In August 2010, John Carey won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the oldest and most prestigious literary prizes in Britain, for his biography of William Golding: The Man who wrote Lord of the Flies. Thirty-one years ago, William Golding was awarded the same prize in the literary fiction section for his work, Darkness Visible. Both were well deserved.
Sir William Gerald Golding (1911-1993), Nobel Prize for Literature winner, is best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), but equally for works such as The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), and To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy’s first work Rites of Passage (1980). Lord of the Flies has reached the 20 million sales mark – a remarkable achievement – and in 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of “The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945” (i.e. postwar), beaten only by Philip Larkin (a prolific poet) and George Orwell, author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Golding never wrote an autobiography, although he started one, but he kept a painstakingly detailed and emotive diary that he adhered to daily. In addition to this routine, he reveals an unemotional, single-minded, ritualistic approach to writing. It is these diaries, and the files of Faber & Faber of London’s editor, Charles Monteith, that enables Carey to intimately cover almost every aspect of Golding’s life, feelings, inspirations, rejections, acceptances, and writing development.
Carey commences at the beginning in a logical sequence that also covers Golding’s earlier unpublished works such as Seahorse (1948), Circle under the Sea (1951), and Short Measure (1952). However, it’s in the evolution of Golding’s first novel that Carey is detailed-obsessed, noting every date (although unlike Golding himself who also noted the hour at which he concluded a novel).
The Lord of the Flies, originally called Strangers from Within, originated when he used to read stories about islands to his two children: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?” he told his wife, Ann. Golding notes in his diary that the novel “came very easily” by way of two mental images: (1) a little boy standing on his head in the sand, delighted to be at last on a real coral island; and (2) the same little boy being hunted down like a pig by the savages the children turned into. He just had to join the two images.
After a series of rejections over seven months, most famously by Polly Perkins of Faber & Faber, who wrote of her impression of Strangers from Within: “Time: the Future. Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle-country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” As luck would have it, a young inexperienced Charles Monteith fished it out of the reject pile and realized its potential – with some re-writing. And fortunately Golding accepted the improved ideas and re-submitted the work, fiercely debated internally at Faber & Faber before they relented and published it. So at the age of 42 the school teacher was a published author.
Carey, through Golding’s diaries, reveals not only the genesis of ideas for his novels, but also the insecurities, the doubts, the fears, the cockiness, the arrogance, the writer’s block, the drinking episodes: in fact all the resoluteness and all the vulnerabilities of a creative author.
Carey’s writing is at first annoying, due to the over-use of quotes from Golding’s diary and the over-use of detail. Fortunately the content is inherently interesting and inspiring, so much so that the biographical style becomes acceptable. And there are 525 pages in which to be inspired.
Comments
Post a Comment