Enigmatic Golding

Dick, Bernard F.

Enigmatic Golding Talk: Conversations with William Golding, by Jack I. Biles. Foreword by William Golding. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 112 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Bernard F. Dick Although novelist...

...Biles has asked the right questions, and from them one finally learns about the man who radicalized a generation of students into looking at human nature before carping at society...
...the armchair archaeologist who venerates the past...
...the postwar schoolmaster who immersed himself in the literature of the Greeks whose fatalism echoed his own...
...While many professors have abandoned Golding because of his lack of "relevance" (evil is clearly irrelevant today) and prefer to teach about more topical authors to atone for the sin of their own literacy, Golding has, ironically enough, become a writer's writer...
...Anyone who was shattered by Lord of the Flies, or whose children are now experiencing a similar effect, should read Talk...
...It is therefore a pleasure to have this record of a conversation between Golding and his friend, Jack Biles, an urbane English professor who, unlike many of his peers, does not metamorphose into a footnote at twilight...
...it only seems that they are...
...Golding's demotion from cult hero to arch villain has diminished his reputation among academicians...
...Consequently, Lord of the Flies, the cult book of the 1960s when college kids had an existential hangover, has now moved down to the high school where anyone who has been to camp can relive his ghastly experiences with Ralph and Jack and Simon and Piggy...
...Talk provides the definitive portrait of the would-be poet who went into World War II as an optimist and came out of it a realist...
...the bemused novelist who can chide the critics for finding a symbol under every metaphor...
...It will explain much about this enigmatic writer whose only flaw was that he knew too much about man...
...Yet Academe's ways are not God's...
...His belief that evil is innate in man is untenable to those who would return the world to its primeval harmony...
...Reviewed by Bernard F. Dick Although novelist William Golding was the idol of Hiroshima's children, he has fared less well with today's college generation...

Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3


 
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