The Spire of Babel
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Spire of Babel By Stanley Edgar Hyman Two years ago in these pages [Aug. 20, 1962], I described William Golding as the most maverick of novelists, a chooser of the least...
...Jocelin beats them off with the Nail, climbs to the top of the spire and drives in the Nail...
...Jocelin has sacrificed himself, Goody, and the rest to the Greater Glory of God...
...Two powerful mad scenes in the book show Golding at the height of his powers...
...In the course of the building, Jocelin spends more and more of his time in the spire, first to bring the men luck, then to help them with the work, finally because their labor is his "service...
...Jocelin attacked and stripped by a mob of townspeople, Jocelin arranging his tomb, Jocelin dying with the Host on his tongue— all are anticlimax...
...Then, with the spire safe, Jocelin is given over to the devils...
...In one, deserted in the spire because the men have inexplicably left work early, Jocelin sees fires spring up all around the countryside...
...Jocelin sees them as an Army of the Lord, "adding glory to the house...
...You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs—this novel concerns itself with the eggs...
...His love is finally consummated: "there was a wave of ineffable good sweetness, wave after wave, and an atonement...
...On this level, the spire is not held up by God's grace but by man's will...
...He thinks bitterly, "The cost of building material," when he comes upon Goody and Roger in the spire...
...In the course of the work Jocelin discovers that Roger has no Christian faith, and that he is terrified of heights...
...Jocelin himself is an elderly fanatic, mad in a brilliant and outwardly-controlled fashion...
...Take what you want, says God, and pay for it—this novel concerns itself with the payment...
...Goody's body and blood replace Christ's as the sacrifice, in Jocelin's imagination, and he realizes that Goody has always been his true love, and that he has slain her...
...The Spire is much more than a record of madness or obsession...
...Jocelin's final boast, as he lies paralyzed, is: "My spire pierced every stage, from the bottom to the top...
...Roger takes to drink...
...Roger Mason, the master builder who designs and achieves the spire, is another of its victims...
...After the spire is up, the book inevitably weakens, and Golding should have ended it sooner...
...My reference was to his first three novels: Lord of the Flies, about a group of English schoolboys reverting to savagery...
...In a sweet hot dance in devil "uncountry," Goody comes to him, "naked in her red hair...
...Jocelin has erotic dreams of Goody's red hair in association with his spire...
...When Goody's husband deserts in terror of the workmen, she has an affair with Roger...
...But he is the most interesting British writer today, and he baits his hook for Leviathan...
...The Spire tells of the construction of a gigantic spire on an already completed cathedral during the Middle Ages...
...The Inheritors, about the extinction of Neanderthal Man by Homo sapiens...
...This spire is the obsessive project of Jocelin, Dean of the cathedral, who tells the builder in a moment of prescience: "1 see now it'll destroy us of course...
...Golding writes of Jocelin: "His will began to burn fiercely and he thrust it into the four pillars...
...It is these moments of glory that justify The Spire, not the pages of architectural description...
...A guardian angel with six wings visits him occasionally, then settles into constant attendance...
...to set their son on the altar of sacrifice...
...The projected spire was called Jocelin's Folly because the four stone pillars of the church that were to support it themselves rested on no foundation...
...Jocelin weeps for the sins of the world, and decides that as David could not build the temple because of Uriah's blood on his hands, so is his purpose similarly defiled by Goody's blood...
...At the end of the novel he is a bedridden alcoholic, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to hang himself in the outhouse, a blind and dumb one...
...Jocelin sees a workman cavorting, "the model of the spire projecting obscenely from between his legs...
...This vignette beautifully foreshadows her downfall as a result of the spire...
...Goody becomes pregnant and, assaulted by Roger's wife, she miscarries and dies in agony...
...Brace & World, 215 pp., $3.95), and 1 am prepared to modify my opinion somewhat...
...First an imaginary zany in motley strikes him in the groin with a pig's bladder, then a devil torments him at night, eventually all the demonic hordes in Wiltshire have a go at him...
...Then Jocelin realizes that the twig he saw in the cathedral is pagan mistletoe...
...As a result of the nervous tension of the construction...
...In this dry air, his will, his blazing will, was shut down to a steady glow, which illuminated and supported the new building...
...After the spire is built, these pillars are discovered to be hollow and filled with rubble...
...He may be a saint, or he may be a blasphemer...
...When the spire is completed, Jocelin's spine, struck by his angel with a flail, collapses, and Jocelin is left disillusioned and dying...
...to marry a whore...
...On the first level, the literal or historical, the novel is a story of Christian sacrifice...
...Early in the novel a riot by the workmen results in the tearing of Goody's chaste dress and the exposure of her body...
...The workmen are, in the Church's eyes, "murderers, cutthroats, rowdies, brawlers, rapers, notorious fornicators, sodomites, or worse...
...In the two years that it takes to build the spire, Jocelin goes without confession and the sacraments, and he ceases to function as a priest...
...Golding is still the most maverick of novelists, but his subjects have become slightly more promising...
...Jocelin overhears her adulterous dalliance with Roger in the incomplete spire one night, and is shocked less by the act than by her new wanton tone...
...Perhaps the best way to get at its complex significance, and one appropriate to its subject matter, is to look at it in terms of the medieval Four Levels of Meaning...
...You were so—keen...
...His celibacy is a torment of the loins...
...Golding's touch is sometimes unsure...
...As a storm begins to smash the spire, Jocelin braves the elements to go to the cathedral and protect it with the Holy Nail...
...20, 1962], I described William Golding as the most maverick of novelists, a chooser of the least promising fictional subjects...
...There is an embarrassing scene between Jocelin and his confessor Anselm, in which they talk like two schoolgirls having a spat ("Why must you always have a very best friend...
...He is in any case guilty of the sin of pride: picturing his spire as "the apocalypse" to "complete a stone bible," even echoing Christ in "Now you shall have me always with you...
...Jocelin, who had come to give her money to enable her to go away, observes her agony and flees, leaving the money in a pool of blood on the cottage floor...
...The novel's action is the working out of that fate...
...He remembers that they are the balefires of Midsummer Night, "lighted by the devilworshippers out on the hills," and he realizes where the men have gone...
...he tries to pray but Goody appears in a sensual vision...
...The other scene is even more powerful...
...Although Jocelin admits to the possibility that he is mad...
...and Pincher Martin, about the thoughts of a drowning sailor...
...And then there was nothing...
...The cathedral is that of Salisbury, where Golding lives...
...But the spire stands...
...Yet by a miracle, perhaps because of a Holy Nail from the Cross, the spire goes up and stays up...
...Jocelin equates his call to build the spire with God's Kierkegaardian demands in the Bible: "But then out of some deep place comes the command to do what makes no sense at all—to build a ship on dry land...
...Critics of the Gospels, take note...
...On the third level of meaning, the tropological or moral, The Spire is a story of Freudian repression and sublimation (as Golding is fully aware...
...If Jocelin destroys himself and those around him, this destruction is the consequence of a mighty achievement...
...On the next level, the allegorical or typical, Jocelin and his spire are Faustian man, man as he aspires...
...I traded a stone hammer for four people," he recognizes at the end...
...Each time Roger gives up at some insuperable difficulty, Jocelin drives him on, and eventually Roger decides that Jocelin is the devil...
...when he runs down to the cathedral floor, the "paving stones were hot to his feet with all the fires of hell...
...On the ultimate level of meaning, the anagogical or mystical, The Spire is a cautionary fable for the revolutionary or the artist (the partly-autobiographical hero of Free Fall is both a painter and, briefly, a Communist...
...Cost what you like," mad Jocelin cries out to his spire...
...Perhaps the most important casualty is Goody Pangall, the red-haired wife of the cathedral caretaker and Jocelin's beloved god-daughter...
...Of living writers, only Golding, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and a lady whose name escapes me at the moment could bring off such a Witches' Sabbath, or would try to...
...As Ibsen's Master Builder falls from his tower, so Jocelin pride-and-falls...
...Anagogically, The Spire is about the terrible human cost of vision, of creation—ultimately of Golding's own vocation...
...The book is not accurate in its details of medieval life, nor is this sort of literal accuracy important to Golding (thus the fires lit with Piggy's concave eyeglasses in Lord of the Flies...
...to sit among the dunghills...
...Satan in the likeness of a cosmic wildcat" appears and dashes him to the ground, and all the devils out of hell attack him...
...For his own amusement, Golding will add an occasional artificial wormhole, such as spelling "tithe" "tythe," but if he wants Roger to mock a statement of Jocelin's with "Big talk," "Big talk" is what Roger will say...
...Since then 1 have read Free Full, a painter's melodramatic confessions, and now The Spire (Harcourt...
...In these terms the spire is Jocelin's enormous erection, vaster than Goody can contain and live, an impious spire of Babel to challenge the Yahvist's old phallic deity...
...Despite this angel, Jocelin is tormented by evil forces...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 12
