In 1972 William Golding — well on the way to his Nobel prize — was a guest of the Cecils (the lords Cecil, that is) at Cranborne Manor. The “Bloomsbury groupie Frances Partridge” (John Carey’s scathing description) was also there. She recorded in her diary meeting Golding: “A short, squarish, bearded man, smelling rather like an old labourer.”
Ah, yes, that proletarian stink. Amazing that some of them can actually write, but “little Latin and less Greek”, you know.
Golding glowed, lifelong, with the underdog’s radioactive anger. Carey makes it a central theme. How, his biography inquires, does genius find a way through the obstructions that British privilege puts in the way of the unprivileged? He lived, Golding once said, under, not in the class system. That system is indestructible. Destroy Britain with nuclear bombs, dump a bunch of innocent kids on an Edenic desert island, and class reasserts itself like funny putty. Jack Merridew the toff, Piggie the oik.
The obstructions in Golding’s way were the familiar ones. He was two generations up from the artisan’s cottage. His father — an awesomely polymathic autodidact — made it to the schoolteacher class. William went to Marlborough Grammar School. Not far away in distance — but a universe away socially — was Marlborough College. Golding liked to say that he would happily blow up every public school in England. But he was no simple anarchist. In later life he lusted after a knighthood and bullied friends in high places to get him one. Inferiority complexes are complex things.
Following the upward trajectory of the clever grammar school boy (and at great financial sacrifice to his parents), Golding went to Oxford. It was a “disaster”. Why? As Carey records, the public school boys outnumbered the grammar bugs twenty to one. “Not quite a gentleman,” Carey discloses, was the verdict passed on him by the university authorities.
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Golding, despite pathological timidity (which he bravely disguised), served gallantly in the Second World War when even “not quites” could join the officer class. His experience in the Royal Navy convinced him that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey”.
After the war he followed his father into the classroom. He was not, one of his colleagues cattily recalls, a “gifted” teacher. His nickname among the boys was “Scruff”. Over the postwar years he forged an idiosyncratic personal philosophy. Extraordinarily, Carey discloses that he never read with any attention “the three most crashing bores of the Western world” — Marx, Freud and Darwin.
During a visit to Salisbury Cathedral Frank Kermode asked Golding how he boned up on the medieval construction techniques that are so meticulously described in The Spire. “Oh,” Golding replied. “I just came here and said to myself, ‘If I were to build a spire how would I go about it?’.” He created his novels the same way.
Carey’s biography draws on two untapped sources: the Golding family archive and Faber’s correspondence files.
In his private journal Golding recalls a fumbled juvenile attempted rape. More amusingly he recalls discovering the joys of masturbation while shinning up a flagpole. He jilted a girl he was engaged to for the woman he married. Guilt, and bad dreams, pursued him through life. Married for more than 50 years, it seems that there was never a moral lapse other than, perhaps, too warm a friendship with the American scholar Virginia Tiger (wonderful name), which vexed Ann Golding mightily.
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There was, undeniably, an ugly side to Golding, particularly in later life. He was frequently drunk, rude on occasion, arrogant, and preoccupied with money. But Carey is at pains to emphasise how hard Golding was on himself. He could never persuade himself that he was a good man. Those who knew him best thought that he was.
The narrative core of the biography is the working partnership Golding forged with Charles Monteith, his Faber editor. It was Monteith who rescued Lord of the Flies from the slush pile and crafted it into publishable shape with the author. Monteith would in fact be midwife to all the major works. They were all difficult deliveries.
And, over the years, the novels themselves get more difficult. You can keep a dinner party conversation going for hours with Lord of the Flies. Mention Darkness Visible and all you will hear is the clatter of cutlery on plates.
Carey is a superb explanatory critic. He devotes a good half of his many pages to literary exegesis. Read carefully, they throw open a door on some of the most challenging, yet rewarding, fiction we have. The centenary of Golding’s birth is in 2011. Faber should commemorate it by reissuing the novelist’s works with the relevant chapters from this biography as introductions and a collective dedication to Monteith. Carey has done both men a huge service.
William Golding: The Man who wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey (Faber, £25; Buy this book; 573pp)