One of Britain's most original writers was also one of the most troubled, beset by fears of failure and memories of war. Yet he found solace at sea – until a shocking accident. Here, his daughter talks about life with the Nobel-prize winning author.
Robert McCrum - The Observer,
Boom times: aboard his beloved Wild Rose, Golding escaped the demons of class, inferiority and war trauma that haunted him all his life. Photograph: Judy Carver
On the evening of 12 April 1967, in the cosy sitting room of his cottage in Bowerchalke, near Salisbury, the novelist William Golding and his family settled down next to the radio to listen to the latest edition of The Critics, a weekly arts review round-up.
Golding's third novel, The Spire, had just been published, critical opinion was divided, and the author was hoping for a positive boost from the BBC. For a writer who was morbidly sensitive to criticism, this was an occasion fraught with risk. His daughter, Judy Carver, remembers the evening well. "We had a radiogram, with knobs and dials, free-standing speakers, and a lot of varnished wood," she recalls. "There was no way to ignore it."
The programme began and rapidly turned sour. The distinguished literary editor Karl Miller found himself defending The Spire against a vitriolic assault from fellow critic Edward Lucie-Smith, who declared it to be "a very, very, very bad book". Having launched this intemperate attack, Lucie-Smith then misquoted an American critic's verdict that the novel touched "the Wuthering depths" (a gibe actually directed against David Storey's Radcliffe). The panel fell into a bitter wrangle about what was, or was not, the appropriate tone to adopt towards such a highly original English writer as Golding.
In the studio, the atmosphere was becoming mountingly toxic. At home in Salisbury, the Golding family was first aghast, and then distraught. The moment Lucie-Smith began his critique, Golding himself rushed out of the room, while his wife Ann unleashed a torrent of abuse at the radiogram. "She spoke like a navvy in a way I'd never seen before," says Judy, "a lot of words I'd never heard and didn't understand".
Kingsley Amis, Golding's contemporary, always said that you could "let a bad review ruin your breakfast, but not your lunch". But Golding, the former school teacher and author of Lord of the Flies, a surprise bestseller, was a much less worldly and more vulnerable character. Always private, even shy, about his writing, he nurtured a lifelong fear of rejection. A hostile notice such as this was a perfect storm of humiliation. "I think that [programme] really damaged him," says Judy. "The Spire had been a difficult book to write, and this rejection was very unkind."
Link here for the full story.
Golding's third novel, The Spire, had just been published, critical opinion was divided, and the author was hoping for a positive boost from the BBC. For a writer who was morbidly sensitive to criticism, this was an occasion fraught with risk. His daughter, Judy Carver, remembers the evening well. "We had a radiogram, with knobs and dials, free-standing speakers, and a lot of varnished wood," she recalls. "There was no way to ignore it."
The programme began and rapidly turned sour. The distinguished literary editor Karl Miller found himself defending The Spire against a vitriolic assault from fellow critic Edward Lucie-Smith, who declared it to be "a very, very, very bad book". Having launched this intemperate attack, Lucie-Smith then misquoted an American critic's verdict that the novel touched "the Wuthering depths" (a gibe actually directed against David Storey's Radcliffe). The panel fell into a bitter wrangle about what was, or was not, the appropriate tone to adopt towards such a highly original English writer as Golding.
In the studio, the atmosphere was becoming mountingly toxic. At home in Salisbury, the Golding family was first aghast, and then distraught. The moment Lucie-Smith began his critique, Golding himself rushed out of the room, while his wife Ann unleashed a torrent of abuse at the radiogram. "She spoke like a navvy in a way I'd never seen before," says Judy, "a lot of words I'd never heard and didn't understand".
Kingsley Amis, Golding's contemporary, always said that you could "let a bad review ruin your breakfast, but not your lunch". But Golding, the former school teacher and author of Lord of the Flies, a surprise bestseller, was a much less worldly and more vulnerable character. Always private, even shy, about his writing, he nurtured a lifelong fear of rejection. A hostile notice such as this was a perfect storm of humiliation. "I think that [programme] really damaged him," says Judy. "The Spire had been a difficult book to write, and this rejection was very unkind."
Link here for the full story.
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