph is rescued by the timely arrival of a cruiser of the Royal Navy just as he is being hounded by Jack and his followers who set fire to the island.
I do not hesitate to agree that Lord of the Flies is the better book nor is it my intention to suggest that Golding has been guilty at any stage of anything approaching con- scious plagiarism. If he ever read W. L. George's Children of the Morning I have no doubt that he had forgotten all about it by the time he came to write Lord of the Flies, or The Inheritors, let alone Pincher Martin. But the book does seem to have had an extraordinary subliminal effect on him.
My researches suggest that W. L. George had two sons by his second marriage to Helen Agnes Madden, who died in Houston Texas, in 1920, so it seems by no means im- possible that he has descendants. I am not, of course, suggesting for a moment that Mr Golding might like to share his prize-money with them, but it would be a kind thought to send them a tin of pickled herrings or something of the sort on his return from Sweden.
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