Golding William - William Golding: the man who wrote Lord of the flies: a life

The story this book tells has not been told before. William Golding was a shy, private man, scornful of publicity, and of those who sought it, and strongly averse to the idea of a biography being written in his lifetime. None was, and the sources on which this first biography draws have remained largely unread and untouched since his death.

The Golding archive, which is still in the keeping of his family, and has not previously been made accessible to anyone outside it, is remarkably and sometimes bewilderingly rich. It far exceeds in bulk all his published works, and it comprises unpublished novels, both complete and fragmentary, early drafts of published novels, numerous projects and plans, two autobiographical works, one of them concentrating on his relationships with women, and a 5,000-page journal which he kept every day for twenty-two years.

Besides being an intimate account of his private life, and a treasure-house of memories of his childhood and youth, the journal is a behindthe-scenes revelation of the writers craft, reporting each day on the progress of whatever novel he is at work on, tracing its origins, trying out alternative plot-lines, and criticizing, often violently, what he has written so far. Further, he began the journal as a dream diary, and though his waking life gradually came to dominate, he continued to record dreams almost to the end, together with his interpretations and identification of the incidents they recalled. As an authors systematic exploration of his unconscious and examination of his conscious life, Goldings journal is, I think, unique.

My other main source is the correspondence between Golding and his editor at Faber and Faber, Charles Monteith. It was Monteith who rescued Golding from obscurity. When they first met, Golding was a provincial schoolmaster, forty-two years old, who had written several novels, and sent them to every publisher he could think of, without success. The most recent of the rejects had come into Monteiths hands, and he worked with Golding to make it publishable, though no one else, either at Faber and Faber or elsewhere, thought that it was. It became a modern classic, Lord of the Flies, which has sold, to date, twenty million copies in the UK alone, and has been translated into over thirty languages.

Monteith remained Goldings editor, friend, consultant and champion for forty years. Together they developed a spectacularly successful working relationship, the record of which is preserved in hundreds of letters in the Faber and Faber archive. These have remained uninspected until now, and they provide an account of Goldings development as a writer, his plans, ambitions and fears, his thoughts about his written and unwritten books, his struggles with indecision and despair, and his anxieties as a husband and father and how they affected his work.

A minor problem in quoting from Goldings manuscripts is his spelling, which was sometimes erratic. It might seem better to correct it, or to draw attention to misspellings so that they are not taken for misprints. However, he anticipated both these alternatives with disfavour. Its a moody-making thought, he remarked in his journal on 1 March 1982, that some bugger will either silently (unobtrusively) correct my spelling, or even worse, interrupt the text with brackets and sic in italics. But my bad grammar and bad spelling was me. Out of respect for his disquiet I have left any misspellings uncorrected and unsignalled.