Issue 20 / February - March 2010
Tales from a Bookshop: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies
John Carey's talk about William Golding at the Savile Club was the perfect way to end a week spent reading his biography of this elusive and gifted English author, writes Anna Goodall.
William Golding was himself a member of the Savile Club and in one episode in Carey's comprehensive biography, he recounts Golding noting in his journal that he was so drunk at Savile's he had to be assisted to one of the bedrooms by two other members. A suitable setting then to discuss this contradictory man.
Initially seeming quite tense, Carey soon opened up and his oratory proved to be much like his prose - precise, clear but approachable and wryly funny. He began by reading a passage early on in the biography that sets out the dichotomy of Golding's life and imagination: an unresolved clash between the inheritance of scientific rationalism instilled in him by his atheist schoolmaster father, Alec, and his own personal and powerful spiritual experiences, the earliest of which he claims occurred when he was only eighteen months old. Carey sets out his stall immediately writing that these two contrasting ideologies 'were at the centre of [Golding's] creative life'.
In relation to this constantly shifting sense of reality, when a member of the audience remarked that on reading the book he found it hard to know who Golding was, not due to lack of clarity in the text, but rather because Golding was a man full of contradictions, Carey enthusiastically agreed. In the book's postscript he notes that not least of these was the 'affable, old sea dog' persona Carey himself encountered at Oxford that seemed entirely at odds with the dark and fertile imagination in his works: 'I could not believe that this was the man who had written the novels'. But Golding, as Carey subsequently learnt was just highly adept at protecting his vulnerable, self-doubting and vain self from the world. (He discovered this by having access to Golding's complete journals, of which there are fifty-thousand pages that took the assiduous Carey six months to read.)
The huge amount of primary source material is highly unusual and as Carey said himself, he has never got to know an author so well ... and the revelations aren't always pretty. Such as when Golding admits, with a brutal honesty characteristic to him, that it hurt him more to pay his colossal tax bill than it did when he heard a close friend had died.
The journals also shed crucial light on Golding's early life and often thereby where the obsessions that endlessly recur in his fiction come from. His personal writings were often full of shame and revulsion, but the events he describes do not seem to merit his self-styling as a monster. Carey suggests he: 'saw the seeds of evil in his own heart, and...found monstrous things, or things he accounted monstrous, in his imagination.'
Indeed, much of his fiction is concerned with this inherent darkness in man, and Carey takes care to trace Golding's lifelong love of reading Greek (he taught himself during the Second World War), Greek myth and the idea of mythology, where man is deeply flawed and adrift in the jaws of fate. Yet Golding always disturbed any strictly existential conclusions with his inherent belief in the counter-truth of spiritual experience and many of his novels are laced with religious themes.
This conflict was a part of Golding's writing that not everyone was comfortable with and he often attracted vehement criticism from reviewers. Fascinatingly we also learn, via detailed correspondence, how his lifelong publisher and friend Charles Monteith at Faber quite ruthlessly cut out all suggestions in Lord of the Flies that Simon was a Christ-like, spiritual figure who ultimately communes with God. He never so severely edited any of Golding's work again and Golding admitted later that he felt it took away from his more subtle intended meaing.
However, despite this one regret, their partnership was incredibly productive and it is Carey's detailed account of their relationship and correspondence that is the most gripping part of the book. It reveals Golding's writing processes, and just how painful writing was to him ... and yet how necessary. Regardless of past successes Golding's submission of manuscripts to Monteith would always be prefaced by an explanatory clause telling him how poor and messy the enclosed new work was. When sending along the first draft of his Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage, for example, he writes, 'Herewith this load of old rope. I hope you can make head of tail of it.' Again Golding is hiding, genuinely petrified of failure.
Over the years Monteith encouraged, suggested, cajoled, guided and praised Golding. Apart from being the only person to initially recognise his talent (famously rescuing Lord of the Flies from the bin of Faber's professional reader Polly Perkin's who labelled it 'Rubbish and dull. Pointless.'), Monteith knew how to get the best from Golding, when to apply pressure and when not to. Although you could feel his irritation and impatience at times, he both understood and respected Golding: his talent, his endless self-doubt, fear of the critics and the feeling, perhaps central to his prolific nature as a writer, that he never belonged. It is a picture of how fruitful and mutually beneficial the old-fashioned working partnership between editor and writer could, and still ideally should, be.
Monteith, a remarkable intellect, had himself carefully constructed the persona of the upper-class Oxford don with perfect credentials and RP accent... He was in fact a draper's son from Belfast, and during the talk Carey remarked that when he phoned his relatives as part of his research, he couldn't believe how strong their Northern Irish accents were. Golding's lower middle-class upbringing, his unhappiness as a lowly obscure schoolmaster and the snobbery he experienced at Oxford - he was put down as 'NQ' - that is, 'not quite a gentleman' - were a constant source of shame and annoyance to him. Monteith was to him part of the elite, someone to respect, but he was also someone who understood his resentments.
Towards the end of the evening a member of the audience confidently asked what Carey felt about being made to put the tagline on the book cover 'The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies', assuming that Carey would have been against this. He retorted that this heading was actually his idea - it was Faber who wasn't keen.
I, too, had misgivings about it when I first picked up the book and having read it one feels it is a sub-heading Golding himself would have initially resented ... but perhaps eventually enjoyed. As Carey explained it was partly chosen on a practical basis - many people wouldn't know that William Golding wrote this most famous of books, or at least they would not be sure; secondly it is a little ironic - like many authors who write a definitive work, Golding often moaned that it was all he was known for despite the fame and wealth it brought him. Carey's hope is that by the end of the book, readers will realise there was a lot more to him.
This reader is certainly planning to get better acquainted with the complete works of Mr William Golding.
What's Hot:
Secret London - an Unusual Guide by Rachel Howard & Bill Nash is still racing off the shelves faster than we can order it
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem - & we have signed copies in the shop for Lethem aficionados
I Drink Therefore I Am by Roger Scruton
We've also just received some gorgeous new editions of classics published by White's Fine Editions: Wuthering Heights, Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes - His Greatest Cases, & more.
Who Did We Spot?
Jake Arnott
Neil Tennant
Posy Simmonds
...and he hasn't actually come in yet, but Peter Carey may be in the building next week...
Wednesday, 3 February, 2010
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