Selfhatred and misanthropy

Every GenX schoolkid has read William Golding's breakout Lord of the Flies (1954). The kid might not know that Golding kept writing. If you were reading Golding when he was writing, you might have caught Free Fall. For later generations as it happened for me: I found the latter as a spare book at the school nurse's. The former by contrast was everywhere.

Golding was, as hinted, young when he wrote Lord of the Flies. Later, that 1966 stranding at Tonga will put that book's male psychology to the test. Those six stranded boys were able to make a functional camp that did not take the Ba'l-Zebub as its Lord. Admittedly not sixty boys; but Rutger Bregman for The Guardian still cannot defend Golding. Many schools and parents agree so have refused Flies (#woke aside, muh banned books aside).

Bregman sees a "good German" parable behind this book's takeoff. Maybe. I am more interested in how so many schools got hold of this one and kept it to the forefront of Required Reading.

I suspect that schools pushed Lord of the Flies because it supports a benevolent authoritarian Adult World. Golding spins out the second half of Belloc's epigram: And Always Keep Ahold of Nurse, For Fear of Finding Something Worse. The book is "edgy", yes... but safe edgy. How many schools recommend Le camp des saints? or anything Camus. Flies became the Adolescence of the 1960s-70s school system. Over the 1980s, first the satanic-panic and then political-correctness started coming for it, but schoolkids like me still saw the 1970s editions tucked away in this shelf or the other shelf. You would have to hunt, or be lucky, for Free Fall.

I'll lay it out: Free Fall is the better book. I will go further: it serves as Golding's confession, explaining why his view of male nature is as dark as it is. Golding argued for men as a problem because he, as a man, was a problem for a certain woman in his life. When he was writing Flies he tried to get the planet to see how all men are as bad as he once was. But no. It's just Golding; and with Free Fall he copped to it. Arguably too late.

Sometimes the BOOKBANNERS are picking on books which kids don't need anyway; don't get me started on Ted "Seuss" Geisel's didactic postwar output. Let's let him and them fight.