The Dreams of William Golding
Screened online 18 - 22 November 2020 in collaboration with Quay Words at Exeter Custom House
Quay Words at Exeter Custom House screened this thoughtful Arena biopic from the BBC archives, which includes exclusive interviews with Golding’s family. Responding to the film and Golding’s work and life, you can still watch four writers based in the south-west of England, whose work connects to the award-winning novelist in various ways: journalist Rosie Goldsmith, academic Stephanie Jones, Golding expert Tim Kendall and cinema museum curator Phil Wickham. You can still watch their response here, enjoy new poems inspired by the film from two poets living in the region, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Malaika Kegode, and learn how to start your own personal writing journey with a masterclass from author Monique Roffey.
YOUR LOCAL ARENA: RESPONDING TO The Dreams of William Golding
Watch postcolonial scholar Stephanie Jones, arts and culture journalist Rosie Goldsmith, Professor of English Tim Kendall and Curator of Exeter’s Bill Douglas Cinema Museum Phil Wickham respond to the Arena film.
INSPIRED BY ARENA’S The Dreams of William Golding: New Poetry by Louisa Adjoa Parker and Malaika Kegode
Listen to and read specially commissioned poems inspired by The Dreams of William Golding written by two exciting poets from the south-west, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Malaika Kegode.
Louisa Adjoa Parker
‘A Georgian Mansion in Cornwall, Midsummer’
Malaika Kegode
‘Sharpening a Point’
WRITING YOUR MEMOIR: A Masterclass from Monique Roffey
Taking The Dreams of William Golding as a starting point, explore how you can begin to craft your own memoir or life writing with award-winning novelist Monique Roffey, whose latest novel The Mermaid of Black Conch combines myth and legend with contemporary storytelling.
THE DREAMS OF WILLIAM GOLDING
Director: Adam Low, Producer: Martin Rosenbaum (2012)
Listen to Lucy Hannah in conversation with Anthony Wall about the making of The Dreams of William Golding.
Listen to Lucy Hannah in conversation with Helen Chaloner, Chief Executive of Literature Works.
Helen Chaloner is Chief Executive of Literature Works, the regional literature development agency for south west England. She worked as a publishing PR in London before moving to Devon and becoming National Director of Arvon, which is known for its residential creative writing courses. From there she went to Farms for City Children, a charity connecting inner city school children to the countryside through a week on a working farm. Helen is principal short story reader for the Bridport Prize. She lives in West Devon on the northern edge of Dartmoor. Twitter: @LitWorksCEO
Picture a middle-aged, middle-class English man, probably younger than his appearance, with a look so conventional it could almost be deliberate. He is a teacher at a respectable grammar school in Salisbury. It happens to lie in the shadow, half a mile away, of its wealthy, glamourous neighbour — Marlborough, one of England’s most famous public schools. He wears a battered tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, the classic characteristics of an English chap, possibly a little dull but decent. That man is William Golding filmed in the 1950s for Arena’s illustrious predecessor BBC TV’s Monitor.
That conventional chap was perhaps the most daring, imaginative and original novelist of the whole post-war period. He wrote and published four novels before he felt he could relinquish the security of his teaching job. Those four novels, all unique, each one totally different from the others, each one a tour de force, each one emotionally and intellectually challenging in the extreme.
Free Fall followed Pincher Martin; the second book was The Inheritors but it was his first which secured Golding’s prestige forever. Lord of the Flies is the most conventional in form and narrative but it’s just about perfect. The story of a group of schoolboys around the age of ten whose plane has crashed on a desert island, with all the adults on board dead, to survive, the boys form their own society with its own rituals and hierarchies. It’s a morality tale that brings you face to face, whatever your codes or politics, with what Golding called ‘the darkness of man’s heart’.
Golding was haunted by the action he saw serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War; perhaps he sought peace, teaching in a safe school in a safe part of Britain, raising a pint with his friend James Lovelock in the local to celebrate Lovelock’s formulation of the Gaia theory.
Remarkably, Golding and Lovelock lived in the same village. Golding eschewed the fashionable, back-biting world of literary London — ‘I live down here where they can’t get me.’ With his beard and passion for sailing, he was given the nickname Captain Birdseye at his publishers, Faber & Faber. Maybe Captain Birdseye at first sight, but look again and you might see Merlin.
The term ‘magical realism’ was dreamt up to describe the works of the great Latin American writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, J L Borges, they revealed the surreal in everyday existence. Golding was ahead of the game. The Inheritors is told from inside the minds of a family of Neanderthals as they confront the arrival of an unforgiving new species, Homo Sapiens. It’s a book of stunning ambition and originality.
This Arena was the third film to be made about Golding. Following Monitor, our great rival The South Bank Show devoted an episode to him while he was still alive. The two films provided director Adam Low with invaluable archive of Golding at two stages of his life. The Arena adds the fascinating perspective of his daughter Judy and son David, who had never appeared on television to talk about him before. The intimacy of their recollections reveal a private man, uninterested in playing the fame game. Self-deprecating, mildly eccentric, he left fanfares for his work to others. His legacy is incomparable, it was an honour to make this film.
Anthony Wall
4 November 2020
Biographies
Responding to the film
Rosie Goldsmith is an award-winning journalist specialising in arts and foreign affairs. In twenty years at the BBC, she travelled the world, presented several flagship programmes such as Crossing Continents, Open Book and Front Row, and interviewed leading cultural and literary figures, from Margaret Atwood to Edmund de Waal. Cornwall-born Rosie is a passionate linguist and has lived in Europe, Africa and the USA. Today she combines journalism with chairing and curating arts and literary events and festivals in the UK and across the world. She is known as a champion of international literature, translation and language learning; she is Founder and Director of the European Literature Network, editor-in-chief of The Riveter magazine and was Chair of the Judges of the EBRD Literature Prize from 2018-20. Rosie works with major cultural projects, universities and institutions, such as Future Library Norway and the Victoria and Albert Museum London.
Dr Stephanie Jones holds a BA and an LLB from the Australian National University, and a PhD from Cambridge. She is an Associate Professor and Director of Postgraduate Research in English at the University of Southampton. She works on literature about marine and maritime worlds, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean. Stephanie’s research and teaching spans postcolonial and decolonial studies, the interdisciplinary field of law and literature, and the environmental humanities. She has published work on East African law and literature; the poetics and metaphors of international maritime law and lore; fictional and historical piracy and privateering; and literary and legal ‘belonging’.
Tim Kendall is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. His three current and overlapping research interests are: twentieth-century poetry, archives, and William Golding. Recent publications and broadcasts include Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (OUP, 2013) and a one-hour arts documentary, Ivor Gurney: The Poet who Loved the War (BBC 4, 2014; https://vimeo.com/86701188). He was the producer of a BBC 2 documentary on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, broadcast in August 2018. With Mary Jo Salter and Margaret Ferguson, he co-edited the sixth edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry (2018). Tim is currently editing Poetry of the Second World War (OUP, 2020), and the correspondence between William Golding and his Faber editor, Charles Monteith. With Philip Lancaster, he is editing Ivor Gurney's complete literary works in five volumes for OUP.
Dr Phil Wickham is the Curator of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, the foremost museum in the UK on the history of the moving image. He writes and lectures extensively on British film and television and was previously a TV Curator at the BFI. His publications include Understanding Television Text (BFI, 2007) and The Likely Lads (BFI, 2008).
Commissioned poets
Photo credit: Robert Golden
Louisa Adjoa Parker is a writer of English-Ghanaian heritage who lives in south-west England. Her poetry books include Salt-sweat and Tears (Cinnamon Press) and How to wear a skin (Indigo Dreams). Louisa’s writing has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies including Envoi, Wasafiri, Acumen, Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe) and Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories (Peepal Tree). She has been highly commended by the Forward Prize; twice shortlisted by the Bridport Prize; and her grief poem, ‘Kindness’, was commended by the National Poetry Competition 2019. Louisa has written books and exhibitions exploring Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) history, and set up the Where are you really from? project telling stories of black and brown rural life. Her first short story collection will be published later this year (Colenso Books); and she has a forthcoming coastal memoir (Little Toller Books). www.whereareyoureallyfrom.co.uk/
Photo credit: Jon Aitken
Malaika Kegode is a writer, performer and producer based in Bristol. She has worked with a number of organisations including Roundhouse, Historic England, Elstree Studios and the BBC. In 2020, Malaika’s debut theatre show Outlier was commissioned by Bristol Old Vic after two sold-out scratch performances as part of their Ferment season. Malaika’s work has been displayed at the Arnolfini and in 2018 she was included in the BME Power List, celebrating Bristol’s 100 most influential black & minority ethnic people. Outside of her poetry work, Malaika studies film and has worked as a programme selector for Encounters and Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Her two poetry collections, Requite (2017) and Thalassic (2020), were published by Burning Eye Books.
Masterclass
Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards, (the Orange, Encore, Orion and COSTA Fiction Award) and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and was a founding member of WRITERS REBEL, an active writer-led working group within Extinction Rebellion.
