William Golding

William Golding: The Schoolmaster Who Knew the Worst

Seven publishers had already turned down the manuscript when it reached Faber and Faber in September 1953. The reader there, Jan Perkins, wrote a verdict of four words: "Rubbish & dull. Pointless." An editor called Charles Monteith fished it out, asked for revisions, and published it a year later as *Lord of the Flies*. Its author was a forty-three-year-old schoolmaster in Salisbury who had spent six years at sea and had watched what men did there. Twenty-nine years after that reader's report, the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Cornwall, Marlborough, Oxford

William Gerald Golding was born on 19 September 1911 at his maternal grandmother's house in Newquay, Cornwall. His father, Alec, taught science at Marlborough Grammar School, where William and his elder brother Joseph were educated; his mother, Mildred Curnoe, was a Cornish suffragist who filled the house with folklore. The pairing is exact: a rationalist father and a mother who told stories about older and darker things, which is more or less the argument of every book he wrote.

He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1930 to read natural sciences under the chemist Thomas Taylor, then switched after two years to English literature and Anglo-Saxon. He took a second-class degree in 1934 and published a collection of poems with Macmillan the same year. He taught at Michael Hall, a Steiner school, from 1935, at Maidstone Grammar School from 1938, and from April 1940 at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. He married the analytical chemist Ann Brookfield on 30 September 1939; they had two children, David and Judith.

Six Years Afloat

He joined the Royal Navy on 18 December 1940 and, as the Nobel Foundation's own account puts it, spent six years afloat. He served on a destroyer in the pursuit of the *Bismarck* and saw the German battleship destroyed. He commanded a landing craft on D-Day and later a rocket ship as a lieutenant. At Walcheren in the autumn of 1944 he took part in an assault in which ten of the twenty-seven craft that went in were sunk. He returned to the classroom in 1945 with a settled and unfashionable conviction that the capacity for atrocity is not a property of particular nations or systems but of the species, and that civilisation is a thin coat of paint.

Strangers from Within

He began the manuscript in 1951 while teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's, under the title *Strangers from Within*. Published as *Lord of the Flies* in September 1954, it takes the Victorian boys'-adventure island - the genre of *The Coral Island* and *Robinson Crusoe* - and lets it decay into hunting, terror and murder within weeks. Peter Brook filmed it in 1963. It has never gone out of print, and it is one of the very few post-war novels that a majority of English-speaking readers encounter before they are eighteen.

The Novels After the Island

What followed was more formally daring than the book that made him famous. *The Inheritors* (1955) is narrated by a Neanderthal band whose gentleness is annihilated by the arrival of the more intelligent, more violent people who will become us - a novel written almost entirely inside a consciousness that lacks the concepts to describe what is happening to it. *Pincher Martin* (1956) takes place in the last moments of a drowning sailor. *Free Fall* (1959) turns on freedom and choice in a wartime prison camp. *The Spire* (1964) follows the raising of a cathedral tower on inadequate foundations, generally read as Salisbury, and is his most sustained study of the vanity concealed inside a vision. *The Pyramid* (1967) returns to a town like Marlborough; *The Scorpion God* (1971) collects three novellas ranging from ancient Egypt to Rome.

Alcohol, Jung and the Dream Journal

Between 1971 and 1979 he published no novels. He was an alcoholic for most of his adult life and the late 1960s brought a creative collapse from which he emerged partly through a close reading of Carl Jung and through a dream journal he kept from 1971 until his death, running to something like 2.4 million words. Living at Bowerchalke in Wiltshire from 1958, he became friendly with the scientist James Lovelock and supplied the name for Lovelock's hypothesis, proposing Gaia, the Greek personification of the Earth.

When John Carey was given unrestricted access to those papers for his 2009 biography *William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies*, they yielded an admission that has permanently complicated his reputation: that as a teenager he had attempted to rape a girl to whom he had given piano lessons, and that he later characterised her as having wanted heavy sex. It is a repellent passage, and it is also, uncomfortably, consistent with a writer whose entire subject was the thing under the paint.

Booker, Nobel, Knighthood

*Darkness Visible* (1979) ended the silence and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. *Rites of Passage* took the Booker Prize in 1980 and became the first volume of a sea trilogy completed by *Close Quarters* (1987) and *Fire Down Below* (1989) and collected as *To the Ends of the Earth*. *The Paper Men* (1984) is a sour comedy about a novelist and the biographer stalking him. He had been appointed CBE in 1966 and was knighted in 1988.

The Nobel came in 1983, "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today." It was not universally welcomed; the *Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* records it as an unexpected and even contentious choice, and there was open dissent within literary circles about whether the author of a school set text belonged in that company.

Why William Is Called a Genius

Golding's claim is unusually easy to state, because a Nobel committee stated it: realistic narrative art fused with the diversity and universality of myth. The specific creative quality is the ability to build a story that operates simultaneously as a plain, tightly observed sequence of events and as a fable about the species - and to do it without the fable showing through and killing the story. *Lord of the Flies* works as an adventure novel about boys on an island; *The Spire* works as a construction drama; *The Inheritors* works as a survival narrative. Each is also a complete argument about human nature. The technical feat underneath is rarer still: he repeatedly built novels inside consciousnesses that cannot understand their own situation - a Neanderthal without the concept of malice, a drowning man who does not know he is dead - and made them legible to a reader outside. The *Times* placed him third among the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

The counter-case has teeth. The Nobel was contested at the time as unexpected and contentious, and the recurring criticism is that his novels are engineered rather than discovered: the thesis is fixed before the characters arrive, the boys on the island are instruments, and the schematic quality that makes the books so teachable is exactly what makes some readers judge them small. The eight-year silence in the 1970s, the alcoholism, and his own recorded doubts suggest he was not always confident the machine would start again. The Carey biography's disclosure sits alongside all of it, and the honest thing is to say that it neither invalidates the novels nor can be quietly set aside when weighing the man. What survives every deduction is that Golding took a private conviction formed in the water off Walcheren and found, at forty-three, a form exact enough to make an entire century read it.

Legacy

Golding retired from teaching in 1962 and wrote for another thirty years. He died of heart failure on 19 June 1993 at Perranarworthal in Cornwall, aged eighty-one, and was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Bowerchalke. *The Double Tongue*, set at ancient Delphi, appeared posthumously in 1995. His name is attached to a hypothesis about the living planet that he did not devise and to a novel about children that most of the English-speaking world has read. Between them they describe the two halves of his mind, which never stopped arguing with each other.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1983
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize — 1979
• Booker Prize — 1980
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Knight Bachelor — 1988
• Notable work: Lord of the Flies
• Notable work: To the Ends of the Earth