Wormholes by John Fowles

Author:John Fowles [FOWLES, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-44640-268-9
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

GOLDING AND ‘GOLDING’

(1986)

I met William Golding only once, at a pleasant, small, private occasion in the autumn of 1983, just three weeks before the announcement that he had won the Nobel Prize, a coming honour he must have known of but breathed not a word of at our lunch. We were both outshone by David Cecil, who was also there. It is rather difficult to be anything else before someone with amusing memories of being snubbed by Virginia Woolf in her own drawing room and the like; but I think our being outshone by a skilled conversationalist and raconteur was fairly typical of most novelists in such situations. Our talent seldom lies in the spoken, or in the leaving, after such informal encounters, of an indelible impression. I hasten to add that I was not disappointed in my famous fellow author; much more, slightly dislocated. Somehow Golding the man, the presence that day, did not quite fit how I had supposed he might be either from his books or from what small gossip I had heard of him—did not fit what I need really to put in inverted commas, an entity made purely of punctuation, ‘Golding’.

This must seem naive and foolish of me, since I have long had to realize that I share my own life with just such an entity as ‘Golding’. In an extremely unfair kind of way something called ‘Fowles’ has become my representative in the public world, a kind of vulgar waxwork figure with (it seems to me) only a crude caricature resemblance to the original. I believe the Japanese set up stuffed hate figures in their factory gymnasiums, for the workers to take out their resentments on. That is ‘Fowles’. Occasionally this monstrously insufficient surrogate provokes something rather different, a kind of foolish idolatry, like some sort of obscure local saint in Catholic countries . . .but both simulacra remain equally remote from recognizable life.

The real Golding: an affable, gentle man in all outward respects, though not without the bluff asperity or disagreement now and then. Had I not known who he was, I might have guessed a spry retired admiral, as indeed he appears (with clearly comic intent) in one of the crew photographs in the very recent An Egyptian Journal. In the flesh he shows a mixture of authority and reserve, with a distinct dry humour, a tiny hint of buried demon; a man still with a touch of the ancient schoolmaster, and also of what years ago in the Marines we used to call the matelot . . . as anyone who has read the potted biography on the back of one of his books could foresee. He looked older than I expected. I had always thought of him as being of my own age, not a decade and a half my senior, white-bearded, as he is in reality.

For some reason he reminded me that day—it must seem absurdly—on the one hand of an Elizabethan bishop-scholar of the more tolerant humanist kind,

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