by JAMES R. BAKER

Surely we have heard enough about William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Published in 1954, it rapidly gained popularity in England, then in America, then in translation throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia, until it became one of the most familiar and studied tales of the century. In the 1960s it was rated an instant classic in the literature of disillusionment that grew out of the latest great war, and we felt certain it was the perfect fable (more fable than fiction) that spelled out what had gone wrong in that dark and stormy time and what might devastate our future.

But in the postwar generation a new spirit was rising, a new wind blowing on campus, a new politics forming to oppose the old establishment and its failures. Golding, proclaimed "Lord of the Campus" by Time magazine (64) in 1962, was soon found wanting--an antique tragedian, a pessimist, a Christian moralist who would not let us transcend original sin and the disastrous history of the last 50 years. Many "activist" academics came to feel his gloomy allegory was better left to secondary or even primary schools, where a supposedly transparent text (now put down as lacking in intellectual sophistication and contemporary relevance) might serve to exercise apprentice readers. It remained appropriate to read Orwell, Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-four, because he was a political novelist writing in behalf of what he called political freedom, whereas Golding was apolitical and seemingly without faith in political means. The Nobel poet Wislawa Szymborska describes the fashionable attitude, the movement itself, in he r "Children of Our Age" (1986):

We are children of our age,

it's a political age.

All day long, all through the night,

all affairs--yours, ours, theirs--

are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,

your genes have a political past,

your skin, a political cast,

your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,

whatever you don't say speaks for itself,

So either way you're talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,

you're taking political steps

on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,

and above us shines a moon

no longer purely lunar.

To be or not to be, that is the question,

And though it troubles the digestion

it's a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning

you don't even have to be human,

Raw material will do,

or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape

was quarreled over for months:

Should we arbitrate life and death at

a round table or a square one.

Meanwhile, people perished,

animals died

houses burned,

and the fields ran wild

just as in times immemorial

and less political. (149-50)

The identity assigned to Golding during these years was not substantially altered by his later work. The Inheritors (1955) and Pincher Martin (1956), two more fables on the limitations of "rational man," confirmed the prevailing judgment; the later attempts at social comedy, The Pyramid (1967) and The Paper Men (1984), or the long holiday from contemporary reality in the eighteenth-century sea trilogy, Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down Below (1989), failed to efface the original image. He remained the man who wrote Lord of the Flies, the man who felt he had to protest his designation as pessimist even in his Nobel speech of 1983 (Nobel Lecture 149-50). Have we been entirely fair? Golding's reputation, like that of any artist, was created not simply by what he wrote or intended but also by the prevailing mentality of his readership, and often a single work will be selected by that readership as characteristic or definitive. Writer and reader conspire to sketch a portrait of the artist that may or may not endure. In "Fable," a 1962 lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles, Golding acknowledged that in Lord of the Flies he was acting as fabulist and moralist, as one who might as well say he accepted the theology of original sin and fallen man; and on other occasions during his rise to fame he acknowledged that for a time after the war he read almost exclusively in Greek tragedy and history. Such statements contributed to his identity as philosophical antiquarian and served to condition his reception by critics and millions of readers. Yet something was lost, something important obscured that must be recovered--or discovered--to amend our reading of Lord of the Flies (in spite of the attention lavished upon it) and our estimate of Golding's total accomplishment. Most critical judgements on the famous fable are locked into the cliches established soon after its appearance.

In 1962 I began correspondence with Golding in preparation for a book on his work (William Golding: A Critical Study). My thesis, foreshadowed in an essay published in 1963 ("Why It's No Go"), was that the structure and spirit of Lord of the Flies were modeled on Euripidean tragedy, specifically The Bacchae, and that the later novels also borrowed character and structure From the ancient tragedians. Golding's response to the book was positive, kinder than I expected, but it carried a hint I did not immediately understand:

With regard to Greek, you are quite right that I go to that literature for its profound engagement with first and last things. But though a few years ago it was true I'd read little but Greek for twenty years, it's true no longer. The Greek is still there and I go back to it when I feel like that; now I must get in touch with the contemporary scene, and not necessarily the literary one; the scientific one perhaps. (Baker and Golding, letter 12 August 1965)

When I interviewed Golding in 1982 I was determined to question him about this early confrontation with the two cultures. Had there been a "classic revolt," I asked, against his father's scientific point of view? After some defense of the father's complexity of mind, the conclusion was clear: "But I do think that during the formative years I did feel myself to be in a sort of rationalist atmosphere against which I kicked" (130). I also asked whether he felt he belonged to the long line of English writers who, especially since Darwin, had taken scientist and the scientific account of things into their own work--a line running from Tennyson and including among others Hardy, Wells, Huxley, Snow, Durrell, and Fowles. And Golding? His reply was oblique, equivocal, and we hurried on to other matters. In 1988 I tried to sum up what had been achieved and what needed to be done:

We need more work on the role of science in Golding's fiction (perhaps beginning with the impact of Poe on the formation of his attitudes) and we need to reassess his accomplishment in the larger context made up of his contemporaries. ("William Golding" 11)

No scholar has responded. Since Golding's death in 1993 his work has gone into partial eclipse, as he himself predicted. While we wait for recovery, if it ever comes, we should adjust our accounts. We shall find that much of the fiction was oriented and directly influenced by his knowledge of science and that there is an evolution from the extreme negativism of Lord of the Flies toward greater respect for the scientist and scientific inquiry. The much discussed sources for the dark fable lie in Golding's experience of the war, in his connection with Lord Cherwell's research into explosives, in the use of the atomic bombs on Japan, in the postwar revelations of the Holocaust and the horrors of Stalinist Russia--quite enough to bring on the sense of tragic denouement and, as he said in "A Moving Target" (163), "grief, sheer grief' as inspiration, if that is the proper word.

Was there a contemporary literary source or precedent on which he could build his own account of the failure of humanity and the likelihood of atomic apocalypse? There have been a few unfruitful forays into this question. Craig Raine, for example, finds occasional stylistic parallels in Golding with Huxley (Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza) as well as Dostoyevsky, Henry James, and Kipling but concludes that these or others that might be hunted down are not "real sources" (108) worthy of serious attention. We get more specific guidance from Golding himself. In an address titled "Utopias and Antiutopias" he comes, inevitably, to Aldous Huxley:

As the war clouds darkened over Europe he and some of our most notable poets removed themselves to the new world. . . . There Huxley continued to create what we may call antiutopias and utopias with the same gusto, apparently, for both kinds. One antiutopia is certainly a disgusting job and best forgotten... . Yet I owe his writings much myself, I've had much enjoyment from them-in particular release from a certain starry-eyed optimism which stemmed from the optimistic rationalism of the nineteenth century. The last utopia he attempted which was technically and strictly a utopia and ideal state, Island (1962), is one for which I have a considerable liking and respect. (181)

Huxley arrived in America in 1937, toured part of the country, then wrote most of Ends and Means (1937) at the Frieda Lawrence ranch in New Mexico, and settled in Los Angeles that fall. He wrote only two books in the genre Golding discusses before his death in 1963, Island and an earlier antiutopia--undoubtedly the "disgusting job... best forgotten"--Ape and Essence (1948). Golding's harsh judgment on this book (shared by several reviewers and critics) may reflect disappointment in a literary idol. Again there is talk of Huxley in one of the last interviews, "William Golding Talks to John Carey," when the interviewer asks about the four novels the apprentice Golding tried to write. He abandoned all of them (they have never come to light) because they were merely imitations, "examples of other people's work":

WG. I took him very neat, you know. I was fascinated by him. And he was, I think superb--but clever; it was cleverness raised to a very high power indeed. Never what Lawrence can sometimes produce--never that mantic, inspired ... I don't think Huxley was even inspired; almost too clear-sighted to be inspired. (189)

Huxley was the near-contemporary (17 years separated them) so much admired in the early stage of Golding's efforts, and he was quite like Golding--knowledgeable about science and scientists, yet dedicated to literature, intent upon spiritual experience and a search for an acceptable religious faith. Huxley's skeptical views were an update on H. G. Wells and his rather quaint "scientific humanism," a faith fading in Huxley's mind and lost to Golding and many of his generation.

The California years were often difficult for Huxley. After the war began he was privileged to find himself in the company of one of the most extraordinary gatherings of intellectuals ever assembled in the United States--including exiles Mann, Brecht, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Isherwood, and Heard, and Americans Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Agee, and West--some of them writing for money at the studios as Huxley was to do. On the negative side, he was attacked by his countrymen for his pacificism, his eyesight failed further, he was often short of money, and the anxious quest for spiritual sustenance drove him constantly. These personal problems were intensified by the events of the war, the ugly alliance of the scientific and military communities, the bombing of Japan, the emergence of the cold war. Inevitably, he was subject to bouts of depression and despair over the behavior of men and nations. David King Dunaway sums up the effect of these burdens: "In the fall of 1946, Aldous Huxley turned a dark corner and foun d himself in a hallway of desperation; Ape was at the end of that long dark corridor" (214). Back in England, Golding had entered upon a similar period of doubt and reorientation; at the end of his trial he would write Lord of the Files.

Ape and Essence as a novel and judge it as a novel, ignoring the fact that it is an odd pastiche of scenario, dialogue, narrative, and verse. The scenario is indeed s et up or framed by a Huxley-like narrator who recounts the discovery of a film script by an unknown, rejected writer, William Tallis. The setting for this discovery is a studio lot on 30 January 1948--"the day of Gandhi's assassination." Two Hollywood writers walk through the studio lot, one intent upon his own trivial affairs, the more serious narrator meditating upon the newspaper headlines and the fate of the saint in politics. Gandhi's mistake, he thinks, had been to get himself involved in the sub-human mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic, institutions of the nation state." [1] Alas, it is only from without "that the saint can cure our regimented insanity ... our dream of Order" which always begets tyranny. He speaks to his companion of other martyred saints, some of them rejected candidates for film treatment, all of them participants in this repetitive tragic pattern. The headlines in the morning paper were "parables; the event they recorded, an allegory and a prophecy" (8-9). Here, in the abstract, is the outline for Golding's allegory of the boy saint, Simon, martyr to a "sub-human mass-madness." At this point the narrator stumbles upon the rejected manuscript. After reading it he goes in search of this strange man, Tallis, only to find that he had retreated from the world to the Mojave Desert, where he died six weeks before his scenario was rescued from the studio trash. The narrator decides to "print the text of 'Ape and Essence' as I found it, without change and without comment" (32).

The author takes his title from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (2.2.118-23):

But man, proud man,

Dress'd in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd--

His glassy essence--like an angry ape

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep.

His method is to employ an omniscient narrator who introduces the dramatic scenes and follows them with moralizing or sardonic commentary. The setting is a ruined city, Los Angeles in the year 2108. [2] How did the city fall? We are given flash scenes of Einstein and Faraday, representatives of the great men of science we have so revered, enslaved by the ape king and made to serve in an apocalyptic bacteriological and atomic war which ends in "the ultimate and irremediable / Detumescence" (42) of modern civilization. The narrator comments on the ends and means that brought about this great fall:

Surely it's obvious.

Doesn't every schoolboy know it?

Papio's [3] procurer, bursar to baboons,

Reason comes running, eager to ratify;

Comes, a catch-fart, with Philosophy,

truckling to tyrants;

Patent History;

Comes with Medicine to administer the

Ape-king's aphrodisiac;

Comes, with rhyming and with Rhetoric,

to write his orations;

Comes with the Calculus to aim his rockets

Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;

Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate

Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit. [4] (45)

Soulless reason provides a means to serve animal lusts, especially the lust for power; thus the man becomes the ape, the "beast."

it doesn't touch the human problem. Piggy never gets anywhere near coping with anything on that island. He dismisses the beast... says there aren't such things as ghosts, not understanding that the whole of society is riddled with ghosts.... Piggy understands society less than almost anyone there at all.

Putting Forster aside, we have in Golding's Jack, the lusty hunter who instinctively pursues power, a diminutive version of Huxley's ape. In the silence of the forest Jack hunts but is momentarily frightened by the cry of a bird, "and for a minute became less a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the trees" (62). He meets his adult counterpart when the boys find the dead airman on the mountaintop: "Before them, something like a great ape was sitting asleep with its head between its knees" (152). And, in his hour of triumph, he looks down from his castle rock on the defeated Ralph and Piggy: "Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms: authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape" (185).

The religion in Huxley's fable emerges with what its followers call "the Thing." This is not simply a reference to the bioatomic catastrophe but also to the psychopolitical dialectics that led to violent climax and apocalypse. The Chief, a rude master of the work crews that dig the graves of Hollywood Cemetery in search of manufactured goods, explains to his prisoner, Dr. Poole: "The Thing. You know--when He took over....He won the battle and took possession of everybody. That was when they did all this" (71). There's no need to struggle for recognition here, since the future will resurrect a familiar idol known generically as the devil, though it is capable of assuming an interesting variety of forms. In a catechism offered by a "Satanic Science Practitioner" the children respond:

Their teacher nods approvingly.

As the lessons continue we learn that woman is the "vessel of the Unholy Spirit," the source of deformities and therefore "the enemy of the race" (98). Annually, on Belial Day, mothers are publicly humiliated, punished, and their deformed babies killed. The purpose of this blood sacrifice is, of course, a vain attempt to purify the race, but more broadly the catechism reveals, "The chief end of man is to propitiate Belial, depreciate His enmity, and avoid destruction as long as possible" (93). Similarly, the little Christian boys on Golding's island bow down before a ubiquitous fear and soon spontaneously invent a blood ritual to purge this fear ("Kill the beast! Cut his throat/Spill his blood!" [187]) and a rite of propitiation to ensure their survival. The pig's head on the stick becomes a "gift" for the beast and an idol, an incarnation of ancient Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. Like Huxley's devotees they invert and parody the lost and more hopeful religion given to them by a forgotten savior.

On the day of propitiation in 2108 crowds mass in the Los Angeles Coliseum and we witness "the groundless faith, the sub-human excitement, the collective insanity which are the products of ceremonial religion" (108) as the ritual unfolds and chanting is heard from a great altar. The chorus mourns that all have fallen "Into the hands of living Evil, the Enemy of Man":

Semichorus I

Of the rebel against the Order of Things

Semichorus II

And we have conspired with him against ourselves

Semichorus I

Of the great Blowfly who is the Lord of Flies

Crawling in the heart... (109)

We know now that Lord of the Flies was not the title of the manuscript of a novel Golding sent to Faber in 1953. In a charming essay, Charles Monteith, who became editor of the manuscript, recalls the brief note attached: "I send you the typescript of my novel Strangers from Within which might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation. I hope you will feel able to publish it" (57). Reader judgments were largely negative, much revision was demanded, the tide was rejected, and a new one--Lord of the Flies--suggested by another editor at Faber. Golding readily agreed, as well he might have, for it was quite appropriate to give his devil a familiar name (Beelzebub, the fly lord, was present in the "buzz" of conflicting voices at the parliaments on the platform rock), and his theme of submission to evil remained intact. The original tide, nevertheless, was no doubt deliberately chosen to reflect something built into the narrative progression-the gradual effacement of sane and civil behavior and the emergence of an alien power in the consciousness of the boys. The theme of demonic possession was most vital to Golding's purpose, and again it demonstrates the bond with Huxley. [5] When the Arch-Vicar delivers his talk on world history for Poole (all the while munching pig's trotters) he comes to a clear statement of his thesis on the downfall of civilization:

[A]t a certain epoch, the overwhelming majority of human beings accepted beliefs and adopted courses of action that could not possibly result in anything but universal suffering, general degradation and wholesale destruction. The only plausible explanation is that they were inspired or possessed by an alien consciousness, a consciousness that willed their undoing and willed it more strongly than they were able to will their own happiness and survival.

In both fables of possession we see how ritual motion and corybantic chanting bring about the psychological birth of the aliens. Huxley captures this perfectly in the antiphonal chant of the priests on Belial Day hailing that brief period in which mating is spontaneous and allowed:

Semichorus I

This is the time,

Semichorus II

For Belial is in your blood,

Semichorus I

Time for the birth in you

Semichorus II

Of the Others, the Aliens

Semichorus I

Of Itch, of Tetter

Semichorus II

Of tumid worm.

Semichorus I

This is the time,

Semichorus II

For Belial hates you,

Semichorus I

Time for the soul's death

Semichorus II

For the Person to perish

Semichorus I

Sentenced by craving,

Semichorus II

And pleasure is the hangman;

Semichorus I

Time for the Enemy's

Semichorus II

Total triumph,

Semichorus I

For the Baboon to be master,

Semichorus II

That monsters may be begotten.

Semichorus I

Not your will, but His

Semichorus II

As individuals fall victim to collective hysteria, to possession, so too, the ArchVicar insists, do nations, entire civilizations. In his sketch of modem history (116-33), however, he offers some forceful arguments that go beyond theological platitude. He cites the failure of nations to curb population growth or to arrest environmental degradation (failures that would have resulted in world apocalypse even without "the Thing"), yet these and other negative policies were driven by the politics of "Progress and Nationalism" (125). The overarching myth of the age was "the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means" (125), ethical restraints collapse; in the scientific-technological society now defunct the "means" were extended beyond any power known to previous ages, the power to destroy the earth.

The growth of Alfred Poole, D.Sc. (known to his students and colleagues as "Stagnant Poole") to full manhood is the dubious subtext of Huxley's grim fantasy. Golding's harsh judgment on Ape and Essence in 1977 may be aimed primarily at this comedy of redemption. Young Alfred's psychological development has been stunted by a devoted and vampiric mother. It is tempting to compare this mother with Piggy's "auntie" and the life of self-indulgence she allowed, the diet of sweets and scientific fantasy. Poole is 38 when he arrives with the expedition in the company of a tweedy virgin, Miss Ethel Hook, "one of those amazingly efficient and intensely English girls" (57) who hopes to marry this incomplete man. His redemption begins when he is temporarily buried alive by the Chiefs crew of grave robbers and then, on the promise that he can help to produce more food, allowed to live; after all, he is an expert botanist. This symbolic resurrection is immediately followed by a liberating first-time drunken episode in the company of Loola--an 18-year old girl who is blessed with an irresistible dimpled smile and burdened with an extra pair of nipples--who soon becomes the lover of this clownish scientist. Love touches his heart and the affective part of the man blossoms. The scenes with Loola provide incongruous low comedy or Hollywood romance (love among the ruins) in a story inspired by dismay for mankind. The love motif conflicts with the disaster scenario so that, in contrast, Golding appears wise to bar girls from boarding the plane that crashes on his coral island.

Love, Joy and Peace--these are the fruits of the spirit that is your essence and the essence of the world. But the fruits of the ape-mind, the fruits of the monkey's presumption and revolt are hate and unceasing restlessness and a chronic misery tempered only by frenzies more horrible than itself. (190)

Poole and Loola flee down into the Mojave as they journey to Fresno, there to join the minority community of Hots who are capable of enduring love and monogamy. In an incredible coincidence they camp at the site of William Tallis's grave. His monument reveals all that the lovers know of this man--that he died in profound grief for the world--but Poole cracks a (symbolic) hard-boiled egg over the grave before the lovers travel on to their new life. The infantile rationalist, who might have served out a destructive career in nominee Babuini, has been made whole.

JAMES R. BAKER is the author of William Golding: A Critical Study (St. Martin's, 1965) and editor, with A. Ziegler, of the Casebook Edition of Lord of the Flies (Putnam, 1964). He is one of the founders of Twentieth Century Literature.

NOTES

(6.) In a letter to his brother, Sir Julian Huxley, 9 June 1952, Huxley counters the idea that there can be no redemption for fallen man:

Everything seems to point to the fact that, as one goes down through the subliminal, one passes through a layer (with which psychologists commonly deal) predominantly evil and making for evil--a layer of "Original Sin," if one likes to call it so--into a deeper layer of "Original Virtue," which is one of peace, illumination, and insight, which seems to be on the fringes of Pure Ego or Atman. (Letters 635-36)

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Time 22 June 1962.