RereadingWilliam GoldingWilliam Golding's 1964 novel about the building of a spire is a study of bringing the near-impossible into being. His writing is no less miraculousThe Spire was published in 1964. The Dean of a cathedral, Jocelin, wants to add a spire to the building, which has no foundations and is therefore a kind of miracle already. The novel is about the second, highly imperfect miracle, the erection of the spire – and the cost, which is financial, physical and spiritual. And it is about creative realisation, bringing the impossible into being. William Golding wrote the first draft of The Spire in 14 days – itself a kind of miracle.
In 1978, the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor. At this time, a year before her death, she was an unregarded, marginalised figure. She was responding to a criticism sometimes levelled at her work. She said: "Observation is a great joy. Some critics charge that I'm merely a descriptive poet which I don't think is such a bad thing at all if you've done it well." It isn't the most robust defence – "which I don't think is such a bad thing at all" – but it's robust enough in its modestly assertive way. A defence of description.
Literary critics often judge writers – favourably and unfavourably – by their doctrine. FR Leavis invariably asked if writers were "life-enhancing", on the side of life. Being "on the side of life" means agreeing with Leavis agreeing with DH Lawrence. Its opposite – "doing dirt on life" – means not agreeing with Leavis agreeing with Lawrence. It is the difference between being basically joyful or basically jaundiced in your attitude to life. Basically. Overall. But literature is about particulars. These are a few particulars I discovered for the first time in John Carey's biography of Golding. They are taken from various unpublished works, including Golding's journal. An anchor is "a chrysanthemum of phosphorescence"; a boat has "the clumsy beauty of a double bass"; at war, he sees "a Christmas tree of exploding ammunition". This is a huge spider on his pillow: "the dry tap and scramble." He was afraid of spiders.
Golding could describe things. Incomparably. And he could describe anything, judging by the range of subjects in those quotations. So could James Joyce and John Updike. Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. And Elizabeth Bishop. The critic and novelist, DJ Taylor thinks that in the case of Bellow, the good writing is only there to show us all "how good a writer he is" – being, in a word, "literary". And Taylor piously hopes that "the first casualty of the next 10 years of novel-writing will be literariness". No more writing. Especially no more great writing. Because that is just showing off. Eccentrically enough, I daresay, I find myself out of sympathy with Taylor's position. I like great writing.
This is Golding describing dust. The cathedral of stone is being dismantled and added to – creating a cathedral of dust, a phantom, a twin. In Seeing Things, Seamus Heaney evokes "a pillar of radiant house-dust". Here is Golding's creation of not one pillar, but several: "Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral … He shook his head in rueful wonder at the solid sunlight." So, as temporary as a mayfly and a serious rival and replacement. Solid sunlight. Dust definitively described by a master.
Golding can scorch us by the immediate heat of his sentences. But sometimes he chooses the slower narrative burn. The first chapter begins with Jocelin holding the model of the spire and laughing: "He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again. The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows. // Chin up, hands holding the model spire before him, eyes half closed; joy – "I've waited half my life for this day!"'
It doesn't quite make sense, or it doesn't make immediate sense. It is like Gerard Manley Hopkins's opening trump, "As kingfishers catch fire …" Kingfishers don't catch fire. Hopkins is using a metaphor to capture the burst of colours given off by the kingfisher. Ted Hughes uses the same idea of combustion for bold colours in "Macaw and Little Miss", a poem from his first book, The Hawk in the Rain: "the macaw bristles in a staring / combustion …" The brilliant extra touch is that adjective "staring" appended to "combustion". All the indignation peculiar to the macaw is there.
In Golding's opening sentence we read "God the Father was exploding in his face …" which is initially as enigmatic as it is dramatic – until it is resolved as a metaphorical description of sunlight streaming through a stained glass window. The delay is important. There is a semantic lag, a slight, postponed understanding throughout The Spire.
"He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head." It reads at first like third-person impersonal, authorial prose, but as the paragraph proceeds, we become aware that the narrative isn't impersonal: it is focalised for Jocelin. It emanates from his point of view. It isn't free indirect speech – a clearer indicator that we are privy to a character's thoughts. An example from Jane Austen: "The comfort of such a friend at that moment as Colonel Brandon – of such a companion for her mother – how gratefully was it felt!" You can hear Elinor Dashwood's voice, her emotion. Focalisation gives us not the character's voice, but the timbre of their thought. And this is crucial to The Spire because, for most of the narrative, the reader is trapped in Jocelin's subjectivity, in Jocelin's solipsism. We find it difficult to judge him – his motives, his purity, his corruption, his ambition, his vanity – because the view of him is restricted. As in a theatre, where the seats are cheaper because a pillar interferes with the view of the stage.
In this case, not a pillar, exactly, but a nose: "He stood, smiling round his nose, head up …", "so Jocelin felt a smile bend the seams of his own face as he looked round his nose at him." The nose stands for the obstacle of the self.
Golding knew exactly what he was doing. Later, he describes Jocelin's fractured memories in terms of narrative: "they were like sentences from a story, which though they left great gaps, still told enough." Clearly self-referential. True, we are afforded glimpses, dispatches, from the outside world. Two young deacons are overheard by Jocelin, denigrating someone unspecified: "Say what you like; he's proud." Second deacon: "And ignorant." First deacon: "Do you know what? He thinks he is a saint! A man like that!"
We can't be sure they are referring to Jocelin, except for the word "but" which begins this sentence: "But when the two deacons saw the dean looming over them, they fell to their knees."
However, the criticism of Jocelin is obliterated by Jocelin's subjectivity, his joy at having held in his hand the model of the spire that is to be built. "He looked down, loving them in his joy." And he refuses to accept explicitly that they are talking about him. He says: "Who is this poor fellow? You should pray for him rather …" He refuses to accept delivery of the insult he has overheard – and so we cannot be completely sure what he knows and what he doesn't know. The Spire confines us to Jocelin's consciousness – not absolutely, but for most of the novel's length.
There is in the opening pages a dumb mason who is sculpting Jocelin's head for a gargoyle to be built into the spire. He carves while Jocelin loses himself in prayer. It is an objective record. Yet Jocelin disputes it: "Oh no, no, no! I'm not as beaky as that! Not half as beaky!" Then he contemplates the gaunt stone portrait head and reinterprets its bony features as the portrait of spirituality. The dumb man makes a gesture that Jocelin interprets to mean bird flight. And from that supposition it is only a step to identifying with angels: "Rushing on with the angels, the infinite speed that is stillness, hair blown, torn back, straightened with the wind of the spirit, mouth open, not for uttering rain-water, but hosannas and hallelujahs."
The function of the gargoyle is over-ridden. By Jocelin, primarily, though he is conscious of his hubris. A hubris he attributes to the sculptor. "Don't you think you might strain my humility, by making an angel of me?"
And what is the answer to this question? The sculptor shakes his head. "Humming in the throat, headshake, doglike, eager eyes." Is the dumb sculptor denying that Jocelin's humility is vulnerable? Or is he denying that he ever thought of portraying Jocelin as an angel in the first place? Jocelin's extrapolation is, after all, based on a gesture.
What is the dumb sculptor doing in the novel? He represents the muted objective narrative voice. Which we hear only as William James's description of consciousness: "one great blooming buzzing confusion".
It is Golding's task as a novelist to keep this ambiguity alive for the length of his novel.
Let me return to the very beginning of The Spire and ask why Jocelin is laughing? The obvious reason is that he is laughing because he is happy. He has the model of the spire in his hands. But is that all? In the stained glass there are two images. God the father exploding in his face – a phrase that suggests a disaster brought on the self by the self. It blew up in his face. The other image in the stained glass is Abraham and Isaac. In Hebrew, the name "Isaac" means "she laughed". She is Sarah, the wife of Abraham. When Abraham was over 100 and Sarah well beyond child-bearing age, Sarah was promised a son – and she laughed. But the promise comes to pass. Miracles are possible. The spire might also come to pass – and does, at an extraordinary cost. After extraordinary sacrifices. Sacrifices: again we think of Abraham agreeing to sacrifice the boy Isaac and thus demonstrate obedience to a relentless deity. "Consumed and exalted." And those rainbows created by Jocelin's tears of laughter are brilliantly naturalistic, but they also nod to the rainbow of the covenant between God and man after the flood, giving man dominion over the earth and its animals. Power. Like the imperfect power Jocelin wields.
And there is another reason why Jocelin is laughing. He is laughing because The Spire is a divine comedy. In Dante, the word commedia doesn't mean the Comedy Store. It means a happy ending – paradiso, after the inferno and purgatory. In Golding's novel, comedy means something dark, and bitterly ironic. Is Jocelin's angel an angel? Or is the angel a hallucination caused by Jocelin's tubercular spine? There are two explanations. It is not until the final pages that we know for a certainty that we can never know.
There are two explanations just as there are two cathedrals – one of stone, one of dust – in the first chapter. At the end of The Spire, Golding returns to the idea of dust. The dying Jocelin examines a patch by a mounting block. "But for all the feet that had trodden it, it remained ordinary dust." Not a cathedral of individual motes shot through by the sunlight of genius.
Radio 3 is broadcasting five essays to celebrate the centenary of William Golding's birth between Monday 19 and Friday 23 September 2011.
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