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A CONCH IS BLOWN | 0:00:02 | 0:00:05 | |
OMINOUS DRUMBEAT | 0:00:07 | 0:00:09 | |
" 'I got this to say, you're acting like a crowd of kids.' | 0:00:12 | 0:00:15 | |
"The booing rose and died again | 0:00:15 | 0:00:18 | |
"as Piggy lifted the white, magic shell. | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
" 'Which is better, to be a pack of painted savages like you are | 0:00:21 | 0:00:27 | |
" 'or to be sensible like Ralph is?' | 0:00:27 | 0:00:29 | |
"A great clamour arose among the savages. Piggy shouted again, | 0:00:29 | 0:00:33 | |
" 'Which is better, to have rules and agree or to hunt and kill?' " | 0:00:33 | 0:00:38 | |
Kill the pig! Slit her throat! | 0:00:38 | 0:00:40 | |
Bash her in! | 0:00:40 | 0:00:42 | |
"At last, the words of the chant floated up to them | 0:00:42 | 0:00:46 | |
"across the bowl of blackened wood and ashes. | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
" 'Kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood.' " | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
Kill the pig! | 0:00:53 | 0:00:54 | |
HE SCREAMS | 0:00:54 | 0:00:55 | |
I find it very difficult to talk here now | 0:01:40 | 0:01:42 | |
because I'm watching the sea all the time. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:45 | |
The sea always makes me watch it all the time. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:48 | |
I've spent hours and hours, not just on the sea | 0:01:48 | 0:01:51 | |
but just watching wave after wave come in. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:54 | |
If it's an image of anything, | 0:01:56 | 0:01:58 | |
I think it's... | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
an image of our unconscious, | 0:02:01 | 0:02:05 | |
the unconscious of our own minds | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
or you could say, I suppose you could put it the other way round | 0:02:07 | 0:02:10 | |
and that is that we have a sea in us. | 0:02:10 | 0:02:13 | |
After all, we are sea creatures | 0:02:13 | 0:02:15 | |
that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
And perhaps one way and another, we go back to it. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:22 | |
Every night when we dream, | 0:02:22 | 0:02:24 | |
we go back into that kind of depth | 0:02:24 | 0:02:27 | |
and that kind of beauty | 0:02:27 | 0:02:30 | |
and monstrosity, and, um... | 0:02:30 | 0:02:33 | |
mystery. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:35 | |
So, really, the sea is not a single image, | 0:02:38 | 0:02:42 | |
it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover. | 0:02:42 | 0:02:47 | |
He died in this house. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
He died, in fact, in what was then my brother's room, David's room. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
I'm afraid he had got rather drunk. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
And we think he'd got up in the middle of the night | 0:03:33 | 0:03:37 | |
and sat on... | 0:03:37 | 0:03:40 | |
a sofa, we know he was sitting on the sofa, | 0:03:40 | 0:03:43 | |
and the sofa faces one of these great big windows | 0:03:43 | 0:03:46 | |
that we have here | 0:03:46 | 0:03:47 | |
and it faces east. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:48 | |
And it was midsummer. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
It was the 19th of June 1993. | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
And I think he must have seen the sun coming up | 0:03:56 | 0:04:00 | |
behind the trees there. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
And ironically, although this is Cornwall | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
where he was an old man... | 0:04:05 | 0:04:07 | |
..the trees there are beech trees, | 0:04:08 | 0:04:11 | |
as there were in Savernake Forest near Marlborough | 0:04:11 | 0:04:16 | |
where he lived as a child. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:18 | |
And so, in a curious way, | 0:04:18 | 0:04:19 | |
in his death, I think you could see him | 0:04:19 | 0:04:23 | |
as coming around full circle. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:25 | |
"And then quite suddenly, | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
"he knew he was not alone. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:33 | |
"It was not that he saw or heard a presence. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
"He felt it, like the warmth of a fire at his back, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:43 | |
"powerful and gentle at the same time. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
"And so immediate was the pressure of that personality | 0:04:47 | 0:04:51 | |
"it might have been in his very spine. | 0:04:51 | 0:04:53 | |
"He bent his head in terror, | 0:04:55 | 0:04:57 | |
"hardly breathing. | 0:04:57 | 0:04:59 | |
"He allowed the presence to do what it would. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:03 | |
" 'I am here,' the presence seemed to say." | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
" 'Do nothing, we are here.' " | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
He was very strange, I think, in his relationship with reality. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:21 | |
Very early on, he was taken out to Savernake Forest | 0:05:22 | 0:05:27 | |
near Marlborough by his parents | 0:05:27 | 0:05:29 | |
and they were playing around, he was little, | 0:05:29 | 0:05:32 | |
and they pretended to hide behind a tree | 0:05:32 | 0:05:35 | |
at the end of the walk, and he suddenly found himself alone | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
and looked up, | 0:05:38 | 0:05:39 | |
and glaring at him over the brushwood | 0:05:39 | 0:05:43 | |
was a huge stag | 0:05:43 | 0:05:45 | |
which he knew, he says, | 0:05:45 | 0:05:46 | |
he knew wasn't a real stag, | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
was something else, something other. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:50 | |
Right to the end of his life, | 0:05:52 | 0:05:55 | |
he believed in the other. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
William Golding emerged as a writer in the 1950s | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
with a series of astonishingly original novels. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:10 | |
Their subjects include a group of schoolboys | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
stranded on a tropical island, | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
the final days of Neanderthal man, | 0:06:16 | 0:06:20 | |
a sailor marooned on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, | 0:06:20 | 0:06:23 | |
a talented artist consumed by his own ruthless ambition | 0:06:23 | 0:06:28 | |
and the building of a spire on a mediaeval cathedral. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
But they are all expressions of a unique and powerful imagination. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:36 | |
"Lok looked away over the river to forget his hunger. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:44 | |
"He flared his nostrils | 0:06:44 | 0:06:46 | |
"and immediately was rewarded with a whole mixture of smells | 0:06:46 | 0:06:51 | |
"for the mist from the fall magnified any smell incredibly, | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
as rain will deepen and distinguish the colours of a field of flowers. | 0:06:55 | 0:07:00 | |
"There were the smells of the people too, individual, | 0:07:00 | 0:07:04 | |
"but each engaged to the smell of the muddy path where they had been." | 0:07:04 | 0:07:09 | |
Golding couldn't be alone at night, even with the light on. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:17 | |
He says he was terrified, would have to rush upstairs | 0:07:17 | 0:07:20 | |
and lie beside Ann and hear her breathing | 0:07:20 | 0:07:22 | |
and know that it was all right. | 0:07:22 | 0:07:24 | |
If he went into a room at night, | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
he said he had to throw the door open very loudly | 0:07:27 | 0:07:30 | |
so that anything that was inside | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
would be warned and go away. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:35 | |
"But before I could close the door, | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
"the incorrigible schoolmaster in him had called me back. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:47 | |
"I tell you something which may be of value. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:50 | |
"I believe it to be true and powerful - therefore dangerous. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:55 | |
"If you want something enough, you can always get it, | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
"provided you are willing to make the appropriate sacrifice, | 0:07:59 | 0:08:04 | |
"something, anything. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
"But what you get is never quite what you thought | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
"and sooner or later, the sacrifice is always regretted." | 0:08:11 | 0:08:16 | |
SCHOOL BELL RINGS | 0:08:18 | 0:08:20 | |
Golding went on to win the Nobel Prize | 0:08:21 | 0:08:25 | |
but when his first novel was published in 1954, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
he was already 43 years old | 0:08:29 | 0:08:31 | |
and working as a teacher | 0:08:31 | 0:08:33 | |
at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
-Morning. -Good morning, sir. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:39 | |
Right, sit down, please. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
Now, how far have we got? | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
-Act Two, Scene One, sir. -Right, lend me a book, somebody. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:47 | |
'He was a scruff and he was known as Scruff.' | 0:08:47 | 0:08:50 | |
Right, come up and show us what you can do. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
'And in the Junior Six, I was a member of the Bishop's Players' | 0:08:53 | 0:08:57 | |
and he produced a play | 0:08:57 | 0:08:58 | |
and I was one of those who was one of his actors. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
By the time I had him, | 0:09:03 | 0:09:05 | |
Lord of the Flies had just been published. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:09 | |
I think earlier in his career in the school, | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
he may have had some input and done something, | 0:09:11 | 0:09:15 | |
but I think by the time he first published that, | 0:09:15 | 0:09:18 | |
'I think he then had lost all interest in teaching.' | 0:09:18 | 0:09:21 | |
My recollections are that | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
he gave you an exercise book and told you to write | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
and he did his own thing. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:30 | |
Or he told you to read a chapter and he did his own thing. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
Now, our first focus today | 0:09:35 | 0:09:37 | |
is on the work you've done on the island | 0:09:37 | 0:09:40 | |
and I've looked at your maps. | 0:09:40 | 0:09:43 | |
A quick reminder, somebody, when do the boys realise it's an island | 0:09:43 | 0:09:47 | |
-though they've sussed it out? Nick? -When they go to the top | 0:09:47 | 0:09:50 | |
of the mountain, the three of them, | 0:09:50 | 0:09:52 | |
-and they look around and it's, like, boat-shaped. -Yep, boat-shaped. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:56 | |
The coral was scribbled in the sea as though a giant had bent down | 0:09:57 | 0:10:01 | |
to reproduce the shape of the island in a flowing chalk line | 0:10:01 | 0:10:05 | |
but tired before he had finished. | 0:10:05 | 0:10:07 | |
WILLIAM GOLDING: I've always been puzzled | 0:10:16 | 0:10:19 | |
and I am still at this moment, I am in a state of confusion | 0:10:19 | 0:10:24 | |
between the imaginative world and the real world. | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
It is perfectly true to say that I have, sometimes in my life, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:37 | |
found that the imaginative world | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
had pushed the real world right out of the way, | 0:10:40 | 0:10:44 | |
was literally more real. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:46 | |
"The boy with fair hair | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
"lowered himself down the last few feet of rock | 0:10:55 | 0:10:57 | |
"and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. | 0:10:57 | 0:11:01 | |
"And though he had taken off his school sweater | 0:11:01 | 0:11:04 | |
"and trailed it now from one hand, | 0:11:04 | 0:11:06 | |
"his grey shirt stuck to him | 0:11:06 | 0:11:08 | |
"and his hair was plastered to his forehead. | 0:11:08 | 0:11:11 | |
"He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks | 0:11:11 | 0:11:15 | |
"when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, | 0:11:15 | 0:11:17 | |
"flashed upwards with a witch-like cry. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:21 | |
"The fair boy stopped, | 0:11:21 | 0:11:22 | |
"and jerked his stockings with an automatic gesture | 0:11:22 | 0:11:25 | |
"that made the jungle seem for a moment like the Home Counties." | 0:11:25 | 0:11:29 | |
We were living in a council flat at the time | 0:11:35 | 0:11:38 | |
in a converted Victorian house, my wife and I, | 0:11:38 | 0:11:41 | |
and we'd just put the children to bed | 0:11:41 | 0:11:43 | |
and pretty exhausting it had proved to be. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:46 | |
And I'd been reading - well, we'd both been reading to them offhand, | 0:11:46 | 0:11:50 | |
Cannibal Island, Treasure Island, Coral Island, | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
anybody's island, Pirate Island, islands, islands, | 0:11:53 | 0:11:57 | |
islands incorporated, really. | 0:11:57 | 0:11:59 | |
And I said to her, "Wouldn't it be a good idea | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
"to write a book about what actually would happen to children | 0:12:04 | 0:12:08 | |
"if they found themselves alone on an island?" | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
And my wife said, "That's a first-class idea, you write it." | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
"The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:25 | |
"The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:30 | |
"Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, | 0:12:31 | 0:12:35 | |
"travelled through the air sideways from the rock, | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
"turning over as he went. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
"The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:43 | |
"Piggy fell 40 feet | 0:12:43 | 0:12:46 | |
"and landed on his back across that square red rock in the sea. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:50 | |
"His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
"Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, | 0:12:54 | 0:12:56 | |
"like a pig's after it has been killed. | 0:12:56 | 0:12:59 | |
"Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, | 0:12:59 | 0:13:03 | |
"the water boiled white and pink over the rock, | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
"and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone." | 0:13:06 | 0:13:11 | |
Is this how it was when you were a boy? | 0:13:22 | 0:13:24 | |
Much the same sort of houses? | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
The houses were the same... | 0:13:26 | 0:13:28 | |
Golding grew up in Marlborough, | 0:13:28 | 0:13:30 | |
an old market town in the middle of rural Wiltshire. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:35 | |
And you used to sleep in that room? | 0:13:35 | 0:13:37 | |
When I was a very small boy, I slept in there. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:39 | |
I was sent to bed early in the evenings, | 0:13:39 | 0:13:42 | |
the way nice children were in those days. But the nasty children, | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
the ruffian sort with shirts sticking out of their trousers and that, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:49 | |
used to play around here on the green. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:51 | |
Did you ever feel like escaping and joining the ruffians | 0:13:51 | 0:13:54 | |
or did you know your place? | 0:13:54 | 0:13:55 | |
I knew my place. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
I'm not really adventurous, socially. | 0:13:57 | 0:14:00 | |
I knew I was one of us and they were one of them, | 0:14:00 | 0:14:03 | |
and the terrible thing was | 0:14:03 | 0:14:04 | |
that "us" didn't really extend any further than the house | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
so really, we had no place. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:10 | |
MUSIC: "SOUTH BANK SHOW" THEME | 0:14:10 | 0:14:13 | |
It took a bit to persuade him to do it, and it was very difficult | 0:14:13 | 0:14:18 | |
because I came to him at a time | 0:14:18 | 0:14:19 | |
when he'd just been through a big depression, savage depression | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
which I knew only a little about. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:25 | |
I wasn't aware of its size when I met him. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:28 | |
I went down to the house near Salisbury | 0:14:28 | 0:14:30 | |
and he couldn't have been more charming | 0:14:30 | 0:14:33 | |
and Ann, his wife, was wonderful. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:35 | |
And we got colossally drunk, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:36 | |
which seemed to be part of what he wanted to do. I didn't mind either. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:40 | |
And then, those were the days, | 0:14:40 | 0:14:42 | |
he drove me back to Salisbury, drunk as a skunk. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:46 | |
'He's always been a rather strange writer, nothing to do | 0:14:46 | 0:14:49 | |
'with the contemporary cliques and claques of English fiction,' | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
almost a hermit scholar looking for meanings, telling his stories, | 0:14:53 | 0:14:57 | |
'but full of sharp wit and social observation when he needed it.' | 0:14:57 | 0:15:00 | |
I think he saw himself as a scholar. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:02 | |
As you know, he'd been a school teacher, he had a real interest | 0:15:02 | 0:15:05 | |
in ancient civilisations, particularly Greek and Roman. | 0:15:05 | 0:15:08 | |
And the novels are rifted with scholarship. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:11 | |
Golding and his older brother, Jose, | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
were both pupils at the local grammar school, | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
where their father, Alec, was one of the teachers. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:25 | |
His father was a scientist - brilliant scientist, actually, | 0:15:26 | 0:15:31 | |
though he never got beyond being the science master at Marlborough. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:35 | |
And he was an atheist | 0:15:35 | 0:15:37 | |
and indeed, brought Golding up rather strictly as an atheist. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
And on the other hand, there was the mother, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
who believed in all sorts of spooks and ghosts. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:48 | |
Golding was very aware that his father was lower middle-class | 0:15:49 | 0:15:53 | |
and he was aware of it particularly because in Marlborough, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
at one end of the street was Marlborough College, | 0:15:56 | 0:16:00 | |
one of the great public schools of England. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:02 | |
At the other end was Marlborough Grammar School | 0:16:02 | 0:16:05 | |
where his father taught and Golding attended. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
And Golding resented it greatly. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:10 | |
He says how he was filled with envy and hatred. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:13 | |
He never got over it. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:15 | |
It's one of the things his dreams are full of. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:19 | |
"December the 13th, 1971. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
"This dream takes place for the most part | 0:16:28 | 0:16:31 | |
"in the dining room of 29 The Green, Marlborough. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:34 | |
"Jose is there, but he is not Jose. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:37 | |
"For one thing, he is about a foot taller than me | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
"and I believe him to be infinitely stronger. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
"He has got hold of a baby | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
"and he is laughing at it, at me, at everything. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
"He also has a knife. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:49 | |
"He pulls the baby out until its arms are stretched | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
"and fixed in the attitude of crucifixion. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:57 | |
"He begins to work on the hands and fingers, | 0:16:57 | 0:17:01 | |
"dissecting them into patterns while the baby wails and cries. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:05 | |
"I am terrified and revolted. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
"Either I can do nothing or I am too frightened to do anything." | 0:17:07 | 0:17:12 | |
He had a great capacity for seeing wickedness in himself | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
and, of course, drawing on that wickedness. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
I think he used the consciousness of what he might have done | 0:17:22 | 0:17:26 | |
to write his books. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:28 | |
And perhaps, in that way, | 0:17:28 | 0:17:30 | |
he felt he was keeping this other person in its cage. | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
In 1930, at the age of 19, | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
Golding went up to Brasenose College, Oxford | 0:17:46 | 0:17:50 | |
where he was the only grammar school boy in his year. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:54 | |
He went along to the University Appointments Committee, | 0:17:54 | 0:17:57 | |
you go to that in your last year | 0:17:57 | 0:18:00 | |
and they tell you where your career may lie. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:03 | |
And the notes of the chap interviewing him | 0:18:03 | 0:18:07 | |
say that he is not top drawer, NTD, | 0:18:07 | 0:18:12 | |
and not quite a gentleman, | 0:18:12 | 0:18:13 | |
and would be all right for a day school but not a public school. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:17 | |
So that was their estimate of him | 0:18:17 | 0:18:19 | |
and he knew that that's how he was regarded | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
by fellow students, not only by the dons. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:26 | |
"She came down the stairs and stood | 0:18:37 | 0:18:41 | |
"and there was nothing to do but look, | 0:18:41 | 0:18:43 | |
"nothing needing to be said. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:45 | |
"She took a scarf, her father's, I think, and we went out together. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:52 | |
"We went to a blackened-out pub and sat hand in hand, | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
"both stunned by this overwhelming sense of recognition. | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
"We kissed then and there in public | 0:19:00 | 0:19:03 | |
"without shame or bravado, | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
"because although people stood within a yard of us, | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
"we were alone. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
"And we both recognised, without a moment's doubt, | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
"that we should never let each other go." | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
He went to Maidstone for his first teaching job, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:28 | |
Maidstone Grammar School. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:29 | |
And there he met Ann, his wife. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:33 | |
They met in a left book club meeting in London. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
He always says, you know, | 0:19:39 | 0:19:40 | |
"Do tell me absolutely what you think about it." | 0:19:40 | 0:19:44 | |
And I do. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:46 | |
And then I get into fierce trouble for saying something critical. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:51 | |
And he goes away and he mutters and he looks it over | 0:19:51 | 0:19:55 | |
and finally he does, most often, agree. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:59 | |
The Goldings were married in 1939 | 0:20:16 | 0:20:20 | |
and their son, David, was born the following year. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
I think he was a very good father in things | 0:20:27 | 0:20:30 | |
because he didn't do the wrong things. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
I mean, he didn't bully you. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:34 | |
Although he did think he had bullied me at a certain time | 0:20:34 | 0:20:38 | |
when I was very young, | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
that he tried to sort of make a man of me or something | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
when I was a bit young to be made a man of, I thought. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:49 | |
I mean, he took me sailing and taught me how to sail and so on. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
I shared his feeling that sailing was a very important thing. | 0:20:55 | 0:21:00 | |
When he was a student at Oxford, | 0:21:02 | 0:21:03 | |
David had a major mental breakdown | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
from which he has never fully recovered. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:09 | |
I think I've always had some sort of biochemical problem. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:14 | |
When my mother was carrying me in her womb, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
she had German measles. | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
That probably affected me. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:23 | |
I mean, she did say later that... | 0:21:23 | 0:21:27 | |
in these days, probably I would have had an abortion | 0:21:27 | 0:21:31 | |
if that had happened, | 0:21:31 | 0:21:33 | |
and I'm glad that she didn't. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:36 | |
-So am I. -Thank you! Thank you. | 0:21:36 | 0:21:39 | |
Three months after David was born, | 0:21:48 | 0:21:50 | |
Golding joined the Navy, and saw active service throughout the war. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
"I came up out of my cabin at about 0800 | 0:21:58 | 0:22:01 | |
"when Walcheren and Westkapelle light were in sight. | 0:22:01 | 0:22:05 | |
"The rest of the assault was proceeding in, | 0:22:05 | 0:22:08 | |
"about a mile on my starboard bow, | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
"with the landing craft stretching astern. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:14 | |
"The first shell made my heart beat quickly | 0:22:14 | 0:22:17 | |
"and I tried to stop my teeth chattering, | 0:22:17 | 0:22:20 | |
"because now I knew it wasn't going to be an easy assault. | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
"The radar began to show up assault craft and Westkapelle | 0:22:25 | 0:22:29 | |
"and finally I decided to cut loose and run in. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:33 | |
"Odd shells were dropping here and there. | 0:22:33 | 0:22:35 | |
"I was feeling unhappy but fairly fatalistic. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
"I was worried about the obvious balls-up the rockets were making." | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
In 1944, Golding captained a rocket ship | 0:22:45 | 0:22:49 | |
during one of the bloodiest operations of the entire war, | 0:22:49 | 0:22:51 | |
the assault on the Dutch island of Walcheren. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
The island was heavily defended | 0:22:56 | 0:22:58 | |
because it controlled access to the major port of Antwerp. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:02 | |
'This attack was one of the grimmest of the whole war. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
'Heavy enemy shelling met the landing craft, and many were lost. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:12 | |
'Our Typhoons dived on the Hun | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
'and blasted him with rockets. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:17 | |
'Rocket-firing ships poured murderous fire in defenders' positions | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
'while our smoke ships laid a covering screen.' | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
When the bombardment began, | 0:23:25 | 0:23:27 | |
Golding realised that the other Allied ships had made a mistake | 0:23:27 | 0:23:31 | |
and their rockets were exploding amongst their own troops. | 0:23:31 | 0:23:36 | |
A couple of ships were sunk. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:38 | |
Also the coast wasn't bombarded, except by Dad, | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
who continued on in a sort of, rather Nelsonic way. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:47 | |
Dad managed to drop the rockets | 0:23:50 | 0:23:54 | |
just in advance of the marines. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
They were the first people ashore. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
It was rather tragic because | 0:24:04 | 0:24:06 | |
Dad had been informed that the Germans had evacuated the civilians | 0:24:06 | 0:24:11 | |
and, in fact, they hadn't evacuated the civilians. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:13 | |
So a lot of civilians got killed. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
That must have haunted Dad, I think. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:18 | |
He never forgot that. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:21 | |
He never forgot the people who'd been killed | 0:24:21 | 0:24:24 | |
and he never forgot the fact that he'd actually killed civilians too, | 0:24:24 | 0:24:29 | |
killed the nice Dutch people, who hadn't done any harm to anyone. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:33 | |
At the going down of the sun, | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
and in the morning, | 0:24:39 | 0:24:41 | |
we will remember them. | 0:24:41 | 0:24:43 | |
-ALL: -We will remember them. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:46 | |
You've said that the Second World War changed your attitude | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
towards human beings and towards human nature. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
Can you tell us how it changed it? | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
It simply changed because, bit by bit, | 0:25:03 | 0:25:05 | |
we discovered what the Nazis had been doing. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
Here was this highly civilised race of people | 0:25:11 | 0:25:15 | |
who were doing, one gradually found out, | 0:25:15 | 0:25:17 | |
impossible things. I remember, in those days, saying to myself, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
"Yes, well, I have a Nazi inside me. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
"Given the right circumstances, I could have been a Nazi." | 0:25:24 | 0:25:28 | |
But bit by bit, as I discovered more and more | 0:25:28 | 0:25:32 | |
what had gone on, that really changed my view | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
of what people were capable of | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
and therefore what human nature was. | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
So that political nostrums, if you like, | 0:25:41 | 0:25:43 | |
seemed to me just to fall flat on their face | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
in front of this capacity man had for a sort of absolute evil. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:51 | |
What did he say? | 0:25:54 | 0:25:55 | |
He says there's a beast, | 0:25:55 | 0:25:57 | |
comes out of the sea. | 0:25:57 | 0:25:59 | |
"Jack spoke loudly. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:04 | |
" 'This head is for the beast. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
" 'It's a gift.' | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
"The silence accepted the gift and awed them. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
"The head remained there, dim-eyed, grinning faintly, | 0:26:13 | 0:26:17 | |
"blood blackening between the teeth. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
"All at once, they were running away, as fast as they could | 0:26:20 | 0:26:24 | |
"through the forest towards the open beach. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:28 | |
"Simon stayed where he was, | 0:26:28 | 0:26:30 | |
"a small, brown image, concealed by the leaves. | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
"Even if he shut his eyes, | 0:26:34 | 0:26:35 | |
"the sow's head still remained, like an after image. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
"The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:45 | |
"They assured Simon that everything was a bad business." | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
The whole book is posing a question. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:52 | |
You think you've won a war. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
What you've done is finished a war. | 0:26:57 | 0:26:59 | |
There was a crime committed in that war, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:03 | |
the like of which, perhaps, was never committed | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
in human history | 0:27:06 | 0:27:09 | |
and you've got to do something about it. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:12 | |
"Ralph looked at him dumbly. | 0:27:14 | 0:27:16 | |
"For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the strange glamour | 0:27:16 | 0:27:20 | |
"that had once invested the beaches. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:22 | |
"But the island was scorched up like dead wood. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:27 | |
"Simon was dead and Jack had... | 0:27:27 | 0:27:29 | |
"The tears had begun to flow and sobs shook him. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
"He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:36 | |
"great shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:40 | |
"His voice rose unto the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island." | 0:27:40 | 0:27:44 | |
"And infected by that emotion, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:47 | |
"the other little boys began to shake and sob too. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:50 | |
"And in the middle of them with filthy body, matted hair | 0:27:50 | 0:27:54 | |
"and unwiped nose, | 0:27:54 | 0:27:56 | |
"Ralph wept for the end of innocence, | 0:27:56 | 0:27:59 | |
"the darkness of man's heart and the fall through the air | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
"of the true, wise friend called Piggy." | 0:28:03 | 0:28:06 | |
It's really hard to read that without crying. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
It's an incredible piece of prose, because... | 0:28:16 | 0:28:20 | |
"unwiped nose"... it's a child, suddenly, | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
and yet he'd been a man a moment before. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:26 | |
There's no sentimentality, but the "true, wise friend"... it's really... | 0:28:26 | 0:28:31 | |
It's almost the first time he's realised | 0:28:31 | 0:28:33 | |
what a value Piggy was to him. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
And he doesn't get gushes of emotions, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:38 | |
he gets two adjectives - true, wise friend. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
'I think it's absolutely crucial to Lord of the Flies | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
'that it couldn't have been written by someone who wasn't a schoolmaster, | 0:28:47 | 0:28:50 | |
'because he knew boys. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:52 | |
'He saw how boys behaved day in and day out.' | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
OK, I want to start with the conch | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
because that's almost the first thing that's picked up, so Tom and Elliot... | 0:28:58 | 0:29:02 | |
Piggy's death and the conch's... | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
being smashed is the same time. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:08 | |
This kind of represents... | 0:29:08 | 0:29:10 | |
..the end of civilisation. | 0:29:10 | 0:29:11 | |
Excellent. Let Tom finish on that one, | 0:29:11 | 0:29:13 | |
that's a really good canter there, excellent. | 0:29:13 | 0:29:16 | |
When this happens it shows the complete end of civilisation and laws and order | 0:29:16 | 0:29:20 | |
because Piggy, towards the end of the book, | 0:29:20 | 0:29:22 | |
was the only one keeping law and order. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
So when he dies and when the conch is shattered | 0:29:25 | 0:29:27 | |
which throughout the book, was representing it, | 0:29:27 | 0:29:30 | |
it shows that they've all sort of turned into savage | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
-and don't really represent anything anymore. -Yeah. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
It's interesting the way it changes | 0:29:36 | 0:29:38 | |
from being a means of signalling and calling to something completely different | 0:29:38 | 0:29:42 | |
in their assemblies, | 0:29:42 | 0:29:44 | |
-almost like a mace or something ceremonial, doesn't it? -Yeah. | 0:29:44 | 0:29:47 | |
When he came out of the Navy, | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
Golding returned to teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's School. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:57 | |
But he wrote whenever he could, even in lessons, | 0:29:57 | 0:30:00 | |
and much of Lord Of The Flies was written in school time | 0:30:00 | 0:30:04 | |
in a standard-issue exercise book. | 0:30:04 | 0:30:06 | |
So this is the manuscript of Lord Of The Flies. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:18 | |
He used these exercise books for a lot of his early work. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:22 | |
He, I think, abstracted them from the school store. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
He wrote, as you'll see, tiny writing, | 0:30:25 | 0:30:31 | |
which flows over the ruled lines of the exercise book. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:37 | |
And he added in notes, as you'll see, in red biro, | 0:30:37 | 0:30:42 | |
"schoolmaster's biro", he used to call it, | 0:30:42 | 0:30:46 | |
as if he was marking schoolboys' essays. | 0:30:46 | 0:30:50 | |
In 1953, Golding sent his novel to nine publishers, | 0:30:52 | 0:30:56 | |
all of whom rejected it. | 0:30:56 | 0:30:59 | |
Undaunted, he offered the manuscript to Faber and Faber, | 0:30:59 | 0:31:04 | |
one of the most prestigious London firms, | 0:31:04 | 0:31:06 | |
whose directors included the poet TS Eliot. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:10 | |
Crawley, I think you didn't like it. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:13 | |
I'm not really opposed to publication, | 0:31:13 | 0:31:15 | |
just doubtful of its reception by the English-speaking people. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:19 | |
I was a very, very junior editor, | 0:31:19 | 0:31:22 | |
I'd have only been in Fabers for a matter of a few months at this time, | 0:31:22 | 0:31:25 | |
but already there was one particular sort of thing I could spot, | 0:31:25 | 0:31:29 | |
and that was a tired, weather-beaten old manuscript, | 0:31:29 | 0:31:32 | |
that had been around to a lot of publishers before it reached us. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:36 | |
And this was very much that. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
It was a large, yellowing manuscript, | 0:31:39 | 0:31:42 | |
bound in rather depressing hairy brown cardboard. | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
And there was a short, formal covering letter. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:48 | |
Miss Parkinson had written her little note on that already. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:52 | |
This is the comment made by the professional reader | 0:31:52 | 0:31:56 | |
that Fabers employed. | 0:31:56 | 0:31:58 | |
And she says, "Time - the future, | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
"absurd and uninteresting fantasy | 0:32:00 | 0:32:04 | |
"about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
"A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:13 | |
"Rubbish and dull. Pointless." | 0:32:13 | 0:32:16 | |
And then she puts an R for "Reject" in a circle. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:20 | |
Charles Monteith decided to take the manuscript home | 0:32:24 | 0:32:28 | |
and was captivated by Golding's story. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:30 | |
He persuaded Faber and Faber to publish the book | 0:32:31 | 0:32:35 | |
on condition that Golding made some significant changes to the text. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:39 | |
This first version is drastically different | 0:32:40 | 0:32:44 | |
from the Lord of the Flies most people have read. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
This is a religious novel. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
He says he underwent a religious convulsion | 0:32:49 | 0:32:53 | |
and he came out of the war deeply religious. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:57 | |
When Charles Monteith of Fabers | 0:32:57 | 0:33:00 | |
rescued this novel from the slush pile, | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
he thought, "All this must go. All the supernatural stuff must go." | 0:33:03 | 0:33:06 | |
And Golding concedes, concedes, concedes, | 0:33:06 | 0:33:09 | |
until what came out is a novel that is secular, | 0:33:09 | 0:33:14 | |
it's not assuming any supernatural intervention. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
CHOIR SINGS | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
There was Golding, that was me, so we were at either end of the... | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
I was the school organist. | 0:33:30 | 0:33:32 | |
So, you know, I used to play | 0:33:32 | 0:33:34 | |
every day and he used to come every day. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:37 | |
He was a very loyal member of the choir. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:39 | |
I used to go and practise the organ up at St Martin's, just up the road. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:46 | |
I used to go up to that church | 0:33:46 | 0:33:48 | |
and I would suddenly find that Golding was there, | 0:33:48 | 0:33:52 | |
on his knees, praying, alone. | 0:33:52 | 0:33:56 | |
And that wasn't just one occasion, many occasions. | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
That made a great impression on me. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:02 | |
I recognised that there was a man for whom religion was really important. | 0:34:02 | 0:34:06 | |
When I was growing up, he was definitely Christian. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:12 | |
We went to church, he took me to the cathedral, | 0:34:12 | 0:34:15 | |
told me not to swing my legs and behave properly. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
But there was also the sense that they were places of mystery, | 0:34:19 | 0:34:24 | |
and not always completely safe places. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:26 | |
I think he gave me the idea that a church was full of... | 0:34:26 | 0:34:30 | |
dark thoughts, as well as spiritual thoughts. | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
Golding's Christianity was a very odd thing. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
I mean he was never an orthodox Christian, that's for sure. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:40 | |
There were various bits of Christianity he hated. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
A friend said to him once, "Have you ever taken the sacrament?" | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
He said, "I'd be sick." | 0:34:47 | 0:34:49 | |
He said that the crucifixion should never be depicted. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:52 | |
"It's a horror to be veiled", he said. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
SCHOOL BELL RINGS | 0:34:56 | 0:34:59 | |
Although Lord Of The Flies received good reviews | 0:34:59 | 0:35:03 | |
and Golding was recognised as a striking new talent, | 0:35:03 | 0:35:07 | |
he couldn't afford to give up teaching | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
and had to continue with an exhausting daily routine. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
He came in with proofs, typewritten pages, | 0:35:13 | 0:35:19 | |
and he'd hand them out to you. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:21 | |
And he said, "I don't want you to read these, | 0:35:21 | 0:35:24 | |
"I just want you to count the words." | 0:35:24 | 0:35:26 | |
And then you had to put in pencil how many words | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
were on the page and hand them over to somebody else. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:31 | |
And then you got another one so you could check. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
And it was certainly The Inheritors, the one that I was looking at, | 0:35:34 | 0:35:38 | |
because it was all about cavemen. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:41 | |
"He looked at the water, | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
"then at each of the people in turn, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:55 | |
"and they waited. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:56 | |
" 'I have a picture' ". | 0:35:58 | 0:36:00 | |
"He freed a hand and put it flat on his head as if confining the images | 0:36:00 | 0:36:04 | |
"that flickered there. | 0:36:04 | 0:36:07 | |
" 'Mal is not old | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
" 'but clinging to his mother's back. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:12 | |
" 'There is more water, | 0:36:13 | 0:36:15 | |
" 'not only here, but along the trail where we came. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:17 | |
" 'A man is wise. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:20 | |
" 'He makes me take a tree that has fallen and...' " | 0:36:20 | 0:36:24 | |
"his eyes, deep in their hollows, turn to the people | 0:36:24 | 0:36:28 | |
"imploring them to share a picture with him. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:32 | |
"At last, Ha spoke. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
" 'I do not see this picture.' " | 0:36:35 | 0:36:37 | |
I read the first page and I remember saying to myself, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:43 | |
"Oh, my God, first it was schoolboys, now it's bloody cavemen!" | 0:36:43 | 0:36:48 | |
Of course The Inheritors, I think, is his best book. | 0:36:48 | 0:36:50 | |
And I think he thought so, too. | 0:36:50 | 0:36:52 | |
Together with his love of classical literature, | 0:36:55 | 0:36:57 | |
Golding had a deep interest in archaeology | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
and often visited the digs that were taking place | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
in his part of Wiltshire, | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
which is littered with prehistoric sites. | 0:37:06 | 0:37:09 | |
His second novel, The Inheritors, | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
focuses on a small band of Neanderthals | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
who encounter an unknown new species, Homo sapiens, | 0:37:16 | 0:37:19 | |
and are gradually exterminated. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:22 | |
He tries to enter the mind, | 0:37:24 | 0:37:28 | |
if you can use that word, of a pre-mind creature. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
And he didn't follow what most people | 0:37:32 | 0:37:35 | |
thought about Neanderthals at that time at all. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:38 | |
Most people thought Neanderthals hadn't got language | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
and most people still think that. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:43 | |
He thought they had a kind of language. | 0:37:43 | 0:37:45 | |
He gave his Neanderthals the ability to see pictures | 0:37:45 | 0:37:50 | |
in each other's minds and in their own minds. | 0:37:50 | 0:37:52 | |
"I cannot see that picture," | 0:37:52 | 0:37:54 | |
they say to each other if they don't understand. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:57 | |
These Neanderthals are wonderfully sensitive to the external world. | 0:37:57 | 0:38:02 | |
They sort of think in metaphors if they think at all, | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
and he's got to put that it into language which, of course, is impossible, really. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:09 | |
So he invents, he makes a new language, | 0:38:09 | 0:38:12 | |
goes inside a mode of apprehension | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
of the world which is quite unlike anything we have. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:18 | |
"They were as different from the group of bold hunters | 0:38:22 | 0:38:26 | |
"and magicians who had sailed up the river towards the fall, | 0:38:26 | 0:38:30 | |
"as a soaked feather is from a dry one. | 0:38:30 | 0:38:34 | |
"Restlessly, he turned the ivory in his hands. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
"What was the use of sharpening it against a man? | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
"Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?" | 0:38:42 | 0:38:47 | |
The questions he was...puzzled by, I think, | 0:38:51 | 0:38:55 | |
were questions to do with the fragility of goodness, | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
why is it fragile, why does it suddenly break down? | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
He worked out these questions in the form of modern myths, | 0:39:03 | 0:39:07 | |
in other words, stories full of images | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
which contain a great deal of meaning which is latent, | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
rather than expressed in any simple propositions or arguments. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:20 | |
They're like the myths of religion but different from them. | 0:39:20 | 0:39:25 | |
So, for example, the myth that is embodied in The Inheritors | 0:39:25 | 0:39:29 | |
is set in the context not of a biblical story or religious story | 0:39:29 | 0:39:33 | |
but in the context of an evolutionary biological | 0:39:33 | 0:39:38 | |
understanding of the prehistory of the human animal. | 0:39:38 | 0:39:41 | |
I think the tragic aspect of Golding's myth | 0:39:42 | 0:39:48 | |
is that the Neanderthals, in some sense, | 0:39:48 | 0:39:51 | |
intuited their fate | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
and knew that it couldn't be avoided. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
I think it is a very sympathetic account | 0:40:00 | 0:40:03 | |
of how it would have felt to be a Neanderthal at this particular point, | 0:40:03 | 0:40:07 | |
that is, as we now know almost at the end of their existence, | 0:40:07 | 0:40:13 | |
possibly the last group which died out | 0:40:13 | 0:40:17 | |
in the face of these incoming alien modern humans. | 0:40:17 | 0:40:22 | |
So that's what makes it so poignant. | 0:40:22 | 0:40:25 | |
In the 1950s, | 0:40:39 | 0:40:41 | |
Golding bought a series of sailing boats | 0:40:41 | 0:40:44 | |
in which the family would spend their holidays, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:47 | |
sailing along the south coast and across the Channel to France. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:50 | |
Well, the first boat was Seahorse, which was a lifeboat. | 0:40:55 | 0:41:00 | |
Well, the first year we sailed off in that. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:04 | |
After he'd converted her, | 0:41:05 | 0:41:07 | |
put a deck and a cabin on, and we felt that was a luxury. | 0:41:07 | 0:41:12 | |
It wasn't even like camping, | 0:41:13 | 0:41:15 | |
it was just much worse because you couldn't get out and walk. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:18 | |
It was the most extraordinary adventure to take up. | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
'Another shipping forecast | 0:41:24 | 0:41:26 | |
'issued by the Met Office at 2343 on Saturday 18th. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:32 | |
'Rockall, westerly veering north westerly, | 0:41:32 | 0:41:34 | |
'seven to severe gale nine, decreasing, five. Showers...' | 0:41:34 | 0:41:39 | |
"He eyed the peculiar shapes that lay across the trousers | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
"indifferently for a while until at last it occurred to him | 0:41:43 | 0:41:48 | |
"how strange it was that lobsters should sit there. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:52 | |
"Then he was suddenly seized with a terrible loathing for lobsters | 0:41:52 | 0:41:56 | |
"and flung them away so that they cracked on the rock. | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
"The dull pain of the blow extended him into them again | 0:41:59 | 0:42:04 | |
"and they became his hands, | 0:42:04 | 0:42:06 | |
"lying, discarded, where he had tossed them. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:10 | |
Pincher Martin is one of Golding's strangest books | 0:42:13 | 0:42:18 | |
because, of course, except through memory it only has one protagonist | 0:42:18 | 0:42:23 | |
who's even more radically isolated than the schoolboys on the island. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:28 | |
Pincher Martin, Golding's experimental third novel, | 0:42:31 | 0:42:35 | |
is about a sailor who is stranded on a rock in the Atlantic | 0:42:35 | 0:42:39 | |
after his ship has been sunk by an enemy submarine. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:43 | |
The self-absorbed central character appears to look back | 0:42:43 | 0:42:46 | |
over his previous life and the book is both a moral investigation | 0:42:46 | 0:42:52 | |
and an hallucinogenic account of physical isolation. | 0:42:52 | 0:42:55 | |
Golding is struggling with how human beings represent their lives | 0:42:58 | 0:43:02 | |
to themselves and how it's very difficult to tell the difference | 0:43:02 | 0:43:07 | |
between a dream of a life | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
and the actual life that has been lived. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
Is it actually a work of the imagination? | 0:43:14 | 0:43:16 | |
And that there's actually nothing else but, | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
if there are meanings in human life, | 0:43:18 | 0:43:20 | |
it's simply a successful exercise in the imagination? | 0:43:20 | 0:43:23 | |
In Pincher Martin, the rock is more than a rock in the sea | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
or a struggle for a man's survival on this rock, | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
it has other implications. | 0:43:33 | 0:43:35 | |
Pincher Martin isn't about a man | 0:43:35 | 0:43:37 | |
who tries to survive by climbing on a rock. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
It is, in fact, about a man who dies on page two. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:42 | |
I made him die very deliberately on page two, | 0:43:42 | 0:43:45 | |
and the rest of the book, | 0:43:45 | 0:43:47 | |
right up to the last chapter, is in fact about the man in purgatory. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:50 | |
Because he is a very wicked man | 0:43:53 | 0:43:56 | |
who has no kind of religious experience at all, | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
he can't see the compassion of God. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:04 | |
And all the time he's hanging on, he is greed, sheer wickedness, | 0:44:04 | 0:44:08 | |
unless finally he is nothing but claws clutched into each other. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:11 | |
And that is still there resisting this black lightning | 0:44:11 | 0:44:15 | |
which is the compassion of God trying to open them up | 0:44:15 | 0:44:17 | |
and really trying to take them away, | 0:44:17 | 0:44:20 | |
trying to take all the pincher structure away. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:23 | |
Here are some recurrent nightmares. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:35 | |
On 27th January, his second dream is "I am going to be hanged," | 0:44:37 | 0:44:43 | |
and then his third dream, again, "I am going to be hanged." | 0:44:43 | 0:44:47 | |
Dream number two, "I am going to be hanged. | 0:44:49 | 0:44:51 | |
"In the event, I help myself to die by slumping to my knees | 0:44:51 | 0:44:56 | |
"and experience an immediate | 0:44:56 | 0:44:59 | |
"and satisfactory state of nothingness." | 0:44:59 | 0:45:02 | |
"Dream ego," that's his word for having a dream. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:07 | |
"Dream ego has his recurrent nightmare, he is to be hanged | 0:45:07 | 0:45:12 | |
"and, as usual, is under no sort of restraint whatsoever." | 0:45:12 | 0:45:15 | |
There is one particular dream where his father is the executioner. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
And there's another dream where his father has come across the world to see him hanged. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:25 | |
"Comment, my recurrent dream | 0:45:26 | 0:45:28 | |
"may be the result of drinking too much. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:31 | |
"Guilt, in a word." | 0:45:31 | 0:45:32 | |
Well, he would get drunk and he wouldn't get jollily drunk, | 0:45:35 | 0:45:39 | |
he'd get rather, sort of, morosely drunk. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:42 | |
After a while, he would drink it as if he disliked it, | 0:45:42 | 0:45:45 | |
as if it was evil tasting medicine. | 0:45:45 | 0:45:48 | |
And I even caught him once pouring bottles of wine down the sink | 0:45:48 | 0:45:53 | |
in an attempt to get rid of this sort of loathsome substance. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
I mean, he had enormous resources of self loathing anyway. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:01 | |
Sometimes, it would just go over the edge | 0:46:01 | 0:46:05 | |
and it would be horrible. | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
"In a flash of vision, | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
"he saw how other feet would cut their track | 0:46:22 | 0:46:24 | |
"arrow-straight towards the city, | 0:46:24 | 0:46:26 | |
"understood how the tower was laying a hand on the whole landscape, | 0:46:26 | 0:46:30 | |
"altering it, dominating it, enforcing a pattern that reached | 0:46:30 | 0:46:34 | |
"wherever the tower could be seen by sheer force of its being there. | 0:46:34 | 0:46:39 | |
"He swung round the horizon and saw how true his vision was. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:45 | |
"There were new tracks, people in parties | 0:46:45 | 0:46:47 | |
"making their way sturdily between bushes and through heather. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
"The countryside was shrugging itself obediently into a new shape. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:57 | |
"Presently, with this great finger sticking up, | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
"the city would lie like the hub at the centre of a predestined wheel. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
"New Street, New Inn, New Wharf, New Bridge, | 0:47:04 | 0:47:10 | |
"and now new roads to bring in new people." | 0:47:10 | 0:47:14 | |
The Spire, Golding's fifth novel, | 0:47:19 | 0:47:22 | |
is about a medieval Dean called Jocelyn who has a vision | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
which compels him to build a huge steeple on top of his cathedral. | 0:47:26 | 0:47:31 | |
The physical impossibility of the project doesn't deter him | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
and he sacrifices everything to achieve his dream. | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
The Spire... | 0:47:43 | 0:47:45 | |
is a novel about the building of Salisbury Cathedral spire | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
and that was a thing he looked at every day from his classroom window. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:53 | |
When I was teaching and had it in the window | 0:47:55 | 0:47:57 | |
over those bowed heads, I was always puzzled by it. | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
It's obviously possible because there it is, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
but given what technical means were possible at the time, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:09 | |
that's in the 13th century, | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
it seemed to be nearly impossible, anyway, | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
and I would... I wanted to find out | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
what kind of people would do it. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:22 | |
When you turned your mind to finding out, you didn't read old records | 0:48:26 | 0:48:30 | |
or look up the actual people who had done it, | 0:48:30 | 0:48:32 | |
-you went about it your own way? -You can't find it out | 0:48:32 | 0:48:35 | |
because there's no manuals on how to build a gothic cathedral. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:38 | |
I said to myself, "What would these people have?" | 0:48:38 | 0:48:41 | |
And the answer is, of course, they'd have blocks and tackles. | 0:48:41 | 0:48:44 | |
Well, I knew about seamen ship. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:47 | |
So I said to myself, "How would sailors set about | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
"putting this thing up?" And I got at it from that point of view. | 0:48:50 | 0:48:55 | |
So, as far as I know, | 0:48:55 | 0:48:57 | |
the whole thing is an invention from beginning to end | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
but it seems to work and people believe it. | 0:49:00 | 0:49:03 | |
"The whole building revealed itself to me. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:11 | |
"The whole building spoke. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:13 | |
" 'We are labour,' said the walls. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:16 | |
"The ogival windows clasped their hands and sang, | 0:49:16 | 0:49:19 | |
" 'We are prayer.' | 0:49:19 | 0:49:21 | |
"And the trinity over the triangular roof... | 0:49:22 | 0:49:26 | |
"But how shall I say it? | 0:49:26 | 0:49:28 | |
"I had tried to give away my house | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
"and it had returned to me a thousand fold." | 0:49:31 | 0:49:35 | |
He presents in The Spire | 0:49:39 | 0:49:40 | |
this character called Dean Jocelyn | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
who builds the spire - he is responsible for planning it, getting the money. | 0:49:43 | 0:49:46 | |
And what is Jocelyn motivated by | 0:49:46 | 0:49:49 | |
is the great question of the novel. Is he motivated by egotism? Yes. | 0:49:49 | 0:49:55 | |
A kind of sublimated sexuality? Yes. | 0:49:56 | 0:50:00 | |
Or worship? | 0:50:00 | 0:50:04 | |
Yes, as well. | 0:50:04 | 0:50:05 | |
So, he's questioning, through Jocelyn, himself, I think. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:10 | |
And I think that's when it comes, at this quite crucial time | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
in his life when he is just about to start being a full-time writer. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:19 | |
I wanted to conceive the kind of man who would say "This must be done." | 0:50:22 | 0:50:30 | |
And would not know at the beginning | 0:50:31 | 0:50:34 | |
that even if God had told him to do this, | 0:50:34 | 0:50:37 | |
nevertheless the cost was going to be his life | 0:50:37 | 0:50:41 | |
and probably other people's lives, too. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:43 | |
I still think it's a good image almost of any human endeavour, | 0:50:43 | 0:50:50 | |
that it can never be wholly good, it must always have a cost in people. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
Jocelyn was a fanatic, was he not? | 0:50:58 | 0:51:01 | |
We are in the presence of religious fanaticism. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:04 | |
We see what it can do. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
Its cost in suffering and death and sorrow is...is immeasurable. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:15 | |
"I thought it would be simple. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:20 | |
"I thought the spire would complete a stone bible, | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
"it would be the apocalypse in stone. | 0:51:24 | 0:51:27 | |
"I never guessed in my folly | 0:51:27 | 0:51:29 | |
"that there would be a new lesson at every level and a new power. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
"Nor could I have been told. I had to build in faith against advice, | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
"that's the only way, that when you build like this, | 0:51:36 | 0:51:40 | |
"men blunt like a poor chisel or fly off like the head of an axe. | 0:51:40 | 0:51:45 | |
"I was too taken up with my vision to consider this. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
"And the vision was enough." | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
He just has captured what happens | 0:51:58 | 0:52:01 | |
when a vision gets so mixed up with self-aggrandisement, | 0:52:01 | 0:52:06 | |
when somebody so lacks self-awareness, | 0:52:06 | 0:52:09 | |
that actually they and their project become one. | 0:52:09 | 0:52:14 | |
And so what we have is a perfect description, | 0:52:14 | 0:52:19 | |
not just of Deans, but of any human venture, | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
where a leader loses track of their own humility. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:26 | |
We should distrust the voice that tells us that we are right | 0:52:28 | 0:52:34 | |
and everybody else is wrong. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:36 | |
'I have always been a great admirer of Golding's talent | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
'but this is a very, very, very bad book.' | 0:52:46 | 0:52:49 | |
'I happen to agree, only more. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:52 | |
'I heard the word gothic mentioned a couple of times | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
but this is all mock gothic.' | 0:52:55 | 0:52:57 | |
The Spire came out, I think, in April | 0:52:57 | 0:52:59 | |
and quite soon afterwards, there was a radio review of it. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:05 | |
And one of the people on the panel | 0:53:05 | 0:53:07 | |
had really taken against the book. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:11 | |
'The writer sometimes seems to be using the dark ages | 0:53:11 | 0:53:14 | |
'as an excuse for extravagance.' | 0:53:14 | 0:53:16 | |
'I was much more revolted by the book's excesses. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:19 | |
'I believe an American reviewer has already said of this book, | 0:53:19 | 0:53:23 | |
'that it touches the "Wuthering" depths...' | 0:53:23 | 0:53:25 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:53:25 | 0:53:27 | |
We were all sitting around in the sitting room | 0:53:27 | 0:53:29 | |
in our cottage in Wiltshire, | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
and my father, I'd never seen him so emotional. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:36 | |
He turned absolutely white and crashed out of the room. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:39 | |
'I think it is a bad book because I find its symbolism crude. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:44 | |
'I find the sexual undertone of spire building very, very badly managed. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:48 | |
'Very pervasive, very disagreeable.' | 0:53:48 | 0:53:50 | |
And my mother started swearing | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
and I have never heard her swear like that. | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
But I think it frightened my father. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
I think it had an effect | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
on his ability to be confident in his imagination, | 0:54:03 | 0:54:07 | |
and perhaps even to be confident in my mother's judgement. | 0:54:07 | 0:54:14 | |
So...this shook him, | 0:54:14 | 0:54:16 | |
this really shook him. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:18 | |
"He opened his eyes quickly and there was the head, | 0:54:30 | 0:54:34 | |
"grinning amusedly in the strange daylight, ignoring the flies, | 0:54:34 | 0:54:37 | |
"the spilled guts, | 0:54:37 | 0:54:40 | |
"even ignoring the indignity | 0:54:40 | 0:54:42 | |
"of being spiked on a stick." | 0:54:42 | 0:54:43 | |
"He looked away, licking his dry lips. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
"A gift for the beast, | 0:54:48 | 0:54:50 | |
"might not the beast come for it? | 0:54:50 | 0:54:52 | |
"The head, he thought, appeared to agree with him. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
" 'Run away,' said the head silently, 'Go back to the others.' " | 0:54:55 | 0:55:00 | |
Although Lord of the Flies had been a critical success | 0:55:04 | 0:55:08 | |
it wasn't until the publication of the American edition, | 0:55:08 | 0:55:11 | |
and particularly the paperback in 1959, | 0:55:11 | 0:55:14 | |
that Golding became an international bestseller | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
and started to earn large amounts in royalties. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:20 | |
Lord of the Flies has since sold more than 40 million copies. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:27 | |
Well, I grew up a in a little town called Durham, Maine, | 0:55:31 | 0:55:33 | |
and at that time, the State of Maine had a bookmobile service, | 0:55:33 | 0:55:38 | |
it was a mobile library. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:40 | |
And one day I said to the lady who drove the bookmobile, | 0:55:40 | 0:55:46 | |
"Do you have anything about kids the way that kids really are?" | 0:55:46 | 0:55:51 | |
And she thought a little bit about it and she said, | 0:55:51 | 0:55:53 | |
"Well, there's one book | 0:55:53 | 0:55:55 | |
"and it's called Lord of the Flies, | 0:55:55 | 0:55:57 | |
"but if anyone asks you where you got it, | 0:55:57 | 0:56:00 | |
"say you found it on your own because I might lose my job. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:04 | |
"That's an adult book." | 0:56:04 | 0:56:06 | |
And I thought, "Hmm, an adult book about kids." | 0:56:06 | 0:56:09 | |
And I was completely riveted by the story from the very beginning | 0:56:09 | 0:56:14 | |
because it was like a boy's story, the ones that I was accustomed to. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:19 | |
The difference was the boys were real boys. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:23 | |
They acted the way that I understood boys acted. | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
You guys are assholes! | 0:56:28 | 0:56:30 | |
"At last, the words of the chant floated up to them | 0:56:31 | 0:56:34 | |
"across the bowl of blackened wood and ashes, | 0:56:34 | 0:56:38 | |
" 'Kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood.' " | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
You have to put things in context, too, | 0:56:42 | 0:56:46 | |
of the time when I read those lines. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:48 | |
It would have been 1960, | 0:56:49 | 0:56:51 | |
around the time that Kennedy became President | 0:56:51 | 0:56:55 | |
and the civil rights unrest was beginning in the south. | 0:56:55 | 0:57:00 | |
And we saw on the nightly news | 0:57:00 | 0:57:03 | |
police turning dogs on people | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
who just wanted to ride the bus. | 0:57:06 | 0:57:08 | |
MUSIC: "Scarborough Fair" by Simon & Garfunkel | 0:57:08 | 0:57:11 | |
The Vietnam War made the book seem even more relevant. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:20 | |
It acquired a cult status amongst young people in America | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
and Golding became a '60s phenomenon. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:26 | |
We knew that there was bad stuff there. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:34 | |
And I think that, past a certain age, most kids do. | 0:57:34 | 0:57:37 | |
And you look for somebody to explain it to you. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:40 | |
And that's one of the things that the Golding book did. | 0:57:40 | 0:57:44 | |
It explained it to me. It didn't preach, I didn't need that, | 0:57:44 | 0:57:47 | |
but stories, stories that illuminated. That was valuable | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
and I grabbed that with both hands. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:52 | |
So, in that sense, it was comforting. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:55 | |
It was the idea that somebody else understands. | 0:57:55 | 0:57:57 | |
# Are you going to Scarborough fair | 0:58:06 | 0:58:13 | |
# Parsley, sage rosemary and thyme | 0:58:14 | 0:58:21 | |
# Remember me to the one who lives there | 0:58:23 | 0:58:30 | |
# She once was a true love of mine... # | 0:58:30 | 0:58:38 | |
For 30 years, the Goldings lived in Bowerchalke, | 0:58:38 | 0:58:41 | |
an idyllic Wiltshire village just outside Salisbury. | 0:58:41 | 0:58:44 | |
"I am small and in the garden at Marlborough. | 0:58:48 | 0:58:52 | |
"It is twilight. There is a live snake in the garden | 0:58:52 | 0:58:56 | |
"which seems to me about five feet long | 0:58:56 | 0:58:59 | |
"and thick as my arm. | 0:58:59 | 0:59:01 | |
"I hold it firmly close behind the head with my left hand, | 0:59:01 | 0:59:06 | |
"since I am left-handed. The snake writhes and struggles, | 0:59:06 | 0:59:09 | |
"but I know it cannot bite or sting me so long as I hold it just so. | 0:59:09 | 0:59:13 | |
"Somehow the affair changes. | 0:59:15 | 0:59:17 | |
"I am examining a dark hole in the garden | 0:59:17 | 0:59:20 | |
"and the snake is inside, its head now resting in the entrance." | 0:59:20 | 0:59:24 | |
I mean, you know, he doesn't bother to say, | 0:59:24 | 0:59:27 | |
"This is just so amazingly Freudian I don't know what to do about it." | 0:59:27 | 0:59:31 | |
I think it was 1966. | 0:59:38 | 0:59:40 | |
My father received a letter from an American graduate student, | 0:59:41 | 0:59:45 | |
a woman, | 0:59:45 | 0:59:47 | |
saying she was studying his work and would like to talk to him. | 0:59:47 | 0:59:53 | |
And he got lots of these letters | 0:59:53 | 0:59:55 | |
and, mostly, he said, "No." | 0:59:55 | 0:59:59 | |
This time he said no politely and she was much more persistent. | 0:59:59 | 1:00:05 | |
I wrote him a letter. | 1:00:08 | 1:00:10 | |
I got a response and he told me, yes, that he would see me. | 1:00:10 | 1:00:13 | |
I could take the train up to Salisbury | 1:00:13 | 1:00:17 | |
and he would give me lunch in a pub | 1:00:17 | 1:00:19 | |
and he would be sitting in his Rover, | 1:00:19 | 1:00:22 | |
and he wrote out the licence number. | 1:00:22 | 1:00:25 | |
And we went to a pub for lunch and then we talked. | 1:00:30 | 1:00:35 | |
I think the two of us were both very nervous, I certainly was. | 1:00:35 | 1:00:39 | |
And then he took me to Old Sarum and he took me to Stonehenge. | 1:00:39 | 1:00:43 | |
This was a very big thing in both my parents' lives. | 1:00:46 | 1:00:51 | |
Virginia was a very attractive, very intelligent, | 1:00:51 | 1:00:55 | |
very sympathetic person. | 1:00:55 | 1:00:57 | |
Very interested in his writing, | 1:00:57 | 1:01:00 | |
somebody I think my father wanted to be friends with. | 1:01:00 | 1:01:04 | |
But I think it would be misleading | 1:01:04 | 1:01:09 | |
if I didn't acknowledge that he also, | 1:01:09 | 1:01:12 | |
at some layer, at some degree, | 1:01:12 | 1:01:16 | |
I think he fell in love with her. | 1:01:16 | 1:01:18 | |
Was he infatuated with a young Virginia Tiger? | 1:01:26 | 1:01:30 | |
Was he smitten with a young Virginia Tiger, to use an English phrase? | 1:01:30 | 1:01:34 | |
Was he besotted with a young Virginia Tiger, | 1:01:34 | 1:01:37 | |
to use something that might be used in France or Italy | 1:01:37 | 1:01:40 | |
or one of those wicked places? | 1:01:40 | 1:01:42 | |
I would say, yes, he must have been. | 1:01:42 | 1:01:44 | |
There must have been that interest. | 1:01:44 | 1:01:47 | |
We were not lovers, although it was thought that... | 1:01:47 | 1:01:50 | |
I'm sure that Ann thought that might have been a possibility. | 1:01:50 | 1:01:53 | |
We were not lovers. We were very, very good friends. | 1:01:53 | 1:01:57 | |
"We had one of those interminable, reasonable conversations | 1:02:01 | 1:02:04 | |
"about the relationship between men and women. | 1:02:04 | 1:02:07 | |
"One would not be jealous. | 1:02:07 | 1:02:10 | |
"One would understand enjoyment taken with a third person. | 1:02:10 | 1:02:13 | |
"Nothing was permanent, nothing was more than relative. | 1:02:13 | 1:02:16 | |
"Sex was a private business, sex was a clinical matter | 1:02:16 | 1:02:21 | |
"and contraception had removed the need for orthodox family life. | 1:02:21 | 1:02:25 | |
"And then suddenly we were clinging to each other | 1:02:25 | 1:02:28 | |
"as though we were the only stable thing in an earthquake." | 1:02:28 | 1:02:31 | |
You have to remember that I was young, | 1:02:34 | 1:02:37 | |
certainly smart, and attractive. | 1:02:37 | 1:02:40 | |
So she made it very uncomfortable for me. | 1:02:40 | 1:02:44 | |
I think, er... I think she didn't like me. | 1:02:44 | 1:02:49 | |
I'm sure she didn't like me. | 1:02:49 | 1:02:51 | |
Ann was deeply, deeply resentful and jealous | 1:02:51 | 1:02:56 | |
because she thought that she was the person who shared his creative life, | 1:02:56 | 1:03:00 | |
of course, and had shared his creative life, still did. | 1:03:00 | 1:03:04 | |
So yeah, it was a very bad moment for the marriage | 1:03:04 | 1:03:06 | |
and in some sense didn't heal. | 1:03:06 | 1:03:09 | |
Golding's preferred means of escape was to go to sea. | 1:03:13 | 1:03:17 | |
In 1966, he used some of his new-found wealth | 1:03:17 | 1:03:21 | |
to buy a glamorous Dutch racing yacht called Tenace | 1:03:21 | 1:03:25 | |
in which he planned to sail through the canals of France to Greece. | 1:03:25 | 1:03:30 | |
It was 1967 | 1:03:31 | 1:03:33 | |
and we set sail on this tremendous boat. | 1:03:33 | 1:03:38 | |
We were sailing through lightish fog | 1:03:38 | 1:03:42 | |
when suddenly... | 1:03:42 | 1:03:44 | |
I mean, it was most extraordinary. | 1:03:44 | 1:03:47 | |
Part of the fog seemed to get thicker. | 1:03:47 | 1:03:49 | |
And then we realised it was the bow of a huge ship. | 1:03:58 | 1:04:02 | |
It was an enormous freighter and it wasn't very far away | 1:04:02 | 1:04:07 | |
and it was coming straight for us. | 1:04:07 | 1:04:09 | |
And my father put the boat about | 1:04:10 | 1:04:13 | |
and we just glanced | 1:04:13 | 1:04:16 | |
down the side of this boat | 1:04:16 | 1:04:19 | |
and water started to come in. | 1:04:19 | 1:04:22 | |
And I think it very likely that we would have drowned. | 1:04:22 | 1:04:25 | |
Then we saw that somebody on the boat had seen us. | 1:04:26 | 1:04:30 | |
They went round in a huge circle and came back and found us again. | 1:04:30 | 1:04:35 | |
It affected both my parents terribly strongly. | 1:04:41 | 1:04:44 | |
My mother instantly became very ill. | 1:04:44 | 1:04:46 | |
My father became fantastically depressed | 1:04:46 | 1:04:51 | |
and I think it's easy to see why. | 1:04:51 | 1:04:56 | |
He was a sailor, that was one of the defining aspects of him, I think. | 1:04:56 | 1:05:02 | |
And if you're a sailor and a captain | 1:05:02 | 1:05:05 | |
and you lose your ship... | 1:05:05 | 1:05:07 | |
That's a very crushing disgrace. | 1:05:09 | 1:05:12 | |
I was able to see him after that. | 1:05:16 | 1:05:20 | |
We were in a pub in London | 1:05:20 | 1:05:23 | |
and he looked up at a lovely barmaid | 1:05:23 | 1:05:28 | |
and remembered lines from Eliot's The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. | 1:05:28 | 1:05:34 | |
And these are... | 1:05:34 | 1:05:36 | |
"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | 1:05:36 | 1:05:39 | |
"By sea girls wreathed | 1:05:39 | 1:05:42 | |
"With seaweed, red and brown, | 1:05:42 | 1:05:46 | |
"Till human voices wake us and we drown." | 1:05:46 | 1:05:49 | |
I would think that we were in correspondence | 1:05:52 | 1:05:55 | |
less and less over five years. | 1:05:55 | 1:05:58 | |
I think that Ann felt it had gone on, the correspondence had gone on | 1:05:58 | 1:06:03 | |
too long and that that should stop. | 1:06:03 | 1:06:05 | |
"I find it difficult to decide when the crisis began. | 1:06:11 | 1:06:15 | |
"But by 1971, it was unendurable. | 1:06:15 | 1:06:18 | |
"Not only did life seem pointless, | 1:06:18 | 1:06:22 | |
"there was a kind of raw intensity about daylight perception | 1:06:22 | 1:06:25 | |
"that could not be endured. | 1:06:25 | 1:06:28 | |
"On top of that, there was an insomniac length to every night | 1:06:28 | 1:06:32 | |
"when each second had its own weight, | 1:06:32 | 1:06:34 | |
"its tiny addition like a Chinese water torture. | 1:06:34 | 1:06:40 | |
"The remedy for this, of course, was drink - the old, old anodyne. | 1:06:40 | 1:06:46 | |
"I do not now remember how many times | 1:06:46 | 1:06:48 | |
"I was dead drunk in this period." | 1:06:48 | 1:06:50 | |
I think part of the depression, really, | 1:06:52 | 1:06:56 | |
was simply that he didn't have enough structure around him. | 1:06:56 | 1:07:00 | |
He'd had this terrifying school day | 1:07:00 | 1:07:02 | |
and he'd wrote books in it very successfully. | 1:07:02 | 1:07:05 | |
I mean, I think he missed that and he missed the contact certainly. | 1:07:05 | 1:07:09 | |
And it's a bit of a mistake a lot of the time | 1:07:09 | 1:07:12 | |
for writers to shut themselves away. | 1:07:12 | 1:07:14 | |
After the Tenace was sunk in 1967, | 1:07:15 | 1:07:18 | |
Golding wouldn't write another novel for more than ten years. | 1:07:18 | 1:07:22 | |
He had quit the job as a teacher. | 1:07:25 | 1:07:28 | |
He was living and working at home. | 1:07:28 | 1:07:30 | |
But Ann was also not working outside the home. | 1:07:30 | 1:07:32 | |
There were occasional moments when the two of them would disappear | 1:07:32 | 1:07:36 | |
and it was known they were talking about Bill's writing. | 1:07:36 | 1:07:39 | |
But also in the early '70s, this was a period | 1:07:39 | 1:07:42 | |
when he was having a lot of trouble writing. | 1:07:42 | 1:07:45 | |
So in a sense of... The absolutely verboten question was, | 1:07:45 | 1:07:49 | |
"Are you writing something now?" | 1:07:49 | 1:07:51 | |
You know, "Would you like to talk about it?" | 1:07:51 | 1:07:54 | |
"Once or twice I was drunk for more than a day. | 1:07:56 | 1:08:00 | |
"I said unforgivable things to Ann and pulled her about | 1:08:00 | 1:08:03 | |
"on at least three occasions. | 1:08:03 | 1:08:07 | |
"The rawness of daylight pushed at me. | 1:08:07 | 1:08:09 | |
"The presence of David exasperated me. | 1:08:09 | 1:08:12 | |
"My inability to write fretted me and I drank." | 1:08:14 | 1:08:18 | |
Another source of Golding's distress was his son David's mental illness. | 1:08:22 | 1:08:28 | |
Although David went to Oxford, he found university very stressful | 1:08:28 | 1:08:32 | |
and his behaviour became increasingly unstable. | 1:08:32 | 1:08:35 | |
My tutor at Brasenose | 1:08:37 | 1:08:41 | |
offered to let me have a year off | 1:08:41 | 1:08:44 | |
and go to the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, | 1:08:44 | 1:08:48 | |
but I rejected that. | 1:08:48 | 1:08:51 | |
I felt I had to face this | 1:08:51 | 1:08:54 | |
and go through the normal process of an undergraduate. | 1:08:54 | 1:09:00 | |
But, later, it got worse. | 1:09:00 | 1:09:03 | |
I think it really hit about 1968, | 1:09:04 | 1:09:08 | |
because that's a year I really don't remember much about. | 1:09:08 | 1:09:12 | |
I know things were happening which I should've been interested in, | 1:09:12 | 1:09:16 | |
like the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union. | 1:09:16 | 1:09:20 | |
For my parents to have a child | 1:09:24 | 1:09:27 | |
with a real severe, lifelong mental illness | 1:09:27 | 1:09:31 | |
was, I think, their great tragedy. | 1:09:31 | 1:09:34 | |
"The figure was a child, | 1:09:39 | 1:09:42 | |
"drawing nearer. | 1:09:42 | 1:09:45 | |
"He was naked and the miles of light lit him variously. | 1:09:45 | 1:09:50 | |
"A child's stride is quick, | 1:09:50 | 1:09:53 | |
"but this child walked down the very middle of the street | 1:09:53 | 1:09:56 | |
"with a kind of ritual gait | 1:09:56 | 1:09:58 | |
"that in an adult would have been called solemn. | 1:09:58 | 1:10:02 | |
"His face was so swollen he could only glimpse | 1:10:03 | 1:10:06 | |
"where he was going through the merest of slits. | 1:10:06 | 1:10:09 | |
"It was perhaps something animal that was directing him | 1:10:10 | 1:10:14 | |
"away from the place where the world was being consumed. | 1:10:14 | 1:10:17 | |
"Perhaps it was luck, good or bad, | 1:10:17 | 1:10:21 | |
"that kept him pacing in the one direction where he might survive." | 1:10:21 | 1:10:25 | |
I think that Darkness Visible is Golding's reaction | 1:10:29 | 1:10:32 | |
to what had happened to David. | 1:10:32 | 1:10:35 | |
He said that there were two novels he had tried to portray a saint in. | 1:10:37 | 1:10:42 | |
One was Simon in Lord of the Flies, | 1:10:42 | 1:10:45 | |
the other was Matty in Darkness Visible. | 1:10:45 | 1:10:48 | |
He was writing a novel about the Blitz | 1:10:50 | 1:10:53 | |
and a child who walks naked out of a firestorm. | 1:10:53 | 1:10:57 | |
It can't have happened. | 1:10:57 | 1:10:59 | |
This is the kind of firestorm that melts metal. | 1:10:59 | 1:11:03 | |
Eventually, after very strange adventures, | 1:11:03 | 1:11:07 | |
the kind that happen to a sort of religious maniac, | 1:11:07 | 1:11:11 | |
he develops a relationship with spirits | 1:11:11 | 1:11:14 | |
who tell him that he's to be sacrificed. | 1:11:14 | 1:11:17 | |
I think that Darkness Visible is a kind of homage to David. | 1:11:19 | 1:11:23 | |
David was very religious. Became a Catholic, | 1:11:23 | 1:11:27 | |
gave away his possessions. | 1:11:27 | 1:11:29 | |
Saintly boy. | 1:11:29 | 1:11:31 | |
And I think this novel is an attempt to come to terms with | 1:11:31 | 1:11:35 | |
and see what is great in David. | 1:11:35 | 1:11:40 | |
Sometime this year, my brother said to me, | 1:11:43 | 1:11:46 | |
"Of course, you know, I think Matty is me, really." | 1:11:46 | 1:11:49 | |
And I was, um...surprised, | 1:11:49 | 1:11:53 | |
but, in a sense, relieved, | 1:11:53 | 1:11:55 | |
because that means it's OK to discuss it now. | 1:11:55 | 1:11:58 | |
I think there's a huge link between Matty and David, | 1:11:58 | 1:12:02 | |
and I think there's also a link between Matty and my father. | 1:12:02 | 1:12:05 | |
My own feeling, having watched David through these terrible vicissitudes, | 1:12:05 | 1:12:12 | |
is that his mind is quite similar to my father's, | 1:12:12 | 1:12:16 | |
and his imaginative capacity is quite similar, | 1:12:16 | 1:12:20 | |
but something has just tipped it too far that way. | 1:12:20 | 1:12:25 | |
Whereas I think my father's imagination, | 1:12:25 | 1:12:28 | |
which is often quite touch and go | 1:12:28 | 1:12:33 | |
on the "is he sane, is he mad" front... | 1:12:33 | 1:12:36 | |
..it just manages to walk the line in between it. | 1:12:37 | 1:12:42 | |
'We're now alerted to the dangers of an uncontrolled use of pesticides. | 1:12:45 | 1:12:49 | |
'Traces of DDT have even been found in the fat of penguins | 1:12:49 | 1:12:53 | |
'and it took Professor Lovelock's electron absorption detector | 1:12:53 | 1:12:57 | |
'to spot the minute, although important, quantities involved.' | 1:12:57 | 1:13:00 | |
We both of us walked from our homes to the village post office. | 1:13:01 | 1:13:07 | |
And we would start talking to each other in the way you do, | 1:13:08 | 1:13:12 | |
in a village like Bowerchalke, | 1:13:12 | 1:13:14 | |
and that led to exchange of all sorts of views. | 1:13:14 | 1:13:19 | |
We talked about it, and in a sense it was a joint thing. | 1:13:20 | 1:13:25 | |
The earth is a system made up of all of the rocks, | 1:13:26 | 1:13:31 | |
the ocean and the atmosphere and all of the living things, | 1:13:31 | 1:13:35 | |
working together to form a self-regulating entity | 1:13:35 | 1:13:40 | |
that keeps its climate and chemical composition always | 1:13:40 | 1:13:44 | |
so that the planet is habitable. | 1:13:44 | 1:13:46 | |
In other words, big as it is, | 1:13:46 | 1:13:49 | |
it's still behaving as if it were something alive. | 1:13:49 | 1:13:52 | |
And Bill said, "If you're going to come up with a grand idea like that, | 1:13:54 | 1:13:58 | |
"you better give it a good name." So I said, "What would you suggest?" | 1:13:58 | 1:14:02 | |
He said, "I'd call it Gaia, the Greek name for the earth's goddess." | 1:14:02 | 1:14:07 | |
"Now we, if not in the spirit, | 1:14:16 | 1:14:20 | |
"have been caught up to see our earth, | 1:14:20 | 1:14:22 | |
"our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. | 1:14:22 | 1:14:29 | |
"We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible | 1:14:29 | 1:14:34 | |
"nor the area we have to live on limitless, because unbounded. | 1:14:34 | 1:14:38 | |
"We are the children of that great blue, white jewel. | 1:14:40 | 1:14:45 | |
"Through our mother, we are part of the solar system and part, | 1:14:45 | 1:14:51 | |
"through that, of the whole universe. | 1:14:51 | 1:14:55 | |
"In the blazing poetry of the fact, we are the children of the stars." | 1:14:55 | 1:15:00 | |
In October 1983, | 1:15:04 | 1:15:06 | |
Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, | 1:15:06 | 1:15:11 | |
the first English writer to receive it since Winston Churchill in 1953. | 1:15:11 | 1:15:15 | |
One of the judges in Stockholm | 1:15:17 | 1:15:20 | |
announced that he disagreed with the choice, | 1:15:20 | 1:15:22 | |
and described Golding as "a small British phenomenon of no importance." | 1:15:22 | 1:15:27 | |
There was a tremendous farce. | 1:15:30 | 1:15:33 | |
Other judges who shouldn't have broken confidence wrote to Golding | 1:15:33 | 1:15:36 | |
to cheer him up and said that these decisions were never actually unanimous, | 1:15:36 | 1:15:40 | |
that this bloke had taken leave of his senses. | 1:15:40 | 1:15:44 | |
Nonetheless, Golding was deeply hurt. | 1:15:44 | 1:15:46 | |
It just, in a way, reinforced his feeling that somewhere, | 1:15:46 | 1:15:52 | |
in the establishment of culture and the arts, | 1:15:52 | 1:15:56 | |
there was enmity directed against him. | 1:15:56 | 1:15:59 | |
"These are the good fellows whose duty it is to steer our ship, | 1:16:05 | 1:16:09 | |
"to haul on the ropes and do strange things with our sails | 1:16:09 | 1:16:12 | |
"in positions which must surely be perilous, so high they go. | 1:16:12 | 1:16:16 | |
"All this I watch with complacency from far off | 1:16:18 | 1:16:22 | |
"in the shelter of the wooden wall with its stairways, that lead up | 1:16:22 | 1:16:25 | |
"to where the privileged passengers live. | 1:16:25 | 1:16:28 | |
"But forward, beyond the white line which separates the social orders, | 1:16:28 | 1:16:33 | |
"the people work and sing and keep time to the fiddle when they play. | 1:16:33 | 1:16:37 | |
"For like children, they play, | 1:16:37 | 1:16:39 | |
"dancing innocently to the sound of the fiddle." | 1:16:39 | 1:16:43 | |
Rites of Passage is the first in a trilogy of novels | 1:16:46 | 1:16:50 | |
which chronicle a voyage from England to Australia | 1:16:50 | 1:16:54 | |
in the early 19th century. | 1:16:54 | 1:16:56 | |
It is a monumental late work | 1:16:56 | 1:16:58 | |
in which Golding pursues his constant themes of class, | 1:16:58 | 1:17:01 | |
myth, the border between reality and unreality, | 1:17:01 | 1:17:06 | |
and man's capacity for inhumanity. | 1:17:06 | 1:17:08 | |
'It's a voyage that takes a year from Tilbury Docks to Sydney Harbour. | 1:17:11 | 1:17:14 | |
'The overall headline of the story | 1:17:14 | 1:17:16 | |
'is trying to get from one end of the earth to the other by sea' | 1:17:16 | 1:17:21 | |
using ropes and pulleys, canvas and wood, | 1:17:21 | 1:17:23 | |
in order to try and battle against the ever-changing, ever-unpredictable | 1:17:23 | 1:17:28 | |
and unmasterable sea. | 1:17:28 | 1:17:29 | |
'Celebrations are in full swing | 1:17:35 | 1:17:38 | |
'with the news that the 1980 Booker Prize for fiction | 1:17:38 | 1:17:41 | |
'has been won by William Golding.' | 1:17:41 | 1:17:43 | |
'Rites Of Passage,' | 1:17:43 | 1:17:45 | |
a powerful, allegorical novel about life on board a sailing ship | 1:17:45 | 1:17:49 | |
going from England to Australia in the early 19th century. | 1:17:49 | 1:17:52 | |
'I don't like the word "allegorical", I don't like the word "symbolic". | 1:17:52 | 1:17:56 | |
'"he word I really like is "mythic" and people always think | 1:17:56 | 1:18:01 | |
'that means full of lies, whereas of course what it really means' | 1:18:01 | 1:18:04 | |
is full of a truth that cannot be told in any other way but a story. | 1:18:04 | 1:18:10 | |
What do you think, to put it very crudely, you were trying to say? | 1:18:10 | 1:18:14 | |
What is that truth that you were trying to convey? | 1:18:14 | 1:18:17 | |
Oh, mercy, the brotherhood of man | 1:18:17 | 1:18:22 | |
and the capacity for cruelty that we all have in us | 1:18:22 | 1:18:26 | |
and which we have to control. | 1:18:26 | 1:18:29 | |
No, I'm not ready! | 1:18:29 | 1:18:30 | |
No! No! | 1:18:32 | 1:18:34 | |
Please! | 1:18:34 | 1:18:36 | |
Rites of Passage centres on the public humiliation | 1:18:36 | 1:18:39 | |
of one of the passengers, a parson who gets drunk, | 1:18:39 | 1:18:44 | |
has sex with one of the sailors, and then literally dies of shame. | 1:18:44 | 1:18:48 | |
You must be cleansed! | 1:18:48 | 1:18:51 | |
CHEERING | 1:18:51 | 1:18:53 | |
There's a crossing of the line ceremony where they go across the equator and Neptune arises | 1:18:53 | 1:18:58 | |
and there's this big sort of festival. | 1:18:58 | 1:19:00 | |
And the Reverend Colley is the subject of the dunking, | 1:19:00 | 1:19:02 | |
the sort of ritual to take one of the passengers and sort of baptise them. | 1:19:02 | 1:19:07 | |
And it's very, very fierce. | 1:19:09 | 1:19:10 | |
I think Golding's always been fascinated with that, how closely we rub up against barbarity. | 1:19:10 | 1:19:16 | |
And that within the blink of an eye, | 1:19:16 | 1:19:19 | |
you can have something very civilised and seemingly in control | 1:19:19 | 1:19:23 | |
turn into something that is monstrous. | 1:19:23 | 1:19:25 | |
I think he was particularly interested in humiliation. | 1:19:29 | 1:19:32 | |
The character Colley is desperately and utterly | 1:19:32 | 1:19:35 | |
and completely humiliated. | 1:19:35 | 1:19:37 | |
There's drunkenness, there's sexual humiliation, it's all in public. | 1:19:37 | 1:19:42 | |
I think that somewhat goes back to the social class aspect of things. | 1:19:42 | 1:19:47 | |
In June 1988, Golding was given a knighthood. | 1:19:52 | 1:19:55 | |
Paradoxically, | 1:19:56 | 1:19:58 | |
for a writer who had long complained about the English class system, | 1:19:58 | 1:20:01 | |
he had lobbied vociferously for the honour, | 1:20:01 | 1:20:04 | |
and immediately had his and Ann's passports changed | 1:20:04 | 1:20:08 | |
to "Sir William and Lady Golding". | 1:20:08 | 1:20:10 | |
In their 70s, the Goldings had moved to Cornwall. | 1:20:13 | 1:20:17 | |
They bought Tullimar, | 1:20:17 | 1:20:19 | |
a large Georgian house a few miles from the sea | 1:20:19 | 1:20:23 | |
in the village of Perranarworthal, | 1:20:23 | 1:20:25 | |
about as far away from the literary world Golding so disliked | 1:20:25 | 1:20:29 | |
as it was possible to be. | 1:20:29 | 1:20:31 | |
Matthew Evans, who was then the chairman of Faber & Faber said, | 1:20:34 | 1:20:38 | |
"Bill rather wants a version of Lord Of The Flies done for the stage." | 1:20:38 | 1:20:44 | |
And down I went to Cornwall. | 1:20:44 | 1:20:47 | |
And they said, "He'll meet you at the station." | 1:20:47 | 1:20:51 | |
He said, "We live down here because people can't get at us." | 1:20:51 | 1:20:55 | |
But he said, "I think that the way to present this book in the theatre, | 1:20:55 | 1:21:00 | |
"and I think it would be good in the theatre, | 1:21:00 | 1:21:02 | |
"is to try and scrape it back to the original intellectual themes | 1:21:02 | 1:21:07 | |
"that are at its heart." | 1:21:07 | 1:21:08 | |
'It really is the story of English democracy | 1:21:10 | 1:21:14 | |
'and the way in which democracy is a very fragile thing | 1:21:14 | 1:21:18 | |
'that can be broken.' | 1:21:18 | 1:21:19 | |
"The dark boy, Roger, stirred at last and spoke up, 'Let's have a vote'. | 1:21:19 | 1:21:26 | |
"Yes, vote for a chief, let's vote." | 1:21:26 | 1:21:29 | |
-CONCH BLARES -You've done it! | 1:21:29 | 1:21:31 | |
CONCH BLARES | 1:21:32 | 1:21:33 | |
This symbol of the conch, which is at the heart of the whole book, | 1:21:33 | 1:21:38 | |
which is the moment which they can all come together | 1:21:38 | 1:21:40 | |
and agree on something, it could be a symbol of kingly power, | 1:21:40 | 1:21:44 | |
it could be the staff at the English Houses of Parliament, | 1:21:44 | 1:21:48 | |
but it's very much to do with English consensus | 1:21:48 | 1:21:51 | |
and he was fascinated by that. | 1:21:51 | 1:21:53 | |
And that's what he saw the book being about, | 1:21:53 | 1:21:55 | |
because it's about a group of English schoolboys. | 1:21:55 | 1:21:58 | |
As the guy says at the end of the book, | 1:21:58 | 1:22:00 | |
"I thought an English bunch of schoolboys would have done a little bit better than that." | 1:22:00 | 1:22:04 | |
So it's sort of about the old school tie, too. | 1:22:04 | 1:22:08 | |
Maybe there is a beast. | 1:22:08 | 1:22:11 | |
LAUGHTER | 1:22:11 | 1:22:12 | |
Hear him! He's got the conch. | 1:22:12 | 1:22:15 | |
'What I mean is... | 1:22:15 | 1:22:18 | |
'maybe it's only us.' | 1:22:18 | 1:22:20 | |
On the island, there was nothing for the boys to fear | 1:22:22 | 1:22:25 | |
but fear itself, really. But that fear produced gangs | 1:22:25 | 1:22:28 | |
and produced violence in the end. You've got Jack's camp | 1:22:28 | 1:22:32 | |
and you've got Ralph's camp at the end of the day. | 1:22:32 | 1:22:34 | |
The only thing that produced those was the fear | 1:22:34 | 1:22:36 | |
and the beast, which WAS the fear. | 1:22:36 | 1:22:40 | |
< Could you give us an example? | 1:22:40 | 1:22:41 | |
I don't know, say, like, recently, the riots. | 1:22:41 | 1:22:44 | |
It's people... They're destroying their own place, | 1:22:44 | 1:22:49 | |
their own city, because on the island, they're afraid of things, | 1:22:49 | 1:22:54 | |
when really it turns out to be themselves, so they destroy their own habitat through the fires | 1:22:54 | 1:22:59 | |
and destroy each other's lives. | 1:22:59 | 1:23:01 | |
SCREAMING | 1:23:01 | 1:23:04 | |
"Jack had backed right against the tribe | 1:23:12 | 1:23:15 | |
"and they were a solid mass of menace that bristled with spears. | 1:23:15 | 1:23:19 | |
"The intention of a charge was forming among them. | 1:23:19 | 1:23:22 | |
"Ralph stood facing them, a little to one side, his spear ready. | 1:23:22 | 1:23:27 | |
"The storm of sound beat at them, an incantation of hatred." | 1:23:27 | 1:23:31 | |
'Slit his throat! Bash him in! Kill the pig!' | 1:23:31 | 1:23:34 | |
The debate about good and evil is absolutely at the heart, | 1:23:34 | 1:23:37 | |
the debate about original sin. | 1:23:37 | 1:23:39 | |
Is man a wicked person who has to be improved and moulded by society? | 1:23:39 | 1:23:45 | |
Or is man naturally good? | 1:23:45 | 1:23:48 | |
It touches on an absolutely fundamental debate. | 1:23:48 | 1:23:51 | |
'We have a disharmony in our natures. | 1:23:57 | 1:24:01 | |
'We cannot live together without injuring each other.' | 1:24:02 | 1:24:06 | |
If you look at, not just Lord Of The Flies, but all the books, | 1:24:17 | 1:24:22 | |
I don't think there is another post-war English novelist | 1:24:22 | 1:24:26 | |
who goes so deeply into these fundamental questions | 1:24:26 | 1:24:29 | |
of morality and politics. | 1:24:29 | 1:24:31 | |
I can't think of another writer who matches him, | 1:24:33 | 1:24:37 | |
for the intense way he experiences human emotions, human passion | 1:24:37 | 1:24:42 | |
in a poetic and yet controlled and English way. | 1:24:42 | 1:24:45 | |
I found his body that morning - he died very, very suddenly. | 1:24:52 | 1:24:57 | |
And fortunately my father, who's a doctor, was in the house | 1:24:57 | 1:25:01 | |
and could talk me through this, and indeed the rest of the family, | 1:25:01 | 1:25:06 | |
because I'd never seen a dead body before. | 1:25:06 | 1:25:09 | |
I wanted to put the body on the back of a horse | 1:25:12 | 1:25:14 | |
and take it to the top of a hill and make a bonfire out of it. | 1:25:14 | 1:25:17 | |
Or alternatively put it on a boat, a flaming boat and push it out to sea. | 1:25:17 | 1:25:24 | |
He was clearly very involved with the great epic writers, | 1:25:25 | 1:25:30 | |
so I pictured him also as a kind of Greek bard | 1:25:30 | 1:25:33 | |
in a kind of Homeric mode. | 1:25:33 | 1:25:35 | |
Almost with a lyre, declaiming these things. | 1:25:35 | 1:25:38 | |
In The Spire, when Jocelyn's dying, | 1:25:43 | 1:25:46 | |
he's obviously in a fairly weird state | 1:25:46 | 1:25:51 | |
and he sees the people around him, not as the human beings | 1:25:51 | 1:25:56 | |
he's familiar with, but as shapes and structures and textures | 1:25:56 | 1:26:02 | |
that are completely unfamiliar. | 1:26:02 | 1:26:04 | |
And this was 1964, nearly 30 years before he died, | 1:26:05 | 1:26:09 | |
and he obviously had a strong idea of what it was like to die. | 1:26:09 | 1:26:15 | |
"No matter how high he rises, robe after robe, | 1:26:18 | 1:26:22 | |
"tomorrow or the day after, | 1:26:22 | 1:26:25 | |
"they will tap three times | 1:26:25 | 1:26:27 | |
"on the smooth parchment of that forehead with the silver hammer. | 1:26:27 | 1:26:31 | |
"Then his mind trotted away again | 1:26:33 | 1:26:36 | |
"and he saw what an extraordinary creature Father Adam was, | 1:26:36 | 1:26:40 | |
"covered in parchment from head to foot, | 1:26:40 | 1:26:43 | |
"parchment stretched or tucked in, | 1:26:43 | 1:26:46 | |
"with curious hairs on top | 1:26:46 | 1:26:49 | |
"and a mad structure of bones to keep it apart. | 1:26:49 | 1:26:54 | |
"Immediately, as in a dream that came between him and the face, | 1:26:54 | 1:26:59 | |
"he saw all people naked, creatures of light brown parchment | 1:26:59 | 1:27:04 | |
"which bound in their pipes or struts. | 1:27:04 | 1:27:07 | |
"He saw them pace or prance in sheets of woven stuff | 1:27:08 | 1:27:13 | |
"with the skins of dead animals under their feet. | 1:27:13 | 1:27:16 | |
"And he began to struggle and gasp to leave this vision behind him | 1:27:17 | 1:27:22 | |
"in words that never reached the air." | 1:27:22 | 1:27:25 | |
'It seems to me that we do live in two worlds. | 1:27:38 | 1:27:41 | |
'There is this physical one which is coherent, | 1:27:41 | 1:27:44 | |
'and there is a spiritual one, which to the average man, | 1:27:44 | 1:27:49 | |
'with his flashes of religious experience, | 1:27:49 | 1:27:52 | |
'if you'd like to call them, that world is very often incoherent.' | 1:27:52 | 1:27:56 | |
This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time | 1:27:58 | 1:28:02 | |
or not all the time, occasionally, | 1:28:02 | 1:28:05 | |
is a vital one and is what living is like. | 1:28:05 | 1:28:09 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:28:27 | 1:28:30 |