The word “æuvre” is hard to translate. It means more than the actual count of a writer’s work. It implies a logic of unfolding, of gradually revealed design. In an æuvre, different genres—fiction, poetry, critical essays—take on a personal unity. The achievement argues as a whole, its sum greater and more coherent than any of the parts. The outward statement of an æuvre is that characteristic French and German enterprise, the complete edition in a row of uniform volumes. The contrast with American habits is sharp. Even the classics go ungathered (there is, as yet, no complete edition of Herman Melville). It was in the explicit image of European custom that Henry James built his own sepulcher of print, the great New York Edition in its plum-colored solemnity.
There is here more than a difference of editorial form. The American writer, particularly during the past few decades, has found it difficult to achieve continuity, to make individual acts of invention part of a natural growth and completion. Faulkner is the sovereign exception, and his particular tactics of cunning and patience point up the failure of many of his contemporaries. The history of the writer who produces a stunning first novel, whose second book is either a nervous pastiche of his own success or a botched fling at something new, and whose later work moves erratically between quality and routine, is almost an American cliché. Much of the best of recent American fiction has been won or lost at a roulette of talent; it is not built.
Some of the reasons look obvious. The financial rewards, the critical adulation, the personal celebrity that can be harvested by a very successful first novel are such as to place the writer in a vulnerable position. If his next work fails or defies the format the critics have prepared for it, judgment turns with a vengeance (Mailer, James Jones, William Styron). Under present American conditions, it is not easy for a writer to win that small body of readers, devoted but critical, who will become a sustaining, patient echo to the deepening of his own craft. Room for experiment is hard come by.
In England, circumstances are grayer but they allow breathing space. A book earns far less, even if it is very well received. By American terms, advances against the next are derisively small (many a successful English novelist counts himself lucky if his publisher offers £250). Criticism is more wary, less prone to hosannas. Universities or creative-writing conferences do not pounce on the living writer with their paralyzing scrutiny. It is still possible for a good publisher to nurse an author through a series of novels that sell only moderately, and keep them in print. Thus may be established an invaluable core of readers who have discovered the work for themselves and who will gradually assert its stature (witness the subterranean growth to fame of the æuvre of John Cowper Powys or Charles Williams). Above all, English life fosters privacies, a narrow quiet and modesty of material existence, such as encourage a writer’s slow development of his own voice and purpose. Hence the striking number of contemporary English novelists who genuinely have “work in progress,” in whose writing there is a vital architecture: Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Evelyn Waugh, C. P. Snow, Lawrence Durrell, Muriel Spark. One may not like what they are doing, but their individual books carry the sense of a whole.
This has been strikingly true of William Golding. His manner of life illustrates the case. He did not publish fiction until he was forty-three. His professional career has been that of a schoolmaster in Salisbury. He has lived in the West Country, away from the literary froth and journalism of London. Despite his fame, Golding’s earnings remained modest until recently; his independence is probably based on American lecture fees rather than on English royalties. His style of life and his schoolmastering have allowed (and compelled) him to work slowly. Lord of the Flies was published in 1954; The Inheritors followed in 1955, but had been written and rewritten earlier. Pincher Martin, a very short book, appeared in 1956; Free Fall in 1959. Golding’s new novel has been impatiently awaited, but he held back and reworked. The Spire has been nearly five years in the making. It too is part of an unfolding shape, of a vision in progress.
At present, Golding’s place is even higher in America than it is in England. For a time he replaced Camus and Salinger as the idol of the college bookstore. Lord of the Flies has been a password among the young. Theses are starting to grind the living flesh to fine, dead powder. He has touched a particular American nerve.
This is no accident. He represents, nearly too neatly, the classic contrast between the American tradition of the novel as romance, as dark fable and philosophic allegory, and the English norm of social fiction. The natural precedents to Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin are the tales of Hawthorne and Billy Budd. (This is true even though the plot of Lord of the Flies has its source in an English boys’ adventure story, and owes something to A High Wind in Jamaica.) Golding’s peculiar conjunction of moral allegory and-sensuous detail, the fantasy, solitude, and violence of his outlook touch at many points on the art of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. To find anything like it in the English tradition, one would look to the “outsiders”—to the Brontës, to Stevenson, to John Cowper and T. F. Powys.
Consciously or not, Golding has chosen themes and settings remote from the conventions of the contemporary English novel. Only Free Fall, with its possible echoes of Joyce Cary, is located on home ground and amid the props of habitual society—and even here the controlling device is one of violence and extreme situation. The Inheritors is set in pre-history, The Spire in the Middle Ages. Obvious strands relate the island of Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin’s rock fang to a mainland of class, society, and current crisis, but they run through strange, isolating seas.
Golding’s novels turn on three major themes or obsessions: barbarism, solitude, and will. One can watch how Golding initiates and explores a motif from book to book, how he mines it from different directions of imagination until he has made it his own. Thus The Inheritors and Lord of the Flies form a close pair, whereas Pincher Martin—sea-girt as is the island fable—maps the study in confinement and solitude carried out in Free Fall. By its very title, Free Fall proclaims the metaphors of height and vertigo, of free will and imperiled grace, which define the theme of The Spire.
There are close interrelations. The fabric of human sanity and rational custom is persistently gnawed by savagery or the break of will. A statement from The Golden Bough could stand in epigraph: “We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.” And clearly, Frazer’s hypothesis of how much of ritual terror and magic has survived in the modern psyche matters to Golding. But the counter-strokes of civilization are ambiguous. The “humane barbarism” of the aboriginals in The Inheritors is supplanted by a more rational, efficient savagery. The frenzied pack in Lord of the Flies, with its barbed parody of Rousseau’s dream of child and noble savage, is reclaimed to order and civilization by an instrument of modern war, by a ferocity more disciplined but ultimately more damned than that of the boys—a point made more insistent in the film than in the book.
Solitude is also two-edged. There is no easy escape from the contagion of the group. Alone on a sliver of rock or in the black broom-closet of Free Fall (like Poe, Golding is a master of suffocation and solitary confinement), the human character splinters into raw fragments of fear and hysterical egotism. Together we cry havoc; alone we rend our own flesh. The hazard of grace lies in enormous labors of will: by making of the soul a pure blaze of will, we claw to the top of the rock, we defy the jeering totem of evil, we burst out of the closet. But the price is mortal poise; at its uttermost stretch, the human will makes dizzy and we plummet.
That is the plot of The Spire. Jocelin, Dean of the Cathedral Church of Our Lady at Salisbury, is possessed, to the point of near madness, by the vision of a stone arrow, four hundred feet high, in eternal flight to God’s heaven. To stonemason and fellow priest, to the Cathedral chapter and the outside world, Jocelin’s vision is blasphemous folly. No such spire can be built; the foundations are crumbling beneath its crazy weight; the base pillars of the church sing and bend in intolerable strain; the rising fabric of stone and wood moves sickeningly in the autumn gales.
Jocelin sacrifices every duty, every discrimination, to the shrill fixity of his dream. The money he uses to build is tainted with mockery and corruption. In the stricken nave, open to rubble and the rise of stinking water, the candles go out and the choirs fall silent. There is lechery and murder among the workers; they scurry about like the wolf pack in Lord of the Flies. Thrust out of the stripped loins of the church, the steeple infects all who pass under its shadow. But Jocelin lashes himself into a frenzy of will. An angel stands at his back in mysterious affirmation. Is he God’s messenger, or Jocelin’s will kindled to incarnate flame? The Dean forces himself up the spire in a final lust of soul; he hammers in the crowning nail. Then, in a gesture which is both supreme abasement and a probing of God’s purpose, Jocelin drives a spike deep into the southeast pillar. Even as the spire should come crashing down, he himself falls to the stone floor, his body scorched with a fatal burning.
The fable has a rigorous simplicity. Minor characters exist only as they pass in and out of the wild light of Jocelin’s obsession. The huddled roofs and the river, the downs and the distant beat of the sea, are viewed solely from the angle of the spire. The wheel of the sky and seasons pivots on the mounting structure of pinnacle and octagon. Every page of the novel bears the stress of mutinous stone.
The writing shows all of Golding’s characteristic devices: the very short sentences with their effect of arrested speed; the knit of abstract noun and concrete verb; the omission of the article to give a curious, archaic intensity. The dialogue, as nearly always in Golding, jerks abruptly between normal communication and inward speech. The language is formidably tactile. Even light is made solid to the skin:
Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how the individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral.
Clearly, this is a book of great beauty and distinction of style. But it is not, I think, a good novel. The fierce excitement which is its theme grows static and rhetorical. We know from the first page on that the spire will be built and that Jocelin shall perish in the charring of his will. The very glitter of the language becomes monotonous. I found myself skipping ahead, hoping for some twist of life or modulation of tone. One has the impression of one of those Indian ragas, subtle, formal, beautifully played and controlled, but getting nowhere.
The essential design, and many of the details, moreover, are heavily dated. The novel or drama of obsession, of insane singularity of will and purpose, is a nineteenth-century genre: Ahab, Balzac’s La Recherche de l’Absolu, Zola’s L’Oeuvre. A maniac craftsman trafficking with darkness to achieve a perfect object is a stock theme in Hawthorne. The mad will and the mystic church, the tower and vertigo, take us back to Ibsen’s Brand and The Master Builder. The mute stonecarver who acts as guardian of Jocelin’s conscience has the unexamined pathos of his forebear in Notre-Dame de Paris—a link with Victor Hugo which seems relevant also to Hans d’lslande and Pincher Martin.
The allegory creaks with labored cliches. The spire is the mast of a storm-battered ship. It is a phallus. It ends, in the instant of Jocelin’s death, by being the apple tree of man’s knowledge and “free fall.” Sexual temptation has red hair. Most of the figures are as graphic and flat as playing cards.
That is becoming the main problem of Golding’s art. Allegory generates a surface strength. But it goes hollow unless there is behind it a genuinely complex argument and reading of experience. Golding’s allegoric fiction renders an incisive but increasingly narrow view of human possibility. Notably, it excludes a full treatment of the relations between men and women. The only woman who has come fully alive in Golding is Taffy, and all we see of her in Free Fall are a few glimpses. Here again, Golding’s novels fit the pattern of tense masculinity that prevails in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.
In Golding’s choice of a medieval setting, in the stark naïveté of his tale, there may be an element of withdrawal, of a refusal to enmesh his creative gift with issues more perplexed and contemporaneous. But final simplicity, as in Kafka, works best where it is paradox; where a deep originality and richness of meaning is implicit. As Jocelin crawls down from the reeling summit, the query that nags is—so what?
I say this with diffidence. When dealing with someone of Golding’s stature and integrity of purpose, judgment is provisional. I have been rereading Free Fall and the purgatorial intimations in Pincher Martin. Obviously, some kind of quest is being pursued, and the next novel may give weight to what seems facile and rhetorical in the passion of Dean Jocelin. This is precisely where the notion of an æuvre intervenes. Golding’s novels modify each other in mutual response. We are in mid-course, and it would take rashness to assert that one had unraveled the mastering design.
My worry is, simply, that we are heading toward a religiosity, a positive mystique, far less interesting and personal than Golding’s considerable powers as an artist. The light beckons, and its present absence or tormenting shimmer is finely rendered, but it may turn out to be no more than a High Church candle. This would account for Golding’s prestige on the American campus. Like Camus and Salinger, though in an entirely different vocabulary, he seems to embody and dignify a nervous appetite for revelation. A great novelist, a shaper of new feelings and discomforts, has better to do.