We hear a lot about the death of the author, but William Golding is an author who was almost still-born. The man who wrote Lord of the Flies found that no one wanted to publish it. In 1953, his manuscript spent seven months being perused by publishers, who all promptly returned it. The Curtis Brown agency even declined to represent the would-be author, a dispirited schoolmaster who had written the book during classes and given his pupils, in lieu of an education, the humdrum task of totting up the number of words per page. A dead end seemed to have been reached when the Faber reader, picking through pages that were now yellow and grubby from handling, contemptuously rejected the submission as “absurd & uninteresting ... rubbish & dull.”
Then Charles Monteith, a former lawyer hired as an editor by Faber only a month before, retrieved the book from the bin and persuaded his colleagues to buy it for the piffling sum of US$98. As a set text for schools, Lord of the Flies went on to sell millions of copies, introducing adolescents worldwide to the idea of original sin and the knowledge of their own barbarity.
My childhood reading life began, so far as I can recall, with R.M. Ballantyne’s naively imperialist story The Coral Island; my innocence came to an end when I opened Lord of the Flies, which warps Ballantyne’s tale into an allegory about the wickedness of our species and its rightful ejection from the happy garden. The novel, as the critic Lionel Trilling said, marked a mutation in culture: God may have died, but the Devil was flourishing, especially in England’s elite public schools.
Yet the man who wrote Lord of the Flies spent the rest of his life regretting that he had done so. Golding considered the book “boring and crude.” Its classic status struck him as “a joke” and he disparaged his income from it as “Monopoly money.” And what right had it to overshadow later, better books, like his evolutionary saga, The Inheritors, his medieval fable, The Spire, or his solipsistic tragedy, Pincher Martin?
Towards the end of his life, he refused to reread the manuscript (much revised, on Monteith’s orders, before publication): he feared he’d be so dismayed he might do himself a mischief. Golding whispered the truth about these protests in his journal. He abominated Lord of the Flies, he confided, because “basically I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled.” Discovery, uncovery, detection and rumbling are the appointed tasks of the biographer, about which John Carey, in this authorized life of a man he “admired and respected,” evidently feels uncomfortable.
Golding called himself a monster. His imagination lodged a horde of demons, buzzing like flies inside his haunted head, and his dreams rehearsed his guilt in scenarios that read like sketches for incidents in his novels, which they often were. After dark, his mother became a murderous maniac, hurling knives, shards of shattered mirror or metal pots of scalding tea at little William; a girlfriend he had cast off returned as a stiffened corpse, which he watched himself trying to bury in the garden. At his finest, Golding paid traumatized tribute to the pain of other creatures, like the hooked octopus he once saw impaled by the “vulnerable, vulvar sensitive flesh” of its pink, screaming mouth, or a rabbit he shot in Cornwall, which stared at him before it fell with “a combination of astonishment and outrage.”
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