A Talent for Writing, and Falling Into Things
By Dwight Garner
Published New York Times: July 6, 2010

WILLIAM GOLDING
The Man Who Wrote ‘Lord of the Flies’
By John Carey
573 pages. Free Press. $32.50.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the British novelist William Golding, whose “Lord of the Flies” (1954) supplanted “The Catcher in the Rye” as the bible of tortured adolescence in America, did not have a happy childhood. But the details will put a sweat on your forehead. “He was oversensitive, timid, fearful, lonely,” John Carey writes in this excellent biography, the first to be written about Golding (1911-1993). “He was alienated from his parents and his brother and had no friends.”

 William Golding, with the young actors James Aubrey, left, and Hugh Edwards, at Cannes in 1963 for the world premiere of a film of “Lord of the Flies.” Photo - Tom Hollyman

Golding’s alienation spun into class rage. His father, an impoverished intellectual, taught at a mediocre grammar school that had the misfortune to be not far from Marlborough College, an elite private school. That school’s privileged and preening young men made Golding feel “dirty and ashamed,” Mr. Carey writes. Golding became a writer partly to seek revenge. “The truth is my deepest unconscious desire would be to show Marlborough,” Golding wrote, “and then piddle on them.”

Golding’s sense of social inadequacy never left him. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he shook with resentment. The school’s placement interviewers privately noted that he was “N.T.S.” (not top shelf) and “Not quite” (not quite a gentleman). Small wonder Golding would later write, in a book review, that he wished that he could sneak up on Eton, perhaps England’s most exclusive private school, “with a mile or two of wire, a few hundred tons of TNT, and one of those plunger-detonating machines which makes the user feel like Jehovah.”

In his fiction Golding would become a laureate of humiliation, writes Mr. Carey, a well-known British literary critic, biographer and academic. (He is emeritus Merton professor of English literature at Oxford.) But Golding was also in touch with his darkest impulses, especially his own sublimated bent toward cruelty.

“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding said, “because I am of that sort by nature.”

It was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge,” he added, that he wrote “Lord of the Flies,” about a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island and about how culture and reason fail them.

“We’re not savages,” one of the boys declares. “We’re English.” The sound you hear, emerging from behind that line, is Golding’s demented laughter.

This all sounds a bit bleak, doesn’t it? Well, it’s among Mr. Carey’s achievements that this plump and well-researched biography sits lightly in the lap; it reads like a picaresque novel. Mr. Carey tidily lays out the whole picnic: Golding’s youth; his education; his years in the Royal Navy (he commanded a rocket-firing ship off the coast of Normandy on D-Day); his struggle to write his first books while teaching; his slow path toward success; and ultimately his Nobel Prize, awarded in 1983, which brought Golding the kind of esteem that he felt had long eluded him. Mr. Carey walks you adroitly through Golding’s fiction and lays out the case for many of his lesser-known novels, including “The Inheritors” (1955) and “Pincher Martin” (1956).
The full review at NYT.


Footnote:
Published originally in UK by Faber & Faber. pds25.00
John Carey was one of the stars at the recent Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.