Just as Eliot's criticism is read more to learn about Eliot than, say, Marston or Massinger, so [A Moving Target, a] collection of lectures, essays, reviews, and travel articles, will be read primarily for sights of the author rather than in expectation of intrinsic merit. Golding will not be pleased with this state of affairs … he dislikes 'value by association', disparaging in 'My First Book', the situation whereby his Poems, published in 1934, 'has been on offer in the United States at 4,000 dollars'. The dislike is at least partly justified; like Eliot's essays, some of Golding's occasional pieces—as The Hot Gates (1965) demonstrated—repay perusal on their own account.
The best things about The Hot Gates were the childhood reminiscences, 'Billy the Kid' and 'The Ladder and the Tree', with the travel articles a close second. While there is nothing so directly autobiographical in A Moving Target, places are again impressively represented. What elevates this aspect of Golding's artistry above the routine is his profound sense of history and, indeed, pre-history: landscape is not, for him, a simple here-and-now, but a cultural palimpsest, the sum of its centuries. This sense is strongest in English climes: The Hot Gates splendidly evoked the Channel, Stratford, the South Downs; A Moving Target celebrates Wiltshire, Golding's home county; and the cathedrals of Winchester and Salisbury. Here, the author tunes into the mana of a location, looking through the contemporary to reconstruct the past. 'Tourists will not see what I see,' he writes in 'Wiltshire', 'for it is invisible.'
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