William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey

Author:John Carey [John Carey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265084
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2012-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

21

Disaster

With The Pyramid due to appear on 1 June 1967, Golding followed his usual plan of refusing to talk about the book, and staying out of the country as much as possible prior to publication. He returned a prompt no to BBC Television’s invitation to discuss his new novel on The Lively Arts, hoping that his refusal did not seem ‘stuffy or haughty’. Quite apart from pre-publication nerves he felt that he was, he told Monteith, ‘in a writing slump’. However, once he was abroad his mood brightened. A chatty letter on 1 March from Peter Green’s Athens address, 10 Tsimiski Street, reports that he and Ann have settled in, ‘and very nice too. You can see the ACROP and everything – also the noble descendants of Hellenus necking under the olives in every possible combination of the sexes. It’s a very classical area.’ They are, he adds, off to Russia, ‘next Tuesday, we think, for a fortnight’, and he wonders whether Monteith has any spare proof copies of The Pyramid (‘that exposé of the class system’), since the Russians might publish it, and then they would have ‘lovely roubles to spend on Furs, Ikons, old, unwanted Czarist junk that would otherwise corrupt the Socialist Sixth’. In preparation for their trip they have bought a record ‘with two hundred words of Russian’, of which they have already learnt four. ‘I don’t believe in Russian at all. Nobody, but nobody, could make noises like that.’ Monteith hastened to get a proof copy to them before they left for Greece: ‘Do let me know how the Russkies react to it.’

Having got over the turmoil of their move from Lesvos to Athens, the Greens had more time to spend with their visitors on this holiday than in 1966. One day, after an ‘excellent and discursive lunch’ in the old quarter known as the Plaka, Green asked what they would like to do, and Golding replied resentfully, ‘See the bloody Parthenon, I suppose.’ It was a miserable, rainy afternoon, and the historical site was swarming with tourists. As Green remembers it, after a brief glance at ‘the Western world’s biggest cultural cliché’, Golding seated himself on a block of stone, with his back to the Parthenon, and peered out through the industrial smog that hung over Piraeus at the dirty white mushroom cloud ascending from the Eleusis cement works. ‘This’, he observed moodily, ‘is what I call the right way to look at the Parthenon.’ After a spell of glum silence he added, with evident contempt, ‘Did you know who invented that phrase about “the glory that was Greece”? Edgar Allan Poe.’ At that moment there was a clap of thunder and rain deluged down, scattering the tourists, to the satisfaction of Green and Golding who remained where they were sitting, taking swigs from a hip flask – two ‘laughing, nipping, sodden Olympians in mortal guise’.

This not-entirely-pleasing account was perhaps coloured by Green’s own feelings, for it diverges markedly from Golding’s. ‘The odd thing’, he commented, ‘is that I remember it for a quite different reason.

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