Man as an Island By WILLIAM BOYD

WILLIAM GOLDING

The Man Who Wrote “Lord of the Flies”: A Life

By John Carey

Illustrated. 573 pp. Free Press. $32.50

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 thin-skinned 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.

William Boyd’s most recent novel, “Ordinary Thunderstorms,” was published earlier this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Boyd-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print