Carey: You don't like being interviewed, I know. Is it because you want to be private? Or is it because you feel that a writer writes, and that is his medium, and talking something entirely different?
Golding: I think it's mostly, if not all, a writer writes. There is nothing to a writer but his books. After all--this Egypt I've just been to--there's nothing of a scribe but his hieroglyphics. That's his signature, his moira, his fate.
Carey: So it's almost like saying, Why should a painter be asked to expound his philosophy? He paints.
Golding: Yes, that's right.
Carey: Could we, though, talk a little about your life? You have written about your father, who was obviously a remarkable man. Did you ever feel in his shadow?
Golding: Yes, I did: unconsciously, I think for a long time. But later, when one starts looking back over one's life, I did see that I'd been in his shadow, particularly, I suppose, philosophically, in that he had made of himself a Wellsian rationalist--should I call it--and because he was who he was, I took this; and for a long time I suppose I half convinced myself I was a rationalist, atheist, and so on. Whereas I don't think I was instinctively any of these things at all. This is a condemnation, I suppose, of a human relationship. Because I should have freed myself from him early, or he should have pushed me off, or something. But there it was.
Carey: Might that not provide, though, a very rich conflict within you--the rationalism, and the reaction against it? It might seem, for a creative writer, almost a desirable kind of split.
Golding: Well, that may be so. But of course I wasn't thinking of myself in terms of creative writer: I was thinking in terms of myself as a free and unencumbered being.
Carey: In Free Fall you show the science master, Nick, as a rational, kindly atheistic scholar. I've often wondered whether that was, in any sense, a portrait of your father.
Golding: I think so. I think it was inescapably based on him. But how accurate it was is not for me to say.
Carey: I'm not sure when your father died?
Golding: My father died in--I think it was 1957.
Carey: I wondered whether he had lived long enough to see your success; and he had.
Golding: Oh, yes, he did--just.
Carey: Was he very pleased?
Golding: Oh yes. Very pleased. He was pleased when--I remember saying to him what a curious life he'd had. It was a parallel in many ways with Wells, except that my father hadn't been a writer. And I said I'd like to write about him one
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