Walter de la Mare and William Golding
John Bayley
The thing I particular
remember talking about with him was a poem of Walter de la Mare's. We had been
discussing childhood and birth, and he asked if I had come across a little de
la Mare poem, which he quoted. As it happened I had, and we discussed it at
length. I have never enjoyed such a talk more, and it reminded me of discussing
such things with an old Oxford friend, Lord David Cecil, who was also a great
friend and admirer of Golding. The poem is brief enough to put down here, because
our discussion of - what academics used rather grimly to call 'close analysis'
- revealed so much not only about the poet and his kind of poetry, but about
Golding's own modes of thought and perception and understanding. (He was of
course a poet himself, and I wish Poems (1935) would be republished.
I re-read them often.) 'The Birthnight' Dearest, it was night
That in its darkness
rocked Orion's stars; Along the willows, and
the cedar boughs Laid their white hands
in stealthy peace across The starry silence of
their antique moss: No sound save rushing
air Cold, yet all sweet
with Spring, And in thy mother's
arms, couched weeping there, Thou
lovely thing. Golding said that he was very struck with this poem when he first came across it; and he thought it had influenced him in his outlook; though he said this so modestly and unpretentiously that he did not seem to be making any 'statement' about himself, and what he thought. I was fascinated none the less, and asked how and why. (By now we had found and looked up his copy of the poem and had it before us.) He said because of its rush of continuity: there is no full stop in it. And the way it articulates itself in a single breath of feeling and exclamation. He said he would like to - and tried to - do the same, in a novel, a story or a poem. He felt that even a whole novel could give the same effect: of rapid unpredictable art as feeling and impression.
We then got down to
the poem itself. He compared it to another extremely moving poem, 'To My Mother',
which comes close to it in de la Mare's Collected Poems, as do two other
masterpieces, 'Autumn' and 'Winter'. Nevertheless, he said that when he first
read the poem it repelled him in some way that he wanted the time to understand
more closely. I said: 'Did you find it sentimental?' He said it was a difficult
thing to be sure of what that meant; but he thought it could mean taking a received
emotion from the taste and fashion of the time, without giving it true individual
expression and examination. I said something to the effect that he was very
unsentimental in his art about birth and childhood: that he saw childhood as
a birth of cruelty and evil? He said: 'No, I don't think of it that way;
but it comes through me with a rush sometimes, like that poem.' He went on to
say that the art he valued most had something repellent in its first impact,
because it could seem 'thought out', and taken from some assumption, or conviction,
or personal prejudice on the author's part: and then, as the reader took it
in, it dissolved into something so moving and immediate that all suggestion
of ideas - either the author's own ideas or his received ideas - was swept away.
This is a difficult
thing to convey in print because it was so alive and meaningful in talk; and
because I felt so enlightened by it at the time, though I have never been able
to formulate it in critical words: and perhaps that is just as well. But it
meant to me what I had experienced in Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors
and The Spire, and perhaps most of all in Darkness Visible. It
was the sense of a subject, a donnee as Henry James would say, dissolved by
its own unpredictability; ceasing to be an argument or point of view that could
be stated, and becoming like a rushing mighty wind that blew through the 'idea'
of the book, and made it glow with an internal incandescence that was for the
reader both enormously exhilarating and rather frightening… To return for a moment
to de la Mare's poem, what interested him particulay was his own distaste at
what appeared to be the banality of its subject. Children, even new-born ones,
are not lovely things. However sincere it may be, there is something cloying
about the opening endearment; and a father's indulgence in the aethestic rhapsodies
portrayed seems to be drawing all too glibly on the literary fashions of the
period. These were the points Golding made as he explained his initial reaction.
And then, he said, he was struck by two things: the verbal oscillation of 'rocked'
in the second line; and the invisible wind (he mentioned the 'veiwless wind'
in Shakespeare) transformed in the third line into something white and perceptible
to the eye. He said that he often noticed on a cloudy night how the movement
of the air seemed to make objects more visible: an illusion, of course, but
a remarkably compelling one. The whiteness of the wind could signify - but the
notion became banal as soon as formulated - the spirit of birth. As for 'rocked',
its significance was at once ominous and reassurring - a cradle and an ending:
birth and dissolution. And what about 'stealthy peace' in the fifth line? Could
any paradox be more magically unusual? At once eerie and homely, with finger
on lip, so as not to wake someone, or something? Our chat was actually
very brief, but all this and more came into it; and then he gave a deep rumbling
laugh and said that he had been talking like a critic, but that none the less
the way that poem worked on him was the way he would like his books to work
on the reader: first a questioning, even a rejection, and then an uncovenated
feel of being carried away regardless. In fact the reverse process of what can
often, even usually, happen when we read a novel. We begin by suspending disbelief,
and giving ourselves to the world of the story; and only afterwards do criticisms
and objection crop up, and form an integral part of our critical assessment
of the book. In going the other way, from exposure to disbelief and disagreement
to a sense of rising tempo that carries all before it, Golding's novels are
doing something in the genre that is unusual to the point of uniqueness, although
it is this transfiguring instability and unpredicibility which makes them seem
so baffling to the cool-eyed critic, and so hard to discuss. Absorbed by what he
had said about a subterranean relation between the de la Mare poem and the way
he wanted his books to work, I remarked that 'The Birthright' could well be
the title for one of his own novels. He smiled and agreed… (Extract from 'No
Full Stop: the movement of Golding's fiction' (from the publication accompanying
the British Council exhibtion entitled William Golding 1911-1993, 1994: reproduced
by kind permission of Professor John Bayley