Books: A Prize as Good as Golding

A new Nobel laureate raises hackles and questions

Q. Name three authors worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose last names start with the letter G.

A. Nadine Gordimer. Günter Grass.

Graham Greene.

Right, but still incorrect. With traditional quirkiness, the Swedish Academy last week bestowed the Nobel laurel (and approximately $193,000) on English Novelist William Golding. The decision dumbfounded nearly everybody and drove one of the 18 academy members into an unprecedented public complaint. Artur Lundkvist, 77, called the selection of Golding a "coup" and described the new laureate as "decent but hardly in the Nobel Prize class." Lars Gyllensten, permanent secretary of the academy, countered this objection by saying Lundkvist has "the soul of a magpie" and then announced, a day later, that the maverick "has beaten a retreat and acknowledged that Golding is worthy of the prize."

Others may not be so quickly convinced. The academy's lengthy statement explaining its choice notes that Golding's books "can be read with pleasure and profit without the need to make much effort with learning or acumen." The trouble with this statement is that it is both true and something less than a ringing endorsement for the world's most prestigious literary honor.

Golding, 72, should have been spared both the Nobel Prize and the controversy surrounding its unexpected arrival. An amiable, modest man, he once noted that "my books have been written out of a kind of delayed adolescence." The self-evaluation is astute, for the readers who have responded most enthusiastically to his work have been succeeding generations of adolescents.

His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a suffragist, and the Cornish village of his childhood comfortable and insular. His parents wanted him to become a scientist, but after two years at Oxford he decided to study English literature instead. After graduation he held a succession of temporary jobs, including one with a provincial theater company, published a volume of poems when he was 23, and enlisted in the Royal Navy at the onset of World War II. In his early 30s, Golding came of age. "One had one's nose rubbed in the human condition," he recalls. He witnessed the sinking of the Bismarck, took part in the Normandy invasion and decided that the human race was inherently evil.

This revelation, added to postwar years of teaching, produced Lord of the Flies (1954), a taut parable about a group of English schoolboys who are deposited for safekeeping on a coral island while their elders wage nuclear war. Slowly but inexorably, they revert to savagery. "The theme," Golding explained, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." The book sold modestly in both England and the U.S. (2,383 copies), but a paperback reprint issued in 1959 hit pay dirt. It became the desired and then the required reading for millions of high school and college students.