For
my friend and publisher
CHARLES MONTEITH
In The Paper Men, Wilfred Barclay, an ageing, bibulous writer of novels with such unpromising titles as Horses at the Spring, is pursued around Europe by Professor Rick L. Tucker, a young American academic hell-bent on writing Barclay's biography. It sounds like an academic farce in the Kingsley Amis or Malcolm Bradbury line, lacking in scope for the philosophical and anthropological themes usually pursued by Golding. But in 1984, at the age of seventy-three, Golding wanted a change. He ascribed the Booker Prize-winning success of his previous novel, Rites of Passage to the dark drollery it undoubtedly contains. He had also decided to take his cue from the warm reviews for his wry and amiable collection of essays, A Moving Target. Perhaps, he fretted, he had been trying too hard with most of his fictions. Perhaps he could afford to lighten up.
His editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, seems to have doubted that hilarity was Golding's natural métier, and he counselled against employing sillier names than the just-this-side-of-ridiculous Rick L. Tucker. Nevertheless, The Paper Men opens with broad comedy, indeed slapstick. Tucker is prospecting for literary gold in Barclay's dustbin. As Barclay confronts him, his pyjama trousers fall down. Other pratfalls await Barclay, but most of the humour—and The Paper Men is funny for as long as it wants to be—comes from his scepticism about his adversary and the world he represents. In Seville, Barclay stumbles upon a lecture being given by Tucker: 'A sleepy bunch of professors, lecturers, postgraduate students were all trying their hardest to stay awake and Professor Tucker was making it difficult for them.' As Tucker drones on, Barclay realises he is speaking about a graph he has made showing the incidence of relative clauses in Barclay's work.
A chase begins, Barclay fleeing, the importunate Tucker pursuing. In their early encounters, Barclay maintains a weary forbearance—'How are my relative clauses?'—while Tucker is deferential yet vampiric, and determined to get Barclay's consent to a biography in writing: 'Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters.'
The locations begin to succeed one another in a mad whirl. Barclay's tactic is to leave false forwarding addresses, but at one point, he travels to South Africa, forgetting that he has given this location as a forwarding address and thus making true what was meant to be a lie. The kaleidoscopic nature of the tale is partly explained by the amount of alcohol Barclay puts away. He continually fights the bottle, and notes, 'One of the good things about Greece is that the standard wine is undrinkable … I'd drunk myself into kidding myself that I liked retzina and then drunk myself out of that delusion again.' The locations are incidental to Barclay's mounting paranoia, but there is a casual beauty in their evocation. Barclay goes snorkelling off a Greek island, watching 'the lovely nameless indifferent creatures with their colours and stillnesses and sudden darts and habit of being chums all together between meals.' We have the 'heavy light' of Rome, that 'dung-coloured city'. On a Swiss mountain Barclay experiences 'the hygienic smell of pines and the suggestion round me of their massive darknesses in the fog'. An event occurs on this ominous mountainside that deepens the relationship between Barclay and Tucker, complicating its morality. But the reader may wonder why Barclay hasn't long since accepted the attentions of the younger man as being a function of his success as an author?
Golding himself was a very private individual, who felt himself hounded by critics; and a teacher of literature from San Diego was breathing down his neck at the time he was dreaming up The Paper Men. His densely allusive works were particularly prone to dissection, and he felt that the concentration on his scholarship wore away the magic of the stories. And so the question arises: is Barclay Golding? They have a lot in common, including a beard and liking a drink. Barclay's globe-trotting is funded by the commercial success of his first novel, Coldharbour, just as Golding had a cash cow (and also a millstone around his neck) in the shape of Lord of the Flies. In his biography of Golding, John Carey is in no doubt that Barclay was Golding, and that Golding tried to throw readers off the trail by giving Barclay reasons for shunning scrutiny that could not possibly apply to Golding himself. Hence some allusions to criminality in Barclay's past.
Whether Barclay is Golding or not, the book becomes ever more Golding-esque, in that the whirl culminates in a spiritual crisis, triggered by Barclay's contemplation of a statue of Christ in an Italian cathedral. He suffers a breakdown of a nebulous but hauntingly described kind. It might be encapsulated by saying that his ego collapses under the weight of self-consciousness generated by Tucker's thraldom. The Paper Men is a short novel, but we are by now a long way from loose-waisted pyjama trousers. It is Golding's willingness to address the deepest existential questions that (as he grumbled in the title essay of A Moving Target) made his books 'the raw material of an academic light industry'. By its density and mesmerising strangeness, The Paper Men would only add fuel to the flames.
