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William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies

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You know what to expect in advance from John Carey. With any other author, that would be a bad thing. With Carey, it's part of his integrity. In the introduction to Original Copy, his 1987 selection of reviews and journalism, Carey reminds that us that 'given the nature of subjective nature of literary judgement, the reader has a right to know what sort of person will be laying down the law in the rest of book - what his quirks and prejudices are, and what sort of background has formed him.'

So with this, Carey's long (and eagerly) awaited biography of Golding, you expect the law to cheer on grammar schools, vegetable gardening and divided personalities, and sneer at snobbery, Dons and magical thinking. Golding's dabbling with anthroposophy, you think, is in for a particular thrashing. And as for Golding's public-schooled contemporaries at Brasenose College....

But that's half the fun, of course. Flaubert said that when you write a friend's biography, you must do it as though you were taking revenge on his behalf. Whether you agree that Golding was the abject literary outsider that Carey makes him out to be, you still share his partisan sense of outrage. Take the film critic C.A. Lejeune's response, in chapter fourteen, to Pincher Martin: 'To me it belongs to a class of reading that I deplore, which looks at nothing except what I call the underbelly of the human body, and it sees nothing except what I call the nasty side of it, the horrid side of it.' Behind that you can hear the objection of every person who has ever junked a great book because it's 'too grim', 'depressing' or - this above all - 'doesn't teach me anything'. Carey's response makes gratifying reading, as does his response to Auberon Waugh ('so clearly the voice of a Young Turk eager to make a splash'). Watching him, you feel that vengeance isn't just being served - it's being accompanied by a string quartet.

But if Carey is deadly on the attack, he is better in defence, and that that will surprise some people. I think this may be Carey's most compassionate work to date. People expecting him to tear Golding's beliefs to pieces, even by implication, will be disappointed. In a way, he celebrates them. As with Lawrence and Orwell, Carey sees self-contradictions not a blemish but as a key to greatness. With Golding, it was the constant, inner struggle between faith and reason that breathed life into his writing.

Much has been made of Golding's early scientific optimism and belief in progress, influenced heavily by his father Alec, and how World War II turned him towards pessimism and religion. And, of course, original sin (`Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.'). But the division was, perhaps, already in place long before. There are the supernatural visions/hallucinations Golding sees, and which, apparently, occurred throughout his life. (A cockerel of other-worldly white appears to baby Golding in the cot, angelic and radiant.) Where his father was a kindly, unassuming man, his mother was an unstable collection of temper tantrums and Celtic superstitions. The tension between the two causes him, Carey suggests, to see reality as the battleground of warring viewpoints. 'Both are real', as Sammy says in Free Fall, but `there is no bridge'. His fiction and essays will each, in their way, continue to report on that battlefield.

If Golding had his theme, he still needed a vehicle to express it. By 1953, Golding had written three books for publication in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays, and seen them all repeatedly rejected and returned to him. The school to which he had returned as a teacher offered nothing but grinding routine, without any discernible purpose. If Golding believed he was a third-rate teacher, just as he believed he was 'a monster', he seems unduly hard on himself. (Was he the only teacher who ever rushed off as soon as a lesson was over, who didn't think the world of every last one of his pupils, who didn't look at a small hill of unmarked books with despair?) He started another book, which started as a skit on the stories Golding read to his children at bedtime. Doubtless some insights prompted by his pupils (though Golding, as Carey points out, never taught choristers) found their way into the novel. So, for that matter, did the World War II. The work gave him new energy and drive, and made the real world look grey and dull by comparison. He had total faith in it, feeling it to be the first original work he had ever produced. In it, following a nuclear war a group of school children would find themselves marooned on a desert island, with only wild boars and a dead parachutist for company. Somewhere a big shell would be involved, and so would a Christ figure, performing miracles and offering himself as a martyr. It would be the Robinson Crusoe for our time; it would be the novel that would make his name. It would be...Strangers from Within.

I'm not going to say what happened next, especially for those who haven't read Charles Monteith's account in Carey's earlier book William Golding: The Man and His Books, and which Ian McEwan summarises in Enduring Love. Carey reworks it into chapter twelve, just as he reworks his account of The Inheritors (from Pure Pleasure) into chapter thirteen. You'll just to read it for yourself. It's just too good not to. Suffice to say, if Golding's life had been a film, Charles Monteith, his publisher and model of human patience, tact and reserve, would deserve the Oscar for best supporting actor. It's not for nothing that Carey devotes his last paragraph to him.

Similarly heartening is Carey's enthusiasm for all Golding's works, published and unpublished. Carey has his opinions, and maybe you'll share them, maybe you wont. I never liked Free Fall much (and it seems to be the hardest of Golding's novels to find in the shops), nor The Paper Men and The Pyramid. To me, the most powerful of Golding's novels were his earliest: Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors (which anticipates Craig Raine and the `Martian' poets) Pincher Martin, and The Spire; The most polished were the three novels that comprised the Sea Trilogy. If you agree with Carey or not, we're still left with a timely and powerful corrective to the rather quaint idea that Golding was a one-hit wonder, or, worse, a 'minority taste'.

Carey once praised Orwell for admitting that most people liked to read about murder. I praise Carey for admitting what most people like to read about a writer: the brute facts of how he produced his work, and how much he made from it. Unlike Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark, Carey doesn't omit the figures: advances, royalties, sales figures, foreign rights, film rights - they're all here. To my knowledge, only Mathew J. Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald has done more with an author's balance sheet than this book. The sources couldn't have been better, the writing more concise, the breadth of insight and intelligence wider. Although I would have liked a reference to the work of Kevin McCarron somewhere in there, especially on Rites of Passage and The Inheritors, this is by far the best literary biography I have read this year - and since I have read Patrick French (on V.S. Naipaul), Martin Stannard (on Muriel Spark) and Zachary Leader (on Kingsley Amis), that is the highest praise I can think of.

Not to be missed.

This is the first authorized biography of William Golding, one of the 20th century's greatest novelists. Golding, who died in 1993 aged 81, was a prolific novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Sir William (he was knighted in 1988) was best known for `Lord of the Flies', his first published novel.

This biography was written by John Carey, the literary critic and English literature professor at Oxford. Professor Carey was given access to the previously private archive of Golding, which consists of three unpublished novels, two autobiographical works and a journal of over two million words. While Professor Carey had a wealth of information to work with, it must have been difficult deciding what was most relevant.

After reading this biography, I am moved to read more of Golding's novels, and to reread others. William Golding lived a full and interesting life but it seems that he was often paralyzed by self-doubt and was unable to appreciate the strength of his own writing gift. I have yet to read `Pincher Martin' `The Spire' and `Rites of Passage'. I will reread `The Lord of the Flies' and `Darkness Visible' with a greater appreciation of the man behind the novelist.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

This biography is a fascinating and well written document of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. It is interesting that although Golding will long be remembered as the man who wrote Lord of the Flies, he really was so so much more than that ... as an artist and as a human being.If you are interested in Golding I highly recommend this book.

SE Robinson

In his copious diary entries, William Golding, by then a "Sir," reported that only in India did his stories of "his bullying other children at primary school" meet with "the silence of incomprehension or shock." Elsewhere, he was able to stir his audiences to laughter about this dark subject, arguably the generative theme of his most famous book.

Golding started his working life as a public school teacher whose interests included piano, poetry, science, women and drinking. His marriage began with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and lasted the rest of his life, his wife Ann one of the few people who was completely honest with him. Her unique ability to manage him, drunk or sober, caused his sponsors to decide it made good economic sense to pay to have Ann along on his speaking tours because he became so muddled without her. As the biographer puts it, "she realized the only thing that made him unhappier than writing was not writing."

LORD OF THE FLIES was Golding's first complete novel, and almost certainly his greatest, if perennial audience response is a measure of success. It is clearly his best known book among American readers. Its publication was midwifed with care by its booster at Faber and Faber, Charles Monteith, after it had been famously rejected by other editors, even within the same company.

Monteith knew that authors don sackcloth when they get a negative review and spring back to write again when the critics' words flow their way. So he fed Golding on flattery and goaded him with exhortations to make the next book even better. His subsequent three were great, no doubt. THE INHERITORS was not initially published in America, so its fascinating subject matter --- the destruction of an older primitive tribe of Neanderthals by the less rigid, more intelligent homo sapiens --- is not well known here. PINCHER MARTIN, about a marooned sailor, though beautifully written, is often dismissed as an erudite "shaggy dog" story. THE SPIRE treats with a grand theme but not one that immediately captivates --- an arrogant man seeks to build an ever taller and more precarious tower as a monument to his power.

No, there was nothing in his later books to rival the deeply disturbing plot and harrowing language of LORD OF THE FLIES, about a group of shipwrecked English schoolboys who quickly revert to savagery on a deserted island, despite their quixotic attempts to govern wisely and play fair. Golding's works always grappled with the darkness of evil, with but a pale strip of hopeful light struggling to win out, so that on balance he is considered a pessimist. Was he reliving, through his writing, his experiences of World War II? Or channeling that bullying schoolchild who he conjured up to make audiences laugh with him? Making a bow to his atheist father by insinuating the godlessness of the neo-nuclear age? Venting his repressed sorrow at having a son with a clubfoot and chronic mental illness? Or merely recording what he observed firsthand as a schoolteacher of adolescent males? Whatever it was, LORD OF THE FLIES has a fiery magic that caused it to be made into two different films and a play. It was for other works, however, that Golding won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the totality of his output that gained him significant honor in his native land.

John Carey, who has written this first biography of one of the 20th century's great authors, is himself an author, professor and book reviewer who triumphs here with his intimate portrait of the heroic Golding --- bearded, seafaring, self-blaming and sometimes insecure, at times bold, brawling, hard-drinking and, to his public, ever brilliant, ever the charmer. Casey had the advantage of having met Golding and developing cooperative relationships with his family to reveal the man behind the public façade. It is hard to imagine any other book about Golding now that this one has been written.

In August 2010, John Carey won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the oldest and most prestigious literary prizes in Britain, for his biography of William Golding: The Man who wrote Lord of the Flies. Thirty-one years ago, William Golding was awarded the same prize in the literary fiction section for his work, Darkness Visible. Both were well deserved.

Sir William Gerald Golding (1911-1993), Nobel Prize for Literature winner, is best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), but equally for works such as The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), and To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy's first work Rites of Passage (1980). Lord of the Flies has reached the 20 million sales mark - a remarkable achievement - and in 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945" (i.e. postwar), beaten only by Philip Larkin (a prolific poet) and George Orwell, author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Golding never wrote an autobiography, although he started one (Men, Women & Now), but kept a painstakingly detailed and emotive diary that he adhered to daily. In addition to this routine, he reveals an unemotional, single-minded, ritualistic approach to writing. It is these diaries, and the files of Faber & Faber of London's editor, Charles Monteith, that enables Carey to intimately cover almost every aspect of Golding's life, feelings, inspirations, rejections, acceptances, and writing development.

Carey commences at the beginning in a logical sequence that also covers Golding's earlier unpublished works such as Seahorse (1948), Circle under the Sea (1951), and Short Measure (1952). However, it's in the evolution of Golding's first novel that Carey is detailed-obsessed, noting every date (although unlike Golding himself who also noted the hour at which he concluded a novel).

The Lord of the Flies, originally called Strangers from Within, originated when Golding used to read stories about islands to his two children: "Wouldn't it be a good idea if I wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" he told his wife, Ann. Golding notes in his diary that the novel "came very easily" by way of two mental images: (1) a little boy standing on his head in the sand, delighted to be at last on a real coral island; and (2) the same little boy being hunted down like a pig by the savages the children turned into. He just had to join the two images.
After a series of rejections over seven months, most famously by Polly Perkins of Faber & Faber, who wrote of her impression of Strangers from Within: "Time: the Future. Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle-country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless." As luck would have it, a young inexperienced Charles Monteith fished it out of the reject pile and realized its potential - with some re-writing. And fortunately Golding accepted the improved ideas and re-submitted the work, fiercely debated internally at Faber & Faber before they relented and published it. So at the age of 42 the school teacher was a published author.

Carey, through Golding's diaries, reveals not only the genesis of ideas for his novels, but also the insecurities, the doubts, the fears, the cockiness, the arrogance, the writer's block, the drinking episodes: in fact all the resoluteness and all the vulnerabilities of a creative author.

Carey's writing is at first annoying, due to the over-use of quotes from Golding's diary and the over-use of detail. Fortunately the content is inherently interesting and inspiring, so much so that the biographical style becomes acceptable. And there are 525 pages in which to be inspired.

Martina Nicolls, Author of "The Sudan Curse" and "Kashmir on a Knife-Edge"

Anyone who, like William Golding, has been a teacher of young schoolboys could be forgiven for thinking that chaos is the natural condition of humanity. As a boys' grammar school teacher, William Golding experimented with giving liberty to small boys and, in his first novel, made the disorder and cruelty it unleashed the paramount trait of human nature.

Born in 1911 in England to socialist parents, Golding inherited their resentment of the wealthy classes and in 1938 joined the Left Book Club. "No one in his generation could fail to be influenced by Marxism", he later reflected of the radical thirties. Socialism proved to be a passing fad for Golding, however, and after a stint as a Navy officer during the war, and a teacher during the classroom wars, he lost heart for any prospects of improving the human condition.

Lord of the Flies gave vent, in 1954, to his pessimism with its story of a group of English schoolboys marooned on a desert island paradise in the Pacific. The novel, as Golding explained it, is about "how a group of stranded boys attempt to make a reasonable society for themselves but how, even if we start with a clean slate like these boys, our nature compels us to make a muck of it".

The few (Ralph, Piggy, Simon) amongst the group who try to maintain civilised, rational standards become victims. Simon and Piggy are murdered and Ralph is hunted as the island is set on fire and destroyed. This is Golding's version of Original Sin - reason, intelligence and cooperative social relations do not stand a chance against the brutal instincts of an inherently flawed human nature. Golding's self-described aim of the novel was to "trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature", to the "darkness of man's heart". Socialists and other believers in social betterment, it follows, are but utopian dreamers. Any paradise would be quickly reduced to a flaming hell. Humanity can not improve.

Golding's later novels provided variations on this theme and his one (aborted) venture as a script-writer for a film about a giant traffic jam, has the car occupants committing murder, throwing grenades and setting cars on fire. Humanity, in Golding's eyes, is doomed to always fall into pits of greed, lust, egotism, cruelty, selfishness, violence and war, burning up goodness.

The only thing protecting against total savagery is state authority ("parents and school and policemen and the law" in Lord of the Flies). It is no surprise that Golding wound up a political conservative with this mindset. When print unions struck and stopped The Times in 1981, Golding called them "a handful of illiterate bastards". He supported Prime Minister Thatcher's war against Argentina over control of Argentina's Falklands Islands. He provided valuable foreign exchange for the military junta which had seized power in Greece in 1967 by continuing to holiday there. Despite a professed opposition to nuclear weapons, Golding was not beyond wishing one of them would melt the polar ice caps and drown the "tiresome, half-witted Irishry, Moscow and eight hundred and fifty million Chinese". Patriotism and royalty puffed out his chest when he was awarded a CBE and a knighthood.

Golding often claimed he was just a storyteller, complaining that his detractors were fixing solely on the "thought-content" of his books. The Nobel Prize-winning Golding could write well (unlike his usually concise biographer who, in this case, labours to build mountains of detail from train timetables, computer chess software and other minutiae from Golding's life) but Golding's stories also propounded prejudices about human nature which were highly uncongenial to people with a value-system based on social cooperation and peace, ideals for which there is as least as much evidence as Golding's nightmare world.

What Golding presents as eternally evil in human nature is but the ideology of the ruling class, a set of beliefs about the world that justifies and sustains that group and its privileged interests. `Only we can prevent total anarchy', as the rich and powerful might well paraphrase Lord of the Flies - `leave everything up to us; if you lot attempt social change, you'll only stuff everything up because basically you're all rubbish'.

There is a paradox at the heart of Golding. If human nature is fixed, then everyone should display the same brutal savagery, yet Ralph, Piggy and Simon bucked the mould and had to be eliminated by the advocates of brutal savagery. It was politics, not `human nature' that mattered. The good lost out to the bad because they weren't as well organised. That is not always the outcome. When Golding declaims that "Man produces evil as a bee produces honey", he is simply speaking as the literary lord of the lies.