A schoolmaster’s son turned schoolboys into a dark fable
Sir William Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) published Lord of the Flies in 1954 and twelve more fiction volumes afterward. Knighted in 1988 and ranked third among The Times’s fifty greatest British writers in 2008, he began as a science master’s son in Newquay before Oxford English.
He was born at his grandmother's house in Newquay, called Karenza, the Cornish word for love, and grew up in Marlborough, attending the school where his father taught. His mother, a suffrage campaigner, told him old Cornish ghost stories. At Brasenose he switched from natural sciences to English, graduating with a second in 1934, the year Macmillan published a book of his poems. In private writings he admitted attempting, as a teenager, to rape a girl he had known from piano lessons.
Teaching filled most of his working life: at a Steiner school in Streatham, at Maidstone Grammar, and at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, where he taught English, philosophy, Greek and drama until 1961. The war interrupted. His destroyer joined briefly in the hunt for the Bismarck, he commanded a rocket-firing landing craft on D-Day, and at Walcheren in 1944 he saw 10 of 27 assault craft sunk, ending as a lieutenant. He counted the navy and ancient Greek as his two great influences, and his journals describe splitting pupils into two groups to fight, a scene he drew on for the novel.
That book, begun in 1951 as Strangers from Within, was rejected by seven publishers before Faber's reader dismissed it as rubbish, dull and pointless. The young editor Charles Monteith rescued it, requested changes, and saw it published in September 1954. Harsh reviews of The Spire deepened a lifelong drinking problem, and after The Pyramid in 1967 severe writer's block set in, so twelve years passed before Darkness Visible.
Reading Carl Jung helped him recover; in 1971 he visited Switzerland and began a dream journal that reached about 2.4 million words by the night before his death. He then finished six more novels, won the Booker in 1980 for Rites of Passage and received the Nobel Prize in 1983.
Source: William Golding
