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Summary
Summary
In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher writing books on his breaks, lunch hours and holidays. His work had been rejected by every major publisher--until an editor at Faber and Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile. This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in the millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition.
Golding went on to become one of the most popular and influential British authors to have emerged since World War II. He received the Booker Prize for the novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Stephen King has stated that the Castle Rock in Lord of the Flies continues to inspire him, so much so that he named his entertainment company after it and has placed the Golding novel prominently in his novels Hearts in Atlantis and Cujo . Golding has been called a British Vonnegut--disheveled and darkly humorous, perverse when it would have been easier to be bitter, bitter when it would have been easier to be lazy, sometimes more disturbing than he is palatable and above all fascinating beyond measure.
Yet despite the fame and acclaim, the renowned author saw himself as a monster--a reclusive depressive ruled by his fears and a man who battled alcoholism throughout his life. In addition to being a schoolteacher, Golding was a scientist, a sailor and a poet before becoming a bestselling author, and his embitterment and alienation, his family, the women in his past, along with his experiences in the war, inform his work. This is the first book to unpack the life and character of a man whose entire oeuvre dealt with the conflict between light and dark in the human soul, tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature itself.
Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through his exclusive access to Golding's family, Carey uses hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding's intimate journals to draw a revelatory and definitive portrait. An acclaimed critic, Carey enriches crucially our appreciation of the literary work of Golding, bringing us, as the best literary biographies do, back to the books. And with equal parts lyricism and driving emotion, Carey brings to light a life that is extraordinary to the point of transcendent and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.
Author Notes
John Carey is Merton Professor of English at Oxford University. A distinguished critic, reviewer, & broadcaster, he is the author of several books, including "The Intellectuals & the Masses".
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this trenchant portrait, British critic Carey weaves masterful readings of Golding's work with intimate details about his life. Drawing on newly available materials-including Golding's never-before seen journal-Carey chronicles Golding's life from his relatively isolated and unhappy childhood, and his struggles as a young writer trapped in a schoolteacher position, to his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Such early praise elevated Golding's first novel to heights that made the novel became better known than the novelist. Despite praise, Lord of the Flies was not an immediate bestseller. Golding's subsequent novels (among them The Inheritors and Pincher Martin) fared little better with critics and booksellers-until 1958, when literary critic Frank Kermode praised Pincher Martin as the work of a philosophical novelist whose great theme was the Fall of Man. As a writer-in-residence at Hollins College in America, Golding had finally earned enough success to be published in paperback. In spite of his glory, Golding remained sensitive throughout his life, battling fears of being alone in the dark, the supernatural, insects, and writing (as Carey elegantly enunciates, Golding's greatest fear was of not writing; he continued writing to postpone the terror of having nothing more to write). (June) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lord of the Flies may be one of the most powerful (and widely taught) novels in postwar English literature, but until now, a comprehensive biography of William Golding has not been available. One suspects this may be because of the sheer difficulty of attaining some sort of perspective on the writer, whose complicated personality and enigmatic, symbol-laden works present prospective biographers with a formidable literary-psychological knot. And yet Carey's biography soars, presenting a nuanced and sensitive portrait of the small-town schoolteacher with a proclivity for Greek mythology and abiding class issues, the wartime ship's captain perennially drawn to the power of the sea, and the extraordinarily talented (if often blocked) writer who used fiction to plumb the murky depths of his subconscious. Recognizing Golding as a literary outsider and embracing him as such, the anti-elitist Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses, 2002) may be the perfect explicator for Golding's life; he also enjoyed the benefit of 5,000 pages of Golding's diaries, which, including summaries of his dreams, seem to have helped sew together Golding's life and art. Likely to lead Lord of the Flies fans to Golding's other works, this book is highly recommended.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
William Golding feared his name would be forever linked to a book he considered a minor effort. It was. IN the late 1960s, some 15 years after the publication of "Lord of the Flies," William Golding confessed to a friend that he resented the novel because it meant that he owed his reputation to what he thought of as a minor book, a book that had made him a classic in his lifetime, which was "a joke," and that the money he had gained from it was "Monopoly money" because he hadn't really earned it. Golding was drinking heavily at the time (he had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism) and one may have to take his bitterness advisedly, but these remarks reveal an interesting artistic conundrum. What is it like to owe virtually your entire reputation as a writer to a single book? One thinks of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller - to cite only the 20th-century American exemplars - but such one-book writers are legion in all literatures. John Carey seems to allude to the category in this biography's subtitle (even though Carey eventually disputes the implication). However, if anyone thinks of William Golding today, it is almost certain that his name will be conjoined with his extraordinary first novel. A blessing and then a curse of some sort - though by the time the book finally appeared in 1954, Golding wouldn't have cared about any downside. He was a 42-year-old provincial schoolteacher, desperate merely to have a novel published (it was the fourth book he had written, incidentally); renown and wealth were not even remotely considered. In fact, even "Lord of the Flies" was rejected by many publishers before an alert junior editor at Faber & Faber, Charles Monteith, saw its potential and encouraged Golding to make changes. By 1980, sales in the United States alone had reached seven million. Golding, to other writers, is a model of the late starter (along with Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark). You don't need to be young to make your name, so his career asserts, and once Golding had achieved that first success it never really left him. "Lord of the Flies" was swiftly followed by "The Inheritors" (1955) and "Pincher Martin" (1956), both published to great, if not universal, acclaim. A new and highly distinctive voice seemed to have arrived in contemporary British literature. The critical reception was not always so favorable for subsequent novels ("Free Fall," in 1959, suffered a near-unanimous pasting), but it is fair to say that Golding's life as a writer was forever financially secure thanks to the rock-solid, never-ending sales of "Lord of the Flies." Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. He was only eight years younger than Evelyn Waugh and is effectively part of that generation of English novelists (including Graham Greene, Anthony Powell and Aldous Huxley) who had reached their maturity by the time of World War II. But we never think of Golding in their company because his success as a writer was entirely postwar - he seems in some way more modern and contemporary. Golding joined the navy a year after war broke out (he was already married with a child). At D-Day in 1944 and the Battle of Walcheren some months later, he was in command of a rocket-firing landing craft, a vessel designed to deliver a terrifying "shock and awe"-style blanket barrage of thousands of small deadly rockets. Golding, operating the firing mechanism on the bridge of his ship, clearly saw the indiscriminate, devastating effect of the wall of fire and destruction that was unleashed as his myriad rockets erupted on beachheads and coastal villages. He survived the war unharmed and with some reluctance went back to the tedium of schoolmastering in Wiltshire. Carey makes the valid point that his war in the navy was profoundly destabilizing for him in various ways (both personally and artistically), and many of the key themes in his work can be traced to these formative and disturbing experiences. Carey summarizes the abiding obsession in the novels as the collision of "the spiritual and the miraculous" with "science and rationality," and it is this persistent hypersensitivity to the numinous and immaterial aspects of the world and the human condition that sets Golding apart from the broad river of social realism that so defines the 20th-century English novel. He was a kind of maverick in the way D. H. Lawrence was, or Lawrence Durrell, or John Fowles - to name but three - and I think this strangeness explains how throughout his life, after his initial success, the critical responses to his work were so violently divided. You either loved William Golding, it seemed, or you hated him. Golding himself was abnormally thinskinned when it came to criticism of his work. He simply could not read even the mildest reservation and on occasion left the country when his books were published. What is fascinating about "William Golding" is the portrait that emerges of a man of almost absurdly dramatic contrasts. He fought with commendable bravery at D-Day, yet in life was the most timid arachnophobe. He was married for more than 50 years, yet was probably a repressed homosexual. He was an accomplished classical musician and excellent chess player and an embarrassing, infantile drunk. He loathed and detested the stilted conventions of the British class system (particular scorn was directed at the Bloomsbury group), and yet when already a Nobel laureate and a member of the elite group to whom the queen grants the title Companion of Literature, he still frenetically lobbied his important friends to secure him a knighthood - successfully - and was a proud member of two of London's stuffiest gentlemen's clubs. Time and again the impression is of a man in a form of omnipresent torment of one kind or another: sometimes it would be mild and possibly amusing; at other moments, debilitating and damagingly neurotic. John Carey has had unrestricted access to the Golding archive, and it is unlikely that this biography will ever be bettered or superseded. Moreover, Carey, an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford and one of the most respected literary critics in Britain, writes with great wit and lucidity as well as authority and compassionate insight. Perhaps because he has had the opportunity of reading the mass of Golding's unpublished intimate journals, he brings unusual understanding to the complex and deeply troubled man who lies behind the intriguing but undeniably idiosyncratic novels. And the fiction is highly unusual and uneven, right up to the end of Golding's energetic working life - his last novel, "Fire Down Below," was published in 1989, only four years before his death at the age of 81 - emblematic of the warring forces in his imagination, of a writer (in Carey's words) "interested in ideas rather than people, and in seeing mankind in a cosmic perspective rather than an everyday social setting." Anthony Burgess described his talent as "deep and narrow," and Golding's own demons often drove him to analyze the extent and limits of his achievement. After the publication of "The Inheritors," as the acclaim flowed in, Golding remarked that he saw himself "spiraling up towards being a . . . universally admired, but unread," novelist. This was horribly prescient. With the exception of "Lord of the Flies," Golding's strange, haunting, difficult novels have few readers these days, and his posthumous reputation is neglected and in decline. At the very least, Carey's superb biography should take us back to the work again and allow us to make up our own minds, anew. 'Lord of the Flies' was rejected by many publishers before an alert junior editor saw its potential. William Boyd's most recent novel, "Ordinary Thunderstorms," was published earlier this year.
Choice Review
This first masterful biography of Golding, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, serves as an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to know about the man who wrote a modern literary classic, and about why and how he created it. Aided by unfettered access to Golding's private papers, Carey provides a meticulous but rather sobering investigation of an individual considered, while in school, "not quite a gentleman." Golding was well into his forties before he experienced his phenomenal success, and he nursed his grievances against a world that was late in recognizing his greatness. He did not consider himself a good man; indeed, he believed that his renowned novel reflected the evil within him. Carey hesitates to reveal the dark side of his subject, but provides an empathetic portrait of a troubled man. And, good critic that he is, he explains why Golding's later novels, for example, The Paper Men, were not entirely successful. Carey has produced a cutting-edge work exemplifying the best features of literary biography. No explanation of Golding is likely to supplant this one. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. C. Rollyson Bernard M. Baruch College, CUNY
Kirkus Review
With the cooperation of his subject's daughter, Sunday Times chief book reviewer Carey (What Good Are the Arts?, 2006, etc.) produces the first major biography of Nobel Prizewinning novelist William Golding (19111993).The author is uniquely equipped to handle the task. He was the first person allowed access to Golding's immense archive of letters, journals and drafts, and he also knew Golding personally, having edited a Festschrift for his 75th birthday. The amount of detail is impressive, even staggering. After an unhappy career at Oxford and a stint in the Royal Navy during World War II, Golding became, like his father, a dissatisfied schoolteacher. He published several novels, including Lord of the Flies (his first book) in 1954, while laboring over class preparations and student essays. Literary celebrity finally freed him from his bondage in the classroom. Carey ably chronicles Golding's career-long relationship with Faber and Faber and editor Charles Monteith, and he describes Golding's long marriage, which was lubricated with alcohol, animated by world travel and punctuated by arguments, even violence. The author portrays an insecure Golding who revised ferociously but disdained research, often preferring the visions in his imagination to the inconvenience of fact. Although he professed to dislike publicity and fame, Golding reveled in it as well, accepting countless speaking engagements and tours all over the world, as well as numerous awards and honorary degrees. Despite Carey's enormous scholarship and access, however, much of this massive volume slips into hagiography. He invariably portrays Golding in the most positive way possible, dragging even the novelist's darkest demonsexcessive drink, possible spousal abuseinto a forgiving if not flattering light.A tendentious but relentlessly thorough, historically important treatment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Carey (English, emeritus, Oxford Univ.; What Good Are the Arts?) has produced the first biography of the Nobel Prize-winning English novelist (there have, of course, been many critical studies). The subtitle of this book is ironic because Golding (1911-93) wrote many other novels besides Lord of the Flies, but most readers still associate his name with only his first book. Carey, who met Golding a number of times, sympathetically presents a portrait of a famous writer who throughout his career lacked self-confidence and felt keenly his earlier rejections. Carey is especially good at describing the themes of Golding's many works, especially his constant use of oppositions, such as science vs. faith. He had the complete cooperation of Golding's two children and close friends and colleagues, as well as access to the personal journal that Golding kept for many years, an important source. Golding's close relationship with Charles Monteith, his discoverer and editor at Faber & Faber, is touchingly conveyed. VERDICT Especially recommended for fans of Golding's writings as well as anyone interested in mid- to late 20th-century British fiction, whether general readers or undergraduates. (Photographs not seen.)-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations | p. ix |
A Note on Sources | p. xi |
1 Beginning | p. 1 |
2 Grandparents | p. 3 |
3 Parents | p. 7 |
4 The House | p. 15 |
5 Childhood | p. 18 |
6 Growing Up | p. 30 |
7 Oxford | p. 41 |
8 Drifting | p. 59 |
9 The War | p. 82 |
10 Teaching | p. 111 |
11 Unpublished Novelist | p. 130 |
12 Breakthrough | p. 149 |
13 The Inheritors | p. 170 |
14 Pincher Martin | p. 190 |
15 The Brass Butterfly | p. 206 |
16 Free Fall | p. 213 |
17 Journalism and Difficulties with The Spire | p. 236 |
18 America | p. 252 |
19 The Spire | p. 268 |
20 The Hot Gates and The Pyramid | p. 286 |
21 Disaster | p. 303 |
22 'The Jam' and a Breakdown | p. 315 |
23 The Scorpion God and 'History of A Crisis' | p. 327 |
24 Gap Years | p. 339 |
25 Darkness Visible | p. 364 |
26 Rites of Passage | p. 388 |
27 A Moving Target and The Paper Men | p. 408 |
28 The Nobel Prize and An Egyptian Journal | p. 430 |
29 A Move and Close Quarters | p. 451 |
30 Fire Down Below and Globe-Trotting | p. 472 |
31 The Double Tongue | p. 495 |
Postscript | p. 516 |
Acknowledgements | p. 522 |
Sources | p. 525 |
Illustration Credits | p. 547 |
Appendix | p. 548 |
Index | p. 549 |