The Paper Men by William Golding

First published: 1984

Type of work: Domestic realism

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: England, Switzerland, and Italy

Principal Characters:

• Wilfred Barclay, a prominent English novelist
• Rick L. Tucker, an American academic bent on becoming Barclay’s authorized biographer

The Novel

Wilfred Barclay has had a very successful career as a novelist. His first book was both a popular and a critical success. Subsequent works have done well, but in later years he has coasted on his reputation and has given in to his propensity for heavy drinking. Although he has had a decent respect for his own work, he has not thought in terms of literary immortality. He seems, rather, to enjoy living in comfort in the country with his wife, Elizabeth.

Barclay’s whole life and his view of his career begin to change radically with the appearance of an American academic, Rick L. Tucker. Invited to Barclay’s home for dinner, Tucker stays the night and is caught rifling through Barclay’s garbage for the discarded pieces of the novelist’s literary output. Disturbed by the ruckus between Barclay and Tucker, Elizabeth discovers the men struggling in the kitchen in a kind of embrace. Actually Barclay has mistaken the hairy Tucker, on his knees rooting about in garbage, for a badger.

Elizabeth wrests from Tucker the scrap of paper he has managed to extract from the garbage. Rather than a rejected draft of a literary work, the paper turns out to be a fragment of a Barclay letter to a former mistress. Barclay, whose pajama bottoms have fallen to the floor in his wrestling with Tucker, is literally caught with his pants down. Tucker’s intrusion into his home leads to Barclay’s divorce from Elizabeth and to a turning point in his literary career, for Tucker’s aspiration to be Barclay’s official biographer forces the novelist to reflect deeply on the farcical nature of his life and work.

Much of the remainder of the novel concerns Rick L. Tucker’s pursuit of Wilfred Barclay. Although the novelist is flattered to be considered worthy of a biography, his predominant attitude is one of disdain for the oafish but predatory American academic. As Barclay moves from one location to the next—becoming a world traveler in his efforts to escape not only Tucker but also his doubts about his own worthiness—he gradually bankrupts whatever spiritual reserves he has come to rely upon. He writes little and seems unable to form enduring relationships.

Eventually Tucker catches up with Barclay and tries to entice the novelist into an agreement naming Tucker as authorized biographer. Tucker even appears to lure Barclay into a contract by offering his new young wife for the writer’s pleasure. Just when Barclay seems most revolted by Tucker’s crude tactics, the would-be biographer saves his subject from falling to his death on an Alpine slope (or so it appears at the time). Although Barclay is grateful to Tucker—indeed, he confesses that he owes his life to him—Barclay again escapes. This time, however, on his travels he evolves a plan to best his biographer, and the novel ends with Barclay’s and Tucker’s final and startling rendezvous.

The Characters

The novel is narrated by Barclay. As a result, not only Tucker but all the other minor characters as well take their color from his rather aloof, egotistical attitude. Not that Barclay thinks he is a prize. On the contrary, there is a wry awareness of his severe limitations, of his inability to empathize with his wife and later with an Italian mistress, whose religious feelings are injured by Barclay’s unsympathetic rationalism and psychologizing. Barclay tends to caricature others, to make fun of Tucker’s and his wife’s use of “hon,” for example.

Reviewers have noted that William Golding is much more successful in his characterization of Barclay than of Tucker. Golding seems to know little about American academic life, about the kind of writing an academic writer such as Tucker would do, and even about the degrees Tucker would hold. In part, this ignorance may be Barclay’s, since the main character clearly is not very interested in the world from which Tucker comes. On the other hand, Barclay quotes Tucker’s words, and even these sometimes seem out of tune for an American.

Much more authentic are scenes at Barclay’s English club with the critic John St. John, one of those minor English characters Golding easily understands. Through his words, St. John comes alive and gives the reader a more penetrating look at Barclay than is possible to get in pages and pages of Barclay’s self-description and dialogue with Tucker. Here, for example, is St. John getting the best of Barclay at their club:

You are utterly penetrable, Wilfred. You’d be perfectly happy with my little homilies if instead of calling you Rudesby I’d called you cher maltre, wouldn’t you now? We all have our ambitions such as they are—a K, perhaps, eh, Wilf? No? All passion spent?

Through such a passage, the rhythms of English talk, the sense of one character sizing up another, and a deep sense of place are established.

Critical Context

Since the appearance of his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding has been received as a writer of moral allegories and parables. At its outset, The Paper Men seems a very different kind of work, a realistic domestic comedy. Yet gradually the religious overtones of the narrative take hold, and Barclay’s insistence on viewing his life as “farce” is seen against the background of larger failings in human society. That society often seems as flat and two-dimensional as the novel’s two main characters.

By and large, reviewers have been disappointed in Golding’s novel, albeit he has been judged by the high expectations occasioned by his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. His selection was controversial and provoked an unprecedented protest by one of the Nobel judges. Even sympathetic reviews of The Paper Men noted that only admirers of Golding’s previous work would greet it with enthusiasm, and his doubters would have no reason for revising their low opinions.

It is perhaps too early to characterize the place of The Paper Men in Golding’s career. It does seem apparent, however, that in this novel he has not fully integrated his concern with important moral and religious themes with a convincing cast of characters who are interesting in their own right. To some extent, this is always the problem for a writer of allegory, who employs his figures to stand for more than themselves. The Paper Men also suffers when compared to Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Pale Fire (1962), both of which are brilliant novels about biography and the literary life. Nevertheless, Golding’s Nobel Prize and his most recent novel testify to the fact that his work seriously engages profound themes in a way that much contemporary fiction avoids. It is a considerable act of courage for Golding to have chosen as his narrator-protagonist the figure of a writer not unlike himself in some respects. If Barclay has not had Golding’s success, he does physically resemble his creator, and he recalls some of Golding’s nonfiction writing about the academic “light industry” that has grown up around his fiction. To view the persona of the writer in the darkest light, as Golding has done in The Paper Men, to make of him both the scapegoat and the symbol of contemporary culture, is to write with enormous ambition.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert M. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX (April 1, 1984), p. 3.

Biles, Jack I., and Robert O. Evans, eds. William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, 1978.

Gray, Paul. Review in Time. CXXIII (April 9, 1984), p. 98.

Library Journal. CIX, March 15, 1984, p. 596.

Lodge, David. Review in The New Republic. CXC (April 16, 1984), pp. 32-35.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 3, 1984, p. 3.

New Statesman. CVII, February 10, 1984, p. 23.

The New Yorker. LX, May 21, 1984, p. 132.

Oldsey, Bernard S., and Stanley Weintraub. The Art of William Golding, 1965.

Prescott, Peter S. Review in Newsweek. CIII (April 30, 1984), p. 77.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, February 24, 1984, p. 127.

Raban, Jonathan. Review in The Atlantic. CCLIII (April, 1984), p. 142.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIII, April 19, 1984, p. 28.