Words can change history — laureate

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 37

Words can change history — laureate

NZPA-NYT Stockholm William Golding, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, has appealed to the writers of the world to “move man a little nearer the perilous safety of a warless and provident world.”

The English novelist, aged 72, said in his Nobel Prize lecture to the Swedish Academy and an invited audience in Stockholm’s Old Town that the world seemed bent on self-destruction. “Either we blow ourselves off the face of the Earth or we degrade the fertility of the Earth bit by bit until we have ruined it,” he said. He argued that words could change the course of history and cited those of Sir Winston Churchill, another English laureate in literature, as proof of that. “Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world,” said

Golding. “They may move men to speak to each other because some of those words somewhere express not just what the writer is thinking but what a huge segment of the world is thinking. “They may allow man to speak to man, the man in the street to speak to his fellow until a ripple becomes a tide running through every nation — of common sense, of simple healthy caution, a tide that rulers and negotiators cannot ignore so that nation truly does speak unto nation.” _

Golding adopted a selfmocking if serious tone in his speech. He had been a “middle-aged fool” 25 years ago when he accepted the word “pessimistic” to describe his work; he called himself “an ancient schoolmaster” and he told with delight of the policewoman in a Wiltshire town near his home who gave him a parking ticket the day after he

won the Nobel Prize and then demanded, “Can’t you read?”

Golding is the seventh English laureate in literature, following Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Churchill, Bertrand Russell, and the American-born T.S. Eliot. His most successful novel, “Lord of the Flies,” which sold 20 million copies, appeared almost 30 years ago, but one of his most recent works, “Rites of Passage,” published in 1980, won critical approval and the Booker Prize, England’s premier literary award.

When the Nobel choice was announced, one member of the academy, Arthur Lundkvist, an influential poet and critic, entered a public dissent. He called Golding “a little English phenomenon of no special interest.” But the novelist received a warm reception in Stockholm.