And So Much More…

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, by John Carey; Faber & Faber, 2009, $49.99.

John Carey’s William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies discusses the novelist and his work. The subtitle, Carey admits, is ironic. Golding was much more than the author of his first published (and most celebrated) novel. As a biographer, Carey has been blessed. He has secured access to and presented to the public such a mass of material that his biography will be a valuable resource for any future attempts to discuss Golding’s life and works.

First, Golding’s father, a bookish, atheist and socialist school teacher, kept a journal, which Carey uses to provide insights into the man who had the most significant influence on Golding the writer.

Second, Golding’s publisher, Faber & Faber, provided access to their archive, and in particular to the correspondence between Golding and his editor at Faber & Faber, Charles Monteith. It was Monteith who, in 1953, rescued the manuscript of Lord of the Flies from the pile of rejects at Faber & Faber—“Absurd & uninteresting fantasy … Rubbish & dull. Pointless” was the assessment of their professional reader—and thus initiated the relationship between novelist and editor that was to last for four decades, until Golding’s death in 1993. This archival source is used to good effect, especially in discussing the books.

However, valuable as they are, these sources pale in comparison to the most significant evidence for Golding’s life and troubled thought, the Golding family archive. As described by Carey, this consists of a remarkable treasure-trove—not only unpublished novels and early drafts of published works, but also two autobiographical works and a 5000-page journal.

Today’s reader looks forward to sensational disclosures in a modern biography, and Carey has had the good fortune to find plenty in the contents of Golding’s unpublished autobiographical writings. Golding’s most shocking revelation—he accused himself of attempted rape—was made public just in time to stimulate interest in Carey’s book.

Carey handles his material honestly and with sympathy. The result is a powerful and insightful biography. It consists of two major narratives. The material on the nuts and bolts of Golding’s output—descriptions of the process of writing and rewriting, how many copies were printed, what his publisher paid him, and so on—together with an overview of the popular press reactions to each of the novels, constitutes a rather dry account of the novelist. This is combined with an account of the life of the man, which, given Carey’s handling of the strengths and weaknesses of Golding’s character, provides for a much more lively and intriguing narrative. The unpublished material in particular reveals a private self—dark and mystical—not previously known.

A sensitive and imaginative child who was frightened of ghosts and monsters, Golding’s early life follows that of many of his generation who were bright but from relatively poor families—grammar school, followed by Oxford, and then a career as a teacher.

Golding’s father was science master at Marlborough Grammar School from 1905. Marlborough has another school, Marlborough College, and this bastion of privilege seems to have cast a shadow over Golding’s entire life. He attended Marlborough Grammar School from 1921 to 1930, and half a century later, in the 1970s, was still troubled by nightmares about Marlborough College’s young gentlemen, the “upper-class graciousness [of whom] … made him feel dirty and ashamed”.

He entered Oxford in 1930, where he initially studied the natural sciences his father taught at school but, in 1932, changed his major to English literature.

The lessons of class privilege learnt in the shadow of Marlborough College were reinforced in Oxford, and Carey emphasises the class snobbery of the day. Written reports on the career advice provided to Golding by Oxford stated that he was “Not quite” (Oxford shorthand for not quite a gentleman) and “N.T.S” (not top shelf), and later that he was “Not quite a gent but good enough for all day [government] schools”. Golding never managed to shrug off his resentment about class privilege. One can understand, perhaps, why the sight of students at Marlborough College might trigger feelings of “hatred and envy” in a schoolboy. However, much later, having achieved a CBE in 1966, the Booker Prize in 1980 (for Rites of Passage), the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983, a knighthood in 1988, public acclaim, and private wealth, Sir William Golding still felt oppressed by the public school.

The attempted rape happened while he was at Oxford. The victim was a fifteen-year-old girl, a student of his father, who “was willing to be kissed and hugged, but took fright when he tried to touch her breasts”. Golding wrestled with her, she began to cry, and they parted. A few years later, he took up with her again. One of Golding’s father’s colleagues was also seeing her, and had whipped her bottom, the sight of which Golding found “loathsomely exciting”. Golding was later to claim that he understood the Nazis because he himself shared the same capacity for sadism.

In 1934, Golding graduated from Oxford and published his first book, a collection of poems, with the unimaginative title Poems. In 1935, following in his father’s footsteps, he became a teacher, and in 1937 returned to Oxford to get a Diploma in Education. In 1940, he joined the navy (he participated in the hunt for the Bismarck, and later in the D-Day operations). After the war, he returned to teaching.

As a school teacher, Golding seems to have been notably unsuccessful. He did enjoy teaching drama, and when a new teacher threatened his pre-eminence it triggered deep anxieties—Golding was still suffering from nightmares about his rival two decades later. The success of Lord of the Flies, which happened during his trip to America in 1961–62—he was famously hailed by Time magazine as Lord of the Campus—enabled him to end his teaching career and become a full-time writer. Carey discusses “Golding’s complicated and resentful feelings about his first book’s enormous success”. Because his reputation was based on what he himself came to regard as a minor work, he resented Lord of the Flies, and referred to the benefits of its success as “Monopoly money”.

Carey’s Golding emerges as a flawed character. He drank too much, and was abusive when drunk. He was capable of cruelty to those closest to him. His attitude to money makes for entertaining reading—Golding compared the grief he felt in 1987 in paying £52,000 in income tax to the death of a very close friend—but must have made him a burden to live with. He was convinced that he only needed to peer into his own soul to see “all wickedness”, and that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey”. Knowing that his journal would be read by a future biographer, he believed that people would peer into the darkness of his heart and “come to the conclusion that I am a monster”. His journal notes, and his fiction at times reflects, his sadistic desires to hurt and break women.

There are moments of levity. Antony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon—Golding refers to him as a “twit of a photographer”—once told Golding that he was fan, and had liked Lord of the Rings. On receiving a knighthood in 1988, a delighted Golding, aware of his own limitations, looked up Jane Austen’s clinical remarks on Sir William Lucas and how “The distinction [of his knighthood] had perhaps been felt too strongly”, but this self-awareness did not prevent him from immediately amending the name in his passport to Sir William Golding.

In addition to the life, Carey provides a description of each novel, and a detailed account of the various reviews in the British press. Carey uses the life to shed light on the work, including the unpublished manuscripts. One book Golding never wrote but did propose was one on four of his enthusiasms—Greek, sailing, music and archaeology (other enthusiasms included chess and, later, gardening).

Sailing and archaeology were linked in Golding’s powerful, mystical imagination. The sea was a hybrid world of visible, knowable surface and invisible, unknowable depths. Archaeology ripped off the topsoil in an attempt to expose historical narratives lurking in the earth. As Golding once wrote, “For me there is a glossy darkness under the turf, and against that background the people of the past play out their actions in technicolor.” Both sea and turf thus serve as metaphors for the dichotomy of the body and soul; the contrast between surface and unknown depths corresponds to that known between reason (or science) and faith (or religion). Golding was (or at least became) impatient with the atheistic rationalism of his father, emphasising instead mysticism and faith.

A good literary biography stimulates its readers to reread the novels of its subjects; a great one will provide new insights into this reading. Carey’s biography succeeds. One of its strengths is that the reader is forced to rethink phrases and episodes in Golding’s works, such as “the screen that conceals the working of things” in Darkness Visible, or the description of how a drag-rope is used to clean the bottom of the ship in Close Quarters, and how it dislodges a vast amount of weed, through which something bobs up, then disappears—in Golding’s words, “Its appearance cancelled the insecure ‘facts’ of the deep sea and seemed to illustrate instead the horribly unknown.”

We will see more on Golding as the centenary of his birth in 2011 approaches, but Carey has set the bar very high. It is to be hoped that he will encourage a new generation of readers to look beyond Lord of the Flies and also read works such as The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Rites of Passage.