Golding, William (19 September 1911 - 19 June 1993)

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William Golding (19 September 1911 - 19 June 1993)

Michael C. Prusse
Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich
Zurich University of Applied Sciences, School of Education

1983 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

Golding: Banquet Speech

Golding: Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1983

Interviews

Bibliography

References

Papers

See also the Golding entries in DLB 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959; DLB 100: Modern British Essayists, Second Series; DLB 255: British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918–1960; DLB 326: Booker Prize Novels: 1969–2005; and DLB Yearbook: 1983.

BOOKS: Poems (London: Macmillan, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1935);

Lord of the Flies (London: Faber & Faber, 1954; New York: Coward-McCann, 1955);

The Inheritors (London: Faber & Faber, 1955; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962);

Pincher Martin (London: Faber & Faber, 1956; New York: Capricorn, 1956); republished as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957);

The Brass Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts (London: Faber & Faber, 1958); republished with introduction by Golding (London: Faber & Faber, 1963);

Free Fall (London: Faber & Faber, 1959; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960);

The Spire (London: Faber & Faber, 1964; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964);

The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces (London: Faber & Faber, 1965; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966);

The Pyramid (London: Faber & Faber, 1967; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967);

The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (London: Faber & Faber, 1971; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972);

Darkness Visible (London: Faber & Faber, 1979; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979);

Rites of Passage (London: Faber & Faber, 1980; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980);

A Moving Target (London: Faber & Faber, 1982; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982; revised, 1984);

Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1983 (Leamington Spa, U.K.: Sixth Chamber, 1984);

The Paper Men (London: Faber & Faber, 1984; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984);

An Egyptian Journal (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1985);

Close Quarters (London: Faber & Faber, 1987; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987);

Fire Down Below (London: Faber & Faber, 1989; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989);

To the Ends of the Earth (London: Faber & Faber, 1991)–comprises Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, and Fire Down Below;

The Double Tongue (London: Faber & Faber, 1995; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: The Brass Butterfly, Oxford, New Theatre, 24 February 1958; London, Strand Theatre, April 1958; New York, Lincoln Square Theatre, West Side YMCA, 11 December 1965.

PRODUCED SCRIPTS: “Our Way of Life,” radio, Third Programme, BBC, 15 December 1956;

“Miss Pulkinhorn,” radio, Third Programme, BBC, 20 April 1960;

“Break My Heart,” radio, Third Programme, BBC, 19 March 1961.

OTHER: “Envoy Extraordinary,” in Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination, by Golding, John Wyndham, and Mervyn Peake (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956; New York: Ballantine, 1957), pp. 3–60;

“Miss Pulkinhorn,” in The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by Malcolm Bradbury (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 99–107;

“Foreword,” in William Golding: A Bibliography 1934–1993, edited by R. A. Gekoski and P. A. Grogan (London: Deutsch, 1994).

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS-UNCOLLECTED: “The Writer in His Age,” London Magazine, 4 (May 1957): 45–46;

“Pincher Martin,” Radio Times, 38 (21 March 1958): 8;

“The Anglo-Saxon,” Queen, 215 (22 December 1959): 27–30;

“Androids All,” review of New Maps of Hell, by Kingsley Amis, Spectator, 206 (24 February 1961): 263–264;

“Before the Beginning,” review of World Prehistory, by Grahame Clark, Spectator, 206 (26 May 1961): 768;

“It’s a Long Way to Oxrhynchus,” Spectator, 207 (7 July 1961): 9;

“The Condition of the Novel,” New Left Review (January-February 1965): 34–35;

“Egypt and I,” Holiday, 34 (April 1966): 32, 46–49;

“Delphi: The Oracle Revealed,” Holiday, 43 (August 1967): 60–61, 87–88, 90, 150.

The novels of William Golding can be characterized as depicting individuals or isolated groups of human beings in archetypal circumstances, confronted with their humanity and experiencing the limits of civilization. By focusing on man’s capacity for both good and evil, Golding’s fiction frequently displays the quality of fable or approximates myth–the latter is the taxonomy that the novelist himself preferred. Stephen Medcalf, in The Times Literary Supplement (2 September 2005), called Golding “the celebrator of the height, depth and greatness of the human character.” Peter O. Stummer just as aptly classifies Golding’s narratives as accounts of “man’s beastliness to man,” whereas David Lodge asserts that Golding created his own particular genre, “the fable of spiritual crisis.” Elucidating on his own narrative strategies in his essay “Fable” (included in The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces, 1965), Golding writes that “the fabulist is didactic, desires to inculcate a moral lesson.” However, it would be wrong to brand Golding as a simple moral fabulist, since his stories, as the English critic Frank Kermode once put it, do not “yield themselves at one reading.” Virginia Tiger even maintains that the more time one devotes to the study of Golding’s work, “the more one is struck by its increasing complexity, ambiguity, and equivocation.”

Even if Golding’s narratives with their mythological qualities are understood as complex representations of reality, which enable readers to recognize existential contradictions that his protagonists fail to perceive, his assumption of authority is problematic. In “Fable,” Golding argues that, in order to succeed in having his story read, the storyteller has to sugarcoat the pill, and even then he will meet with hostility because he “has made an unforgivable assumption; namely that he knows better than his reader; nor does good intention save him.” Golding’s explicit claim to “authorial” power in an era in which critical theory questioned this authority has divided his readers into two camps: the first group view him as one of the greatest British writers of the twentieth century, with a reputation reaching far beyond his native land, while the second group perceive him as clinging to a single determinist notion-human sinfulness–which he analyzes in several variations.

William Gerald Golding was born in St. Columb Minor (near Newquay) in Cornwall on 19 September 1911. His father, Alec Golding, was a schoolteacher, while his mother, Mildred (née Curnoe), was a keen supporter of the suffragettes. Golding had one older brother, Jose, and a younger adopted sister, Eileen (actually his first cousin). Golding’s father taught at Marlborough Grammar School in Wiltshire, and like his older brother, Golding went to school there before going on to Brasenose College Oxford in 1930, where he studied natural sciences for two years. Feeling dissatisfied with his subject, he opted for English literature instead and graduated in 1935. During his time at Oxford the future novelist published his first book, a slim volume of poems. Before and after studying for a Diploma in Education he held a series of odd jobs as a teacher, part-time actor, stage manager, and producer. On 30 September 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II, he married Ann Brookfield and became a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury.

Golding joined the Royal Navy in December 1940 and served on various ships until the end of the war, except for some time in New York and a period spent on a weapons-development program. He was involved in the pursuit of the Bismarck and was deeply affected by the deaths and injuries he witnessed. His service on minesweepers, destroyers, cruisers, and a rocket launcher–which he commanded at the rank of lieutenant–left a lasting impression on Golding and acutely influenced his early novels. According to Golding’s friend the British historian and writer Andrew Sinclair (in a 1996 BBC documentary on Golding), the writer’s decision to take his rocket ship–a “flying time-bomb”–across a minefield in order to be in time for the D-Day operations, had a profound effect since Golding had to weigh the moral choice of risking the lives of his men against being late for the assault on the beaches of Normandy. Later, he discovered that the minefield did not exist–it had been put on the map to deter the Germans–and this incident provided the author with an example of how questions about life and death can be conjured up and lead to passionate involvement when, in reality, there is no foundation for them.

After the war, Golding returned to teaching English, philosophy, and the classics in Salisbury and wrote several novels. Publishers rejected all of them, and even his best-known book, Lord of the Flies (1954), collected twenty-one rejection slips until publisher Charles Monteith picked the manuscript up from a pile of rejects and noticed the comment of the professional reader. As Monteith recalled in “Strangers from Within” (1986), the reader’s verdict began with the words “Absurd and uninteresting fantasy” and ended with “Rubbish and dull. Pointless.” Nevertheless, Monteith read the manuscript and was intrigued by it, a fascination that led to the subsequent publication of the novel by Faber and Faber in 1954.

Lord of the Flies–the title is a literal translation of Beelzebub from Hebrew–is an allegorical dystopia that relates the fate of a group of schoolboys who are evacuated during a future nuclear war and whose plane crashes on a desert island in the tropics. Since there are no adult survivors, the boys at first attempt to act sensibly to ensure their survival: “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.” Ralph is elected as their leader, whereas Jack, “chapter chorister and head boy,” becomes his chief rival. Jack’s choirboys turn into hunters who chase and kill the feral pigs on the island, while Ralph’s chief supporters–Piggy, a fat, bespectacled intellectual, and Simon, who suffers from epilepsy and later becomes a Cassandra-like prophet figure–build shelters.

The first dispute results from the signal fire that the group keeps going on the mountain and which the hunters fail to sustain because they are all involved in chasing a pig, and thus a ship passing by fails to rescue them. Furthermore, the boys are frightened by “the beast”–a product of their imagination that seems to become real when they mistake a dead parachutist hanging between the trees for physical evidence of the beast. When Simon rushes out of the jungle to inform them that the beast is in fact just a corpse, the panicked boys assume he is the beast and kill him. Simon is the only one to be illuminated about the residence of evil within themselves when the “Lord of the Flies”–in fact a pig’s skull on a stake beset by flies–tells him that he is not a beast that can be hunted and killed: “I’m part of you.” Though he perceives that the true beast resides within the boys themselves, he cannot communicate this insight.

When Jack loses another leadership contest against Ralph, there is a rift between them that results in the former founding a tribal society. Gradually all the boys drift into Jack’s camp, and when Ralph leads his last three supporters to negotiate, Piggy is killed and the others are taken prisoner. Ralph is chased like a pig across the island and eventually, in despair, stumbles onto the beach, where he encounters a British officer and is saved. The basic idea of this novel is, according to Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, “that within us all, eagerly waiting to be let out, lie savages.”

In his essay “Fable,” Golding confirms what the words of the officer (“Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island”) already spelled out: that he consciously rewrote Robert Ballantyne’s Victorian adventure novel The Coral Island (1857) with a view to challenge its simplistic message of English supremacy. Golding even kept the names of two of Ballantyne’s main characters, Ralph and Jack. Instead of the third one, Peterkin, Golding uses an almost biblical figure, Simon, who, like the man from Cyrene, is “compelled to bear his cross” (Matthew 27:32). The novelist also compares the boys’ urge to conquer the island to British imperial sway, encouraging critics such as Kevin McCarron to maintain that Golding was writing about colonialism in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby, Joyce Cary, and Paul Scott. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest might be added to the list since it also deals with the subduing and domination of wild and aboriginal forces in the figure of Caliban.

The main theme of Golding’s fiction–the truth about human nature, the capacity for both good and evil–permeates his first novel. In “Fable” he documents the various thoughts that led to the conception of the narrative. He freely admits that Lord of the Flies is an adventure story that carries a moral message: the purpose of the adventure is to serve as sugar coating, which is necessary to entice readers into learning their moral lesson. The novelist was moved by his experiences of World War II to think that mankind was incorrigible in its habits: “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” He was struck by Ballantyne’s notion in The Coral Island that evil resides outside its three protagonists and is present only in the savages and pirates that visit the islands. Lord of the Flies, according to Golding, describes the boys’ attempt at constructing a civilization on the island, which “breaks down in blood and terror because the boys are suffering from the terrible disease of being human.” Apart from the movie versions–Peter Brook filmed the first version in 1963, and another debuted in 1990–there exists one dramatized version that Golding approved of, by the British novelist and playwright Nigel Williams (first performed by students in 1991 and professionally in 1995).

In this productive phase of his life, which kept Golding writing in addition to his teaching duties, he published two more novels, The Inheritors in 1955 and Pincher Martin in 1956. The Inheritors relates the fate of a small group of Neanderthals who struggle for survival in the harsh environmental circumstances of the Stone Age and of their lethal encounter with the ancestors of mankind, Homo sapiens. The setting of the narrative in the distant past was inspired by “The Grisly Folk,” a short story by H. G. Wells, which was first published in Storyteller Magazine in 1921. The theme of one race waning and another ascending must have appealed to the novelist. As much as The Coral Island influenced Lord of the Flies, Wells’s short story must have provoked Golding by means of presumptions such as the “queer inhuman fashion” of the Neanderthals’ appearance or their supposed cannibalism: “The Neandertalers thought the little children of men fair game and pleasant eating.”

At the outset of Golding’s narrative the small band loses its leader, and the other members are gradually killed off by the new men. Once again there is a chase in which the protagonist has to run for his life. Lok takes flight from the race of new arrivals, to whom he is curiously attracted and whom he completely fails to understand. His desperate flight is probably even more terrifying than Ralph’s, since the Neanderthal man (after his wife, Fa, has been felled by an arrow) is dimly aware of the fact that he might be the last of his race. The novel is generally perceived as difficult, although it relates a rather simple story. The difficulty arises from the fact that the author writes from the perspective of a Neanderthal man, who is incapable of sophisticated thought. Once the reader has learned to read Lok’s impressionist perception of his surroundings, the story can easily be grasped. An example of Golding’s technique is a scene in which an arrow is shot at Lok; since he is not familiar with the concept of bow and arrow, he simply relays the information his senses procure:

The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again.

“Clop!”

The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice.

His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat.

The last chapter of the novel, like that of Lord of the Flies, is written from a different perspective, namely that of a Cro-Magnon man. More refined in their language and thinking, and also as producers of art, the newcomers are not innocent like the Neanderthals. Rather, they think pragmatically, logically, and are capable of both good and evil, and the artist-protagonist is aware of this fact.

Many critics claim that The Inheritors is Golding’s greatest achievement. The writer Arthur Koestler (quoted by Medcalf) called it “an earthquake in the petrified forest of the English novel.” Monteith believed it to be “the best book he ever wrote” and asserted (in the BBC documentary) that Golding himself thought so too. S. J. Boyd compares the narrative to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1795) because the innocents, the Neanderthals, are destroyed by contact with the new people, who even leave gifts for those they call “the devils,” namely their rotten honey–an alcoholic drink that has an overwhelming effect on Fa and Lok. Moreover, their similarity to Adam and Eve has been noted by Lawrence S. Friedman, who declares that the two Neanderthals “partake of the knowledge of evil” when they witness how the new people ritually sacrifice and eat Liku, a young Neanderthal. Kermode comments on the problematic nature of the fall: “Not to know evil is, in a sense, to know nothing.” According to Boyd, by relating how a group of people that live in harmony with nature are cast as devils by men and ruthlessly pursued and exterminated, Golding explains how mankind gained its position: “The world of the new people is essentially our world. We are their inheritors.” The notion that human beings are the pinnacle of evolution is severely challenged by this outside contemplation of man’s behavior. According to Kermode, “Golding believes in human guilt and the human sense of paradise lost.”

Golding’s third novel, Pincher Martin, concentrates on one individual, namely Christopher Hadley Martin, who saves himself from a destroyer that was torpedoed by a German submarine by swimming to a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. On this rock Martin, by means of flashbacks, is confronted with his rather unpleasant personality: “I am who I was.” One particularly shocking memory evokes the coldness with which Martin raped his best friend’s fiancée. His nickname, Pincher, refers both to the greed that makes him such an unattractive person and to the intense tenacity with which he clings to life. The protagonist attempts to create his reality–his life–by creating this rock in the middle of the Atlantic, by naming its different parts and by continuously asserting his belief that rescue is imminent. The novel refers to certain philosophical positions assumed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the two leading French exponents of existentialism, and also directly alludes to myth when Martin declares: “I am Atlas. I am Prometheus.” Martin is clearly a Sisyphus figure, indebted to Camus and his essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; translated as The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955). Like the French existentialists, Golding is concerned with the question of choice: “You gave me the power to choose and all my life you led me carefully to this suffering because the choice was my own.” Eventually, Martin’s tale of endurance on the rock is exposed as no more than the hallucinations of a drowning man, a mirage that echoes the miraculous but illusory escape of the protagonist who is hanged in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1892).

Several critics, including McCarron and Tiger, have noted that Golding’s first three novels, although describing vastly different characters in distinct settings, feature a certain structural similarity. All of them end with a shift in perspective that permits the reader to step outside the densely woven fictional world and perceive matters from an alternative point of view. In Lord of the Flies it is the officer who arrives on the island and, misapprehending the situation, congratulates the boys on their “jolly good show.” At the end of The Inheritors readers are given the thoughts of one of the new race who hunted and exterminated the Neanderthals. Last but not least, the ending of Pincher Martin reveals, to all those who failed to identify the clues provided by Golding, that the protagonist was imagining his quest for survival during his death struggles in the sea. The irony of the statement by Davidson, the officer who steps on the Scottish shore to identify the body, is only evident to the reader; Davidson believes that Martin died instantly: “He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots.” Tiger has provided a name for this technique of narrative structuring “whereby two points of view are turned on one situation”; she calls it “the ideographic structure.” Its purpose is, as Tiger asserts, to make Golding’s “readers embrace paradoxes of existence which his own characters cannot recognize.”

Golding’s growing reputation drew him into the London literary scene and permitted him to supplement his income by writing essays, reviews, and travel reports. In 1955 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Golding’s novella “Envoy Extraordinary” was published in a collective volume of three narratives in 1956; the other contributions were by John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake. Two years later, in 1958, he transformed this story into a play, The Brass Butterfly, which was first performed in Oxford and toured the provinces before appearing in London. In the following year he published his fourth novel, Free Fall (1959), as well as many reviews and travel pieces.

Free Fall is the quest into the past of the artist Sammy Mountjoy, who wants to find “the point where I began,” to discover at what point in his life he lost his “innocence” and chose to become “evil.” Looking back at his childhood, he describes himself as “wandering in paradise. I can only guess our innocence, not experience it.” Apart from the obvious allusion to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Golding refers to one of his favorite themes–namely, the notion of a fall from paradise that inevitably occurs in the course of human lives. Sammy’s surname has frequently been read as a variation on the theme of paradise, but it is also the name of a well-known prison in Dublin–a metaphor that fittingly describes Sammy’s condition: trapped in choices.

Sammy, whose confessional notes are presented in a gesture of atonement, is clearly related to the protagonists of French existentialism, who also probe into the freedom of the will and into human choices, as typified by the writings of Sartre and Camus. Sammy’s notion of people being other people’s hell–“We are forced here and now to torture each other”–is most certainly indebted to Sartre’s play Huis Clos (1945; translated as In Camera, 1946). The tormenting of his Dante-inspired lover, Beatrice Ifor, whom Sammy possibly drives to madness, is one such instance; the agonies that Sammy suffers at the orders of Dr. Halde in a German prison camp during World War II provide another. The fact that the protagonist of Free Fall opts for sin of his own free will suggests parallels to the protagonist of La Chute (1956; translated as The Fall, 1957) by Camus–a narrative that also proclaims the fall in its title.

The novel furthermore carries an autobiographical touch, illuminating Golding’s wandering between the world of science and the spiritual: Nick, the science master, is based upon Golding’s father, as the author admitted in an interview with John Carey. Miss Pringle, who teaches religion, perceives that Sammy has talents in the realm of the spiritual and attempts to expose him as a fake. Eventually, Sammy recognizes that everything is to be had at a price, and, since he is willing to sacrifice everything to get Beatrice, this realization is probably the decisive moment where the protagonist overstepped the limit.

Golding’s short story “Miss Pulkinhorn” (1960) is a variation on faith, fanaticism, and “goodness,” describing through the eyes of the cathedral organist, Sir Edward, how Miss Pulkinhorn, a religious zealot and “God’s own chicken,” is responsible for the death of a saintly and rather odd vicar. The narrative gives the reader, according to Medcalf, insights into “the vulnerability of the more innocent, the totality of self-deception in the less innocent.” The novelist spent the academic year of 1961 in the United States since he had been appointed writer-in-residence at Hollins, a women’s liberal arts college in Virginia. Realizing that his writing interfered with his teaching and vice versa, Golding resigned from his post at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in 1962 and became a full-time writer.

The Spire, the novel that was inspired by his residence in Salisbury and the impressive town cathedral, was published in 1964. Golding wrote, in A Moving Target (1982), that he was prompted to write about this building because of the curious absence of it in Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels. In The Spire, set in the fourteenth century, Dean Jocelin acts on his vision that God has selected him to erect a tower rising to four hundred feet above Barchester Cathedral, and he pursues this goal ruthlessly and persistently, regardless of costs, particularly of human lives. The workmen murder a crippled employee of the cathedral, possibly as a heathen sacrifice for the impossible task, and the dean is aware of this incident and other unchristian proceedings. The builder, aptly named Roger Mason, who has an illicit relationship with the wife of the murdered man, sets his technological knowledge against Jocelin’s fanatic faith: according to the builder, the foundations cannot support the weight of such a construction. Against all expectations the spire rises triumphantly, while those involved in its construction are either dead or dying.

As McCarron puts it, the novel accounts for the appalling costs that result from Jocelin’s hubris. Jocelin soon becomes aware of what he has to sacrifice to his vision when friendships are lost, and he reveals his fierce determination: “I didn’t know how much you would cost up there, the four hundred feet of you. I thought you would cost no more than money. But still, cost what you like.” With Jocelin the reader learns about the gradual rise in cost, until the narrative assumes the dimensions of a Greek tragedy: “I never guessed in my folly that there would be a new lesson at every level, and a new power.” Ultimately, some uneasy questions remain: does the spire remain standing because of the human sacrifice or despite it? Do good intentions condone evil acts? The Spire is a complex investigation into what life entails. Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor sum up their interpretation: “The Spire is built in heavy stone, in faith, in sin: all three things are true, and contradictory.” According to English novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, writing in the Observer (20 June 1993), the building of the spire “may stand for many kinds of aspiration yet the toil and sweat of the artisans, and the materials with which they are working, are utterly real.”

In 1965 Golding published The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces, a collection of his essays, followed in 1967 by The Pyramid, a narrative with several autobiographical elements; the title alludes to Golding’s lifelong fascination with Egyptology. The collection of essays also includes two autobiographical pieces, “Billy the Kid” and “The Ladder and the Tree,” in which the roots of Golding’s love of books are traced back to his childhood. The Pyramid, apart from focusing on growing up in an English country town with the telling name of Stilbourne (a village nearby is just as tellingly called Bumstead), presents a harsh analysis of the British class system. It is told from the point of view of Oliver, its lower-middle-class protagonist, and allows glances into other spheres, mainly because of his relationships with working-class Evie Babbacombe and with the upper-middle-class doctor’s son, Robert Ewan. At the beginning of The Pyramid, Robert announces that Oliver is his slave. When Oliver doubts this statement, his opponent reasons: “Yes you are. My father’s a doctor and yours is only his dispenser.” Class plays a role in all of Oliver’s decisions: what friendships to form, what course of studies to pursue: “Nobody mentioned the line, but everybody knew it was there.”

Golding, who was a keen amateur pianist, conceived a narrative that abounds with music and musical allusions. Although music has primarily positive attributes, a life dedicated to music can also be “hell,” as Friedman writes–the example is Miss Dawlish, Oliver’s piano teacher, who eventually burns her sheet music and metronome and smashes her bust of Ludwig von Beethoven. In the course of the novel Oliver forsakes his musical ambitions and talent and becomes an industrial chemist who is involved in the production of poison gas–his worldly success is, like the erection of the spire in Golding’s previous novel, only to be had at a price. Oliver, who lusted after Evie in the first part of the novel, later only considers her from the point of class and thus treats her like a sex object, not a human being. There are further scenes of chances missed: the town itself rejects the modern age and hence becomes even more provincial, a theme that is highlighted in the disastrous production of an opera by the appropriately named Stilbourne Operatic Society (SOS), and by the rise of Henry Williams, a mechanic, who owns most of the town by the end of the novel. The sonata form of the story was, as Golding commented in an interview with Mary Lynn Scott, not conceived from the beginning; but once he became aware of this slant, the novelist decided to adopt this structure: “I more precisely shaped it in that direction so that the last story about the old music teacher is really an air and variations: it comes back in different forms.” The middle part is clearly a scherzo, and although Golding is frequently described as a novelist lacking in humor, The Pyramid shows traces of farce and is, on the whole, quite funny.

Despite these features, The Pyramid did not fare well with the critics, who diagnosed deteriorating creative faculties. The same fate met the novelist’s next publication, The Scorpion God (1971), a volume consisting of three long stories or novellas, namely “The Scorpion God,” “Clonk, Clonk,” and “Envoy Extraordinary.” The first of these is set in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs and deals with incest, rituals, and a court jester, called the Liar, who brings to bear a different perspective on the sterile, death-oriented Egyptian culture. However, since he is not in harmony with his environment (as the Egyptians are), the step forward in human evolution that the Liar’s rational thinking will produce is inevitably linked to the loss of this harmonious existence. “Clonk, Clonk” is an optimistic narrative that is set a hundred thousand years ago somewhere in Africa and describes the lives of an ancient matriarchal tribe of hunters and planters. The women look after the camp and the crops and brew beer, while the men are mostly out hunting. When one of the hunters, who suffers from a weak ankle that goes “clonk” at a decisive moment during the hunt, creeps back to the camp and sleeps with Palm Woman, the leader of that society, the complementary nature of women and men becomes evident.

The last novella in the volume, “Envoy Extraordinary,” describes events in Capri during the third century A.D. as the Roman emperor encounters the inventor Phanocles, who wants to convince the leader to adopt three of his best inventions: a steam barge, gunpowder, and the printing press. While the emperor enjoys the culinary results of a variation of the first invention, a pressure steam cooker, the others result in revolt among the slaves (who are worried that steam will make them redundant) and by the military leader Posthumus, who attempts to usurp the throne because he perceives the steamship as a military threat. While the coup fails, the steam barge is destroyed, and the emperor makes Phanocles an “envoy extraordinary” and sends him with the gunpowder and the printing press to China. Like the other two narratives, “Envoy Extraordinary” deals with a crucial moment in history that is characterized by a shift in consciousness. While Phanocles clings to the idealistic beliefs that his inventions will make the world a better place, the cost of progress is recognized by the emperor: “There will always be slaves though the name may change. What is slavery but the domination of the weak by the strong? How can you make them equal? Or are you fool enough to think that men are born equal?”

The late 1960s and the early 1970s were an arid period in Golding’s writing career; apart from writer’s block, he suffered from depression and struggled with alcohol. While wrestling with these difficulties he wrote two novels: Darkness Visible (1979), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Rites of Passage (1980), which was declared winner of the Booker Prize. In the period leading up to the genesis of these narratives the novelist had terrible dreams that he noted in his diary, and out of these nightmares the hellish visions of Darkness Visible arose. The opening scene, which Monteith (in the BBC documentary) called “the most powerful piece of prose he ever wrote,” describes how a severely burned child, later named Matty (Matthew) Septimus Windrove, miraculously appears in the aftermath of an air raid on London in World War II. The fire, compared to a burning bush and by implication to the scene in Moses, establishes a context of biblical allusions. Saved by a group of firemen, tended by doctors and nurses, and named by an official, Matty grows up in a school for orphans. There a pedophile teacher, Sebastian Pedigree, is assigned by the headmaster to give private lessons to Matty rather than to his current favorite, Henderson, in order to assuage any suspicion of his particular inclinations. When Henderson, feeling thwarted, commits suicide and Pedigree is fired, Matty becomes a tragic hero since he believes himself guilty of having caused both Henderson’s death and Pedigree’s dismissal, although he is, in fact, also a victim. He is sent off to work in an ironmonger’s shop and later migrates to Australia, where he has several odd jobs and eventually wanders through the outback. Hideously scarred by the fire, Matty is on a quest for his identity and is haunted by questions about his existence and purpose. When he returns to Britain, to the Celtic influences of Golding’s native Cornwall, he finds himself addressed by spirits who give him a task that he does not understand but unquestioningly accepts: he goes back to Greenfield, near London, and obtains employment as an odd-job man at Wandicott, a boarding school for boys from the ruling classes.

The second part of the novel introduces the twins Sophy and Toni Stanhope. Sophy is characterized by a disturbing scene in which she, as a child, kills a dabchick quite brutally with a stone, simply because she can. Sophy’s powerful attraction to evil forces is strongly reminiscent of Roger in Lord of the Flies, who first playfully flicks stones at one of the smaller boys, Henry, and later is the one to murder Piggy. Sophy and her twin sister are abandoned by their father after his wife has run off with another man. While Sophy discovers her ability to manipulate others, especially men–except for the orgasms, sex does not mean much to her–Toni leaves for Afghanistan and learns about postcolonial politics and becomes a terrorist. Sophy allies herself with Gerry, a former officer in the army, and his friend, Bill, a private who enjoys killing (a soulmate for Sophy, who relishes similar “pleasures”). Gerry and Bill are petty criminals who are led by Sophy into contemplating more daring schemes: they plan a raid on Wandicott in order to kidnap an Arabian prince and demand a huge ransom.

The third part focuses mostly on two witnesses in Greenfield, Edwin Bell and Sim Goodchild, the owner of a bookshop. They are selected by Matty to help him in his task of protecting the Arabian prince, who, according to his spiritual advisers, is destined to play a significant role in the future. Eventually, the raid takes place and fails: although Matty has been knocked down, he succeeds in manipulating the diversionary fire in such a fashion that Bill drops the Saudi prince. Matty, however, is killed in the fire that the raiders have started. Thus, Matty, who was the innocent cause of the death of a boy at the beginning, now dies saving another boy.

The title, Darkness Visible, is an allusion to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), specifically to the moment when Lucifer surveys his new abode and notices the horrible lightless dungeon, where, by means of “darkness visible,” he perceives nothing but “sights of woe.” Matty’s name clearly hints at Matthew 7:1, which begins with the words “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Again, the thematic focus is on the human capacity for good and evil, but matters are complicated by Matty’s unattractive appearance and his fanatic and unquestioning faith, which is reminiscent of earlier characters in Golding’s fiction, such as Jocelin in The Spire. Medcalf perhaps characterizes the two antagonists in Darkness Visible best when writing of Sophy that “in her heart she is diabolically mad where Matty is, perhaps, angelically sane.” Henri Petter points out that Matty and Sophy are contrastive figures: one mutilated, the other stunningly attractive; one of limited intelligence, the other a prodigy. According to Petter, Matty tries to find his role and considers the afterlife, while Sophy’s hubris consists in her belief that she can master fate, and she is utterly focused on the here and now. There are, however, some similarities between them: he is an orphan, and she a semi-orphan; he renounces love, while she loses her father’s love.

Most critics were surprised at the comparatively lighthearted tone of Rites of Passage, which followed Darkness Visible. However, the narrative is not without its grave moments, since it relates the fate of a clergyman who shames himself in public and consequently wills himself to die. The story is told by Edmund Talbot, a young man of neoclassical tastes, who is extremely conceited and destined to become a member of the governor’s entourage in New South Wales. He travels aboard an unnamed old ship of the line–her name is presumably Britannia–to the Antipodes, and in the course of the passage, he undergoes several rites that nudge him toward maturity. The ship features a microcosm of British society: apart from the tyrannical captain, Anderson, who tolerates Talbot because he writes a journal for his godfather, who is a rich and influential politician, the vessel carries several emigrants of various classes as well as the officers and crew.

When the ship crosses the equator, the clergyman, Robert James Colley, is selected as a victim for the seamen’s entertainment, during which he is baptized in a container of foul fluids, including urine. Indignant at what he perceives as an attack on his office, Colley in vain asks for the support of the captain. Eventually, he ventures to the forecastle to berate the seamen, but instead he gets drunk and ends up performing fellatio on a young sailor he particularly admires and submitting to sodomy. This shaming experience eventually results in his death. In contrast to Talbot, Colley is a romantic, and his fervor is not just for God but also for nature; the admiration of nature and natural phenomena is effusively expressed in letters addressed to his sister, which Talbot discovers after the clergyman’s death.

Summers, the ship’s first lieutenant, makes Talbot recognize the unfavorable role he has played in the Colley affair (Talbot’s defiance of Anderson’s authority had provoked Colley to act in a similar fashion, but since Colley did not have Talbot’s powerful connections to protect him, the captain retaliated harshly). When the young man finds the clergyman’s letters, he realizes how much he is to blame for his hauteur and pomposity and for relying on his privileges, and he understands how events look completely different from another point of view. One of the modern themes of Rites of Passage is Golding’s insistence on proving the unreliability of narrative. Luke Strongman interprets the novel as the author’s attempt at “metafictional play.”

In his foreword for To the Ends of the Earth (1991), which collects Rites of Passage and its two sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), Golding asserts that apart from the language of the seamen and the sea, it is class or “rank” that pervades his book: “This is a difficult subject since we British are still so dunked from childhood in that hierarchy we become unaware of it.” As Paul Crawford points out, by juxtaposing “issues of textuality and constructedness with ‘constructions’ of class,” Golding makes the reader aware of class as a construct by means of language and communication.

In 1982 the author published A Moving Target, a collection of essays, reviews, and travel accounts. The title essay, his “Address to Les Anglicistes” at a congress in Rouen in 1976, illustrates some of Golding’s notions concerning the state and the future of the novel. In an obvious admonition to this audience of academics and professional critics, the author censures the tendency of critics to entomb living writers in theoretical pigeonholes, which do not account for the writer’s potential for development. He clearly refers to an aspect discerned by Tiger, namely that “the assessment must be balanced against the fact that the whole creative body of work shifts with the publication of each new novel.” Advising a student looking for a subject for her thesis, the novelist agrees with her professor that preferably she ought to focus on a dead author: “She could guarantee filling him with a shower of critical small-shot at any time she wanted. But as for me, I am a moving target.” It is no coincidence that the ending of his next novel, The Paper Men (1984), features an author being shot at his desk like a sitting duck.

In 1983 Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, an announcement that caused some controversy. The London newspapers of 7 October 1983 carried headlines such as “Row over Golding’s Nobel Prize” (Times) or “Uproar as Golding Takes Nobel Prize” (Daily Telegraph). The Academy secretary, Lars Gyllensten, had originally informed reporters that the choice of Golding was the result of a smooth and almost unanimous selection process. Julian Isherwood, relying on sources from within the Nobel committee, noted in the Daily Telegraph (7 October 1983) that two voting sessions had been required to give Golding the award–the French author Claude Simon (who eventually won the prize in 1985) coming in a close second. In any case, Gyllensten’s announcement was contested by the Swedish poet Artur Lundkvist, a fierce opponent of an award to Golding, who claimed in a Guardian article by Paul Keel and W. L. Webb (7 October 1983) that the second vote took place in his absence and that the decision of the committee amounted to a coup against him. Furthermore, as Michael Specter records, Lundkvist dismissed Golding as “a little English phenomenon of no special interest.” A further dissenting voice belonged to Time critic Paul Gray, who agreed with Lundkvist that Golding “was decent but hardly in the Nobel Prize class.” According to Gray, Golding “should have been spared both the Nobel Prize and the controversy surrounding its unexpected arrival.”

Despite this harsh criticism, the majority of the commentators applauded the Swedish Academy’s decision. In an article in Newsweek (17 October 1983), Peter S. Prescott even showed surprise at the “rift in the secrecy that traditionally attends the Academy’s proceedings” because he qualified Golding’s selection as sensible. Fellow writers also reacted in a positive fashion: as Keel and Webb reported, Doris Lessing stated that she was “absolutely delighted” with the decision, while John Fowles, best known for his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), expressed his conviction that Golding was “the best British novelist of his generation.”

In their laudation the Nobel Foundation commended Golding on his status of being “a writer for the learned and the unlearned” and compared him to Jonathan Swift and Herman Melville. The novelist was characterized as “a writer of myth,” and there was praise for his “novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today.”

The author’s own reactions at being awarded the prize are revealed in the entry in his diary for 6 October 1983, reproduced on his website (<http://www.william-golding.co.uk/p_honours.html>). Apparently, he had received a phone call at ten o’clock in the morning by a reporter called Ingmar from Stockholm–the novelist did not catch the surname–who insinuated that the odds were at fifty percent that Golding would be awarded the Nobel Prize. Golding was indignant with the journalist for trying to stir up excitement and probably just striving for the scoop of being the first to get his reaction. Golding deliberately attempted to dismiss the thought and to remain calm. However, in the early afternoon it was official, and he began to experience the harassment of journalists in earnest. In order to absorb the news, he went horseback riding. His official reaction was, on the one hand, patriotic, since in the Guardian (7 October 1983) he expressed his delight “not just for myself but because the prize has been won after 30 years by an Englishman.” On the other hand, the novelist declared in the Times (7 October 1983) that the award was for most writers “a kind of supposing, a kind of daydream.” He also admitted to feeling “stunned, overwhelmed, incredulous,” but added that these adjectives could not really describe his true state.

In December 1983 the Goldings traveled to Stockholm for the award ceremony. Monteith, who had first printed Lord of the Flies, accompanied the couple. In “Strangers from Within,” Monteith relates what passed between the novelist and the king of Sweden at the great ball on the evening of the presentation: Carl XVI Gustaf informed Golding that it was “a great pleasure to meet” him, since the king had “had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” In his Nobel lecture, Golding described how he had once thoughtlessly accepted the label of “pessimist” and declared that he was, in fact, “a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist.” He thus addressed an issue regularly debated in books and articles about him. It is interesting to note that in this respect the author already contradicts himself in his early essays: the regularly quoted statement of his pessimistic outlook can be found in his essay on education, “On the Crest of the Wave,” included in The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. In the same volume, namely in “Fable,” the author states quite clearly that he is a European “and an optimist.” Later in his career, in the foreword for To the Ends of the Earth, he even expressed strong disagreement with the common opinion that diagnosed him as pessimist. Glendinning confirmed this assessment in her Observer article, writing that Golding “was more hopeful about man’s condition than his books might suggest.”

A further point that the author referred to in his address at the Nobel award ceremony was the fact that the English language was possibly suffering “from too wide a use rather than too narrow a one.” Stressing the significance of stories, Golding also expressed his concern with the state of the planet and raised the question of environmental issues. He then focused on the writer’s craft, saying that words “may through the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.” Ending on a wry note, he related how a police officer had explained to him how to pay a parking ticket, only to add as an afterthought: “And may we congratulate you on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

The honor brought certain side effects with it, as Judy Carver, Golding’s daughter, recalls in a 2004 essay about her parents’ lives: “My father became a quarry–for journalists, zealous readers, academics,” even sightseers. Golding consequently left the proximity of London in 1985 and moved to an elegant Georgian house near Truro in Cornwall. Golding, who remarked in the 1986 interview with Carey that there “is nothing to a writer but his books,” resented the intrusions into his private life, and his apparently vitriolic reaction to literary paparazzi is evident in his first post-Nobel novel, The Paper Men.

Glendinning, in her Observer article, called The Paper Men Golding’s “tragicomic cautionary tale for all literary biographers.” In fact, The Paper Men not only comments on certain vulture-like excesses observable in some academics when focusing on the papers of a specific author but also presents a deeply disturbing portrait of a writer. Ultimately, the novel unveils the symbiotic relationship between author and critic and, as McCarron explains, addresses the issue raised by Roland Barthes and later hotly debated in academic circles, namely, the literary theory that postulates “the death of the author.”

The novel begins on a farcical note when Wilf Barclay, a famous English novelist, shoots Rick L. Tucker, a pertinacious American literary biographer, with an air gun because he mistakes him for a badger plundering the rubbish bins. In reality, Tucker is researching scraps for his biography, and since he discovers a reference to a former lover, his research causes the breakup of Barclay’s frail marriage. The writer attempts to escape Tucker’s clutches and begins to travel on the highways and byways of Europe, his mind fogged by enormous quantities of alcohol. When Tucker appears to save Barclay’s life in a mountaineering accident in Switzerland, the writer feels indebted but nevertheless takes to the road again. A coincidental meeting at a conference gives Golding the opportunity to vent his feelings about academic proceedings: “A sleepy bunch of professors, lecturers, postgraduate students were all trying their hardest to stay awake and Professor Tucker was making it difficult for them.”

As the narrative progresses, it becomes evident that Barclay and Tucker are the paper men of the title, both in the metonymic sense since they “live off and by paper” and “in the metaphorical sense of being two-dimensional, incomplete human beings,” as Lodge observes in “Life Between Covers” (1984) and as Barclay himself recognizes: “Neither of us, critic and author, we knew nothing about people or not enough.” Both are in a spiritual crisis, willing to sacrifice everything to their success, either as author or critic. Barclay baits, tortures, and humiliates Tucker because, although he is reluctant to have his biography written, worried about what the critic might detect, he also feels flattered that he should be subject to such interest. Their mutual dependence ultimately leads to the death of the author at the hands of the critic.

Those readers who understand The Paper Men simply as a determined attack on academic literary criticism are misled: the novelist was clearly aware of his public role. As he had already stated in “Fable,” he no longer believed “that the author has a sort of patria potestas over his brainchildren. Once they are printed they have reached their majority and the author has no more authority over them, knows no more about them, perhaps knows less about them than the critic who comes fresh to them, and sees them not as the author hoped they would be, but as what they are.”

In the course of his career the novelist was awarded many honorary doctorates by universities; his country also recognized his stature and, having been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1966, Golding was knighted by the queen in 1988. The year before, he had published Close Quarters, a sequel to Rites of Passage, and in 1989 Fire Down Below completed the sea trilogy. Two years later, in a rare case of editing his work, Golding revised the three books and Faber and Faber released them in a single volume titled To the Ends of the Earth. In his foreword to the trilogy Golding admits that he “did not foresee volumes two and three” when he wrote Rites of Passage.

Close Quarters resumes the narrative of Edmund Talbot. When the Britannia loses her topmasts and damages her foremast as a result of a negligent omission by Lieutenant Deverel, the frigate Alcyone can catch up with her. Apart from the news about the end of the war with France, she carries two ladies, the captain’s wife and a dependent relative. Talbot, who has severely injured his head in the excitement preceding the arrival of the possible enemy ship, instantly falls in love with the second lady, Miss Chumley. To celebrate the news that Napoleon Bonaparte has been vanquished (he is to become king of Elba) and the announcement of peace, a ball and other festivities take place on the high seas. A surprise member of the Alcyone crew is Talbot’s steward, Wheeler, who mysteriously disappeared from the ship in Rites of Passage. He fell into the sea–actually, he was most likely pushed, since he had informed on sailor Billy Rogers’s involvement in the abusing of Colley–and had been picked up by the frigate when drifting in the Atlantic. As a result of Talbot’s infatuation with Miss Chumley, who sails off to India on the Alcyone, the next phase in his education begins.

The Britannia has been severely slowed down by a carpet of plants that settled on the ship in the doldrums, and Lieutenant Benét–who swapped places with Deverel–devises a method to rid the hull of these obstacles. When the operation appears to remove part of the keel and threatens crew and passengers with drowning, Wheeler, who cannot bear the idea of another turn in the ocean, shoots himself in Talbot’s cabin.

While Talbot stands “halfway between the classic and the romantic” in Rites of Passage, as Golding himself asserted in his foreword to the collected edition of his sea trilogy, there are many signals in Close Quarters that also point at the watershed between the waning of the Romantic and the arrival of the Victorian era. The description of the Alcyone being dragged out of Plymouth Sound by a steam tug carries distinct echoes of William Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1838)–which portrays an old ship of the line being towed by steam tug against a colorful sunset–and thus of the ascendancy of steam and steel and concurrently the decline of sail and wood. The narrative is also characterized by several metafictional instances: unlike in Rites of Passage, where Talbot had a task, namely, to report events to his godfather, he now is faced with writing for himself–a project that daunts him and makes him frequently compare his meager talents in this respect with the effusive style of Colley’s letters. In his “postscriptum” Talbot even proclaims the eventual title for the sea trilogy, which he envisages with “gusto” in “three splendid volumes” as “Talbot’s Voyage or The Ends of the Earth!”

With Fire Down Below, Golding concludes Talbot’s voyage to Sydney Cove. The microcosm of the ship is still governed by changes among the relationships between the different individuals. Talbot is steadfast in his friendship to Lieutenant Summers but also befriends fellow passengers the Prettimans (a revolutionary philosopher and a governess who were married aboard the ship) and is tempted but ultimately not convinced by their visions of socialist utopias. His education, already furthered by his coup de foudre (intense love at first sight) in Close Quarters, progresses as a result of the discussions with the Prettimans. Fire Down Below also reveals one of the purposes of Talbot’s journey, namely to spy on Aloysius Prettiman and to keep an eye on the printing press, which the latter transports in the hull to the colonies.

The foremast of the ship is mended by means of an ingenious device proposed by Lieutenant Benét–a process involving fire that ultimately spells doom for the Britannia. However, the fixing of the mast allows the vessel to survive in one of the central scenes of the narrative, namely, an enormous storm that threatens the crew and the passengers and bears a strong resemblance to other “literary” storms such as in Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) and Typhoon (1903), and Richard Hughes’s In Hazard (1938). The repaired mast also allows the ship to escape the ice cliffs of Antarctica, on which the voyage almost comes to an end.

When Talbot arrives in Sydney, he receives the news that his godfather has died and his prospects are shattered; but his misfortune is tempered when he later learns that he has been elected to Parliament. A further disaster is the fire on the Britannia that destroys the ship and kills Lieutenant Summers. The happy end is the result of the arrival of Miss Chumley, who accepts Talbot’s suit. Nevertheless, the novel ends on a melancholy note: although Talbot has risen to power in British government and reveals himself to be an utter colonialist–a prime example is his outrage at an Aborigine gazing at Sydney’s harbor “as if he owned the place!”–there is an awareness of the price he had to pay by not giving in to his idealistic notions and by not following Prettiman, whose bones–as Talbot’s journal implies–probably bleach somewhere in the Australian outback.

The two sequels suffer from those structural defects that frequently arise when a narrative is continued beyond its original end. Thus, Boyd is accurate in his assessment of Close Quarters and Fire Down Below as “soap-operatic,” even if it is soap opera of a high standard. He discerns the “lack of allegorical or symbolical density” that marked Rites of Passage. The brief excerpt from a letter by a friend of Talbot inserted in Fire Down Below-its author is an eminent geographer who has not traveled much himself and who disputes the existence of Antarctica–is too slight to orchestrate a similar impact as Colley’s letters in the first volume of the trilogy and to succeed in introducing a different point of view. As if to confirm the potential for soap opera, To the Ends of the Earth was filmed for television and broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC 2) on 6, 13, and 20 July 2005.

When Golding died in his Cornwall home on 19 June 1993, he was in the process of revising another completed novel, The Double Tongue–the title was the one that the novelist had written on the manuscript. The book, posthumously published by Faber and Faber in 1995, resumes the novelist’s fascination with the Greeks. Set in Delphi in the first century B.C., it traces the careers of Arieka, the Pythia at the famous oracle of Delphi (she is the first-person narrator of events), and of her mentor, Ionides Peisistrades, the homosexual priest of Apollo. The notion of one age waning–here, the Greek–and another one ascending, namely, the Roman Empire, is one of the author’s favorite topics and is once again employed to describe the human condition. Despite “its unpolished state,” Medcalf writes, “The Double Tongue is as intransigent, as fresh as any of Golding’s greatest novels.”

The novelist’s death was widely regretted: Glendinning, for instance, in her Observer article, described the author as the “Grand Old Man” of the British literary scene. She also noted that Golding “believed in a god, but rejected organised religion.” The lack of an official biography–Carey has been commissioned to write it–makes it difficult to assess the accuracy of such statements. It appears, however, that the novelist, raised as an atheist and set for a career as a scientist, was brought to a halt by some sort of spiritual crisis, and, as Medcalf writes, “Golding’s sense of his own creativity was deeply bound up with his belief in God.”

In an interview included in the 1996 BBC documentary, William Golding declared that he was first and foremost a storyteller: “What matters to me is that there should be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” This approach is too modest for an author who could be characterized in the words that Talbot uses for Prettiman in Fire Down Below: “his mind ranged vastly through the universe of space and time as it did through the other universe of books!”

Interviews

Victoria Glendinning, “William Golding: The Old Man and the Sea,” Sunday Times, 19 October 1980: 39;

John Carey, “William Golding Talks to John Carey,” in William Golding. The Man and His Books: A Tribute on His 75th Birthday, edited by Carey (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp. 171–189;

Mary Lynn Scott, “Universal Pessimist, Cosmic Optimist: William Golding,” Aurora Online, <http://aurora.icaap.org/archive/golding.html>.

Bibliography

R. A. Gekoski and P. A. Grogan, William Golding: A Bibliography 1934–1993 (London: André Deutsch, 1994).

References

Anonymous, “Golding: Moralist Exploring Evil Through Parable,” Times, 7 October 1983: 3;

Anonymous, “Row Over Golding’s Nobel Prize,” Times, 7 October 1983: 1;

S. J. Boyd, The Novels of William Golding, revised edition (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990);

Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, “1954: Lord of the Flies,” in The Modern Library: The Two Hundred Best Novels in English Since 1950 (London: Picador, 1999), p. 66;

John Carey, “The Man Who Died of Shame,” Sunday Times, 19 October 1980: 42;

Judy Carver, “Harbour and Voyage: The Marriage of Ann and Bill Golding,” in Living With a Writer, edited by Dale Salwak (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 44–55;

Paul Crawford, Politics and History in William Golding: The World Turned Upside Down (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002);

L. L. Dickson, The Modern Allegories of William Golding (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1990);

John Fowles, “Golding and ‘Golding,’” in William Golding. The Man and His Books: A Tribute on His 75th Birthday, edited by John Carey (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp. 146–156;

Lawrence S. Friedman, William Golding (New York: Continuum, 1993);

James Gindin, William Golding (London: Macmillan, 1988);

Victoria Glendinning, “Golding’s Voyage Ends Without Landfall,” Observer, 20June 1993;

Paul Gray, “A Prize as Good as Golding,” Time (17 October 1983): 97;

Great Writers of the Twentieth Century: William Golding, BBC, 1996;

David Holloway, “Multi-layered Work of Golding is an Academic’s Dream,” Daily Telegraph, 7 October 1983: 11;

Philip Howard, “Fiction Prize for William Golding,” Times, 22 October 1980: 1;

Julian Isherwood, “Uproar as Golding Takes Nobel Prize,” Daily Telegraph, 7 October 1983: 1;

Paul Keel and W. L. Webb, “Patriotic Golding Claims Nobel Prize for England,” Guardian, 7 October 1983:1;

Frank Kermode, “On William Golding” [1962], in The English Novel: Developments in Criticism since Henry James, edited by Stephen Hazell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 151–162;

Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor, eds., William Golding: A Critical Study of the Novels, third revised edition (London: Faber & Faber, 2002);

David Lodge, “Life Between Covers” [1984], in his Write On: Occasional Essays 1965–1985 (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 174–179;

Kevin McCarron, The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding’s Later Fiction (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995);

McCarron, William Golding (Plymouth: Northcote, 1994);

Stephen Medcalf, “Island Skies–William Golding Reappraised,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 September 2005:12–13;

Charles Monteith, “Strangers from Within,” in William Golding. The Man and His Books: A Tribute on His 75th Birthday, edited by John Carey (London: Faber & Faber, 1986);

Henri Petter, “Golding’s Darkness Visible,” in Modes of Interpretation: Essays Presented to Ernst Leisi, edited by Richard J. Watts and Urs Weidmann (Tübingen: Narr, 1984), pp. 159–166;

Peter S. Prescott and Edward Behr, “A Nobel Prize for Britain,” Newsweek (17 October 1983): 97;

Michael Specter, “Letter from Stockholm: The Nobel Syndrome,” New Yorker, 5 October 1998 <http://www.michaelspecter.com/ny/1998/1998_10_05_nobel.html>;

Robin Stringer, “Golding Wins £10,000 Booker Prize,” Daily Telegraph, 22 October 1980: 17;

Peter O. Stummer, “Man’s Beastliness to Man: The Novels of William Golding,” in Essays on the Contemporary British Novel, edited by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim (Munich: Max Hueber, 1986), pp. 79–100;

Luke Strongman, The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002);

V. V. Subbarao, William Golding: A Study (London: Oriental University Press, 1987);

Virginia Tiger, “William Golding’s ‘Wooden World’: Religious Rites in Rites of Passage,” in Critical Essays on William Golding, edited by James R. Baker (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), pp. 135–149;

W. L. Webb, “Lord of the Prize,” Guardian, 7 October 1983: 12.

Papers

Most of William Golding’s papers are still in the possession of his family. His daughter, Judy Carver, is editing his journals and letters for future publication.