Rites of Passage Read online

  TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  Rites of Passage

  WILLIAM GOLDING

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction by Robert McCrum

  (1)

  (2)

  (3)

  (4)

  (5)

  (X)

  (12)

  (17)

  (?)

  (23)

  (27)

  (30)

  (Y)

  ZETA

  (Z)

  (Ω)

  (51)

  ALPHA

  (60)

  (61)

  BETA

  GAMMA

  COLLEY’S LETTER

  NEXT DAY

  ———————

  (&)

  About the Author

  By The Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction by Robert McCrum

  When I joined Faber in 1979, weeks after Mrs Thatcher became prime minister, William Golding’s Darkness Visible was the novel on the Autumn list that everyone was talking about. Charles Monteith, who had just appointed me, was especially proud of the book. Ever since Lord of the Flies (1954), Golding had always been his editor’s calling card.

  But Golding hadn’t published any new fiction since the three novellas of The Scorpion God (1971). For almost a decade, he had been terribly ‘blocked’, troubled by the darkness both in the story and in his own middle passage of life. Nursing Darkness Visible to publication was an in-house triumph. Only later did I come to understand what Monteith had gone through.

  Faber has always depended on its great writers to deliver. This tortured manuscript would be a commercial as well as an artistic milestone. As the new boy, I took this in from the wings. My job was to find the next Golding, and I had not yet read some stories by a young man from Catford named Kazuo Ishiguro.

  Then, perhaps sensing the hot breath of a new generation, Golding pulled a surprise. Barely a month after the launch of Darkness Visible, word came down from the chairman’s penthouse office that Bill had not been as ‘blocked’ as we’d been told. In fact, he had just delivered a new one, written almost simultaneously. Monteith, more generous and supportive than I deserved, wondered if I would care to take a look at ‘the new Golding’? It was, apparently, a compelling quasi-epistolary narrative, a sea-faring drama of the eighteenth century, and a wonderful return to form.

  Rites of Passage – I can see the typescript with my inner eye – arrived on my desk in the New Year of 1980. The moment I began to read I knew – we always say this in hindsight, but I remember so well the thrilling sensation of something that’s new and original – I knew this was a winner. But Monteith was wrong. It was not really about the sea. Narrated by a toff, Edmund Talbot, en route to Australia, it was, essentially, about England. And what it was really about was: class.

  Later, when I got to know him better, I came to understand that Rites of Passage dramatised, in nautical form, one of its author’s lifelong obsessions, his resentment of social inferiority. The son of a socialist and a suffragette, William Gerald Golding had been born at the wrong – the lower-middle-class – end of Marlborough, excluded from the charmed lives of the posh boys who went to the College.

  Wartime had been an escape, darkened by terrifying intimations of man’s inhumanity. Then, after naval service, he had reluctantly returned to school-teaching as ‘Scruff’ Golding, the shy, oddball English teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School just outside Salisbury. Only with the publication of Lord of the Flies in 1954 did Golding begin to liberate himself.

  But he was never at ease, even with literary recognition. When I came to know him, years later at Faber, he was garlanded with both the Booker and the Nobel prizes. But he always struck me as someone who was not just socially awkward, but mildly belligerent about his awkwardness, too.

  In interview, his daughter Judy says that, with her father, the touchy subject of class is something ‘you cannot make too much of’. She adds that ‘the good burghers of Marlborough’ never failed to arouse the most bitter feelings of social inadequacy. For Golding the class gulf was ‘as real as a wound’, and contributed to terrible episodes of rage throughout his life.

  For Golding the sea had always been an escape, but that was now denied to him. In 1966, more than a decade after the publication of Lord of the Flies, he had bought a gaff-rigged sailing boat, a Dutch cutter named Tenace. On one of its very first voyages, Tenace had been run down in sea-fog by a freighter and sunk. Golding and his family had been lucky to escape with their lives.

  The years that followed were difficult. Golding was in torment. After what he saw as the failure of The Spire (1964), he could not write. He would no longer sail; he wrestled with demons; and he drank to excess. Rites of Passage became the visceral release from this predicament.

  If there was one thing that tortured Golding as deeply as the wounds of class, it was his sense of inadequacy, of being a figure of fun. This was partly self-mocking, his daughter remembers: ‘He was one of the funniest men I knew. And he would laugh at himself. Poor old Dad, one of the roles he felt he fulfilled was that of a clown. In life, he felt he was clownish, in the good and the bad sense.’

  Colley, a classic fictional clergyman, joins Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice as a figure of fun, though in much grimmer circumstances. His fate, which dominates the second half of Talbot’s narrative, takes him into ‘a hell of self-degradation’ profoundly expressive of Golding’s battle with himself and his place in the world.

  So Rites of Passage is about its author, and every class of English men and women at sea – officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants all jostling for space below decks. On board a ship that becomes a microcosm of English society, the tensions, humiliations and vanities of English life become enacted beneath the vast, indifferent canopy of the ocean sky.

  During the voyage to the ends of the earth, the novel that went on to win the 1980 Booker Prize reconciles all William Golding’s inner conflicts, and transforms them into a work of art. Rites of Passage celebrates a great sea journey; it tackles vexed issues of class and sexuality; and it shows off Golding’s prose at its most edgy and exhilarating.

  I remember him describing how, when he was working well, he felt as though his prose was flowing down his arm to his writing hand. It was, he said, as if he was taking dictation from his unconscious. That was a typical flight of Golding fancy, but when you look more closely at these pages, you will find a writer finally at peace, a man who knew how to tune the elements into the rare music of great fiction.

  (1)

  Honoured godfather,

  With those words I begin the journal I engaged myself to keep for you—no words could be more suitable!

  Very well then. The place: on board the ship at last. The year: you know it. The date? Surely what matters is that it is the first day of my passage to the other side of the world; in token whereof I have this moment inscribed the number “one” at the top of this page. For what I am about to write must be a record of our first day. The month or day of the week can signify little since in our long passage from the south of Old England to the Antipodes we shall pass through the geometry of all four seasons!

  This very morning before I left the hall I paid a visit to my young brothers, and they were such a trial to old Dobbie! Young Lionel performed what he conceived to be an Aborigine’s war dance. Young Percy lay on his back and rubbed his belly, meanwhile venting horrid groans to convey the awful results of eating me! I cuffed them both into attitudes of decent dejection, then descended again to where my mother and father were waiting. My mother​—contrived a tear or two? Oh no, it was the genuine arti
cle, for there was at that point a warmth in my own bosom which might not have been thought manly. Why, even my father—We have, I believe, paid more attention to sentimental Goldsmith and Richardson than lively old Fielding and Smollett! Your lordship would indeed have been convinced of my worth had you heard the invocations over me, as if I were a convict in irons rather than a young gentleman going to assist the governor in the administration of one of His Majesty’s colonies! I felt much the better for my parents’ evident feelings—and I felt the better for my own feelings too! Your godson is a good enough fellow at bottom. Recovery took him all the way down the drive, past the lodge and as far as the first turning by the mill!

  Well then, to resume, I am aboard. I climbed the bulging and tarry side of what once, in her young days, may have been one of Britain’s formidable wooden walls. I stepped through a kind of low doorway into the darkness of some deck or other and gagged at my first breath. Good God, it was quite nauseous! There was much bustling and hustling about in an artificial twilight. A fellow who announced himself as my servant conducted me to a kind of hutch against the vessel’s side, which he assured me was my cabin. He is a limping old fellow with a sharp face and a bunch of white hair on either side of it. These bunches are connected over his pate by a shining baldness.

  “My good man,” said I, “what is this stink?”

  He stuck his sharp nose up and peered round as if he might see the stink in the darkness rather than nose it. “Stink, sir? What stink, sir?”

  “The stink,” said I, my hand over my nose and mouth as I gagged, “the fetor, the stench, call it what you will!”

  He is a sunny fellow, this Wheeler. He smiled at me then as if the deck, close over our heads, had opened and let in some light.

  “Lord, sir!” said he. “You’ll soon get used to that!”

  “I do not wish to get used to it! Where is the captain of this vessel?”

  Wheeler dowsed the light of his countenance and opened the door of my hutch for me.

  “There’s nothing Captain Anderson could do either, sir,” said he. “It’s sand and gravel you see. The new ships has iron ballast but she’s older than that. If she was betwixt and between in age, as you might say, they’d have dug it out. But not her. She’s too old you see. They wouldn’t want to go stirring about down there, sir.”

  “It must be a graveyard then!”

  Wheeler thought for a moment.

  “As to that, I can’t say, sir, not having been in her previous. Now you sit here for a bit and I’ll bring a brandy.”

  With that, he was gone before I could bear to speak again and have to inhale more of the ’tween decks air. So there I was and here I am.

  Let me describe what will be my lodging until I can secure more fitting accommodation. The hutch contains a sleeping place like a trough laid along the ship’s side with two drawers built under it. Wheeler informs me these standing bedplaces have been provided for the passengers as we go far south and such “bunks” are thought warmer than cots or hammocks. At one end of the hutch a flap lets down as a writing table and there is a canvas bowl with a bucket under it at the other. I must suppose the ship contains a more commodious area for the performance of our natural functions! There is room for a mirror above the bowl and two shelves for books at the foot of the bunk. A canvas chair is the movable furniture of this noble apartment. The door has a fairly big opening in it at eye-level through which some daylight filters, and the wall on either side of it is furnished with hooks. The floor, or deck as I must call it, is rutted deep enough to twist an ankle. I suppose these ruts were made by the iron wheels of her gun trolleys in the days when she was young and frisky enough to sport a full set of weapons! The hutch is new but the ceiling—the deckhead?—and the side of the ship beyond my bunk, old, worn and splintered and hugely patched. Imagine me, asked to live in such a coop, such a sty! However, I shall put up with it good-humouredly enough until I can see the captain. Already the act of breathing has moderated my awareness of our stench and the generous glass of brandy that Wheeler brought has gone near to reconciling me to it.

  But what a noisy world this wooden one is! The south-west wind that keeps us at anchor booms and whistles in the rigging and thunders over her—over our (for I am determined to use this long voyage in becoming wholly master of the sea affair)—over our furled canvas. Flurries of rain beat a retreat of kettle-drums over every inch of her. If that were not enough, there comes from forward and on this very deck the baaing of sheep, lowing of cattle, shouts of men and yes, the shrieks of women! There is noise enough here too. My hutch, or sty, is only one on this side of the deck of a half-a-dozen such, faced by a like number on the other side. A stark lobby separates the two rows and this lobby is interrupted only by the ascending and enormous cylinder of our mizzen mast. Aft of the lobby, Wheeler assures me, is the dining saloon for the passengers with the offices of necessity on either side of it. In the lobby dim figures pass or stand in clusters. They—we—are the passengers I must suppose; and why an ancient ship of the line such as this one has been so transformed into a travelling store-ship and farm and passenger conveyance is only to be explained by the straits my lords of the Admiralty are in with more than six hundred warships in commission.

  Bates, the saloon steward, has told me just this minute that we dine in an hour’s time at four o’clock. On my remarking that I proposed to request more ample accommodation he paused for a moment’s reflection, then replied it would be a matter of some difficulty and that he advised me to wait for a while. On my expressing some indignation that such a decrepit vessel should be used for such a voyage, he, standing in the door of the saloon with a napkin over his arm, lent me as much as he could of a seaman’s philosophy—as: Lord sir she’ll float till she sinks, and Lord sir she was built to be sunk; with such a lecture on lying in ordinary with no one aboard but the boatswain and the carpenter, so much about the easiness of lying to a hawser in the good old way rather than to a nasty iron chain that rattles like a corpse on a gibbet, he has sunk my heart clear down to her filthy ballast! He had such a dismissiveness of copper bottoms! I find we are no more than pitched within and without like the oldest vessel of all and suppose her first commander was none other than Captain Noah! Bates’s parting comfort to me was that he was sure she is “safer in a blow than many a stiffer vessel”. Safer! “For,” said he, “if we get into a bit of a blow she’ll render like an old boot.” To tell the truth he left me with much of the brandy’s good work undone. After all that, I found it was positively required I should remove all articles that I should need on the voyage from my chests before they were struck down below! Such is the confusion aboard this vessel I can find no one who has the authority to countermand this singularly foolish order. I have resigned myself therefore, used Wheeler for some of this unpacking, set out my books myself, and seen my chests taken away. I should be angry if the situation were not so farcical. However, I had a certain delight in some of the talk between the fellows who took them off, the words were so perfectly nautical. I have laid Falconer’s Marine Dictionary by my pillow; for I am determined to speak the tarry language as perfectly as any of these rolling fellows!

  LATER

  We have dined by the light of an ample stern window at two long tables in a great muddle. Nobody knew anything. There were no officers, the servants were harassed, the food poor, my fellow-passengers in a temper, and their ladies approaching the hysterics. But the sight of the other vessels at anchor outside the stern window was undeniably exciting. Wheeler, my staff and guide, says it is the remainder of the convoy. He assures me that the confusion aboard will diminish and that, as he phrases it, we shall shake down—presumably in the way the sand and gravel has shaken down, until—if I may judge by some of the passengers—we shall stink like the vessel. Your lordship may observe a certain pettishness in my words. Indeed, had it not been for a tolerable wine I should be downright angry. Our Noah, one Captain Anderson, has not chosen to appear. I shall make myself known to hi
m at the first opportunity but now it is dark. Tomorrow morning I propose to examine the topography of the vessel and form an acquaintance with the better sort of officer if there be any. We have ladies, some young, some middling, some old. We have some oldish gentlemen, a youngish army officer and a younger parson. This last poor fellow tried to ask a blessing on our meal and fell to eating as bashful as a bride. I have not been able to see Mr Prettiman but suppose he is aboard.

  Wheeler tells me the wind will veer during the night and we shall get a-weigh, make sail; be off, start on our vast journey when the tide turns. I have told him I am a good sailor and have observed that same peculiar light, which is not quite a smile but rather an involuntary expansiveness, flit across his face. I made an immediate resolution to teach the man a lesson in manners at the first opportunity—but as I write these very words the pattern of our wooden world changes. There is a volleying and thundering up there from what must be the loosened canvas. There is the shrilling of pipes. Good God, can human throats emit such noises? But that and that must be the signal guns! Outside my hutch a passenger has fallen with many oaths and the ladies are shrieking, the cattle are lowing and the sheep baaing. All is confusion. Perhaps then the cows are baaing, the sheep lowing and the ladies damning the ship and her timbers to all hell fire? The canvas bowl into which Wheeler poured water for me has shifted in its gimbals and now lies at a slight angle.

  Our anchor has been plucked out of the sand and gravel of Old England. I shall have no connection with my native soil for three, or it may be four or five, years. I own that even with the prospect of interesting and advantageous employment before me it is a solemn thought.

  How else, since we are being solemn, should I conclude the account of my first day at sea than with an expression of my profound gratitude? You have set my foot on the ladder and however high I climb—for I must warn your lordship that my ambition is boundless!—I shall never forget whose kindly hand first helped me upwards. That he may never be found unworthy of that hand, nor do anything unworthy of it—is the prayer—the intention—of your lordship’s grateful godson.