At the end of his thorough and considered life of William Golding, John Carey remarks that ‘nowadays mention of Lord of the Flies sparks recognition in a way that Golding’s own name does not, or so my admittedly limited market research has indicated.’ Can this really be true? Has Golding’s immense reputation diminished, in the 16 years since his death, to the authorship of that first novel?
Carey refers elsewhere to a book signing in Oxford in 1984. In the wake of the Nobel Prize and the celebrated Booker of 1980, when Golding was thought to have won over Anthony Burgess’s magnificent Earthly Powers with Rites of Passage, the queue ‘coiled out of Blackwell’s and back down the Broad past the White Horse, and an American tourist, impressed by the crow, mistook Golding for George Bernard Shaw.’ I was in that queue, and still have one of many extant signed copies of The Paper Men. (I wish it were Darkness Visible, though). On the other hand, that same year, I also got a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Sebastian, and not many people seem to stick up for him nowadays. If Golding’s reputation has sunk to the level that Carey suggests, what can be rescued from the tremendous wreck?
Lord of the Flies was forever a burden round Golding’s neck, and there is no mistaking his long irritation with its pre-eminence. Most of us have been tempted to feel the same way, having had to study it and write essays about intrinsic evil afterwards. Forever afterwards, Golding and his publisher Charles Monteith had to put up with letters from know-it-all schoolboys about Piggy’s glasses. (Since Piggy was myopic, it seemed unlikely that his glasses could be used to light a fire, as the novel suggests). ‘What a horrible little boy,’ Golding wrote to Monteith about one such correspondent. ‘Let’s hope he takes up drug-smuggling in Turkey.’
Golding had difficulty breaking into print; his first novel was only just rescued from the rejection from which Faber’s reader, the famous Polly Perkins, had consigned it with the words ‘Absurd and uninteresting fantasy … rubbish and dull. Pointless’. After that, too, many of Golding’s novels were often greeted with a certain amount of carping. Even some of his best novels, such as Free Fall came out to a torrent of abuse. He never took the trouble to meet fellow authors, and at a Booker dinner in the 1970s is reported as sitting there with his wife, knowing nobody at all. Amazingly, in 1979, he was so humiliated, on a first trip to the London Library, not to have known what ‘quarto’ meant on the catalogue cards that he had to console himself with dinner and drinks with Angus Wilson. He is surprisingly difficult to envisage in relation to any of the literary movements of the postwar period, neither Angry Young Man, nor mystic, nor magic realist, nor historical novelist except in the most literal sense. The crucial events of his life, we might conclude after reading this biography, were nothing to do with his books, but might be such tragedies as his abandonment of sailing after the loss of his boat Tenace and coming close to death. His best novels are the untidiest and initially most puzzling, such as the strange autobiographical fantasy Free Fall and that magnificent mythological take on late-seventies sociological despair, Darkness Visible. No: he deserves to be read in bulk.
The personality uncovered by Carey is an awkward one, self-punishing and full of fears and worries. A good deal of pre-publicity for this biography has centred on the idea that Golding committed rape in youth.
Having read it, the reader must conclude that the accusation comes from Golding himself, and falls into a large number of incidents of self-flagellation and repentance. He was one of those people who liked to put the worst possible spin on his own behaviour, and it is not inconceivable that he engineered some incidents in order to experience the shame and humiliation afterwards. There are several letters of apology here for some late-night overstepping the mark after over-indulging (the reader is left in no doubt that Golding was quite a sot). Sometimes this is trivial; sometimes Golding’s behaviour seems to call for the sort of repentance he so enjoys. Carey is exceedingly funny about Golding’s disastrous trip to Egypt to research what became An Egyptian Journal. On the other hand, the distinguished novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who with her brother gave him considerable help and support during the trip, was not amused to read, among other things, that she had been reduced to a sentence about a Doctor Hamdi turning up ‘together with the females of Alaa’s apparently extended family’. That is bad behaviour of quite a different order.
‘Basically,’ Golding wrote to Carey towards the end of his life, ‘I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled,’ that loving variance of the envisaged punishment telling its own tale. In the end, the daunting, sage-like hermit of his last years remained, as Carey respectfully and convincingly suggests, the same self-doubting, needy, self-critical but love-hungry man so unmistakably documented in Free Fall. I wonder whether Carey hangs back from one or two conclusions which the reader might guess at; there are suggestions from witnesses as well as from Golding in self-lacerating mood that he might have been fundamentally homosexual, lending an interesting aspect to Colley’s humiliation in Rites of Passage. There is, too, one ‘friendship’ with a woman not Golding’s wife which seems to lead to a more dramatic sequence of events than friendship normally entails. But for the most part, this is a biography which does exactly what a literary biography should do, and send you back to the novels. They turn out to be just as good as we always thought.
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