William Golding

As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Early life and education

Son of Alec Golding, a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), and Mildred (née Curnoe), William Golding was born on 19 September 1911 at his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay, Cornwall. The house was known as Karenza, the Cornish word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there. The Golding family lived at 29, The Green, Marlborough, Wiltshire, and Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where their father taught. Golding's mother was a campaigner for female suffrage. She was Cornish, and was considered by her son "a superstitious Celt" who used to tell him old Cornish ghost stories from her own childhood.

In 1930, Golding went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read natural sciences for two years before transferring to English for his final two years. Golding's original tutor was the chemist Thomas Taylor. In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding admitted that, as a teenager during a vacation, he tried to rape a teenage girl with whom he had previously taken piano lessons, perceiving her to have "wanted heavy sex".

Golding took his B.A. degree with second class honours during the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of his Poems was published by Macmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.

In 1935, Golding took a job teaching English at Michael Hall School, a Steiner-Waldorf school then in Streatham, South London, staying there for two years. After a year in Oxford studying for a Diploma of Education, he became a schoolmaster, teaching English and music at Maidstone Grammar School from 1938 to 1940, before moving to Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, in April 1940. There, Golding taught English, philosophy, Greek, and drama until joining the navy on 18 December 1940, reporting for duty at HMS Raleigh. He returned in 1945 and taught the same subjects until 1961.

Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years from 1971 until the night before his death; it contained approximately 2.4 million words in total. The journal was initially used by Golding to record his dreams, but over time it began to function as a record of his life. The journals contained insights including retrospective thoughts about Golding's novels and memories from his past. At one point, Golding described setting his students up into two groups to fight each other – an experience he drew on when writing Lord of the Flies. John Carey, an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University, was eventually given 'unprecedented access to Golding's unpublished papers and journals by the Golding estate'. Although Golding had not written the journals specifically so that a biography could be written about him, Carey published William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies in 2009.

Military service

During World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940. He served on a destroyer which was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. Additionally, Golding participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing craft that fired salvoes of rockets onto the beaches. He was also in action at Walcheren in October and November 1944, during which time 10 out of 27 assault craft that went into the attack were sunk. Golding rose to the rank of lieutenant.

Crisis

Golding had a troubled relationship with alcohol; his daughter Judy Carver notes that her father was "always very open, if rueful, about problems with drink". Golding suggested that his self-described "crisis", of which alcoholism played a major part, had plagued him his entire life.

John Carey mentions several instances of Golding's binge drinking in his biography, including Golding's experiences in 1963. Whilst on holiday in Greece when he was meant to have been finishing his novel The Spire, Golding would, after working on his writing in the morning, go to his preferred "Kapheneion" to drink at midday. By the evening, he would move on to ouzo and brandy, and developed a reputation locally for "provoking explosions".

Unfortunately, the eventual publication of The Spire the following year did not help Golding's developing struggle with alcohol; it had precisely the opposite effect, with the novel's scathingly negative reviews in a BBC radio broadcast affecting him severely.

Following the publication of The Pyramid in 1967, Golding experienced a severe writer's block, the result of a myriad of crises: family anxieties, insomnia, and a general sense of dejection. Golding eventually became unable to deal with what he perceived to be the intense reality of his life without first drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Tim Kendall suggests that these experiences manifest in Golding's writing as the character Wilf in The Paper Men; "an ageing novelist whose alcohol-sodden journeys across Europe are bankrolled by the continuing success of his first book". By the late 1960s, Golding was hopelessly addicted to alcohol – which he referred to as "the old, old anodyne".

Golding's first steps towards recovery came from his study of Carl Jung's writings, and in what he called "an admission of discipleship," Golding travelled to Switzerland in 1971 to see Jung's landscapes for himself. That same year, Golding started keeping a journal in which he recorded and interpreted his dreams; the last entry is from the day before he died, in 1993, and the work came to be thousands of pages long by this time.

The crisis did inevitably affect Golding's output, and his next novel, Darkness Visible, would be published twelve years after The Pyramid; a far cry from the prolific author who had produced six novels in thirteen years since the start of his career. Despite this, the extent of Golding's recovery is evident from the fact that this was only the first of six further novels that Golding completed before his death.