Books: Human Geometry

THE PYRAMID by William Golding. 183 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

William Golding is a philosophical novelist whose moral theorems in hu man geometry are demonstrated with severe economy. His originality lies in his ability to trace complex psychological diagrams within the traditional form of the novel without technical stunts or verbal virtuosity. His art concerns extreme situations and final choices.

Hitherto, Golding has preferred to present his characters almost as abstractions. Lord of the Flies was a laboratory demonstration of original sin taking place on a rather unreal island; The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin dealt with a mid-Atlantic castaway who seems to choose life with pain over easeful death, but is in fact already dead and in purgatory; The Spire set a drama of spirit and flesh in a remote time. The Pyramid represents no retreat from these tours de force, but Golding’s command of fiction is now such that he can dress his tragedians in street clothes, put them on a topographically exact stage and fix the time in the present. This is a more interesting literary exploit.

Abortive Lives. Ostensibly, The Pyramid is a simple story told by a man named Oliver, who recounts his life at three stages. The base of this living pyramid is an English village near the Trollopean cathedral town of Barchester; the village is Stilbourne, appropriately named, since it encloses so many deformed and abortive lives.

To Oliver, Stilbourne is an awful shambles from which he must escape. He is the classic adolescent—ruthless, secretive and vulnerable; few better studies have been written of his condition. He wrestles with sacred and profane loves, one represented by Imogen, a local beauty and culture snob who is headed for a cathedral marriage, and the other by Evie, the town crier’s pretty daughter, a “secular” sexpot with eyes like black plums. For Oliver, a chapel-going apothecary’s son, marriage is unthinkable with either, even when he gets Evie pregnant (or so she lets him think). It sounds like an un-American tragedy; yet Golding’s story is no glum Dreiserian dirge. Eros wears a comic mask.

Seen from the outside, through the eyes of Stilbourne’s dim but eccentric characters, Oliver is just a bright boy with a small talent for music and a chance to rise on the “awful ladder” of the British class system by way of a science scholarship to Oxford. The boy views himself as others do—a mod erate success. It is only in the later episodes that he comes to see himself as Novelist Golding sees him—a moral failure. Sadly, he recognizes that he is one of those who would like to pay anything for a chance to give life to himself and others, but that actually “he would never pay more than a reasonable price.” It is not enough, for by then he is a successful career man in science (he made poison gas during World War II), and his real life lies stillborn behind him.

Nothing Is Simple. The people in Golding’s work are not so much characters as beings. Somehow, they are elevated above their existence in the commonplace world into a region where nonpractical life is led; behind the plane surface lies another dimension. On the level of social comedy, Miss Dawlish, Oliver’s music teacher, is a Margaret

Rutherfordish figure of provincial fun, with her corduroy hat skewered to her bun, her tweeds, and her booming, snorting voice well suited to her nickname, “Bounce.” But her devotion to music, for all the pathetic form it takes, is a genuine passion.

Bounce is funny enough when an infatuation for an unsuitable garageman seizes her, or when she walks out into the street one day, mother-naked except for her gloves and absurd hat. She would seem to have disappeared from the story after they “take her away.” Then comes one of Golding’s effects: she is cured of her happy insanity and returned to Stilbourne, well and unhappy.

Years later, when the adult Oliver returns to visit her memorial tablet in Stil bourne church, he realizes that there was more truth in Bounce’s silliness than in all his science. It is with guilt that he reads her epitaph, “Heaven is Music,” and realizes that, unlike himself, she had denied nothing to life. “I was afraid of you,” he thinks, “and so I hated you. It is as simple as that. When I heard you were dead I was glad.”

Nothing in Golding is “as simple as that.” It is unclear whether he is insist ing that Oliver has denied his true vocation—music. But it is powerfully clear that Oliver has failed by withholding love from his girl, his parents and, as he seems to have no friends, from humanity at large. Had he not constricted his emotions, he would probably never have made it out of Stilbourne. As it is, like Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black, he has “got on.” And with infinite skill, Golding has counted the cost.

William Golding is that paradoxical individual—a prophet who points toward the past. He sees man’s future sketched out by his inheritance from innumerable savage ancestors. A gentle, bearded, schoolmasterly figure who lives with his wife in the village of Bow-erchalke in southern England, Golding, 56, is shy and reticent to the point of secretiveness, but has occasionally written about himself. In The Hot Gates, a collection of his nonfiction pieces, he tells how as a boy he dreamed of becoming not Prime Minister, explorer or engine driver, but apprentice to the curator of mummies in the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum.

The boy, much possessed with death, persisted in the man. After Oxford, he taught Greek at Bishop Wordsworth’s school near Salisbury, and it would be anybody’s guess whether his mind was more at ease with the cathedral or with nearby Stonehenge. In World War II, he grew his Royal Navy officer-type beard and received confirmation of his bleak view of man. After a slim volume of dud poetry, he wrote Lord of the Flies. It was out of print when it was discovered by American college youth, who sent paperback sales to 2,000,000 and emancipated Golding from any more schoolmastering.

He returned the favor by emancipating U.S. youth from the life view of that other campus Pied Piper, J. D. Salinger. Salinger and Golding have enjoyed almost prophetic status with the young, and the young have been right to elevate these two against trend spotters and opinion makers. Each gave fictional form to contrary views of life —Salinger maintaining that youth, innocence and grace are corrupted by the cruel conventions of a corrupt society, and Golding demonstrating in fable after fable that man’s heart in herits the evil of his ancestry. Wrote Golding in an essay: “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”

Golding’s view of original sin as an anthropological fact is one that modern man would like to reject but that five dreadful decades of history have forced back into the forefront of the mind.

He thus spells out the vision of man which informs all his fiction: “We stand among the flotsam, the odd shoes and tins, hot-water bottles and skulls of sheep or deer. We know nothing. We stand where any upright food-gatherer has stood, on the edge of our own unconscious, and hope, perhaps, for the terror and excitement of the print of a single foot.”