Lord of the Campus

Back in England last week after a year in the U.S., British Author William Golding recalled his interrogation by American college students. "The question most asked was, Is there any hope for humanity?' I very dutifully said 'yes-'" Golding's credentials for being asked such a monumental query--and for answering it--rest on one accomplishment: his Lord of the Flies, a grim parable that holds out precious little hope for humanity, and is the most influential novel among U.S. undergraduates since Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

When Lord of the Flies was first published in the U.S. in 1955. it sold only 2,383 copies, and quickly went out of print. But British enthusiasm for it has been gradually exported to Ivy League English departments, and demand for the book is now high. The paperback edition, published in 1959, has already sold more than 65,000 copies. At the Columbia University bookstore, it outsells Salinger.

Lord of the Flies is required reading at a hundred U.S. colleges, is on the list of suggested summer reading for freshmen entering colleges from Occidental to Williams. At Harvard it is recommended for a social-relations course on "interpersonal behavior." An M.I.T. minister uses it for a discussion group on original sin. At Yale and Princeton--where Salinger, like the three-button suit, has lost some of his mystique as he becomes adopted by the outlanders --the in-group popularity of Golding's book is creeping up. At Smith, where Lord of the Flies runs a close second in sales to Salinger's Franny and Zooey, 1,000 girls turned out for a lecture by Golding. The reception was the same at the thirty campuses Golding visited during his year as a rarely resident writer-in-residence at Virginia's Hollins College.

Creating Their Own Misery. The British schoolboys in Lord of the Flies are a few years younger than Salinger's Holden Caulfield--they are six to twelve--but they are not self-pitying innocents in a world made miserable by adults. They create their own world, their own misery.

Deposited unhurt on a deserted coral island by a plane during an atomic war, they form the responsible vacationland democracy that their heritage calls for, and it gradually degenerates into anarchy, barbarism and murder. When adult rescue finally comes, they are a tribe of screaming painted savages hunting down their elected leader to tear him apart. The British naval officer who finds them says, "I should have thought that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that." Then he goes back to his own war.

Says Golding: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. Before the war, most Europeans believed that man could be perfected by perfecting his society. We all saw a hell of a lot in the war that can't be accounted for except on the basis of original evil." "People I Knew in Camp." What accounts for the appeal? Part of it is, of course, pure identification. A Harvard undergraduate says the book "rounds up all the people I knew in camp when I was a counselor." On another level, Golding believes students "seem to have it in for the whole world of organization. They're very cynical. And here was someone who was not making excuses for society. It was new to find someone who believes in original sin." The prickly belief in original sin is not Golding's only unfashionable stance. Under questioning by undergraduates, he cheerfully admitted he has read "absolutely no Freud" (he prefers Greek plays in the original) and said there are no girls on the island because he does not believe that "sex has anything to do with humanity at this level." At 51, bearded, scholarly William Golding claims to have been writing for 44 years--through childhood in Cornwall, Oxford, wartime duty as a naval officer, and 19 years as a schoolmaster. Golding claims to be an optimist--emotionally if not intellectually--and has a humor that belies the gloomy themes of his allegories.

One critical appraisal of Lord of the Flies that impressed him came from an English schoolboy who went to an island near Puerto Rico last year to make a movie based on the book. Wrote the little boy from the idyllic island, surrounded by his happy peers and pampered by his producer : "I think Lord of the Flies stinks. I can't imagine what I'm doing on this filthy island, and it's all your fault." In Golding's view, a perfectly cast savage.

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