Wyndham Lewis' Taxi-Cab-Driver Test: 1. "The Spire" by William Golding

In Men Without Art (1934), Wyndham Lewis proposed the "taxi-cab-driver test" for fiction. The idea is that one should examine a random page from a novel (though the two examples he selected were both opening pages) on the assumption that it represents the kind of intellectual object that the novel is as a whole (even, whether it is fiction at all). I am shortly going to apply the test to the first page of William Golding's novel The Spire (1964).
   There are some novels for which the choice of the first page would be inappropriate. I mean those novels where the author has expended what was probably an enormous effort to make the first page or first paragraph a prose poem that is quite unrepresentative of the rest of the novel. Such novels then commonly lapse into something else, such as pages of dialogue or background material. In this case, however, it is quite appropriate. Golding goes on exactly as he begins, and the first page displays the faults and virtues of the novel to an extraordinary degree. (And by the way, I intend to make the taxi-cab-driver test a regular feature of the blog). So here is the first page of The Spire. Note that, as the text begins an unusually long way down the first page, I have included a portion of the second page in order to bring the sample up to page length.

He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again. The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows.
   Chin up, hands holding the model spire before him, eyes half closed; joy -
   "I've waited half my life for this day!"
   Opposite him, the other side of the model of the cathedral on its trestle table, stood the chancellor, his face dark with shadow, over ancient pallor.
   "I don't know, my Lord Dean. I don't know."
   He peered across at the model of the spire, where Jocelin held it firmly in both hands. His voice was bat-thin, and wandered vaguely into the large, high air of the chapter house.
   "But if you consider that this small piece of wood - how long is it?"
   "Eighteen inches, my Lord Chancellor."
   "Eighteen inches. Yes. Well. It represents, does it not, a construction of wood and stone and metal -"
   "Four hundred feet high."
   The chancellor moved out into sunlight, hands up to his chest, and peered around him. He looked up at the roof. Jocelin looked sideways at him, loving him.
   "The foundations. I know. But God will provide."
   The chancellor had found what he was looking for, a memory.
   "Ah yes."
   Then, in ancient busyness, he crept away over the pavement to the door and through it. He left a message, in the air behind him.
   "Mattins. Of course."
   Jocelin stood still, and shot an arrow of love after him.

   The Spire is set at an unspecified time in the Middle Ages. Jocelin, the Dean of a Cathedral, is obsessed with building a four hundred foot spire on top of the Cathedral. All the men around him have misgivings about the wisdom of this enterprise. It has often been stated that Golding was inspired by Salisbury Cathedral, but there are reasons for supposing that the true inspiration came from Wells, not Salisbury. Wells Cathedral was begun in 1180, but much of the construction, including its spire, took place under Bishop (not Dean) Jocelin, who held the See of Bath from 1206 to 1242. His spire caused the central pillars of the Cathedral to sink, and the vaulting had to be reinforced. When the spire was destroyed by fire in the Fifteenth Century, it was considered too risky to replace it, and Wells remains spireless to this day. So much by way of background.
   At the beginning of the novel, we meet two of the principal characters, Dean Jocelin and the Chancellor, standing beneath the glory of the stained-glass windows of the Chapter House. This glory is marred by several elements of the writing: the shocking carelessness of "moved with his movements" (why not simply "moved with him"?); the melodramatic gestures of Jocelin ("laughing, chin up, and shaking his head"); and the awkwardness of the imagery in "The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows". But it is not only the sunlight pouring in through the stained-glass windows that moves Jocelin to such transports. The model of the new spire is now complete.
   This would naturally have been an opportunity for the author, through Jocelin, to make known to the reader the justification for the enterprise. But the brief conversation that ensues is inarticulate, frigid, and abruptly terminated, after an 'I must be going now' moment, by the unconscious humour of "He [the Chancellor] left a message, in the air behind him." Finally, another comic line follows, calling up an unwanted image of Cupid and his bow: "Jocelin....shot an arrow of love after him."
   The novel was neither a critical nor a popular success, though for creditable reasons and not because it is badly written, or because it has characters who are given to throwing back their heads and laughing. The age did not want to read about the ambition of a mediaeval cleric to celebrate in stone the greater glory of God. Golding, I need hardly say, was a much better writer than the evidence of The Spire would imply. His first published novel, Lord of the Flies, has rightly become a classic, and he followed up The Spire with the excellent The Scorpion God (1971), a collection of three imaginative novellas. During the 1980s he lapsed again, and devoted the rest of his career to writing tedious Booker Prize novels. The Spire is still in print, and continues to divide readers.