In his preface [to A Moving Target] Golding explains that five of the pieces included began life as lectures. And he says: "When you get down to it, what an audience wants to hear from a novelist is how he writes. Since how he writes is in intimate association with what he is and how he lives the novelist finds himself in danger of being his own raw material." He goes on: "I have always tried to resist this and have always given way in the end so that at last I find myself talking about myself with the grossest liberality. This leads to nothing but self-disgust." I find the tone of this disturbing. If the self-disgust is genuine, why agree to give the lecture? Even more to the point, why publish such pieces between hard covers? I feel there is a confusion here which is not the bafflement of wonder such as Golding felt in Delphi or Egypt, but a Protestant sort of confusion about guilt and honesty. And the lectures themselves too often reflect this, unfortunately. The tone is both humble and hectoring, it both seems to despise its audience and seeks to woo it. The last lecture is a case in point. Entitled "Belief and Creativity" it is full of such remarks as: "Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world." This may be Golding's view, but it does nothing for us except to tell us that it is his view. Should it interest us for that reason?…
Fame seems to have got at Golding. To judge from these lectures he cannot get over the fact that he is known from Iceland to the Cape and from Timbuctoo to San Francisco. If he has not read he has at least examined every single book that has been written about him. And though part of him dismisses it all as nonsense, another is impressed. "Ladies and gentlemen," he begins one lecture, "you see before you a man, I will not say more sinned against than sinning, but a man more analysed than analysing." And the title of the whole collection, which is also the title of one of the lectures, refers not to the novelist's quarry but to himself: "It was not long ago that I received a letter from a young lady at a famous English university…. She was, you see, looking for a subject for her thesis." Her professor had recommended that she write on a subject connected with Dr Johnson, but "she was not going to write a thesis on anything as dull as a dead man. She wanted fresh blood. She was going out with her critical shotgun to bring home the living. She proposed I should bare my soul…. I wrote back at once, saying that I agreed wholeheartedly with her professor." Someone who had known Dr Johnson, and so was safely dead, he suggests to the young lady, would make a much better target, for he would stand still. "But as for me, I am a moving target."
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