BIOGRAPHY: William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the FliesBy John Carey Faber & Faber, 573pp £25
SELF-HATING, alcoholic and often belligerent, William Golding transformed his neuroses into literature
Lord of the Flies, William Golding's Crusoe-like fable of extremity and isolation on a desert island, is a landmark in post-war British fiction and ever-popular. Published in 1954, it explores the cruelties of a group of schoolboys who endure a rite of passage into the adult life and loss of innocence. The novel has sold in its millions and was turned into a film in 1963 by Peter Brook.
In later years, however, Golding came to resent the book's reputation, which eclipsed the greatness of his other work, he believed. The grievance was understandable, but just how good a writer was Golding? Lord of the Fliesis occasionally precious in tone (the "multitudinous murmur of bees") and self-consciously literary. Moreover, its insistence on the evil and cruelty innate in man is questionable, if not bleakly undermining for some readers. Golding was aware of cruelty in himself, and half-jokingly said he would have been a Nazi, had he been born in Hitler's Germany. Lord of the Fliesapparently grew out of this self-knowledge. "I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature", Golding clarified.
For much of his life, according to John Carey, Golding was prey to a corrosive pessimism and sense of sin. A difficult, at times self-hating man, he was alcoholic, possibly homosexual and often belligerent, yet capable, too, of acts of great kindness. Impressively for a writer so boozy, moreover, he remained faithful to his wife Ann, with whom he had two children, for 40 years. Physically, Golding came to resemble the sea captain on the Player’s cigarette packet; a grizzled, whiskery fellow, nicknamed variously “Scruff”, “Goldilocks” and (to friends) “Bill”.
Wary of mateyness, John Carey refers to his subject as "Golding" throughout this biography, even though he knew him and clearly admires the work. Few biographers get to meet their subjects; Carey's acquaintance with Golding (dating from the mid-1980s) provided him with an enduring image of the man, and much of his later biographical research was informed by it. The result is a dignified, scholarly life, which convincingly claims Golding as one of the 20th century's great writers. In recognition of the undoubted power of such novels as Pincher Martin, The Spireand Rites of Passage, in 1983 Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize.
He was born in 1911, in Cornwall, to nonconformist, teacher parents, who cared little for social niceties. Golding himself could later become prickly and hostile in the presence of what he called “top-drawer Englishmen”, and his sense of social inferiority and grievance was exacerbated when the family moved to Malborough in Wiltshire, where the sight of privileged young gentlemen from Malborough College (one of the great public schools of England) filled him with class “hatred and envy”. Nevertheless he was happy enough to be knighted in 1988 by the Queen, and indeed went to strenuous lengths to ensure he got his “K”.
At Oxford University, where he read English, Golding wrote Tennysonian poetry and developed a lifelong interest in the culture and burial rites of ancient Egypt. During the Easter holidays, disturbingly, he tried to rape a 15-year-old girl, Dora Spencer, whom he had known at school in Malborough. (Small wonder Golding considered himself "a monster".) Afterwards, in 1939, he married and in the same year took a job teaching at a school in Salisbury, where he became a familiar, if disconcertingly odd presence in Harris tweeds and malodorous cords. According to one ex-pupil, Golding deliberately stirred antagonisms in his class in order to observe their reactions. Perhaps only a schoolmaster could know how "beastly" boys could be; the dystopian allegory of Lord of the Flieswas, in part, informed by personal experience.
Incredibly, Golding’s debut novel was rejected by over 20 publishers before finally finding a home at Faber Faber. The reluctance to publish was partly understandable, for, as Carey reveals, the typescript was in narrative disarray and positively groaned with infelicities of plot. “Rubbish and pointless”, was the verdict of one professional reader employed by Faber.
The novel might have hit the literary scrap-heap, says Carey, had Charles Monteith not intervened. Born in 1921 into an Ulster Protestant family, Monteith was to become a legendary figure at Faber, attentive to his authors and brimful of initiative. Unusually for a man of letters, he had no ambition to become a writer himself, but worked for the love of books alone. Expecting little of Golding’s manuscript, he found he was compelled to read it all in one sitting.
Excited, he accepted Golding's manuscript for publication, on condition that alterations be made. Golding made these willingly; and, as the typescript left his hands, a friendship with Monteith flourished. Imposingly aristocratic in manner, Monteith had been an army officer in the second World War, yet he remained Golding's editor, consultant and champion for over four decades. Carey's biography is, among other things, a homage to this grand, old school editor, whose "healthy pruning" of Lord of the Fliesensured it would be well received by the critics and, eventually, become a set text in schools.
Bolstered by Monteith's support, Golding went on to write a further 10 fable-like novels set in different times and places. Not everybody liked them. The Inheritors, about Neanderthal man, was "the purest gibberish", in Auberon Waugh's view. For all their myth-making and aspiration to poetry, however, they are rooted in the everyday and quite accessible. Darkness Visible, a hauntingly beautiful late work, alludes to the Bloody Sunday shooting in Derry in 1972 of civil rights protesters.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his growing international fame, Golding remained a victim of dark phobias and drank heavily to anaesthetise them. At a friend’s house one night he destroyed a puppet of Bob Dylan and, under the impression that it was Satan, buried it in the back garden. There is much fascinating material here, though some might find the biography too detailed. Long synopses of the novels, together with pages of literary criticism and social history, make for quite a tome. Of course it is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone’s life, yet ultimately John Carey has managed to do this. His life of Golding should ensure that we go back to the books, at least.
Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award 2003. His account of modern Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber this year