Golding delight for ‘paper men’

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 18

Golding delight for ‘paper men’

The Paper Men. By William Golding. Faber and Faber, 1984. 191 pp. $26.25. (Reviewed by Graham Zanker) When William Golding won the Nobel Prize last year (the first Englishman to do so since Winston Churchill back in 1953). the award provoked Artur Lundkvist. one of the eighteen Swedish Academicians who select the winner, to comment that Golding did not “possess the international weight needed to win the prize,” thereby breaking the academy’s 82 years of keeping up a united front. The comment created a minor sensation, but touched upon an important facet of Golding’s works, including “The Paper Men," published this year. The distinguished writer. Wilfred Barclay, the hero and narrator of the novel, “ is indeed what the English papers are enthusiastic to call naughty but “very English”: he is aging, lecherous, and on the verge of alcoholism, but a master of verbal incision and wit, and, above all, successful. Rick L. Tucker, the untenured American academic striving to become Barclay’s biographer, stands in a long line of literary figures embodying what the English like to see as the oafish American fawning on English cultural superiority and displaying “the Americans’ hideous deafness to the English language” (Sebastian Faulks). For example, Barclay twice refers to Tucker as “Jake,” which can only be a reference to Jake Balokowsky, the repellent American “biographer” of Philip Larkin in his poem “Posterity.” The reception of “The Paper Men” in America has been understandably cool. But if the reader can forgive Golding his exploitation of the type and his English particularism (Tucker is, qua type, a sufficiently rounded character and Golding’s regionalism is filled with an irony which the English press prefers not to notice), the theme of “The Paper Men” is quite universal enough, and national character is only a prop in front of which it is played out. This is, after all, a common enough phenomenon in Golding, from “Lord of the Flies” onwards. In other words, Golding’s English slant on things by no means precludes universality. Wilfred Barclay’s tale starts with the moment when he shoots with his airgun what, in the dark and in his characteristically crapulent state, he takes for a badger rummaging through his rubbish bin: the badger is, of course, Rick L. Tucker, who is staying with the Barclays and currently searching for discarded documentation on his “subject.” We are then told of Barclay’s flight from Tucker, who, however, tracks him down in Switzerland and, maddeningly for Barclay, saves him from what would have been a fatal fall on a mountain walk: “It seems I owe you my life,” the infuriated novelist puns. He bolts again, but on an Italian island (unnamed, but probably Sicily)

he is confronted by a statue of Christ in a delapidated church, recognises his belief in God and collapses, whether because of the revelation, the stroke diagnosed by the local doctor, or delirium tremens. He returns to Switzerland, arranges a meeting with Tucker, whom he cruelly tantalises with an offer of the rights to his "life." Back in England, he has learnt "the peace and security" of having come to terms with his writer’s sense of moral defectiveness and, at last truly happy in that knowledge, is writing his “life" to present to Tucker. The actual ending of the novel, or Barclay’s tale, looks simply like a masterpiece of comic gimmickry until you realise that it is also a perfectly satisfying thematic denouement. “The Paper Men" is about a writer's discovery. Barclay has divorced himself from human feeling in his pursuit of art and has cut himself off from ordinary human contact at least partly because of his loathing for the immorality which he associates with his art. He discovers that he is a part of the universe: "I saw that I had been planned from the beginning." He discovers that he is capable of love, which he celebrates in the composition of his autobiography for Tucker. His “sacrifice” is explicitly (if ironically) compared with Christ’s, which might sound heavy stuff, but in Barclay’s deterministic world the discovery of love is redemption indeed. The narrative device is deployed with superb artistry. Barclay’s drunkeness is an hilarious or crushingly depressing method for blurring the outlines, whether of the “moving target’s” careering travel routes, or his recollection of events or conversations. The style can slide legitimately from conversational exercises in verbal wit, to lucid “perfect recall,” to the reflection of the tortured thought-patterns of a strokevictim, or to a semi mystical mode. Some critics have felt that the comedy and self-humour with which Barclay describes some of his more portentous experiences is too buoyant to do anything but to distract, but when you finally learn of the happy state of mind in which Barclay is dashing down his memoirs you realise why he can apparently take things so lightly. Of course, this lightness is a marvellous means of understatement. It is probably clear enough by now that the book is an academic’s delight: in the process of sending up Barclay’s students, critics, and reviewers, Golding exposes the foibles of such people with such a comic sense that few scholars or literary critics could stifle a laugh, though their American colleagues could be forgiven at times if they could. What is more, “The Paper Men” is rich in literary resonances from Homer and Sappho to Nabokov and Waugh, and self-consciously places itself in an interesting literary tradition. So it is a book for “paper men,” but Golding seems to assume, probably rightly, that that’s what all serious readers end up close to being.