The Double Tongue (18 page)
Authors: William Golding
It was only the next day that I received a letter from the Archon of Athens. In view of my long service as Pythia of the Apolline Oracle the city wished to erect a stone image of me among the altars on the Field of Mars. I wrote back – remembering the void – and feeling strangely that there was a kind of tenderness in it that I could explain to nobody. I asked that rather than an image of me they should erect a simple altar and inscribe there:
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume,
Poems
, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel,
Lord of the Flies
, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961.
Lord of the Flies
was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections
The Hot Gates
and
A Moving Target
. He won the Booker Prize for his novel
Rites of Passage
in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.
The Double Tongue
, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.
Books by
Sir William Golding
1911–1993
Nobel Prize for Literature
Fiction
LORD OF THE FLIES
THE INHERITORS
PINCHER MARTIN
FREE FALL
THE SPIRE
THE PYRAMID
THE SCORPION GOD
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE PAPER MEN
RITES OF PASSAGE
CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRE DOWN BELOW
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
(a revised text of
Rites
of
Passage
,
Close
Quarters
and
Fire
Down
Below
in one volume)
Essays
THE HOT GATES
A MOVING TARGET
Travel
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL
Play
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY
LORD OF THE FLIES
adapted for the stage by
Nigel Williams
First published in 1995
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012All rights reserved
© The Estate of William Golding, 1995The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26742–2
