Sir William Golding, CBE, English novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature (1983), died suddenly at his home near Truro, Cornwall, on June
19 aged 81. He was born in St Columb Minor, Cornwall, on September 19, 1911.
WILLIAM GOLDING was one of only four English authors (the others are Kipling,
Galsworthy and Winston Churchill) to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Some felt it might justly have gone to Graham Greene, Anthony Powell or
James Hanley, but none questioned his suitability for the award, as is so
often the case.
He was a "big'' novelist, most of whose work could usually carry the weight he
put into it. He lived outside literary coteries, struggled with grave and
ponderous themes, and took risks which lesser writers could not dare to
take. As is the case with all such writers there is general disagreement
about which is his masterpiece but no doubt as to whether he produced one.
Is it Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), The Spire (1964),
Darkness Visible (1979) or the last trilogy consisting of Rites of Passage,
Close Quarters and Fire Down Below (1981-89)? This is in any case a
formidable list and some would add to it.
William Gerald Golding's father, a Quaker turned atheist, was a master at
Marlbrough Grammar School where William was educated. He then went on to
Brasenose College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1935. While still at
Oxford he published, as "W.G. Golding'', a volume Poems (1934) with
Macmillan in London, and in New York (1935). What reviews this received were
indifferent, and of the book he later declared that he made "furtive efforts
to conceal, destroy, or at any rate disclaim that melancholy slim volume of
my extreme youth.'' For some years, indeed, there was no copy of it in the
British Museum Reading Room. However, slim and melancholy though it may have
been, some have found in it vital clues to his later struggles and
achievements.
From 1935 until 1940 and again, part-time, from 1945 to 1954 Golding worked in
small theatre companies in Wiltshire as writer, actor and director. Some of
his impressions of this work may be gathered from his novel The Pyramid
(1967), not one of his best books. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy which he
admired and enjoyed "because it worked.'' During his service he became
officer in charge of a rocket ship and (and as a schoolteacher) instructed
naval cadets. In 1945 he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury,
whose staff he had joined in 1939. He remained there until 1961 when the
success of Lord of the Flies enabled him to resign.
This novel was the fruition of half a lifetime. Golding was 43 when he
published it. Its knowledge of youth in particular and of human nature in
general was immediately apparent. Yet, anthropologically, this story of boys
who, isolated from adult supervision, become brutal and self-destructive is
"wrong'': studies have shown that boys who are actually thus isolated do not
behave as Golding had them behave in Lord of the Flies. The force of his
fable rose from its being, not based on "fact'' but on what any sensitive
and highly-imaginative schoolmaster might dream up while performing his
duties on a wet afternoon. It was R.M. Ballantyne's charming Victorian tale,
Coral Island, turned on its head; but its ``boys'' are really terrible
little men as in Kipling's Stalky & Co which Golding rewrites with the venom
its author was unable to put into it.
Read like that, Lord of the Flies is the story of adults (at least males) in
the 20th century with its politicians and its "experts'' and its wars. Yet
Faber's reader had originally famously said of it: "Rubbish and dull.
Pointless.'' The public disagreed and the book quickly acquired a cult
reputation, especially in the United States, where it succeeded The Catcher
in the Rye as the most popular novel for young Americans. By the mid-1960s
it had been widely translated, had sold over two million copies and had been
made into a successful film (the success was part of the reason why Golding
could eventually give up teaching).
Golding liked to change his style and mood with each book: his gear changes
were never those of a "minor'' writer and his fiction covered an enormous
range of subject matter from prehistoric man to 19th-century sea voyagers,
from Ancient Egypt to Britain during the Blitz. The Inheritors (1955) is one
of the most remarkable tours de force in postwar fiction of any nationality.
It tells of the defeat of a group of Neanderthals at the hands of homo
sapiens. Some would say this is Golding's greatest novel.
His work had at all times a pronounced sense of the religious, but nowhere
more so than in his next magnificent novel, The Spire (1964) set in Medieval
England: a priest, Jocelin, tries to crown his cathedral with a four-hundred
foot spire, even against the laws of gravity. He, a "flesh dog'', is
inspired by angels and tempted by demons at every step.
Golding always waited until he was ready, and this meant long periods of
comparative silence. The 15 years from 1964 to 1979 saw only the relatively
minor The Pyramid, a collection of three novellas called The Scorpion God
(1971), and a book of essays The Hot Gates and other Occasional Pieces
(1966). During this period Golding had almost drowned his family and himself
in the English Channel while pursuing his most beloved recreation, sailing.
It was, he said: "A traumatic experience which stopped me doing anything for
two or three years.''
In other respects, however, he made good use of his time. He kept a journal,
travelled widely and developed his love of music, particularly the piano.
His reputation was by now intact: he had received a CBE in 1966, and
throughout the 1960s and 1970s academic articles continued to pour out. As a
novelist, however, he was silent but not forgotten.
He returned triumphantly with Darkness Visible (1978) and dispelled any
lingering doubts among his followers that he was a one, or at most two,
novel writer. Pincher Martin (1956) had not provoked uniformly good reviews
and critics continued to quarrel over the respective merits of Lord of the
Flies and The Spire, and to interpret the latter in various wild ways as
anything from a Christian allegory to a Freudian phallic fantasy.
Darkness Visible is set in England from 1940 to the late 1970s. It has a
relatively simple, thriller-like plot at its centre, but its complex
characterisation, (of the boy Matty, in particular), its moral seriousness
and dense symbolism attracted critics who, although they could not agree
about it recognised that they had a real, and a really tragic, book on their
hands. Golding was no help: he refused interviews and was himself profoundly
disturbed by what he had produced.
Of the final trilogy and the separate novel, The Papermen (1984), perhaps the
latter, a grim parable about the trials and tribulations of a writer's life,
is the more powerful and satisfying. The trilogy, beginning with Rites of
Passage, is less intense and written at a lower level of energy, although it
is a profoundly interesting work by a man by no means written out. Its first
half is Golding's most exhuberant and humorous work, and the one which best
reveals his love-hate relationship with the sea. In the work as a whole,
Golding tried to express his curiosity about and sympathy with
homosexuality, and to portray the nature of male sexual desire as distinct
from female. It was, as always, highly unusual.
"Miss Pulkinhorn'' a short story published in Encounter in August 1960 and
adapted for radio by Golding in that year, should be mentioned as one of
Golding's outstanding uncollected works.
William Golding was a private man who was careful to stay well outside the
literary politics of the metropolitan world. That independence of spirit lay
at the heart of his fictional achievement. But he was also genial and
courteous with friends, and those who knew him spoke warmly of him.
He had been well before his sudden collapse. He leaves a widow, Ann, whom he
married in 1939, and a son and a daughter.
