Not a one-trick pony

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Dreaming of conch shells

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote “Lord of the Flies”. By John Carey. Faber and Faber; 573 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

A READER once complimented William Golding on his book, “The Lord of the Rings”—a cruel twist for a man who is famous for just one book. The title of John Carey's biography acknowledges the problem that dogged Golding ever after the success of his 1954 novel, “Lord of the Flies”. But this first authorised biography confirms Golding as a writer of range and power who deserves far wider recognition. Reading it has sent this reviewer back to “Pincher Martin”, “The Inheritors” and his other books with a sense of revelation.

Golding's novels gain enormously from an understanding of his life. Their bare mythic quality, their dreamlike intensity, their bleak understanding of cruelty and humiliation, even their famous misogyny—all these things have their origins there. Mr Carey has had access to the family's huge archive of previously unseen manuscripts (several of them outright masterpieces, he thinks) as well as stories, notes, poems, drafts and above all a 5,000-page journal that Golding kept every day for 22 years.

Born in Cornwall in 1911, Golding was raised in Marlborough, Wiltshire. His father, the son of a bootmaker, taught science at the local grammar school. Marlborough exemplified England's class system, for it lay in the shadow of Marlborough College, one of the nation's great public schools, a preserve of tradition and privilege. Golding himself attended the grammar school, and the social humiliation he felt as a child—reinforced later at Oxford University, where he read science—was “as real as a wound”.

The boy was morbidly sensitive, with a hallucinatory imagination. The dark old Marlborough house backing on to a graveyard was a source of terror, particularly the cellar, which haunted his dreams all his life. This feeling for the unseen set him apart from his parents' rational, atheist, progressive outlook. He loved them, especially his father, a gifted and creative man. But their scepticism shrivelled him, as did their chilly inhibitions. By the time he was six, any budding friendships with the little girls at his dancing class were promptly nipped. Golding could remember his father touching him only twice in his life.

No wonder he developed odd notions about women (poor, soft, cleft creatures) or that he grew inward and self-examining. Understanding his “muddy mind”, as he once called it, became a guiding principle, his job as a writer. The schoolboys he taught before and after the second world war, and the war itself, cast a blight on his view of humanity. But he firmly believed that “Lord of the Flies” grew out of the knowledge of his own cruelty: “I have always understood the Nazis”, he wrote, “because I am of that sort by nature.”

Mr Carey's biography doesn't mince matters. Golding had a bullying streak and he drank too much. But he was always remorseful, genuinely modest and witty at his own expense. He had many friends and vivid passions: for music, sailing and chess, for ancient Greek and Greece, for composing Latin verse and raising orchids. He knew about ecology before most people, and his friend James Lovelock adopted the goddess Gaia at his suggestion.

But writing was the thing, and Mr Carey's discussion of the novels and of the process of their creation is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Fear, he believes, was Golding's sharpest emotion, the fear of writing itself being one of the worst. His books emerged painfully through many revisions, each draft being a way of postponing the final one. His tactful, patient, encouraging editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, was a lifeline to him, a friend on whom he relied more than any other during the second half of his life.

Later chapters sag, perhaps unavoidably, under the weight of Golding's gathering fame and honours—the Booker, the Nobel. Mr Carey might have cut down on the itineraries and schedules and dinners. And what of Ann, Golding's brilliant and beautiful wife? She is glimpsed in flashes, a remark, an insight, an indispensable presence on too many reading tours, increasingly ill. Yet Golding needed her as desperately as he needed Monteith. Mr Carey ends the book with a quote from Golding's journal, a wry and moving tribute to Ann for everything she has meant to him, from bed to books. “I would never have been as happy in the one with someone else, nor have written the other with someone else—or indeed written anything.”