Golding and the Sea

Thanks to my colleague Paul Williams for sending the link to the BBC's Art of the Sea. The section on Golding is over 5 minutes long, and starts at about 34 minutes.

Neanderthals, Cannibalism, Interbreeding

I have blogged previously about recent archaeological discoveries which support William Golding's contention in The Inheritors that Homo Sapiens killed and ate Neanderthal man. At the end of the novel, the only surviving Neanderthal is a baby, who is adopted by the Homo Sapiens tribe. There is at least the implication that the Neanderthal will become assimilated, perhaps will even grow up to breed with its distant cousins. Having been confronted with the shock of recognising the murderers as our own ancestors, we are given a second shock: we are descended from both perpetrators and victims, having witnessed one tribe of our ancestors committing genocide against another.

Evidence from DNA analysis claims to identify the extent of this interbreeding. According to newly published research, between 1% and 4% of the DNA of Europeans and Asians has been inherited from Neanderthals. The scientists go on to explain that 'interbreeding between humans [sic] and Neanderthals may nonetheless have been rare. Just two Neanderthal females in a group of around a hundred humans would have been enough to leave such a trace in our genome, provided that was the group that gave rise to all modern humans outside Africa.'

Golding Memorial Lecture by John Carey

John Carey will be giving the 2010 William Golding Memorial Lecture at the Cornwall Campus of the University of Exeter, Lecture Theatre A, on 26 January at 6pm. His title is 'Bill and Mollie: An Unwritten Episode'. All are welcome. Members of the public are invited to register their interest at wgoldinglecture@exeter.ac.uk

John Carey is Merton Professor Emeritus at Oxford University. A distinguished critic and reviewer, he has twice chaired the Booker Prize judging panel. His most recent book, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, is the first biography of the author, and draws almost entirely on materials never before made public.

Born in Cornwall in 1911, William Golding is the county’s most distinguished author. His first novel, Lord of the Flies, was an immediate success. He went on to write twelve more novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in Perranarworthal, near Truro, in 1993.

Lord of the Flies: 'Inaccurate and erratic sentence structure'

Today's Times reports that works by some of our major authors have been fed into a computer used for marking 'the American equivalent of A level English'. Predictably enough, the computer was not impressed. Churchill's style was deemed 'too repetitive', Hemingway was told to write 'with more care and detail', and Lord of the Flies was found guilty of 'inaccurate and erratic sentence structure'. American children are learning the knack of 'schmoozing the computer' --- that is, adapting their style to the computer's judgements.

William Golding Centenary Conference: Call for Papers

The William Golding Centenary Conference
University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus
16-18 September 2011
Plenary speakers: John Carey, Judy Carver.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Born in Cornwall, William Golding returned to his native county late in life, finding what he called ‘a little bit of heaven’ at Perranarworthal, a hamlet just a few miles from what is now the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus. In September 2011, the campus will mark the centenary of his birth by holding a major conference in his honour. Events will include a tour of his family home, a film screening, and an exhibition of unpublished manuscripts and memorabilia.

Although he is still best remembered for Lord of the Flies, Golding wrote across a variety of genres. His published works comprise a dozen novels, as well as a play, short stories, essays, poems, and a travel book. Interest in Golding is now undergoing a strong revival, most recently marked by John Carey’s biography.

Papers are invited on any aspect of William Golding’s life and work. Topics which may be covered include, but are not restricted to:

• Lord of the Flies and its afterlives
• Golding and women
• Golding among his contemporaries
• The rational and the religious
• Golding and the state of the nation
• Golding's non-fictional writings
• Childhood and innocence
• Golding and war
• Golding's narrative techniques
• Golding and travel
• Golding's influence/influences on Golding

For further information, please contact the conference organisers, Prof. Tim Kendall and Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra.

The deadline for proposals (approx. 250 words for 20-minute papers) is 31 March 2011. Please email or post proposals to the conference organisers: Tim Kendall, Department of English, University of Exeter, Queen’s Building, The Queen’s Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH; or Adeline Johns-Putra, Department of English, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9EZ.

William Golding in Wiltshire

29 The Green, Marlborough, reproduced with kind permission of the Golding Family.

Here is my article for BBC Wiltshire on William Golding's links with the county.

John Carey at Wells

John Carey will be speaking about William Golding at the Wells Festival of Literature, St Cuthbert's Church, Wells, on Friday 16 October at 7.30pm.

John Carey on Front Row

Courtesy of BBC's iPlayer, here (from 0.45) is John Carey interviewed by Mark Lawson on Radio 4's Front Row last night. Carey discusses, inter alia, the 'rape story', the struggle to find a publisher for Lord of the Flies, the subtitle of his own biography, the unpublished Golding papers and novels, the reasons for Golding's mid-career drought, and his own changed feelings towards the art of biography now that he has finally joined the biographers' union.

Publication of Lord of the Flies

After last week's sensationalised rape story, today's Sunday Times begins its serialisation of John Carey's forthcoming biography with his account of the publication of Lord of the Flies. Much of this has been done before, not least by Golding's editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, who tells how he rescued the tea-stained manuscript from the slush-pile. But Carey pulls the different sources together effectively, pointing out (for example) that Golding's cover letter was 'scarcely alluring':

Dear Sir

I send you the typescript of my novel 'Strangers from Within' which might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation.

I hope you will feel able to publish it.

Yours faithfully

William Golding

Faber's reader has scrawled along the top of the letter that the novel is an 'Absurd and uninteresting fantasy', and concludes with the verdict 'Rubbish & dull'. Far more remarkable even than Monteith's talent for spotting what everyone else had missed must have been the diligence with which he carried out his job. Faced with a report like that, and a dog-eared manuscript which had evidently done the rounds of the publishing houses already, very few hard-pressed editors would have spent more than a minute before scribbling a kindly rejection note.

Update --- thanks to Sean Hewitt for pointing out that there is now a link to the Sunday Times serialisation: here.

William Golding's 'Rape': Amor Vinshit Omnia

More reaction today to the Sunday Times's story about William Golding's 'attempted rape' of a 15-year-old girl. Golding's self-punishing phrase has been repeated in the newspaper headlines without quotation marks. The online comments sections which follow are filled with complaints that 'rape' is not the right word. As one defender of Golding put it, 'why let nuance get in the way of a good headline?' Kathryn Hughes, for Guardian online, wonders whether the incident would 'be better described as a botched seduction scene which took place between two teenagers living at a time when sexual knowledge was something you had to acquire unofficially, often in fear and loathing?'

Here are the crucial paragraphs in Richard Brooks's Sunday Times article:

Golding writes that they went for a walk to the common and he “felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth”.

Soon they were “wrestling like enemies” as he “tried unhandily to rape her”. But she resisted and Golding, all those years later, wrote that “he had made such a bad hand at rape” before shaking her and shouting “I’m not going to hurt you”. Dora ran off.

After a gap of two years, they met again and consummated their relationship. Golding records her unromantic question, when she asked: “Should I have all that rammed up my guts?”

There is an added difficulty in judging an incident which took place in 1929, and for which we have only one account --- from an unpublished memoir written during the 1960s. Golding is said to have written the piece to show his wife that he was a 'monster': the defendant becomes his own most aggressive prosecutor, having recourse to emotive language in order to clinch his case.

If any good comes from these headlines, it must be that it will send readers back to The Pyramid (1967), a darkly comic novel based (it now appears) on Golding's teenage years in Marlborough. Evie fights off Oliver, and conspires to expose his antics to his father by having sex with him on the escarpment overlooking the town. 'Should I have all that?' she asks the proudly tumescent Oliver with a hint of mockery, thereby providing an abbreviated version of Dora's eloquent question.

Increasingly irritated by the spotless reputation of the town's golden boy, Evie later denounces Oliver in the pub for having 'raped' her. Meanwhile her father, the town crier, has been loudly proclaiming through the streets of Stilbourne that 'Amor vinshit omnia'. With its nice mixture of idealism and excrement, it seems as good a motto for The Pyramid as any.

Pre-publicity for Sunday Times Serialisation

A story in today's Sunday Times serves as a taster for the serialisation, beginning next week, of John Carey's biography of Golding. 'Author William Golding attacked girl of 15', it states, above a photograph of Golding in his late thirties with his wife. Not until the eighth paragraph is it revealed that Golding had been 18 at the time.

In an unpublished memoir written decades after the event, Golding accused himself of attempted rape. Walking with 'Dora' on the common, he had 'felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth'. Soon they were 'wrestling like enemies' as he 'tried unhandily to rape her'. When she resisted, he shook her and shouted 'I’m not going to hurt you'. Then Dora ran off. The Sunday Times reports that two years later they consummated their relationship, in circumstances evidently adapted by Golding for the open-air sex between Oliver and Evie in The Pyramid.

There is a lively discussion in the comments section over whether Golding was accurate in using the word 'rape'.

Update: my view of the 'rape' story is here.

John Carey's Biography

The official publication date for John Carey's biography is 3 September. On 29 September at 6.30pm John Carey will be talking with Mark Lawson about the biography at the conference centre of the British Library. Tickets (£6/£4) are bookable at the British Library box office, or by calling 01937 546546.

According to Faber's synopsis, the biography will reveal 'a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a "monster", a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.'

I have one reservation. The subtitle (The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies) concedes a case which did not need to be acknowledged. I can see the argument for hooking readers before showing them in the biography itself why Golding amounts to so much more than Lord of the Flies. But the subtitle narrows Golding's achievement unnecessarily. Was the decision made by the biographer or the marketing department?

That matter aside, I am looking forward to this book more than any for a very long time. Golding tantalises his readers with novels which have autobiographical elements: the Marlborough/Stilbourne setting of The Pyramid; the meeting of Sammy and Taffy (both already engaged to others) in Free Fall; the alcoholic novelist wealthy on account of one book's success in The Paper Men. At last we will find out when and where (and whether) the autobiography stopped.

Update: See here for my view of the 'rape' story.