The Golden Age of Vagrancy: Notes on “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp”

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Cover of "The Autobiopgraphy of a Super-Tramp" by W. H. Davies, as published by Standard Ebooks. The cover depicts two tramps in the countryside, one standing and the other drinking from a pond.

Last month, Standard Ebooks published a new edition of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W. H. Davies. I’m announcing it here because I produced the edition, which entailed formatting, proofreading, assembling the metadata, and handing it off to the Standard Ebooks team for publication.

I’ve wanted to produce a book for Standard Ebooks since I first learned of their organization years ago. Getting an ebook over the finish line and accepted by them is a milestone for me.

If you’re unfamiliar with Standard Ebooks, they’re an open-source, volunteer-driven project producing high-quality ebooks of works unencumbered by copyrights. They’ve put out editions ranging from modern genre fiction to classical and ancient literature. They have a rigorous style guide, which makes these ebooks handsome, polished, and a pleasure to read. (I’ve found them to be of even higher quality than ebooks from some major publishers.) Best of all, their ebooks are free for anyone to download and keep.

I was thoroughly impressed by Standard Ebooks’ support. Not only do they have comprehensive documentation for building the ebook, but also the style guides I mentioned, and custom tooling for assembling and proofing the work. Whenever I ran into trouble, they were always quick to respond on their newsgroup.

Take a gander at their catalog. If you’re a curious reader, you’re bound to find something striking your fancy. If you’re interested in contributing, check out how you can get involved.

“Hobohemia”

I tend not to discuss my works-in-progress until they near completion, but I’ll make an exception here. My next novel (assuming I finish it!) regards a drifter wandering the Pacific coast between the world wars. My research led me to Davies’ Super-Tramp, which Standard Ebooks did not offer at the time, but had listed on their wanted list. I realized I could read the book as I worked on it. Two birds, one stone.

My work-in-progress is set in 1925, about seventeen years after Davies’ autobiography was first published. 1925 was also near the end of a period in American history where significant numbers of tramps and hoboes traveled the country. They sought work, relief, or simply a chance to experience all the natural beauty the United States had to offer. As H. L. Menken put it,

Tramps and hobos are commonly lumped together, but see themselves as sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply a migratory laborer; he may take some longish holidays, but sooner or later he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels.

A recent article by Caroline Fraser in New York Review of Books covers this period of hobos and tramps in better detail than I can offer. She describes what might be called the Golden Age of Vagrancy:

A hundred years ago, it seemed as if everyone wanted to be a hobo… Dreams of a tramp utopia, once termed “hobohemia,” produced classics of Americana. Recorded in the 1920s by [Harry] McClintock, the rollicking hobo anthem “Big Rock Candy Mountain” [sic] envisions an itinerants’ paradise where cigarette trees bloom and streams of alcohol trickle down the rocks. … The contradictory nature of the hobo, a character without home or possessions who embodied good-natured liberty and a gap-toothed joie de vivre, gave rise to a persistent sense of envy.

Davies appeared smack in the middle of this age of tramps and hoboes. These impoverished migrants were not uniformly uneducated or illiterate, as his autobiography shows.

Super-Tramp is a remarkable read, unadorned and understated in even the most shocking of situations, such as when Davies loses his foot in a train accident. This event, which curtailed his tramping days, is described so obliquely, and with such calm, I had to reread the passage to make sure he wrote what I thought he wrote.

Davies was not the only tramp documenting this way of life. Bart Kennedy also wrote several books on life spent on road and rail, with A Man Adrift being his most important by several accounts. Like Davies, Kennedy opens his book young and penniless in England, drawn to wander the United States out of a sense of awe for the young country’s purported freedoms and boundless natural beauty.

For my purposes—writing a novel about a loner drifting freely across the western United States—the most significant chapter in Kennedy’s book is the appropriately-titled “On Tramp”:

To be penniless and on tramp is a curious experience. You care for no one, and no one cares for you. Things about you seem vague and elusive. You are in a mental chaos. You are a link dissevered from the human chain. And you wander hardly knowing or caring where you wander. … Who you are or what you were matters not. You may be a man with a past, you may be a man with a future. You may be one who has belonged to the topmost class; you may be a labourer, or a man from out the filth of the slums, or a dispirited low-down thief.

Kennedy’s bleak outlook, which veers into a cynical romanticism, stands in almost direct contrast to Davies’ even-keeled account. Davies is less philosophical, and less analytical, but no less thoughtful than Kennedy:

Although I had at this time become lazy, losing almost all sense of respectability, I often reproached Brum for the aimlessness of this existence; telling him we must seek work and attend to other wants than those of the body. I would tell him of the arts, and how the cultivation of them was lost to us through a continual lack of funds. I told him of the pleasures of reading, visiting picture galleries, museums and theatres, and of the wonders of instrumental music, and of the human voice. …

We often go for days without reading matter, and we know not what the world is saying; nor what the world is doing. The beauty of nature is forever before my eyes, but I am certainly not enriching my mind, for who can contemplate nature with any profit in the presence of others. I have no leisure to make notes in hopes of future use, and am so overpacking my memory with all these scenes, that when their time comes for use, they will not then take definite shape. I must go to work for some months, so that I may live sparingly on my savings in some large city, where I can cultivate my mind.

These insights from Davies and Kennedy come nowhere near the common caricature of tramps, jolly homeless men in shabby clothes, bearing five o’clock shadow and an alcoholic’s rosacea nose, smoking discarded cigars and carrying handkerchief bindles.

A cartoon still of a tramp cooking a fish over an open fire.

Davies’ autobiography has the lens of a documentarian, a plain-speaking record of incidents and happenstance set against a pastoral backdrop of North America at the turn of the last century. (It is not a leap to compare it to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.) While Davies’ contemporaries were producing fin de siècles of decadence and decay, Davies described an earnest America on the rise, for the better or worse.

Breakfast in America

Although Davies and Kennedy hail from the British Isles, their books contribute important links in the history of American wanderlust literature.

Getting off the grid has an auspicious history in this country: From Transcendentalists like Walt Whitman and Thoreau, through the Age of Vagrancy documented by Davies and Kennedy, and into the 1950s and 60s, where no less than three styles of “life on the tramp” appeared in popular culture: the escapist beachcombers of Tiki and exotica music, the Kerouackian road-trip sagas popular with college students, and the middle-class tales of men ducking out of their button-up, chained-down lives, such as Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

If all-American wanderlust ever peaked, it would be among the counterculture of the 1960s, a mass youth movement essentially defined by the impulse to up and leave, recreating one’s identity in the process. Fraser points this out in her review when she recounts Bob Dylan’s youthful zeal to restyle himself a modern-day hobo-philosopher once he’d arrived in New York City.

Although a century has passed since Davies and Kennedy, the romanticized tramp’s life has not diminished in the modern popular imagination. The temptations of the wandering life are hardy and durable. You’ll find it among couch-surfers, backpackers wandering the Third World (with Alex Garland’s The Beach being its finest example), and the #vanlife movement.

The most extreme resurgence has to be with Christopher McCandless, the young man who abandoned an easy well-heeled life, drifted across the western United States, and died in the Alaskan interior after making a go at subsistence living there. McCandless admired Davies, going so far as to adopt the moniker “Alexander Supertramp.” (This is how I first learned of Davies’ autobiography, and have long wanted to write about such a character.) His example inspired countless young people, with many dying in a vain attempt to, in McCandless’ words, “Kill The False Being Within.”

As I’ve written before, the debate over the cause of McCandless’ death has become a decades-long fixture in America’s culture war. It centers on the very questions that Thoreau, Davies, Kennedy, and even the #vanlife movement have faced:

Should we admire or damn those who dare to escape their responsibilities to live a freer life? When they fail, should we honor their attempt? Or, should we hold them up as a warning for those curious to follow?

And if you look back at the list I’ve compiled here, just about all of them failed or collapsed in some way. Not only did Davies have to set aside his wanderlust due to injury, other tramps he meets find the demands of life on the road unsustainable. The hippy communes have all shuttered; the #vanlife movement has suffered; and Rabbit wound up not running very far. Even Walden has been used as a warning, not a blueprint, for subsequent generations toying with their own ideas of living off the grid.

Of Walden, E. B. White wrote it’s “the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world…and the urge to set the world straight.”

The same can be said of Davies’ autobiography. Contrary to George Bernard Shaw’s preface, Super-Tramp is not quite the unrepentant declaration of an anarchist’s credo he makes it out to be. It concludes with Davies settling down in an English country house, a return to the domesticated life he elected to abandon at the outset. There he writes,

People are not to be blamed for their doubts, but that they make no effort to arrive at the truth. However much people of a higher standing may doubt the veracity of certain matters, I have the one consolation to know that many a poor man, who is without talent or means to make his experiences public, knows what I have written to be the truth.

A desire to enjoy the world, and the urge to set the world straight: This is the tramp’s life.


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“Chandler & West” now at San Francisco Public Library

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Photo of the novel "Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles" on a table.

My Hollywood crime novel Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles is now stocked by the San Francisco Public Library. As a San Franciscan, I’m especially proud to know my work is on the shelf of my local library. And if you live here, it’s one more way to pick up the book.

You can request the book from its SFPL catalog page, or visit one of the branches listed to pick it up in person. My prior historical crime book A Man Named Baskerville is also in SFPL’s catalog as well.


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Hammett’s voice in the Flitcraft Parable

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Humphrey Bogart holding the Maltese Falcon (film prop).
Humphrey Bogart and “the dingus.” (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Anyone who’s followed this blog knows I’ve written a few times about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. In particular, I’ve posted notes on an interlude within it about a man named Charles Flitcraft who, after a near-death experience, leaves his family and home to wander the world, only to return to a similar suburban family life a few years later. This episode is commonly called the Flitcraft Parable, for it does indeed read like one, even if the term is never used in The Maltese Falcon itself.

Detective Sam Spade tells this brief tale to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the book’s femme fatale. The reason for the telling is a common question about the parable, since it seems out-of-place in this taut and lean novel. I’ve also explored how the parable plays into the book’s final scene, when Spade lays out his credo for O’Shaughnessy.

Recently, I was rereading the Flitcraft Parable for a project I’m developing, when I noticed something surprising in it: It’s the one place in the book where Hammett’s voice comes through, almost directly.

The parable

In the book, Sam Spade tells of Flitcraft, a well-to-do banker with a house, a car, and a family. One day, on his way to lunch, he strolls by a construction site:

A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. … He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.

Shaken to the core, and realizing he’d been spared by cosmic fate, Flitcraft abandons his family and wealth, and flees for life on the road. Years later, he winds up in another suburban town, remarried and with a new child, living a life near-identical to the one he fled. “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

The perspective

It’s important here to mention that The Maltese Falcon is told in the third-person objective, a perspective rarely used in fiction. It’s a significant choice on Hammett’s part.

Most modern third-person fiction is told as third-person limited, where the narrator describes the main character’s thoughts and feelings. In third-person objective, the narrator never reveals any character’s internal thoughts. The only clues for the reader are external details and reactions, such as facial expressions. Merriam-Webster defines third-person objective as:

…the narrator reports the events that take place without knowing the motivations or thoughts of any of the characters. We know little about what drives them until we hear them speak or observe their actions. The resulting tone is often matter-of-fact, not colored by any opinions or commentary, nor of knowledge of what takes place outside the scene.

It’s an extremely difficult point-of-view to pull off, especially for novel-length work. It’s the kind of restrictive perspective creative writing instructors warn their students to avoid.

Photograph of Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett

Hammett does pull off third-person objective in The Maltese Falcon though, and he does it so well, most readers don’t even notice it.

So, it’s notable when Hammett’s own voice breaks through the narrative during the Flitcraft Parable, like God calling down from the heavens:

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

To be clear, I’m not saying Hammett has broken the rules of third-person objective here. Yet I can’t help but read the above as something more than “matter-of-fact, not colored by any opinions or commentary, now of knowledge of what takes place outside the scene.”

Rereading the above quote carefully, sentence by sentence, it seems less like a summary offered by Spade to O’Shaughnessy, and more like Hammett inserting himself into the book. He offers, in essence, a summary near to the moral or meaning of the parable, much as Jesus asks at the end of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”

Hammett’s daughter, Jo, remembers her father telling the Flitcraft Parable to her years after The Maltese Falcon‘s publication “as a story he had just heard or read, not as if he had used it as a set-piece in a book.” Apparently, he liked to tell the story to others as well. It seems the parable of a comfortable man shocked into a realization of life’s fragility struck Hammett deeply. That’s why I think he took a chance to include it in The Maltese Falcon, and took an even greater chance to explain to the reader, in his own voice, what the parable signifies.


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Touring the Golden Gate Park Commission Vault

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Interior of the Commission Vault Mini Museum.
Commission Vault Mini Museum. (All photos by author.)

Back in April of this year, I learned of the “Commission Vault Mini Museum” via SFGate.com, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle. I immediately booked a reservation to tour the museum, which is so backlogged, it takes month to get in. I only visited on July 9th, three months later.

The Commission in question the San Francisco Park Commission, which governs the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. The museum houses photographs and artifacts from the department’s century and a half tenure, which extends back to 1871.

This must be one of the smallest museums on the West Coast—it’s housed inside a walk-in vault. The floor dimensions are perhaps twelve feet by four feet. It’s so compact only four or five people can comfortably stand in it at once. You begin to understand why open reservations are months out.

For me, the tour began when I entered the Commission’s headquarters, located at the eastern entrance to Golden Gate Park, inside McLaren Lodge. It was built in the late 19th century for John McLaren, the most famous and prominent superintendent of San Francisco’s Parks Department. The lodge not only served as offices for his staff, but was also home for him, his family, and personal staff. It was as though all 1,017 acres of Golden Gate Park was his personal backyard.

Exterior of McLaren Lodge.
McLaren Lodge.

It’s a grand structure, with rustic stone exterior and rough columns and arches, topped with red clay roof tiles. Historian-in-residence Christopher Pollock told me it’s often described as a mixture of Mission Revival and Craftsman architecture, although at least one source dubbed it “Scottish Baronial.” It’s a fitting term for horticulturalist McLaren, who immigrated to America from Scotland in his youth, and was known in his later years as bearing a kind but kingly manner.

Either way, McLaren Lodge’s architecture is oddly familiar but strikingly unusual compared to San Francisco’s other architectural styles. It’s the kind of structure a Hollywood millionaire would build in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, or you read about in The Day of the Locust. In that sense, the lodge is uniquely Californian: A style evocative of another place or time, but not of any other time or place.

As a boomtown, early San Francisco had few public green spaces. The thousand-acre Golden Gate Park on the city’s west side was the solution. The first problem to be solved was the land itself. The acreage was barren and covered in windswept sand dunes blown eastward from the Pacific ocean. (No, really—check out some photos for yourself.)

Portrait painting of John McLaren.
Portrait of John McLaren.

McLaren and his predecessor William Hammond Hall spent decades terraforming this desolate stretch of wasteland into a woodland reserve, with rose gardens, rhododendron dells, groves of sequoias and Monterey cypress, and wide meadows of Kentucky bluegrass. For entertainment, McLaren installed lakes, fishing holes, lawn bowling courts, horse stables, and much more. Golden Gate Park was California’s first Disneyland, a theme park before there were theme parks, showcasing the state’s natural beauty.

McLaren’s decades of devotion to building the greatest city park in the world, and the resulting grandeur, made him one of the most popular public servants in San Francisco history. The city amended its charter in order to appoint him Park Superintendent for life, a post he held for over four decades. The meeting room where the Vault Museum is found features a prominent portrait of McLaren, still overseeing the Commission’s agenda decades after his passing.

Fireplace and mantle in McLaren Lodge. The walls are covered in leather.
Original meeting table and chairs, still in use today. The window looks out on JFK Drive, the scoliotic east-west spine of Golden Gate Park.

The vault & museum

The vault holding the museum was where the Commission originally stored cash and valuables, from a time when physical currency was more common for things like park permits and payroll. Later, the vault was cleared out and used for storage, which included several filing cabinets of paperwork. Those papers turned out to be historical documents unto themselves. They’re now stored at the San Francisco Public Library.

Vault door leading into the museum.

With the vault cleared out, the idea came to use it for a display of the Park’s history, which led to the creation of the Mini Museum.

The Museum itself is a picturesque but brief travel through the decades of Golden Gate Park’s long life. Photographs of the early years show the sand dunes that had to be tamed by McLaren and Hall, as well as the cemeteries originally lining the northwestern border of the park. (Those graves would eventually be moved down the peninsula to Colma; some of the broken headstones would wind up lining the pathways and gutters in Buena Vista Park, a few blocks from McLaren Lodge.)

Each decade thereafter depicts the city’s and park’s development, recording the growing population and an increasing number of public parks throughout San Francisco. (One surprise for me: the nondescript Colombia Square, which I gave short shrift to in my “San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names” page, is actually one of the city’s earliest neighborhood parks.) The timeline also shows Golden Gate Park as a civic meeting place and cultural lodestone, such as when it hosted now-legendary rock acts in the late 1960s.

An 1884 schedule of weekend concerts at Golden Gate Park’s bandstand, featuring the “Second Artillery Reg’t Band of N. G. C.”
Early “Official Guide to Golden Gate Park” with a surprisingly clean folding map inside. Note McLaren’s name on the cover; I can’t tell if it’s to indicate he owned the copy, or is listing him as the “author” of Golden Gate Park.

For over a hundred years, San Francisco has been known as a “city of hotels.” It’s also a city of museums and tours, mainstream as well as quirky, cool, odd, and now tiny. It’s hard to call the Commission Vault Mini Museum a must-see for visitors in town for only a few days. I do think it’s worth your while if you love San Francisco history—especially the history of its parks—and can line up a spot for an afternoon viewing. I wasn’t disappointed at all; I’m just unsure if my enthusiasm for Golden Gate Park’s history is widely shared.

Someone on the tour asked if they offered tours of McLaren Lodge itself, which apparently is under consideration. Combining a tour of the vault with a tour of house itself would make an afternoon visit a no-doubter.


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The Tonga castaways don’t disprove “Lord of the Flies”

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Book cover of "The Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

With the release of a new Netflix adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies comes another round of media reminders that the book’s most famous plot element—shipwrecked children turn barbarously violent—was “disproven” fifty years ago on an island in the South Pacific.

The logic goes something like this:

In 1965, six Tongan teenagers were shipwrecked on ‘Ata, an uninhabited island on the southern tip of the Tonga archipelago. Rather than descend into savagery, as the children do in Lord of the Flies, the Tongans managed to survive and form a communal-like existence. They shared duties, gathered food, kept spirits up, and even tended to one another, such as setting one’s boy’s fractured leg. After fifteen months, they were rescued and returned to their families.

The story of the Tongans has grown into a modern parable warning against taking Golding’s book seriously, or even discarding it outright. One example comes from a recent article, where Lenore Skenazy recounts the Tongan success story with the brisk conclusion, “So much for barbarism.”

The popular linking of the true-life Tongan incident with Golding’s novel appears to have started with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. His 2019 book Humankind: A Hopeful History sets out to prove that people are fundamentally decent and eager to build a better society. Whatever Golding’s fictional account may depict, he says, real children do not become wild, bloodthirsty creatures once they’re removed from the watchful eyes of civilization.

Bregman followed his book with a 2020 Guardian article headlined “The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.” The story went viral on social media, leading to years of articles repeating his thesis. A sampling of subsequent headlines shows they even mirrored the Guardian‘s, almost down to the word:

Since the Tongan teenagers didn’t turn against each other, the logic goes, Lord of the Flies has been proven wrong. It’s as if we should discard the lessons of Animal Farm because there exists not one recorded episode of farm animals forming an authoritarian Marxist collective.

The best at everything

As Scott Alexander writes, “Beware the man of one study.” A single example that ends well does not slam the door on Golding’s book, and it’s pretty sad that so many people think it would.

But if one example is proof positive, is a single counterexample dispositive? Consider the Sugamo child abandonment case. In 1988, a mother left her four young children alone in a Tokyo apartment for nine months. No, they weren’t shipwrecked like the Tongans or the Lord of the Flies boys—but that’s kind of the point. The children had modern shelter, clean running water, and easy access to food, which they procured from local convenience stores using money the mother had left for them. The children did a remarkable job of taking care of each other, but it wasn’t enough.

When finally discovered by social workers, they were malnourished, and one of the children was missing. The eldest boy admitted that two of his friends had assaulted and killed the youngest girl. While the eldest boy was not present at the killing, he helped his friends bury her body.

Still from Nobody Knows (2004), a Japanese film based on the Sugamo case.

When reports reached the public, the response in Japan mirrored an underlying question posed many times in Lord of the Flies: “How could Japanese children be reduced to this behavior?”

In Lord of the Flies, it’s the English who are puzzled: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys…would have been able to put up a better show than that,” one character remarks at the end of the book. The boys were raised well and taught in boarding schools. Each had a reading diet of British Empire adventure books about self-sufficient boys who always act as proper young gentlemen, even in the face of adversity. “We’re English, and the English are best at everything,” young Jack declares, a statement which turns out to be surprisingly empty by the final chapter. “The northern European tradition of work, play, and food right through the day, made it possible for them to adjust wholly to this new rhythm,” the narrator of Lord of the Files declares, another statement emptied of meaning after only a few pages.

After all, the book most often named the first prose novel in the English language is none other than Robinson Crusoe, a story about a shipwrecked Englishman surviving due to self-discipline, routine, and his education. Crusoe was written for adults, but over the years it developed a younger audience. It also became a model for how every Englishman should act under duress.

It’s not hard to imagine Ralph, Jack, and the others reading Crusoe while in school. Yet Golding’s book feels like a rebuttal to Defoe’s classic, tearing down its colonial-era pride with cool precision.

Scene from the 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies.

“How can you be surprised that Tongans survived on an island?”

Contrary to popular depiction, the children in Lord of the Flies don’t immediately descend into barbarism. Upon their arrival on the island, the boys formulate rules, coordinate efforts, and develop routines, just as their boarding school education taught them. They choose a leader in the fair-haired (and fair-minded) Ralph, who sets about in assigning duties. He even leads the boys in building a signal fire atop the island’s sole mountain, exactly as the Tongan boys did.

The Tongans numbered six teenagers, aged 13 to 19. They were friends at a Catholic school. They ran away, gathered food and supplies, and stole a boat. That is, they were working together before they even reached the island.

In contrast, the number of children in the book is not stated with precision, but it’s likely close to twenty or thirty. The children do not know each other, and none are pubescent. The “littleuns” are so numerous that, after the mountaintop fire grows into an inferno, the older children are unsure if one of them perished in the blaze.

Two months after Bregman’s story in the Guardian, Tongan Meleika Gesa penned a rebuttal arguing the boys of ‘Ata were not the “real” Lord of the Flies. Gesa explains how Tongan values and education prepared them for survival. Not only did they know how to start a fire and catch and prepare fish, the Tongan culture instilled a familial cohesion among the group. There’s no such unity among the boys in Lord of the Flies, save for their nationality.

Amusingly, Gesa asks, “How can you be surprised that Pasifika people, specifically Tongan, can survive on an island?”

The Guardian article claims Bregman “unearthed” the forgotten story about Tongan teenagers on an island, like a paleontologist discovering a new fossil. Gesa points out the story of the teens is well known among Tongans, and not forgotten at all.

Gesa has more complaints about the way Bregman presents the story, but the overarching tragedy is that Bregman’s, not Gesa’s, account dominates public perception. “While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read,” Bregman wrote in 2020. That’s not so true today.

Realism and literalism

In the 1950s, William Golding wrote that Lord of the Flies “is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. … The whole book is symbolic in nature.” (Emphasis mine.)

That Lord of the Flies is a parable constructed with symbolism and metaphor, and not a detailed, realistic account of children on an island, seems incredibly obvious to me—and yet, here we are, with people treating the book as a failed thought experiment.

We all seem to agree that society is defective—otherwise, we wouldn’t spend so much time arguing over politics, policy, and taxes. If society’s defects don’t emerge from defects in human nature, where else would they come from?

I see little evidence in the world that people’s natural instincts are to work together, avoid conflict, and live peaceably side-by-side. If anything, much of our modern existence is spent pushing against those social norms. Modern culture treats every little interaction as a zero-sum transaction, which concludes with one party the winner and the other the loser. Getting people to see humility, cooperation, and teamwork as being non-zero-sum—transactions where everyone wins—seems futile.

But can those social values—work together, avoid conflict—be taught? At one time, they were, via a humanistic education, religion, and active parenting—the same institutions Western culture has been discounting over the past fifty years.

So, have we adopted some system of moral instruction to fill the void? If so, I can’t locate it. What appears to have taken its place is the zero-sum thinking I mentioned above. With it came a kind of raw, undeveloped trust in Realism and Literalism, twin brothers of interpretation which frantically attempt to nail down, rather than open up, our understanding of human nature. By nailing down human nature into a flat and mechanical one, it opens up a self-justifying excuse for zero-sum thinking. Add to that our culture’s simmering anxiety of being taken for a chump, which appears to be one of our deepest fears. Way back when, if someone took advantage of another, the cheater was shamed.

William Golding wrote, “The moral [of Lord of the Flies] is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.”

Tongan Meleika Gesa wrote during the pandemic, “Just look at how we’re surviving Covid-19 together. My family have given away food to our neighbours and checked up on friends and family because that’s how we survive.”

Jack in Lord of the Flies says, “We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

That’s the ethical and moral divide between the Tongan teens and the boys in Lord of the Flies. What follows for each group flows from within.


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