‘Nuncle,’ says the fool in Lear, ‘thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ the middle. Look — here comes one of the parings.’ The paring in question is Goneril and she gives him a dirty look. No one has ever been quite sure what happened to the fool later on. He disappears halfway through the play in mysterious circumstances, but we need not be surprised. He asked time and again for summary measures to be taken against him. Oh, the uncomfortable counsel he gave! ‘Thou did’st little good when thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers.’ He tries to comfort Lear; to turn his mind from his sorrows; but ever and again the bitter truth will out. Notice that he never says ‘It was a piece of folly to put yourself in the power of your bloody-minded daughters’. Always the truth is metaphorical. So he disappears; and though Shakespeare nowhere says so, it is plain enough to me that Lear’s daughters got him in the end. For the fool was a fabulist, and fabulists are never popular. They are those people who haunt the fringes of history and appear in miscellanies of anecdotes as slaves or jesters, rash courtiers, or just plain wise men. They tell the dictator, the absolute monarch what he ought to know but does not want to hear. Generally they are hanged, or beheaded or even bow-stringed, unless they have the wit to get out of that hole with another pretty jest. It is a thankless task, to be a fabulist.
Why this is so is clear enough. The fabulist is a moralist. He cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it. Arranging his signs as he does, he reaches, not profundity on many levels, but what you would expect from signs, that is overt significance. By the nature of his craft then, the fabulist is didactic, desires to inculcate a moral lesson. People do not much like moral lessons. The pill has to be sugared, has to be witty or entertaining, or engaging in some way or another. Also, the moralist has to be out of his victim’s reach, when the full impact of the lesson strikes him. For the moralist has made an unforgiveable assumption; namely that he knows better than his reader; nor does a good intention save him. If the pill is not sufficiently sugared it will not be swallowed. If the moral is terrible enough he will be regarded as inhuman; and if the edge of his parable cuts deeply enough, he will be crucified.
Any of Aesop’s fables will do as examples to begin with. The fox who loses his tail in a trap and then tries to persuade all the other foxes to cut their’s off, because a fox looks better that way, is a situation that may be paralleled in human experience easily enough. But, you cannot make a scale model. This is why Animal Farm, George Orwell’s splendid fable, having to choose between falsifying the human situation and falsifying the nature of animals, chooses to do the latter. Often, we forget they are animals. They are people, and Orwell’s brilliant mechanics have placed them in a situation where he can underline every moral point he cares to make. We read his funny, poignant book and consent to the lesson as much out of our own experience as out of his. There are fables from other centuries, Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps Robinson Crusoe. Children love them, since by a God-given urgency for pleasure, they duck the morals and enjoy the story. But children do not like Animal Farm. Why should the poor animals suffer so? Why should even animal life be without point or hope? Perhaps in the twentieth century, the sort of fables we must construct, are not for children on any level.
With all its drawbacks and difficulties, it was this method of presenting the truth as I saw it in fable form which I adopted for the first of my novels which ever got published. The overall intention may be stated simply enough. Before the second world war I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of society. It is possible that today I believe something of the same again; but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another. I am not talking of one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him or blowing him up or torpedoing him. I am thinking of the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. It is bad enough to say that so many Jews were exterminated in this way and that, so many people liquidated — lovely, elegant word — but there were things done during that period from which I still have to avert my mind less I should be physically sick. They were not done by the headhunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind. I do not want to elaborate this. I would like to pass on; but I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. Let me take a parallel from a social situation. We are commonly dressed, and commonly behave as if we had no genitalia. Taboos and prohibitions have grown up round that very necessary part of the human anatomy. But in sickness, the whole structure of man must be exhibited to the doctor. When the occasion is important enough, we admit to what we have. It seems to me that in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century society of the West, similar taboos grew up round the nature of man. He was supposed not to have in him, the sad fact of his own cruelty and lust. When these capacities emerged into action they were thought aberrant. Social systems, political systems were composed, detached from the real nature of man. They were what one might call political symphonies. They would perfect most men, and at the least, reduce aberrance.
Why, then, have they never worked? How did the idealist concepts of primitive socialism turn at last into Stalinism? How could the political and philosophical idealism of Germany produce as its ultimate fruit, the rule of Adolf Hitler? My own conviction grew, that what had happened was that men were putting the cart before the horse. They were looking at the system rather than the people. It seemed to me that man’s capacity for greed, his innate cruelty and selfishness was being hidden behind a kind of pair of political pants. I believed then, that man was sick — not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time, was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into.
To many of you, this will seem trite, obvious and familiar in theological terms. Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous. I accept the theology and admit the triteness; but what is trite is true; and a truism can become more than a truism when it is a belief passionately held. I looked round me for some convenient form in which this thesis might be worked out, and found it in the play of children. I was well situated for this, since at this time I was teaching them. Moreover, I am a son, brother, and father. I have lived for many years with small boys, and understand and know them with awful precision. I decided to take the literary convention of boys on an island, only make them real boys instead of paper cutouts with no life in them; and try to show how the shape of the society they evolved would be conditioned by their diseased, their fallen nature.
It is worth looking for a moment at the great original of boys on an island. This is The Coral Island, published a century ago, at the height of Victorian smugness, ignorance, and prosperity. I can do no better than quote to you Professor Carl Niemeyer’s sketch of this book.
‘Ballantyne shipwrecks his three boys — Jack, eighteen; Ralph, the narrator, aged fifteen; and Peterkin Gay, a comic sort of boy, aged thirteen — somewhere in the South Seas on an uninhabited coral island. Jack is a natural leader, but both Ralph and Peterkin have abilities valuable for survival. Jack has the most common sense and foresight, but Peterkin turns out to be a skilful killer of pigs and Ralph, when later in the book he is separated from his friends and alone on a schooner, coolly navigates back to Coral Island by dead reckoning, a feat sufficiently impressive, if not quite equal to captain Bligh’s. The boys’ life on the island is idyllic; and they are themselves without malice or wickedness, tho’ there are a few curious episodes in which Ballantyne seems to hint at something he himself understands as little as do his characters…. Ballantyne’s book raises the problem of evil — which comes to the boys not from within themselves but from the outside world. Tropical nature to be sure, is kind, but the men of this non-Christian world are bad. For example the island is visited by savage cannibals, one canoeful pursuing another, who fight a cruel and bloody battle, observed by the horrified boys and then go away. A little later, the island is again visited, this time by pirates (i.e. white men who have renounced or scorned their Christian heritage) who succeed in capturing Ralph. In due time the pirates are deservedly destroyed, and in the final episode of the book the natives undergo an unmotivated conversion to Christianity, which effects a total change in their nature just in time to rescue the boys from their clutches.
‘Thus Ballantyne’s view of man is seen to be optimistic, like his view of English boys’ pluck and resourcefulness, which subdues tropical islands as triumphantly as England imposes empire and religion on lawless breeds of men.’
Ballantyne’s island was a nineteenth-century island inhabited by English boys; mine was to be a twentieth-century island inhabited by English boys. I can say here in America what I should not like to say at home; which is that I condemn and detest my country’s faults precisely because I am so proud of her many virtues. One of our faults is to believe that evil is somewhere else and inherent in another nation. My book was to say: you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here.
So the boys try to construct a civilization on the island; but it breaks down in blood and terror because the boys are suffering from the terrible disease of being human.
The protagonist was Ralph, the average, rather more than average, man of goodwill and commonsense; the man who makes mistakes because he simply does not understand at first the nature of the disease from which they all suffer. The boys find an earthly paradise, a world, in fact like our world, of boundless wealth, beauty and resource. The boys were below the age of overt sex, for I did not want to complicate the issue with that relative triviality. They did not have to fight for survival, for I did not want a Marxist exegesis. If disaster came, it was not to come through the exploitation of one class by another. It was to rise, simply and solely out of the nature of the brute. The overall picture was to be the tragic lesson that the English have had to learn over a period of one hundred years; that one lot of people is inherently like any other lot of people; and that the only enemy of man is inside him. So the picture I had in my mind of the change to be brought about was exemplified by two pictures of the little boy Ralph. The first is when he discovers he is on a real desert island and delights in the discovery.
‘He jumped down from the terrace. The sand was thick over his black shoes and the heat hit him. He became conscious of the weight of clothes, kicked his shoes off fiercely and ripped off each stocking with its elastic garter in a single movement. Then he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows from the palms and the forest sliding over his skin. He undid the snake-clasp of his belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood there naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water.
‘He was old enough, twelve years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood; and not yet old enough for adolescence to have made him awkward. You could see now that he might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness of shoulders went, but there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil. He patted the palm trunk softly; and forced at last to believe in the reality of the island, laughed delightedly again, and stood on his head. He turned neatly on to his feet, jumped down to the beach, knelt, and swept a double armful of sand into a pile against his chest. Then he sat back and looked at the water with bright, excited eyes.’
This is innocence and hope; but the picture changes and the book is so designed that our last view of Ralph is very different. By the end, he has come to understand the fallen nature of man, and that what stands between him and happiness comes from inside him; a trite lesson as I have said; but one which I believed needed urgently to be driven home.
Yet if one takes the whole of the human condition as background of a fable it becomes hopelessly complex, tho’ I worked the book out in detail.
Let us take, for example, the word ‘history’. It seems to me that the word has two common meanings, each of them of awful importance. First there is what might be called academic, or if you like campus history. To my mind this is not only of importance, but of supreme importance. It is that objective yet devoted stare with which humanity observes its own past; and in that stare, that attempt to see how things have become what they are, where they went wrong, and where right, that our only hope lies of having some control over our own future. The exploration of the physical world is an art, with all the attendant aesthetic pleasures; but the knowledge we get from it is not immediately applicable to the problems that we have on hand. But history is a kind of selfknowledge, and it may be with care that selfknowledge will be sufficient to give us the right clue to our behaviour in the future. I say a clue; for we stand today in the same general condition as we have always stood, under sentence of death.
But there is another kind of force which we call history; and how uncontrollable that force is, even in the most detached of men was amusingly demonstrated to me only the other day. I was being driven over the last battleground of the war between the States, a historical episode which I am able to observe with some objectivity. My driver was a southerner and scholar. His exposition to me of the situation was a model of historical balance. He explained to me how the south had embarked on a war which they could not hope to win, in support of a pattern of society which could not hope to survive. He was, perhaps a little harder on the south than a northerner would have been; but judicially so. As the day wore on, his voice began to return to its origins. Emotion crept in — not very far, because of course he was a scholar, and scholars are detached and unemotional are they not? — At a discreet forty miles an hour we followed the wavering fortunes of battle down into Virginia. Here, he told me, Lee had performed that last incredible tactical feat in the defence of Richmond; here, Grant had sidestepped — but what was this? His voice had lost all pretence of scholarship. Insensibly the speed of the car had increased. When we came to the Appomatox, this educated, and indeed rather cynical man grunted — ‘Aw, shucks!’ and drove past the place where Lee surrendered to Grant at seventy-five miles an hour.
This is a different force from campus history. It is history felt in the blood and bones. Sometimes it is dignified by a pretty name, but I am not sure in my own mind, that it is ever anything but pernicious. However this is a political and historical question which we need not settle here and now. My point is that however pathetic or amusing we find these lesser manifestations of prejudice, when they go beyond a certain point no one in the world can doubt that they are wholly evil. Jew and Arab in the name of religion, Jew and Nordic in the name of race, Negro and white in the name of God knows what.
And it is not only these larger more spectacular examples of frozen history which do the damage. I am a European and an optimist. But I do not believe that history is only a nominal thing. There have been many years when as I contemplate our national frontiers, I have fallen into something like despair. Frontiers in Europe may be likened to wrinkles in an aged face, and all that will remove them is the death of the body. Now I know you will point out to me that Europe is already moving towards some confederation; and I would agree and add that that confederation has the full support of every man of goodwill and commonsense. But the wrinkles are so deep. And I cannot think of a confederation in history, where the members voluntarily bowed to supranational authority without at least one of the members fighting a war to contest it. In Europe there is and has been, a terrible fund of national illwill, handed down from generation to generation. There are habits of feeling which have acquired the force of instinct. These habits of feeling may be encouraged in school or college, but they are rarely taught there. They are an unconscious legacy wished on children by their parents. A woman, like one old French lady I knew, who had gone through the business of being conquered three times, in 1870, 1914 and 1940, had acquired an attitude to the Germans which was a hate so deep that she shook when she thought of them. Indeed, as I make these words, I am aware in myself of resents, indignations and perhaps fears which have nothing to do with today, with the England and Germany of today, in a word, with reality, but are there, nevertheless. I got them from off-campus history; and unless I make a conscious effort I shall hand them on. These impulses, prejudices, even perhaps these just hates which are nevertheless backward-looking are what parents luxuriating in a cheap emotion can wish on their children without being properly conscious of it and so perpetuate division through the generations. A less painful example of this is the way in which where one Englishman and one American are gathered together, that sad old story of the eighteenth century will raise its head, so that the American whose ancestors have perhaps been in the States since 1911 will be arrogating to himself all the splendours of that struggle, while the Englishman who may have spent his life in the pursuit and furtherance of liberal principles may find himself forced into the ridiculous position of defending his fellow Englishman George III. My own technique on these occasions, is to start talking about the vicious occupation of my country by the Romans and the splendid resistance to them by our own heroes, Queen Boadicea and King Arthur. Some of these examples are silly, meant to be silly, and are understood as silly by the contestants. They are less severe than the partisanship roused by games of one sort or another; nevertheless they are symptomatic. We ought not to underestimate the power or the destructiveness of these emotions. The one country to leave the British Commonwealth of Nations in recent centuries, is the Union of South Africa, forced out by a universal, if sometimes smug condemnation of her policy towards her own black population. But a quarter of a century ago England and Australia were shaken to the very roots of their common interests by a game of cricket. Those of you who find this incredible, either do not understand the tenuousness of the bond that holds Australia and England together, or else do not understand the fierce passions that can be roused by cricket. But the point is that many Englishmen and Australians did in fact begin to think of each other as objectionable, irrational, ill-disposed, vindictive. For a moment each nation, or at least the sillier members of each — and there are always enough silly people in any country to form a sizeable mass-movement — each nation stood squarely behind their culture heroes, the one a very fast and accurate bowler, the other a batsman who objected to being struck repeatedly on the head. If the random agglomeration of nations which is the commonwealth seems to you to have any power for good, you may consider it lucky that England and Australia are twelve thousand miles apart. Had they been separated, not by half a world, but by a relatively small ocean, Australia might have taken her bat and gone off fiercely to play cricket by herself. It was George Orwell who commented on the destructive force of international contests. Anyone who has watched a television programme of a game between two European nations must agree with him. There’s savagery for you. There’s bloodlust. There’s ugly nationalism raising its gorgon head.
What I am trying to do is to add together those elements, some horrible, some merely funny, but all significant, which I suppose to be the forces of off-campus history. They are a failure of human sympathy, ignorance of facts, the objectivizing of our own inadequacies so as to make a scapegoat. At moments of optimism I have felt that education and perhaps a miracle or two would be sufficient to remove their more dangerous elements. When I feel pessimistic, then they seem to constitute a trap into which humanity has got itself with a dreary inevitability much as the dinosaur trapped itself in its own useless armour. For if humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies. I was feeling pessimistic when I tried to include a sign for this thing in a fable.
The point about off-campus history is that it is always dead. It is a cloak of national prestige which the uneducated pull round their shoulders to keep off the wind of personal self-knowledge. It is a dead thing handed on, but dead though it is, it will not lie down. It is a monstrous creature descending to us from our ancestors, producing nothing but disunity, chaos. War and disorder prolong in it the ghastly and ironic semblance of life. All the marching and countermarching, the flags, the heroism and cruelty are galvanic twitches induced in its slaves and subjects by that hideous, parody thing. When I constructed a sign for it, therefore, it had to be something that was dead but had a kind of life. It had to be presented to my island of children by the world of grown-ups. There was only one way in which I could do this. First I must take the children at a moment when mature council and authority might have saved them as on so many occasions we might have saved our own children, might have been saved ourselves. Since a novelist ought not preach overtly in a fable, the situation had to be highlighted by the children having some dim knowledge that wisdom, that commonsense even, is to be found in the world of grown-ups. They must yearn for it, now they have begun to find the inadequacy of their own powers. I took a moment therefore, when they had tried to hold a council meeting to discuss ways and means but had found that other questions came up — questions which they would sooner have ignored. Finally the meeting breaks down. The children who are retrogressing more rapidly have gone off into the wardance with which they fortify their own sense of power and togetherness. It is dark. The few remainder, puzzled, anxious, surrounded by half perceived threats and mysteries; faced with a problem which once looked so simple of solution, the maintenance of a fire on the mountain, but which proved to be too much for them — these few, men of goodwill, are searching for some hope, some power for good, some commonsense.
‘If only they could get a message to us’, cried Ralph desperately. ‘If only they could send us something grown-up — a sign or something.’
What the grown-ups send them is indeed a sign, a sign to fit into the fable; but in the fable sense, that arbitrary sign stands for off-campus history, the thing which threatens every child everywhere, the history of blood and intolerance, of ignorance and prejudice, the thing which is dead but won’t lie down.
‘There was no light left save that of the stars. The three bigger boys went together to the next shelter. They lay restlessly and noisily among the dry leaves, watching the patch of stars that was the opening towards the lagoon. Sometimes a little ’un cried out from the other shelters and once a big ’un spoke in the dark. Then they too fell asleep.
‘A sliver of moon rose over the horizon, hardly large enough to make a path of light even when it sat right down on the water; but there were other lights in the sky, that moved fast, winked or went out, though not even a faint popping came down from the battle fought at ten miles height. But a sign came down from the world of grown-ups, though at that time there was no child awake to read it. There was a sudden bright explosion and a corkscrew trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars. There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs. The changing winds of various altitudes took the figure where they would. Then, three miles up the wind steadied and bore it in a descending curve round the sky and swept it in a great slant across the reef and the lagoon towards the mountain. The figure fell and crumpled among the blue flowers of the mountainside, but now there was a gentle breeze at this height too and the parachute flopped and banged and pulled. So the figure, with feet that dragged behind it, slid up the mountain. Yard by yard, puff by puff, the breeze hauled the figure through the blue flowers, over the boulders and red stones, till it lay huddled among the shattered rocks of the mountain top. Here the breeze was fitful and allowed the strings of the parachute to tangle and festoon; and the figure sat, its helmeted head between its knees, held by a complication of lines. When the breeze blew, the lines would strain taut and some accident of this pull lifted the head and chest upright so that the figure seemed to peer across the brow of the mountain. Then, each time the wind dropped, the lines would slacken and the figure bow forward again, sinking its head between its knees. So as the stars moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountain top and bowed and sank and bowed again.’
I have no time to prolong this quotation, nor is it necessary, since I am glad to say the book itself remains in print. But it is perhaps worth noticing that this figure which is dead but won’t lie down, falls on the very place where the children are making their one constructive attempt to get themselves helped. It dominates the mountaintop and so prevents them keeping a fire alight there as a signal. To take an actual historical example, the fire is perhaps like the long defunct but once much hoped-over League of Nations. That great effort at international sanity fell before the pressures of nationalism which were founded in ignorance, jealousy, greed — before the pressures of off-campus history which was dead but would not lie down.
Having got thus far, I must admit to a number of qualifications, not in the theory itself but in the result. Fable, as a method, depends on two things neither of which can be relied on. First the writer has to have a coherent picture of the subject; but if he takes the whole human condition as his subject, his picture is likely to get a little dim at the edges. Next a fable can only be taken as far as the parable, the parallel is exact; and these literary parallels between the fable and the underlying life do not extend to infinity. It is not just that a small scale model cannot be exact in every detail. It is because every sort of life, once referred to, brings up associations of its own within its own limits which may have no significant relationships with the matter under consideration. Thus, the fable is most successful qua fable, when it works within strict limits. George Orwell’s Animal Farm confines itself to consideration and satire of a given political situation. In other words, the fable must be under strict control. Yet it is at this very point, that the imagination can get out of hand.
I had better explain that I am not referring now to normal exercises of imagination, which we are told is the selection and rearrangement of pictures already latent in the mind. There is another possible experience, which some may think admirable and others pathological. I remember, many years ago, trying to bore a hole with a drilling machine through armour plate. Armour plate is constructed to resist just such an operation — a point which had escaped me for the time being. In my extreme ignorance, I put the drill in the chuck, held by half an inch of its extreme end. I seized the handle and brought the revolving drill down on the armour. It wobbled for a second; then there was a sharp explosion, the drill departed in every direction, breaking two windows and taking a piece of my uniform with it. Wiser now, I held the next drill deep in the chuck so that only the point protruded, held it mercilessly in those steel jaws and brought it down on the armour with the power behind it of many hundred horses. This operation was successful. I made a small red-hot hole in the armour, though of course I ruined the drill. If this small anecdote seems fatuous, I assure you that it is the best image I know for one sort of imaginative process. There is the same merciless concentration, the same will, the same apparently impenetrable target, the same pressure applied steadily to one small point. It is not a normal mode of life; or we should find ourselves posting mail in mailboxes which were not there. But it happens sometimes and it works. The point of the fable under imaginative consideration does not become more real than the real world, it shoves the real world on one side. The author becomes a spectator, appalled or delighted, but a spectator. At this moment, how can he be sure that he is keeping a relationship between the fable and the moralized world, when he is only conscious of one of them? I believe he cannot be sure. This experience, excellent for the novel which does not claim to be a parable must surely lead to a distortion of the fable. Yet is it not the experience which we expect and hope the novelist to have?
It might be appropriate now to give an example of a situation in which something like this happened. For reasons it is not necessary to specify, I included a Christ-figure in my fable. This is the little boy Simon, solitary, stammering, a lover of mankind, a visionary, who reaches commonsense attitudes not by reason but by intuition. Of all the boys, he is the only one who feels the need to be alone and goes every now and then into the bushes. Since this book is one that is highly and diversely explicable, you would not believe the various interpretations that have been given of Simon’s going into the bushes. But go he does, and prays, as the child Jean Vianney would go, and some other saints — though not many. He is really turning a part of the jungle into a church, not a physical one, perhaps, but a spiritual one. Here there is a scene, when civilization has already begun to break down under the combined pressures of boy-nature and the thing still ducking and bowing on the mountaintop, when the hunters bring before him, without knowing he is there, their false god, the pig’s head on a stick. It was at this point of imaginative concentration that I found that the pig’s head knew Simon was there. In fact the Pig’s head delivered something very like a sermon to the boy; the pig’s head spoke. I know because I heard it.
‘You are a silly little boy,’ said the Lord of the Flies, ‘just an ignorant, silly little boy.’
Simon moved his swollen tongue but said nothing.
‘Don’t you agree?’ said the Lord of the Flies. ‘Aren’t you just a silly little boy?’ Simon answered him in the same silent voice.
‘Well then,’ said the Lord of the Flies, ‘you’d better run off and play with the others. They think you’re batty. You don’t want Ralph to think you’re batty do you? You like Ralph a lot don’t you? And Piggy and Jack?’
Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him.
‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’
Simon shook.
‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the beast.’
Simon’s head laboured, brought forth audible words.
‘Pig’s head on a stick.’
‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?’
The laughter shivered again.
‘Come now’, said the Lord of the Flies. ‘Get back to the others and we’ll forget the whole thing.’
Simon’s head wobbled. His eyes were half-closed as though he were imitating the obscene thing on the stick. He knew that one of his times was coming on. The Lord of the Flies was expanding like a balloon.
‘This is ridiculous. You know perfectly well you’ll only meet me down there — so don’t try to escape!’
Simon’s body was arched and stiff. The Lord of the Flies spoke in the voice of a schoolmaster.
‘This has gone quite far enough. My poor, misguided child, do you think you know better than I do?’
There was a pause.
‘I’m warning you. I’m going to get waxy. D’you see? You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don’t try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else —’
Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.
‘— Or else,’ said the Lord of the Flies, ‘we shall do you. See? Jack and Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph? Do you. See?’
Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness.
That then is an example of how a fable when it is extended to novel length can bid fair to get out of hand. Fortunately the Lord of the Flies’ theology and mine were sufficiently alike to conceal the fact that I was writing at his dictation. I don’t think the fable ever got right out of hand; but there are many places I am sure, where the fable splits at the seams and I would like to think that if this is so, the splits do not rise from ineptitude or deficiency but from a plenitude of imagination. Faults of excess seem to me more forgivable than faults of coldness, at least in the exercise of craftsmanship.
And then I remind myself that after all, the last lecture on sign, symbol, fable and myth, and this one more particularly on fable, are exercises not in craftsmanship but in analysis. I suspect that art, like experience is a continuum and if we try to take elements out of that continuum, they cease to be what they were, because they are no longer together. Take these words, then, as efforts to indicate trends and possibilities rather than discrete things. May it not be that at the very moments when I felt the fable to come to its own life before me it may in fact have become something more valuable, so that where I thought it was failing, it was really succeeding? I leave that consideration to the many learned and devoted persons, who in speech and the printed word, have explained to me what the story means. For I have shifted somewhat from the position I held when I wrote the book. I no longer believe that the author has a sort of patria potestas over his brainchildren. Once they are printed they have reached their majority and the author has no more authority over them, knows no more about them, perhaps knows less about them than the critic who comes fresh to them, and sees them not as the author hoped they would be, but as what they are.
At least the fable has caught attention, and gone out into the world. The effect on me has been diverse and not wholly satisfactory. On the good side it has brought me here, seven thousand miles from home, jet-propelled tho’ somewhat jaundiced. It has subjected me to a steady stream of letters. I get letters from schoolmasters who want permission to turn the book into a play so that their classes can act it. I get letters from schoolmasters telling me that they have turned the book into a play so that their classes can act it. Now and again I get letters from mothers of boys whose schoolmasters have turned the book into a play so that their classes can act it. I get letters from psychiatrists, psychologists, clergymen — complimentary, I am glad to say; but sometimes tinged with a faint air of indignation that I should seem to know something about human nature without being officially qualified.
And at the last — students. How am I to put this gently and politely? In the first place, I am moved and fulfilled by the fact that anyone of your generation should think a book I have written is significant for you. But this, is the standard form of the letters I get from most English speaking parts of the world.
Dear Mr. Golding, I and my friend so and so have read your book Lord of the Flies and we think so forth and so forth. However there are some things in it which we are not able to understand. We shall be glad therefore if you will kindly answer the following forty-one questions. A prompt reply would oblige as exams start next week.
Well there it is. I cannot do your homework for you; and it is in some ways a melancholy thought that I have become a school textbook before I am properly dead and buried. To go on being a schoolmaster so that I should have time to write novels was a tactic I employed in the struggle of life. But life, clever life, has got back at me. My first novel ensured that I should be treated for the rest of my days as a schoolmaster only given a longer tether — one that has stretched seven thousand miles.