Fatal flaws of Golding, Byron and moi!

Aug 23 2009 by Lorne Jackson, Sunday Mercury

A FEW things you should know about me.

I’m kind to children and cute, furry animals. I floss religiously after every meal. When I see a Big Issue seller in the street I buy a copy and never haggle over change.

I also cry watching Bambi and tut-tut through every Quentin Tarantino gore fest. I even walk on water, though it must be shallow water (a tenth of a centimetre deep) and I wear wellies so my toes don’t get soaked.

All of which makes me a darned fine fellow. But does any of the above prove I’m a competent columnist?

Nope.

Whether I’m good or bad at moaning for the Mercury has nothing to do with my character – all that matters is the quality of the published articles.

So I know I’m fab at my job because of the bulging sack of fan mail I receive every week. Well, okay, there was only that one letter, three years ago, and it was sent to George Tyndale, though he kindly passed it on to me as it happened to be ticking...

But I digress. The point I’m making is that producing quality work has nothing to do with being a nice person.

Which is why I haven’t changed my opinions about the literary merits of William Golding, even though a new biography of the author of The Lord Of The Flies claims he attempted to rape a girl while he was a student at Oxford.

Clearly this news, if true, means that Golding, who died in 1993, was no ethical titan.

The man’s personal reputation is diminished, but Lord Of The Flies still stands as one of the classics of post-war English literature, and should remain a standard high school text.

If we were to ban every book written by some dodgy low life, there wouldn’t be much of a literary canon left.

Scandalous

Just look at the list of reprobates who built the library of English lit. Byron was notorious for being “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Proud of his roguish rep he was, too, scribbling a scandalous autobiography to be released after his death.

Unfortunately his publishers were so disturbed by the book’s contents that they burned it, meaning it was lost to posterity.

If modern readers had been given a chance to appraise the work, would they have judged Byron’s celebrated poem, Don Juan, to be less powerful, just because the lascivious Lord turned out to be a greater scoundrel than previously imagined?

Not if they appreciated stirring verse.

Byron lived in a louche age, when men of standing were given a fair amount of leeway to indulge their baser instincts. This was not the case in the Victorian era, yet authors still managed to behave poorly.

Charles Dickens may have been pious in public, but he treated his wife abysmally and kept a secret mistress. That doesn’t mean I won’t be enjoying yet another TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol this winter.

Meanwhile, Dickens’ bosom buddy, Wilkie Collins, invented the modern detective novel with his polished pot-boiler, The Moonstone.

An important literary figure, old Wilkie, but also a completely bonkers one.

This was largely a result of being addicted to laudanum, a hallucinogenic cocktail of opium and alcohol legally available over the chemist’s counter and purchased under the label of Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.

It didn’t do much quieting for Collins, who was menaced by ghosts, a mysterious doppelganger and a hideous green woman who sprouted a pair of tusks.

Wilkie may have been wacko, but books such as The Moonstone and The Woman In White remain classics.

There is every possibility that his deranged mental state contributed to the quality of his novels, which are sinister in the extreme.

All of which proves that a writer without weakness is a writer with little to say about this flawed world of fools and phonies that every one of us is doomed to stumble through until the day we die.

With that in mind, I’ve got a few ideas for improving my own literary style.

For starters, the next time I watch Bambi, I’m going to be rooting for the hunter.