Last week the TLS published reviews of two noteworthy biographies...
First, John Carey’s authorized biography of William Golding (
William Golding - The man who wrote 'Lord of the Flies',
Faber, 2009, 573p). Golding was a late bloomer. A very successful one
for that matter. He was in his mid forties when he published his first
novel,
The Lord of Flies, which became an instant success. In 1983 he received the Nobel Prize.
About a later novel, Allan Massie writes, in his overall positive review, the following baffling comments:
The victim in Rites of Passage
is the young clergyman Colley, who takes to his bed and apparently dies
of shame after participating in a drunken homosexual incident on the
lower deck. Some of Golding's friends believed that he had homosexual
tendencies himself, and after a dream in which he had dressed up in his
mother's clothes Golding wrote in his notebooks: 'I pretend to be
immune to such bent delights as homosexuality and transvestism, but my
dreams won't let me get away with standard attitudes about myself'. He
dreamed of making love to two of his Oxford contemporaries and of being
invited by a small Ethiopian boy 'to bugger him'. He declined the
invitation 'with a gloomy sense that he has missed the only thing the
place has to offer'. Such dreams represented his unconscious self, and
he denied any 'real life' homosexual experience. Carey, perhaps wisely,
does not indulge in further speculation, though he notes that when
Golding's daughter published a novel, it was one in which the heroine's
father 'reveals that he was in love with another man before meeting her
mother'.
Golding, who died in 1993, can also be remembered
for his contribution to naming Lovelock's hypothesis after Gaia, the
goddess of the Earth. Which is not a minor achievement, considering the
relevance of the Gaia hypothesis in explaining the current acceleration
of climate changes... In his latest memoir,
The Vanishing Face of Gaia - A Final Warning (Basic Books,, 2009, 278p), a fascinating book, worth reading, James Lovelock writes:
May
I remind you why I call the Earth Gaia? It came about in the 1960s when
the author William Golding, who subsequently won the Nobel and many
other prizes, was near neighbor and friend. We both lived in the
village of Bowerchalke, twelve miles southwest of Salisbury in southern
England. We would often talk on scientific topics on walks around the
village or in the village pub, the Bell Inn. In 1968 or 1969, during a
walk, I tried out my hypothesis on him; he was receptive because,
unlike most literary figures, he had taken physics while at Oxford as
an undergraduate and fully understood the science of my argument. He
grew enthusiastic and said, "If you are intending to come out with a
large idea like that, I suggest that you give it a proper name: I
propose 'Gaia.'" I was pleased with his suggestion - it was a word, not
an acronym, and even then I saw the Earth as in certain ways alive, at
least to the extent that it appeared to regulate its own climate and
chemistry. Few scientists are familiar with the classics, and are
unaware that Gaia is sometimes given the alternate name 'Ge.' Ge, of
course, is the prefix of the sciences of geology, geophysics and
geochemistry. To Golding, Gaia, the goddess who brought order out of
chaos, was the appropriate title for a hypothesis about an Earth system
that regulate its climate and chemistry so as to sustain habitability.
But
I am digressing... On the next page of the TLS, Richard Davenport-Hines
reviews Micheal Bloch's biography of James Lees-Milne (
James Lees-Milne - The Life,
John Murray, 2009, 400p). Lees-Milne was an English writer,
architectural historian, novelist and biographer. He is best
remembered, though, for his diaries:
In
1975, he began publishing his diaries, running to a dozen volumes
covering the period from 1942 until his death in 1997. As a chronicle
of his social, aesthetic and sexual milieux -of the upper classes in
years of retrenchments, of conservationists' skirmishes with the
despoilers, of 'pansy' courage in hard times, of persevering, stylish
old age - they are unsurpassed. His prose improved with age: by the end
he wrote with captivating precision.
John Murray published
two volumes of the diaries covering the years 1971 to 1997, edited and
abridged by Michael Bloch. Bloch, who became Lees-Milne's literary
executor, was an Oxford undergraduate when Lees-Milne fell in love with
him. Davenport-Hines remarks:
Lees-Milne
was fifty-nine when male homosexuality was partly decriminalized in
Britain. The cryptic letters he exchanged with lovers, the clandestine
thrills, mischief, duplicity, alcoholism, anguish, sacrifices,
loyalties and undying loves of his sexual underworld, which Bloch
traces with taste as well as candour, makes a compelling theme.
2009.10.04
