Until reading John Carey’s official biography, I had not realised that William Golding was one of the all-star champion drinkers of post-war British fiction — “dead drunk”, by his own estimate, at least once a week. There was the time he fell down the stairs after an All Souls dinner in Oxford. Or the day he cleared out the minibar in his Paris hotel and insulted a fellow writer who had been imprisoned for seven years in South Africa. Or the occasion when he attacked and destroyed a friend’s puppet of Bob Dylan and buried it in the garden in the belief that it was Satan. Or the night he won the Booker prize and went to the gents, where, according to an eyewitness, he “fell flat on his face and said ‘F***.’” It seems only fitting that the last time anyone saw Golding alive, the 81-year-old Nobel laureate was lying drunk and unconscious in a bathtub, fully clothed and wearing a dressing gown.

Unfortunately, Golding, who developed in old age what one visitor called a “Cap’n Birds Eye, yo ho, m’hearties” persona, seems to have been nasty when drunk (calling women “whores” or “pulling about” his wife) and self-pitying when sober (in his journal he bewailed himself as a “common drunk, oh God have mercy!”). He believed he was a monster, and it was this self-disgust, Carey convincingly argues, that lay at the heart of his writing: he “saw the seeds of all evil in his own heart”. In a private memoir, Golding confessed to attempted rape when he was a teenager, to being pleased when a schoolfriend died, to resenting his son when he was born with a club foot, and to being a bully and a sadist: “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.” Not surprisingly, this is the portion of Carey’s book (“Lord of the Flies author ‘tried to rape 15 year old’”) that has been seized on by the press.

In fact, apart from making his wife read the works of Jung so that he could discuss his dreams with her, Golding does not seem to have been especially cruel. He was a faithful husband, an affectionate father, a brave naval officer and a fitfully inspiring teacher (known to his pupils as “Scruff”). There is something neurotic, even faintly self-aggrandising about his guilt complexes. Many people, after all, can harbour violent fantasies

without actually harming anyone. Nevertheless, his acute sensitivity to the concept of original sin (“man produces evil as a bee produces honey”) and his conviction of his own monstrosity provided the imaginative power for almost all his work, especially his three most important and original novels: The Inheritors (1955), about a peaceful group of Neanderthals menaced by the arrival of an ambitious tribe of Homo sapiens; The Spire (1964), describing how, from a swamp of medieval corruption and lust, there arises a great man-made monument to God; and, of course, before either of these, his first and vastly most well-known book, Lord of the Flies (1954).

At a rough guess, Lord of the Flies — with 20m printed in the UK alone — has probably sold about 10 times as many copies as the rest of Golding’s novels combined. Its author came to resent the way it overshadowed both him and his other work. “I found it boring and crude,” he declared on rereading it in 1972, adding — appropriately, given its permanent place on the school English syllabus — “The language is O-level stuff.” Nevertheless, Lord of the Flies was

Golding’s equivalent of a trust fund. From the early 1960s, when it first caught the anti-war and counterculture mood on American campuses, he never really had to work again. It financed his drinking sprees and some long periods of creative idleness — 4½ years in one instance — as well as the usual catalogue of boats, cars, holidays and eventually the purchase of a Cornish manor house with a quarter of a mile of stone walls. Carey is very good on the financial details of all this.

As is often the case with biographies, it is the first half — the struggle to succeed, when Golding was hard up and bitter with class envy — that is the most interesting. Once he has made his money and starts complaining about his tax bill (in 1987 he was “grief-stricken”, according to Carey, about having to write a cheque to the Inland Revenue for £52,000), he becomes harder to like. His

lobbying to secure himself a knighthood, compared with the refusal of such honours by writers such as Kipling and Conrad, somehow marks him as second-rate. Sir William Golding — he insisted on being so addressed — with his CBE, his K, his Nobel and Booker prizes, his hobnobbing with world leaders (“more enjoyable, in Nov-ember, was a lunch with Prime Minister John Major”) and his endless overseas British Council tours, was to become very much the creature of an establishment he had once affected to despise.

Perhaps partly because of this, the decline in his reputation in the 16 years since his death has been precipitous. “Nowadays,” concedes Carey, ruefully explaining the need for his subtitle, “mention of Lord of the Flies sparks instant recognition in a way that Golding’s own name does not.” This is a pity. True,

Golding’s theories about God, art and the universe can often sound like pretty good tosh. (“Comedy and tragedy…are subsumed in an ultimate Dazzle. Neither is a Cosmic truth, only a vivid universal one…”) But some of the novels, not just the first, deserve their classic status, and Golding’s ideas, as Carey points out, especially his scepticism about progress and the Enlightenment, seem even wiser after 9/11 than before. Golding deserves rediscovery, and if he gets it, then this biography — sympathetic without being idolatrous, detailed without becoming boring, learned, witty, insightful and humane: a model of its kind — will be in large measure responsible.

William Golding by John Carey
Faber £25 pp590

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