The Telegraph has published an especially fine essay by Stephen King, excerpted from his introduction to a new edition of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.” In it, King writes about growing up in rural New England, where “there were more cows than people” and where books were delivered once a month by a woman in a green van called the State of Maine Bookmobile. It was there, at the age of twelve, that he was first given “Lord of the Flies” by the bookmobile driver, as a response to the remembered question: “Do you have any stories about how kids really are?”
In the novel’s pages, he found:
a perfect understanding of the sort of beings my friends and I were at 12 or 13, untouched by the usual soft soap and deodorant. Could we be good? Yes. Could we be kind? Yes again. Could we, at the turn of a moment, become little monsters? Indeed we could. And did. At least twice a day and far more frequently on summer vacations, when we were often left to our own devices.
King recalls the feelings of excitement and liberation, and then of grim terror, that he felt while reading “Lord of the Flies” for the first time. His description of his childhood, and of the self-discovery (of things good as well as bad) that children experience when “left to [their] own devices,” put me in mind of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which I’ve been thinking about a lot since I saw it last week.
Some critics have accused Malick of sentimentality (or, even, of reactionary politics) in his depiction of childhood in nineteen-fifties suburban Texas, where mothers wear clean aprons over crisp, line-dried dresses, and nobody locks their front or back doors. Yet that sweeping dismissal misses the vibrant dread that runs through even the most idyllic of Malick’s images of boyhood. Captured deep within the slants of perfect evening light, of shuffling rivers, of sun-dappled water coming from a garden hose are the darker secrets of consciousness that every boy and girl discovers—that is when they are given the space to explore. (That space exists today as it did in the nineteen-fifties, or can exist, and advocating for it as an absolute necessity of growing up, and exploring its power in reality and memory through art, does not necessarily make the artist a mid-century sentimentalist or an Eisenhower apologist or some kind of provincial rube.)
Any assembly of misbehaving boys is now likely to make us think of “Lord of the Flies,” so absorbed is that novel in our collective sense about the evil that lurks in the hearts of young men. And so that story came to mind when I saw the scene in “The Tree of Life” in which neighborhood boys get together to smash windows and the young protagonist, Jack, egged on by his peers, hitches a frog to a rocket and sends him, as one young boy exclaims “to the moon.” A far more ambiguous scene of violence, however, takes place in a quiet moment between Jack and his younger brother, when Jack lures him into putting his finger over the end of the muzzle of a BB gun. It is brutal and shocking then, coming as it does amidst the movie’s surface-level stasis, when Jack pulls the trigger, revealing his power to hurt, and later, in an equally unsettling scene of forgiveness, his power to command love.
Golding’s novel, King’s memory of reading it, and Malick’s are discrete distillations of childhood, reflecting the preoccupations of their creators, and in their evocation of particularity they move toward common experience, or as King writes, showing us, if such a thing is possible, “how kids really are.”
King's introduction to new edition of Lord of the Flies
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Originally Posted by pablo
