TLS on Golding

on Golding

September 23, 2009

William Golding and the capacity for evil
An ambitious and complicated late starter who did not understand the impulses behind his own books

Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
A peer and a Knight of the Garter.

Clement Attlee’s neat summary of his career might be adapted for William Golding. He too was a late starter, one oppressed in youth by doubts and feelings of social, and perhaps intellectual, inferiority. Until his middle forties he was a poor, reluctant and unsatisfied provincial schoolmaster. But, like Attlee, he outstripped many who had a head-start on him and he ended with a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English novelist to be awarded it since Galsworthy. His life was transformed in 1954 by the publication of Lord of the Flies, the novel to which his biographer has thought fit to call to our attention in his subtitle – in case Golding’s name might otherwise be unfamiliar. Yet Lord of the Flies came close to sharing the fate of three novels Golding had already written, which had failed to find a publisher. Five publishers and one literary agency returned it, and the reader for Faber & Faber recommended its rejection as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . . Rubbish and dull. Pointless”.
It was fortunate for Golding that a new editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, had picked up the scruffy typescript, read a few pages, found himself gripped, and managed to persuade his colleagues that they should publish the book if the author would be prepared to revise it. Golding was very lucky indeed. Monteith would remain his editor, friend, comforter, confessor and encourager for more than thirty years, a rock on which Golding’s enviable career was built. And Lord of the Flies was an almost immediate success. It made Golding’s reputation and his fortune. It was soon adopted as a standard school text, eventually selling several million copies in Britain and the United States. When, towards the end of his life, he considered selling the manuscript, its value was put at £250,000. However, “Golding worked out, as he notes in his journal, that after tax and agent’s fees, the manuscript could not be expected to yield more than £100,000, and ‘We don’t need a hundred thousand that bad’”. In 1954, the advance on royalties had been £60.
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As with other comparatively late starters, Muriel Spark and Angus Wilson for example, the publication of one novel released Golding’s creative energies. Others quickly followed: The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964). Given that all Golding’s novels went through several drafts, partly because he rarely seems to have had much idea of where he was heading when he started to write, this was a remarkable rate of production. Though reviewers were often mystified, and sometimes dismissive – and though his concerns were unfashionably metaphysical rather than social – nevertheless, within ten years Golding was firmly established as one of the most original and formidable of contemporary novelists. His own view of his novels was ambiguous, and his responses to questions about them often evasive. Reviewers and academic critics hunted, successfully, for symbols; he insisted that he was only a storyteller, or at least a storyteller first and foremost. Yet, until his last more relaxed novels, readers often had to work hard to follow the narrative.
Of none of his books was this more true than Darkness Visible, which he worked on intermittently for more than ten years. He despaired of it often, sometimes suffering from writer’s block, and after its publication in 1979, refused to discuss it or respond to questions about it. John Carey recounts the plot in detail, with notes about the way the novel changed in the writing. “Windover”, Golding noted in January 1974, “now I think is possibly a coloured gent” who might be extradited to a country that would “do him”, perhaps Portugal. “Two years later”, Carey remarks, “he reminds himself that ‘the proper person for the British Government to sell for oil would be a Jew’, so perhaps Windover could be a ‘coloured Jew’ who is ‘framed’ by MI5 and maybe the CIA as well.” According to Carey, “his decision to ditch these ideas and make international terrorism his political subject seems to have been a response to events”. Many good novelists often have little idea where their novel will take them when they write its first sentence and opening pages, but it does seem that Golding, especially in writing Darkness Visible, had fewer signposts along the road than most like to have. He told Monteith, “The basic difficulty is that I don’t know what the damn thing is about either”. He had written so many versions that “I can’t remember what is which”.
Carey suggests that “his refusal ever to discuss the book may relate to this inner bewilderment”. And Carey himself (who edited William Golding: The man and his books in 1986) eschews explication. His biography is not an essay in criticism; for the most part he contents himself with reporting the response of reviewers, most of whom were favourable, while often puzzled. That, as I recall, was my position when I reviewed Darkness Visible for The Scotsman. I thought there was something remarkable going on, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. A. S. Byatt identified the mysterious Matty as “the incarnate Second Coming”, but also as the Egyptian God Horus, which suggests uncertainty on her part. She found the book “spattered with clues and signs, clotted with symbols and puns” – an observation, Carey says, that was “intended as praise, not blame”. But, whatever its difficulty, the book sold well, 15,000 copies in the first month in Britain, with another printing of 10,000; in the US, 45,000 copies were printed in the first year.
“It would be hard to think of two novels more unlike than Darkness Visible and Rites of Passage”, Carey writes, “but they were written in tandem”. Indeed, the name of a character sometimes slipped from one book to another in Golding’s drafts. This leads Carey to suggest that the two books are not quite as dissimilar as they appear: “For both novels are, though different in tone and period, about despised victims who are redeemed and justified”. The victim in Rites of Passage is the young clergyman Colley, who takes to his bed and apparently dies of shame after participating in a drunken homosexual incident on the lower deck. Some of Golding’s friends believed that he had homosexual tendencies himself, and after a dream in which he had dressed up in his mother’s clothes Golding wrote in his notebooks: “I pretend to be immune to such bent delights as homosexuality and transvestism, but my dreams won’t let me get away with standard attitudes about myself”. He dreamed of making love to two of his Oxford contemporaries and of being invited by a small Ethiopian boy “to bugger him”. He declined the invitation “with a gloomy sense that he has missed the only thing the place has to offer”. Such dreams represented his unconscious self, and he denied any “real life” homosexual experience. Carey, perhaps wisely, does not indulge in further speculation, though he notes that when Golding’s daughter published a novel, it was one in which the heroine’s father “reveals that he was in love with another man before meeting her mother”.
Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize of 1980, which many thought should have gone to Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. Burgess, who had announced that he would attend the Booker Prize dinner only if he had won, shared that opinion. He took his revenge in an apparently generous review of Golding’s 1984 novel The Paper Men (in which a famous novelist is pursued by a tiresome biographer). The dust jacket for the novel declared that the Nobel Prize had been “the final recognition of Golding’s genius” (“come; how about the OM?”, Burgess asked) and confirmation of his unique greatness. “It would seem to me”, Burgess wrote, inserting his stiletto, “that, with right British modesty, Golding has deliberately produced a post-award novel that gives the lie to the great claim. He is a humble man, and The Paper Men is a gesture of humility.”
In this biography, even the best novels receive little more attention than accounts of the many holidays taken by the Golding family. The book is as much about the man as the author, and the social self Golding presented was very different from the self who wrote the novels. This is of course true of most novelists, but evidently more so in Golding’s case than in many others’. His family and friends knew him as Bill. But Carey “would never have dreamed” of following suit, partly because he “respected him far too much”, partly because “the whole ‘Bill’ business seemed and still seems an element in the bluff, affable old sea-dog disguise which hid the real Golding”. At their first meeting he “could not believe that this was the man who had written the novels”.
Yet the man Carey presents to us was complicated enough. From a lower middle-class family with, in his own words, “proletarian roots”, his father a rationalist schoolteacher, Golding was acutely classconscious until well into middle life, resentment being fed by the contrast between his own Marlborough Grammar School and the neighbouring public school, Marlborough College. Yet the schoolboy Golding had certain advantages over the privileged pupils of Marlborough College, one of which was the availability of girls. Two in particular attracted him in his teens. One, a couple of years younger than himself, seemed sexually willing, but when on one occasion she resisted his advances, he attempted to rape her. It would have been what we now call “date-rape”, and it was a couple of years before she protested, volubly, in a pub. This, Golding later wrote, was “the logical, vicious end of a relationship that had begun in vice and prospered viciously”. The other girl, called Mollie, was gentle and chaste. For a time they were engaged, or there was at least an “understanding” between them. Then he ditched her when he met Ann Brookfield who became, and remained, his wife. Mollie subsequently suffered mental problems, for which Golding held himself to some extent responsible. Another cause of guilt.
Despite his comparatively humble background, Golding won a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, to study science. He did little work and wasn’t happy, feeling out of place, and eventually switched to English Literature. After Oxford, he drifted, tried his hand at acting, had a volume of poems published (old-fashioned Georgian verses), before training as a teacher. Carey thinks badly of the appointments board’s judgement that Golding was “a day school type”, but they were probably right. On the outbreak of war he joined the RNVR and married Ann. He had a good war, first as an ordinary seaman, then as an officer in command of a Landing Craft Tank (Rocket) on D-Day and later at Walcheren, a grisly experience, memories of which would haunt him all his life. Then it was back to teaching, music-making, chess-playing, putting on school plays, sailing, and writing, or trying to write, novels.
It sounds a pleasant life, but Golding was discontented, and would remain so until Lord of the Flies and its immediate successors set him free. One wonders how it would have continued if Charles Monteith had not picked up that yellowing typescript and seen there what other readers had been blind to. A private man, uneasy with people he didn’t know well, cagey and often unforthcoming in interviews, Golding nevertheless adapted to his new-found celebrity and wealth. He did stints of teaching at American universities, which he seems to have enjoyed, and which helped to make him known there, even though for some time his American publishers failed to push his books as enthusiastically as he and Faber thought they should. He became a member of London clubs (the Savile, the Athenaeum and the Garrick), and lectured widely, heading eagerly overseas at the drop of the British Council’s hat. Rather to one’s surprise, he lobbied energetically to get his knighthood. Within twenty years of his first novel being published, he was earning enough to resent having to pay so much tax, and went so far as to investigate the possibility of using tax havens, while asking that some overseas royalties be held over to be collected on foreign trips. This doesn’t appear to have offended his wife, whose social democratic principles remained strong enough for her to refuse to visit Greece during the regime of the Colonels. (Carey describes Ann’s family and friends as “staunchly left-wing”. Would he, I wonder, apply that adverb to anyone holding right-wing views?) But success did not resolve tensions, and may even have exacerbated them. Golding was a heavy drinker, and, though stopping short of alcoholism (probably), he sometimes became incapably drunk at inappropriate moments, on one occasion emptying a Paris hotel mini-bar before a dinner at the Paris Book Fair. Sobered up with black coffee, he then asked the South African anti-apartheid poet and novelist Breyten Breytenbach, “What makes you think you can write a novel just because you have been in solitary confinement?” “I am entirely disgusted with myself”, he wrote in his journal.
Golding was uncomfortably conscious of his capacity for evil, or at least for entertaining evil thoughts. “I have always understood the Nazis”, he said, “because I am of that sort by nature”; it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that Lord of the Flies was written; Darkness Visible and Free Fall also. His war experiences brought about “a sort of religious convulsion which is not uncommon among people of a passionate and morbid habit”. The war let him see the “viciousness” and “cruelty” of his own youth, something not apparent to most who knew him, even though, in drink, he was sometimes a conversational bully.
Carey treats him with sympathy and intelligence, eschewing any attempt at amateur psychoanalysis of this complicated man and writer. One might wish that he had applied his own critical skills more often to the novels, especially the more puzzling ones, rather than being content to report the opinions of others, but this is an admirable and continuously interesting literary biography. It is scrupulously done, though it is odd to find Carey reporting a colleague of Golding’s at the Rudolf Steiner School where they taught in 1935 praising C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the first of which was not published till 1950.

John Carey
WILLIAM GOLDING
The man who wrote “Lord of the Flies”
573pp. Faber. £25.
978 0 571 23163 8

Allan Massie’s most recent books include The Thistle and the Rose: Six centuries of love and hate between Scots and English, 2005, and Charlemagne and Roland, which appeared in 2007.