Trailing clouds of glory?

New Yorker, 31 August 1963⁵²

First the Birds and now the Kids. The old standards of innocence are under fire. Perhaps it was Henry James who originally turned the screws on the clean Wordsworthian image of childhood. Anyway, that romantic notion had long ago been knocked out of literature, and then Hitchcock smeared the Franciscan reputation of birds, leaving us with no fixed moral point by which to navigate. The world has become a Satanic sea, and we are adrift in a hurricane of evil, with the pole star of innocence gone forever. A few years back, in his imaginative and, one supposes, unsettling novel Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding ruined whatever illusions we had left, stomping them to death with Hobbes-nailed boots. Professor C. B. Macpherson, in his recent book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, makes an interesting point that has a vital bearing on the main thesis of Lord of the Flies. He says that Hobbes’ theory of the natural man – a nasty brute with a short, ferocious life – is not, as some have held, derived from some actual original state; it is a deduction from current naughtiness, a retroactive fiction that draws its gloomy conclusions from evidence in the here and now.⁵³ In other words, its pessimism works backward. While seeming to lay our present ferocity to the persistence of an original brutishness, it actually postulates that ancient state on the basis of the hoggishness we have at hand. It appears to be Golding’s view that the public-school cherubs in his novel revert to a primitive state. In reality – to look at it the way Professor Macpherson might – they merely ditch a few courtesies and reveal a full-blown version of the bullying nastiness that they already showed back in England’s green and pleasant land. And this is the strength of Peter Brook’s remarkable film version of Golding’s novel.

With an uncanny ear for locker-room chat, Brook, who both adapted and directed Lord of the Flies, has reproduced all the callow customs of the English public school. Far from being, as Golding had it, a universal allegory or a parable about the human condition in general, this is a brilliant local satire. For all its war paint and bonfires, totems and pig-sticking, it never departs from the classroom idiom, and in this it has a great deal in common with Robert Musil’s Young Törless (1906). The desert island is a convenient dramatic counterpart of the Austrian attic where the young toffs act out their sadistic ceremonies. It’s an undress version of familiar public-school vice, removed from the restraining hand of ‘Sir’ – an alfresco production of Tom Brown’s School-days (1857), with Jack, the fierce young chorister, filling in for Flashman, the bully of the Upper Fifth. The satire gains strength by this adherence to local colour, and it is greatly to Brook’s credit that he has not been seduced away from it by the booming generality of the book. All that stuff about mythopoesis is nice enough, but it shouldn’t distract one from the humdrum exchanges between the actual boys, since it is in these that the satire really finds its meat. The details of ‘picking up sides,’ the furtive giggles at a bare-bottom beating, the wrangling over leadership, and the inky chatter of the younger boys are beautifully captured in Brook’s free improvisations. This adds up to a drama that is far more piercing and, in the end, makes a far more convincing point than any of the book’s anthropological ideas, which, when they are not trivial, are certainly dubious. Brook’s direction has been attacked elsewhere for having his boys talk like young public-school boys and for failing to show them as young savages. Yet this seems to be its triumph. The picture’s final burst of anarchy, for all its fierceness, is not a return to some hypothetical state of savagery; it’s just schoolboys run wild – murderous and bloodthirsty, perhaps, but still schoolboys. When authority goes and misrule prevails, we do not return to a primeval condition but rush instead toward a more turbulent and hectic form of our previous, civilized condition.

There is an astonishing performance by Hugh Edwards as the myopic Piggy. Stumbling along the strand in his long, baggy shorts, this extraordinary young man has mastered the style of Golding’s fat, cowardly pragmatist. Crippled by asthma and held up to scorn for his ridiculous figure, Piggy has all the dreary realism of someone whose physical handicaps have driven him to resignation. Disqualified by his bulk from the sporty heroism of his colleagues, he has a plodding common sense that provides a perfect counterpoint to their cruel Jungian fantasies. He is just too fat and breathless to be swept away by their athletic volatility of spirit. He is accidentally wise – unmoved by all the talk of monsters, not through any superiority of intelligence but because his fat boy’s world of tea and telly simply won’t allow such aberrations. He serves as ballast to the slightly Wagnerian extremism of his more streamlined schoolmates. Hugh Edwards carries all this off with magnificent aplomb, and the flat, adenoidal monologue in which he tells his mates everything about his home town of Camberley is an inspired episode, placing his role with perfect accuracy. Tom Chapin, as the ruthless Jack – a lanky, pubescent sadist – displays all the moody vanity of this type. Tom Hollyman’s photography makes beautiful use of grainy close-ups, and the whole thing has been cut with sabre-toothed abruptness by Peter Brook and Gerry Feil. The soundtrack is conspicuous for a fine, harsh sibilance – the crackle of branches and the hot whine of insects.