William Golding

The winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in literature, William Golding (1911-1993)is among the most popular and influential British authors to have emerged after World War II.

Golding's reputation rests primarily upon his acclaimed first novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which he described as "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." A moral allegory as well as an adventure tale in the tradition of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), Lord of the Flies focuses upon a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island. After having organized themselves upon democratic principles, their society degenerates into primeval barbarism. While often the subject of diverse psychological, sociological, and religious interpretations, Lord of the Flies is consistently regarded as an incisive and disturbing portrayal of the fragility of civilization.

Golding was born in St. Columb Minor in Cornwall, England. He enrolled in Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1930, initially intending to obtain a degree in the sciences. After several years of study, however, he decided to devote himself to the study of English literature. He published a volume of poetry, Poems, in 1934 to scant critical notice; he himself later repudiated the work. Receiving a degree in English in 1935, he worked in various theaters in London, and in 1939 he moved to Salisbury, where he was employed as a schoolteacher. He served five years in the Royal Navy during World War II, an experience that likely helped shape his interest in the theme of barbarism and evil within humanity. Following the war Golding continued to teach and to write fiction. In 1954, his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published to much critical acclaim in England. He continued to write novels, as well as essays, lectures, and novellas, throughout the next three decades. Most of these works, however, were overshadowed by the popular and critical success of Lord of the Flies.

Golding's Lord of the Flies presents a central theme of his oeuvre: the conflict between the forces of light and dark within the human soul. Although the novel did not gain popularity in the United States until several years after its original publication, it has now become a modern classic, studied in most high schools and colleges. Set sometime in the near future, Lord of the Flies is about a group of schoolboys abandoned on a desert island during a global war. They attempt to establish a government among themselves, but without the restraints of civilization they quickly revert to savagery. Similar in background and characters to Ballantyne's The Coral Island,Lord of the Flies totally reverses Ballantyne's concept of the purity and innocence of youth and humanity's ability to remain civilized under the worst conditions.

While none of Golding's subsequent works achieved the critical success of Lord of the Flies, he continued to produce novels that elicit widespread critical interpretation. Within the thematic context of exploring the depths of human depravity, the settings of Golding's works range from the prehistoric age, as in The Inheritors, (1955), to the Middle Ages, as in The Spire (1964), to contemporary English society. This wide variety of settings, tones, and structures presents dilemmas to critics attempting to categorize them. Nevertheless, certain stylistic devices are characteristic of his work. One of these, the use of a sudden shift of perspective, has been so dramatically employed by Golding that it both enchants and infuriates critics and readers alike. For example, Pincher Martin (1956) is the story of Christopher Martin, a naval officer who is stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean after his ship has been torpedoed. The entire book relates Martin's struggles to remain alive against all odds. The reader learns in the last few pages that Martin's death occurred on the second page--a fact that transforms the novel from a struggle for earthly survival into a struggle for eternal salvation.

Golding's novels are often termed fables or myths. They are laden with symbols (usually of a spiritual or religious nature) so imbued with meaning that they can be interpreted on many different levels. The Spire, for example, is perhaps his most polished allegorical novel, equating the erecting of a cathedral spire with the protagonist's conflict between his religious faith and the temptations to which he is exposed. Darkness Visible (1979) continues to illuminate the universal confrontation of Good and Evil; Golding was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for this novel in 1980. Throughout the 1980s Golding's novels, essays, and the travel journal An Egyptian Journal (1985) have received general praise from commentators. Lord of the Flies, however, remains central to Golding's popularity and his international reputation as a major contemporary author.

William Golding has been described as pessimistic, mythical, spiritual--an allegorist who uses his novels as a canvas to paint portraits of man's constant struggle between his civilized self and his hidden, darker nature. With the appearance of Lord of the Flies, Golding's first published novel, the author began his career as both a campus cult favorite and one of the late twentieth-century's most distinctive--and debated--literary talents. Golding's appeal is summarized by the Nobel Prize committee, who issued this statement when awarding the author their literature prize in 1983: "[His] books are very entertaining and exciting. They can be read with pleasure and profit without the need to make much effort with learning or acumen. But they have also aroused an unusually great interest in professional literary critics [who find] deep strata of ambiguity and complication in Golding's work, ... in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow."

Golding was born in England's west country in 1911. His father, Alex, was a follower in the family tradition of schoolmasters; his mother, Mildred, was a suffragette. The family home in Marlborough is characterized by Stephen Medcalf in William Golding as "darkness and terror made objective in the flint-walled cellars of their fourteenth-century house ... and in the graveyard by which it stood." By the time Golding was seven years old, Medcalf continues, "he had begun to connect the darkness ... with the ancient Egyptians. From them he learnt, or on them he projected, mystery and symbolism, a habit of mingling life and death, and an attitude of mind sceptical of the scientific method that descends from the Greeks."

When he was twelve, Golding "tried his hand at writing a novel," reports Bernard Oldsey in his Dictionary of Literary Biography article. "It was to be in twelve volumes and, unlike the kinds of works he had been reading [adventure stories of the Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne ilk], was to incorporate a history of the trade-union movement. He never forgot the opening sentence of this magnificent opus: `I was born in the Duchy of Cornwall on the eleventh of October, 1792, of rich but honest parents.' That sentence set a standard he could not maintain, he playfully admitted, and nothing much came of the cycle."

Despite this setback the young man remained an enthusiastic writer and, on entering Brasenose College of Oxford University, abandoned his plans to study science, preferring to read English literature. At twenty-two, a year before taking his B.A. in English, Golding saw his first literary work published--a poetry collection simply titled Poems. In hindsight, the author called the pieces "poor, thin things," according to Medcalf. But, in fact, Medcalf remarks, "They are not bad. They deal with emotions--as they come out in the poems, rather easy emotions--of loss and grief, reflected in nature and the seasons."

After graduating from Oxford, Golding perpetuated family tradition by becoming a schoolmaster in Salisbury, Wiltshire. His teaching career was interrupted in 1940, however, when World War II found "Schoolie," as he was called, serving five years in the Royal Navy. Lieutenant Golding saw active duty in the North Atlantic, commanding a rocket launching craft. "What did I do?," he responds in Oldsey's article about his wartime experiences. "I survived." Present at the sinking of the Bismarck, and participating in the D-Day invasion, Golding later told Joseph Wershba of the New York Post: "World War Two was the turning point for me. I began to see what people were capable of doing."

On returning to his post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1945, Golding, who had enhanced his knowledge of Greek history and mythology by reading while at sea, attempted to further his writing career. He produced three novel manuscripts that remained unpublished. "All that [the author] has divulged about these [works] is that they were attempts to please publishers and that eventually they convinced him that he should write something to please himself," notes Oldsey. That ambition was realized in 1954, when Golding created Lord of the Flies.

The novel which established Golding's reputation, Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers before Faber & Faber accepted the forty-three-year-old schoolmaster's book. While the story has been compared to such previous works as Robinson Crusoe and High Wind in Jamaica, Golding's novel is actually the author's "answer" to nineteenth-century writer R. M. Ballantyne's children's classic The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean. These two books share the same basic plot line and even some of the same character names (two of the lead characters are named Ralph and Jack in both books). The similarity, however, ends there. Ballantyne's story, about a trio of boys stranded on an otherwise uninhabited island, shows how, by pluck and resourcefulness, the young castaways survive with their morals strengthened and their wits sharpened. Lord of the Flies, on the other hand, is "an allegory on human society today, the novel's primary implication being that what we have come to call civilization is, at best, not more than skin-deep," as James Stern explains in a New York Times Book Review article.

Initially, the tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during their escape from atomic war received mixed reviews and sold only modestly in its hardcover edition. But when the paperback edition was published in 1959, thus making the book more accessible to students, the novel began to sell briskly. Teachers, aware of the student interest and impressed by the strong theme and stark symbolism of the work, assigned Lord of the Flies to their literature classes. And as the novel's reputation grew, critics reacted by drawing scholarly theses out of what was previously dismissed as just another adventure story.

Golding provides in Time a simple exegis of his book. "The theme," he says, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." Indeed, the book begins with a company of highly-bred young men ("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," one of them states) and in just a few weeks strips them of nearly every aspect of "civilization," revealing what Golding describes as man's "true" nature underneath. In Lord of the Flies,religion becomes pagan ritual--the boys worship an unknowable, pervading power that they call The Beast; even a group of choirboys becomes a chanting warrior troupe. Democratic society crumbles under barbarism. "Like any orthodox moralist Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon as we permit him to," John Peter points out in Kenyon Review. "One sees what Golding is doing," says Walter Allen in his book The Modern Novel. "He is showing us stripped man, man naked of all the sanctions of custom and civilization, man as he is alone and in his essence, or at any rate, as he can be conceived to be in such a condition."

In his study The Tragic Past, David Anderson, like many critics, sees Biblical implications in Golding's novel. "Lord of the Flies," writes Anderson, "is a complex version of the story of Cain--the man whose smoke-signal failed and who murdered his brother. Above all, it is a refutation of optimistic theologies which believed that God had created a world in which man's moral development had advanced pari passu with his biological evolution and would continue so to advance until the all-justifying End was reached. What we have in [the book] is not moral achievement but moral regression. And there is no all-justifying End: the rescue-party which takes the boys off their island comes from a world in which regression has occurred on a gigantic scale--the scale of atomic war. The human plight is presented in terms which are unqualified and unrelieved. Cain is not merely our remote ancestor: he is contemporary man, and his murderous impulses are equipped with unlimited destructive power."

The work has also been called Golding's response to the popular artistic notion of the 1950s, that youth was a basically innocent collective, victims of adult society (as in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, a novel that rivals Lord of the Flies in student popularity). In 1960, C. B. Cox deemed Lord of the Flies as "probably the most important novel to be published ... in the 1950s." Cox, writing in Critical Quarterly, continued: "[To] succeed, a good story needs more than sudden deaths, a terrifying chase and an unexpected conclusion. Lord of the Flies includes all these ingredients, but their exceptional force derives from Golding's faith that every detail of human life has a religious significance. This is one reason why he is unique among new writers in the '50s.... Golding's intense conviction [is] that every particular of human life has a profound importance. His children are not juvenile delinquents, but human beings realising for themselves the beauty and horror of life."

Not every critic responded with admiration to Lord of the Flies, however. One of Golding's more vocal detractors is Kenneth Rexroth, who had this to say in Atlantic: "Golding's novels are rigged. All thesis novels are rigged. In the great ones the drama escapes from the cage of the rigging or is acted out on it as on a skeleton stage set. Golding's thesis requires more rigging than most and it must by definition be escape-proof and collapsing." Rexroth elaborates: "[The novel] functions in a minimal ecology, but even so, and indefinite as it is, it is wrong. It's the wrong rock for such an island and the wrong vegetation. The boys never come alive as real boys. They are simply the projected annoyances of a disgruntled English schoolmaster."

Jean E. Kennard voiced a different view in her study Number and Nightmare: Forms of Fantasy in Contemporary Fiction: "Golding's ability to create characters which function both realistically and allegorically is illustrated particularly well in Lord of the Flies. It is necessary for Golding to establish the boys as `real' children early in the novel--something he achieves through such small touches as Piggy's attitude to his asthma and the boys' joy in discovering Piggy's nickname--because his major thesis is, after all, about human psychology and the whole force of the fable would be lost if the characters were not first credible to us as human beings."

The wide variety of critical reaction to Golding's first novel is assessed by Bernard Oldsey. In his article, Oldsey cites such writers as E. L. Epstein and Claire Rosenfield, who "analyzed the work as a fictionalized version of primitive psychology and anthropology. Frederick Karl," Oldsey goes on, "oversimplifying the political allegory, declared that `When the boys on the island struggle for supremacy, they re-enact a ritual of the adult world, as much as the Fellows in [C. P.] Snow's The Masters work out the ritual power in the larger world.' The temptation to force the novel into an allegorical box was strong, since the story is evocative and the characters seem to beg for placement within handy categories of meaning. But Golding is a simply complicated writer; and ... none of the boxes fits precisely. [Critics Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes] wisely concluded that `Golding's fiction has been too complex and many sided to be reducible to a thesis and a conclusion. Lord of the Flies is imagined with a flexibility and depth which seem evidence of finer art than the polish and clarity of its surface.'"

Golding took his theme of tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature a step further with his second novel, The Inheritors. This tale is set at the beginning of human existence itself, during the prehistoric age. A tribe of Neanderthals, as seen through the characters of Lok and Fa, live a peaceful primitive life. Their happy world, however, is doomed: evolution brings in its wake the new race, Homo sapiens, who demonstrate their acquired skills with weapons by killing the Neanderthals. The book, which Golding has called his favorite, is also a favorite with several critics. And, inevitably, comparisons were made between The Inheritors and Lord of the Flies.

To Peter Green, in A Review of English Literature, for example, "it is clear that there is a close thematic connection between [the two novels]: Mr. Golding has simply set up a different working model to illustrate the eternal human verities from a new angle. Again it is humanity, and humanity alone, that generates evil; and when the new men triumph, Lok, the Neanderthaler, weeps as Ralph wept for the corruption and end of innocence [in Lord of the Flies]." Oldsey sees the comparison in religious terms: "[The Homo sapiens] represent the Descent of Man, not simply in the Darwinian sense, but in the Biblical sense of the Fall. Peculiarly enough, the boys [in Lord of the Flies] slide backward, through their own bedevilment, toward perdition; and Lok's Neanderthal tribe hunches forward, given a push by their Homo sapiens antagonists, toward the same perdition. In Golding's view, there is precious little room for evolutionary slippage: progression in The Inheritors and retrogression in Lord of the Flies have the same results. The Descent of Man and Man's Fall (that is to say, rationalism versus religion, the scientific view versus spiritual vision) constitute the crux of Golding's constant thematic structuring. This is true for all of his literary endeavors, but nowhere is it more apparent than in The Inheritors."

Just as Lord of the Flies is Golding's rewriting, in his own terms, of The Coral Island, the author "said that he wrote The Inheritors to refute [H. G. Wells's controversial sociological study] Outline of History, and one can see that between the two writers there is a certain filial relation, though strained, as such relations often are," comments a Times Literary Supplement critic. "They share the same fascination with past and future, the extraordinary capacity to move imaginatively to remote points in time, the fabulizing impulse, the need to moralize. There are even similarities in style. And surely now, when Wells's reputation as a great writer is beginning to take form, it will be understood as high praise of Golding if one says that he is our Wells, as good in his own individual way as Wells was in his." Taken together, the author's first two novels are, according to Lawrence R. Ries, "studies in human nature, exposing the kinds of violence that man uses against his fellow man. It is understandable why these first novels have been said to comprise [Golding's] `primitive period,'" as Ries states in his book Wolf Masks: Violence in Contemporary Fiction.

Golding's "primitive period" ended with the publication of his third novel, Pincher Martin (published in America as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, out of the publishers' concern for American readers who would not know that "pincher" is British slang for "petty thief"). Stylistically similar to Ambrose Bierce's famous short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Pincher Martin is about a naval officer who, after his ship is torpedoed in the Atlantic, drifts aimlessly before latching on to a barren rock. Here he clings for days, eating sea anemones and trying his best to retain consciousness. Delirium overtakes Pincher Martin, though, and through his rambling thoughts he relives his past. The discovery of the sailor's corpse at the end of the story in part constitutes what has been called a "gimmick" ending, and gives the book a metaphysical turn--the reader learns that Pincher Martin has been dead from the beginning of the narrative.

The author's use of flashbacks throughout the narrative of Pincher Martin is discussed by Avril Henry in Southern Review: "On the merely narrative level [the device] is the natural result of Martin's isolation and illness, and is the process by which he is gradually brought to his ghastly self-knowledge." In fact, says Henry, the flashbacks "function in several ways. First the flashbacks relate to each other and to the varied forms in which they themselves are repeated throughout the book; second, they relate also to the details of Martin's `survival' on [the rock].... Third, they relate to the six- day structure of the whole experience: the structure which is superficially a temporal check for us and Martin in the otherwise timeless and distorted events on the rock and in the mind, and at a deeper level is a horrible parody of the six days of Creation. What we watch is an unmaking process, in which man attempts to create himself his own God, and the process accelerates daily."

And, while acknowledging the influences present in the themes of Pincher Martin--from Homer's Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe again--Medcalf further suggests that the novel is Golding's most autobiographical work to date. The author, says Medcalf, "gave Martin more of the external conditions of his own life than to any other of his characters, from [his education at] Oxford ... through a period of acting and theatre life to a commission in the wartime Navy." Golding, too, has added another dimension from his own past, notes Medcalf: "His childhood fear of the darkness of the cellar and the coffin ends crushed in the walls from the graveyard outside [his childhood home]. The darkness universalizes him. It becomes increasingly but always properly laden with symbolism: the darkness of the thing that cannot examine itself, the observing ego: the darkness of the unconscious, the darkness of sleep, of death and, beyond death, heaven."

Each of Golding's first three novels, according to James Gindin in his Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes, "demonstrates the use of unusual and striking literary devices. Each is governed by a massive metaphorical structure--a man clinging for survival to a rock in the Atlantic ocean or an excursion into the mind of man's evolutional antecedent--designed to assert something permanent and significant about human nature. The metaphors are intensive, far- reaching; they permeate all the details and events of the novels. Yet at the end of each novel the metaphors, unique and striking as they are, turn into `gimmicks' [Golding's own term for the device], into clever tricks that shift the focus or the emphasis of the novel as a whole." In Gindin's further criticism of Golding's "gimmicks," the critic states that such endings fail "to define or to articulate fully just how [the author's] metaphors are to be qualified, directed, shaped in contemporary and meaningful terms."

Gimmick endings notwithstanding, V. S. Pritchett sums up Golding's early books as romantic "in the austere sense of the term. They take the leap from the probable to the possible." Pritchett elaborates in a New Statesman review: "All romance breaks with the realistic novelist's certainties and exposes the characters to transcendent and testing dangers. But Golding does more than break; he bashes, by the power of his overwhelming sense of the detail of the physical world. He is the most original of our contemporaries."

To follow Pincher Martin, the author "said that he next wanted to show the patternlessness of life before we impose our patterns on it," according to Green. However, the resulting book, Free Fall, Green continues, "avoids the amoebic paradox suggested by his own prophecy, and falls into a more normal pattern of development: normal, that is, for Golding." Not unlike Pincher Martin,Free Fall depicts through flashbacks the life of its protagonist, artist Sammy Mountjoy. Imprisoned in a darkened cell in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, Mountjoy, who has been told that his execution is imminent, has only time to reflect on his past.

Despite the similarity in circumstance to Pincher Martin, Oldsey finds one important difference between that novel and Free Fall. In Free Fall, a scene showing Sammy Mountjoy's tortured reaction on (symbolically) reliving his own downfall indicates a move toward atonement. "It is at this point in Golding's tangled tale that the reader begins to understand the difference between Sammy Mountjoy and Pincher Martin," Oldsey says. "Sammy escapes the machinations of the camp psychiatrist, Dr. Halde, by making use of man's last resource, prayer. It is all concentrated in his cry of `Help me! Help me!'--a cry which Pincher Martin refuses to utter. In this moment of desperate prayer, Sammy spiritually bursts open the door of his own selfishness."

Medcalf sees the story as Dantesque in nature (Mountjoy's romantic interest is even named Beatrice) and remarks: "Dante, like Sammy, came to himself in the middle of his life, in a dark wood [the cell, in Sammy's case], unable to remember how he came there.... His only way out is to see the whole world, and himself in its light. Hell, purgatory and heaven are revealed to him directly, himself and this world of sense in glimpses from the standpoint of divine justice and eternity." In Free Fall the author's intent "is to show this world directly, in other hints and guesses. He is involved therefore in shewing directly the moment of fall at which Dante only hints. He has a hero without reference points, who lives in the vertigo of free fall, therefore, reproachful of an age in which those who have a morality or a system softly refuse to insist on them: a hero for whom no system he has will do, but who is looking for his own unity in the world--and that, the real world, is `like nothing, because it is everything.' Golding, however, has the advantage of being able to bring Dante's world in by allusion: and he does so with a Paradise hill on which Beatrice is met."

Several critics have taken special notice of Golding's use of names in Free Fall--and his selection of the novel's title itself. Peter M. Axthelm, in his book The Modern Confessional Novel, finds that "almost every proper name ... implies something about the character it identifies." The name Sammy Mountjoy, with its hedonistic ring, for example, contrasts sharply with that of his childhood guardian, Father Watts-Watt. The most crucial name in the book, though, states Axthelm, is that of the woman whom Sammy loves and abuses, Beatrice Ifor. Sammy reads her surname as "I-for," an extension of his own sexual passion. But her name can also be read as "If-or," indicating a spiritual choice--"in other words, she is the potential bridge between Sammy's two worlds," as Axthelm notes. Unable to reconcile the two sides of her character, Sammy "ignores the spiritual side of the girl and grasps only the `I-for,' the self-centered, exploitative lust. He upsets the balance and destroys the bridge," says the critic.

"Many critics have commented that the title [ Free Fall] has both a theological and a scientific significance," declares Kennard, "but Golding himself has, as usual, expressed it best: `Everybody has translated this in terms of theology; well, okay, you can do it that way, which is why it's not a bad title, but it is in fact a scientific term. It is where your gravity has gone; it is a man in a space ship who has no gravity; things don't fall or lift, they float about; he is completely divorced from the other idea of a thing up there and centered on there in which he lives.' Sammy Mountjoy, narrator of Free Fall, has more insight and perhaps more conscience than Pincher Martin, but basically his is Pincher's problem. He is islanded, trapped in himself, `completely divorced from the other idea of a thing up there.'" "Sammy is the character through whom Mr. Golding, one suspects, is beginning to be reconciled to the loss of his primal Eden," offers Green.

In Golding's fifth novel, The Spire, "the interest is all in the opacity of the man and in a further exploration of man's all- sacrificing will," writes Medcalf. Fourteenth-century clergyman Dean Jocelin "is obsessed with the belief that it is his divine mission to raise a 400-foot tower and spire above his church," as Oldsey describes. "His colleagues protest vainly that the project is too expensive and the edifice unsuited for such a shaft. His master builder (obviously named Roger Mason) calculates that the foundation and pillars of the church are inadequate to support the added weight, and fruitlessly suggests compromises to limit the shaft to a lesser height. The townspeople--amoral, skeptical, and often literally pagan--are derisive about `Jocelin's Folly.'" Dean Jocelin, nonetheless, strives on. The churchman, in fact, "neglects all his spiritual duties to be up in the tower overseeing the workmen himself, all the while choosing not to see within and without himself what might interrupt the spire's dizzying climb," Oldsey continues. The weight of the tower causes the church's foundations to shudder; the townspeople increasingly come to see Jocelin as a man dangerously driven.

Finally, despite setbacks caused by both the workers (they "drink, fornicate, murder, and brawl away their leisure hours," according to Oldsey) and by the elements of nature (storms ravage the tower in its building stage), the spire nears completion. Dean Jocelin himself drives the final nail into the top of the edifice--and as he does, succumbs to a disease and falls from the tower to his death. "Whether he has been urged by Satan, God, or his own pride (much like that of Pincher Martin) is a moot question," stresses Oldsey, who also notes that "again Golding returns to the most obsessive subject in his fiction--The Fall."

The Spire "is a book about vision and its cost," observes New York Review of Books critic Frank Kermode. "It has to do with the motives of art and prayer, the phallus turned spire; with the deceit, as painful to man as to God, involved in structures which are human but have to be divine, such as churches and spires. But because the whole work is a dance of figurative language such an account of it can only be misleading." Characteristic of all Golding's work, The Spire can be read on two levels, that of an engrossing story and of a biting analysis of human nature. As Nigel Dennis finds in the New York Times Book Review,Golding "has always written on these two levels. But `The Spire' will be of particular interest to his admirers because it can also be read as an exact description of his own artistic method. This consists basically of trying to rise to the heights while keeping himself glued to the ground. Mr. Golding's aspirations climb by clinging to solid objects and working up them like a vine. This is particularly pronounced in [ The Spire], where every piece of building stone, every stage of scaffolding, every joint and ledge, are used by the author to draw himself up into the blue."

With this book Golding completed his first decade in the literary eye. The author's prolific output--five novels in ten years--and the high quality of his work established him as one of the late twentieth- century's most distinguished writers. This view of Golding was cemented in 1965, when the author was named a Commander of the British Empire.

Thus, by 1965, Golding was evidently on his way to continuing acclaim and popular acceptance--but "then matters changed abruptly," as Oldsey relates. The writer's output dropped dramatically: for the next fifteen years he produced no novels and only a handful of novellas, short stories, and occasional pieces. Of this period--what Boyd refers to as the "hiatus in the Golding oeuvre"--The Pyramid,a collection of three related novellas (and considered a novel proper by some critics), is generally regarded as one of the writer's weaker efforts. The episodic story of a man's existence in the suspiciously-named English town of Stilbourne, The Pyramid proved a shock to "even Golding's most faithful adherents [who] wondered if the book was indeed a novel or if it contributed anything to the author's reputation. To some it seemed merely three weak stories jammed together to produce a salable book," says Oldsey. The Pyramid, however, does have its admirers, among them John Wakeman of the New York Times Book Review, who feels the work is Golding's "first sociological novel. It is certainly more humane, exploratory, and life-size than its predecessors, less Old Testament, more New Testament." And to a Times Literary Supplement critic the book "will astonish by what it is not. It is not a fable, it does not contain evident allegory, it is not set in a simplified or remote world. It belongs to another, more commonplace tradition of English fiction; it is a low-keyed, realistic novel of growing up in a small town--the sort of book H. G. Wells might have written if he had been more attentive to his style."

The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels, another collection of novellas, was somewhat better received. One Times Literary Supplement reviewer, while calling the work "not major Golding," nevertheless finds the book "a pure example of Golding's gift.... The title story is from Golding's Egyptological side and is set in ancient Egypt.... By treating the unfamiliar with familiarity, explaining nothing, he teases the reader into the strange world of the story. It is as brilliant a tour de force as The Inheritors, if on a smaller scale."

Golding's reintroduction to the literary world was acknowledged in 1979 with the publication of Darkness Visible. Despite some fifteen years absence from the novel, the author "returns unchanged," Samuel Hynes observes in a Washington Post Book World article. "[He is] still a moralist, still a maker of parables. To be a moralist you must believe in good and evil, and Golding does; indeed, you might say that the nature of good and evil is his only theme. To be a parable-maker you must believe that moral meaning can be expressed in the very fabric of the story itself, and perhaps that some meanings can only be expressed in this way; and this, too, has always been Golding's way."

The title Darkness Visible derives from Milton's description of Hell in Paradise Lost, and from the first scenes of the book Golding confronts the reader with images of fire, mutilation, and pain--which he presents in Biblical terms. For instance, notes Commonweal reviewer Bernard McCabe, the novel's opening describes a small child, "horribly burned, horribly disfigured, [who walks] out of the flames at the height of the London blitz.... The shattered building he emerges from ... is called `a burning bush,' the firemen stare into `two pillars of lighted smoke,' the child walks with a `ritual gait,' and he appears to have been `born from the sheer agony of a burning city.'" The rescued youth, dubbed Matty, the left side of whose face has been left permanently mutilated, grows up to be a religious visionary.

"If Matty is a force for light, he is opposed by a pair of beautiful twins, Toni and Sophy Stanhope," continues Susan Fromberg Schaeffer in her Chicago Tribune Book World review. "These girls, once symbols of innocence in their town, discover the seductive attractions of darkness. Once, say the spirits who visit Matty, the girls were called before them, but they refused to come. Instead, obsessed by the darkness loose in the world, they abandon morality, choosing instead a demonic hedonism that allows them to justify anything, even mass murder." "Inevitably, the two girls will ... [embark on a] spectacular crime, and just as inevitably, Matty, driven by his spirit guides, must oppose them," sums up Time's Peter S. Prescott. "The confrontation, as you may imagine, ends happily for no one."

Darkness Visible received mixed reviews overall, with much of the negative reaction focusing on the author's "embarrassing fictional stereotypes ... and his heavy-handedly ironic attempt to create a visionary-moron in [Matty]," as Joyce Carol Oates relates in New Republic. And McCabe finds that although the novel "has its undeniable fascinations ... [nevertheless] what I end up with is an impression of a very earnest writer, blessed with remarkable skills and up to all sorts of ingenuities, struggling with a dark vision of man, trying to express it through a complex art, making another attempt at another tour de force, and getting nowhere."

On the other hand, Hynes, who concedes that Darkness Visible is a "difficult novel," adds that "unlike many other contemporary novels, it is difficult because its meaning is difficult: it is not a complicated word game, or a labyrinth with a vacuum at the center. Golding, the religious man, has once more set himself the task of finding the signs and revelations, the parable, that will express his sense of the human situation. Difficult, yes--isn't morality difficult?--but worth the effort."

While Darkness Visible "could not by itself restore Golding to prominence," as Robert Towers points out in the New York Review of Books, the wave of renewed interest the book generated in its author paved the way for Golding's following novel, Rites of Passage. A tale of high-seas adventure, Rites of Passage, according to Towers, is "a first-rate historical novel that is also a novel of ideas--a taut, beautifully controlled short book with none of the windiness or costumed pageantry so often associated with fictional attempts to reanimate the past."

Some of the ideas explored in this book trace back to Lord of the Flies "and to the view [the author] held then of man as a fallen being capable of a `vileness beyond words,'" as New Statesman writer Blake Morrison sees it. Set in the early nineteenth-century, Rites of Passage tells of a voyage from England to Australia as recounted through the shipboard diary of young aristocrat Edmund Talbot. "He sets down a vivid record of the ship and its characters," explains Morrison. They include "the irascible Captain Anderson ..., the `wind- machine Mr Brockleband,' the whorish `painted Magdalene' called Zenobia, and the meek and ridiculous `parson,' Mr Colley, who is satirised as mercilessly as the clerics in [Henry] Fielding's Joseph Andrews." This latter character is the one through which much of the dramatic action in Rites of Passage takes place. For Colley, this "country curate ... this hedge priest," as Golding's Talbot describes him, "is the perfect victim--self-deluding, unworldly, sentimentally devout, priggish, and terrified. Above all he is ignorant of the powerful homosexual streak in his nature that impels him toward the crew and especially toward one stalwart sailor, Billy Rogers," says Towers. Driven by his passion yet torn by doubt, ridiculed and shunned by the other passengers on the ship, Colley literally dies of shame during the voyage.

"It should be clear ... that the ship is a microcosm of sorts, encapsulating an entire society or nation," Towers notes. "It may even have occurred to some that the concealed name of this obsolete old ship of the line, with its female figurehead obscenely nicknamed by the crew, might well be Britannia. At this hint of allegorizing I can imagine a shudder passing through certain prospective readers. But they need not fear. Though there is indeed a schoolmasterish streak in Golding, inclining him toward the didactic, tempting him to embellish his work with literary references ..., he has in Rites of Passage constructed a narrative vessel sturdy enough to support his ideas. And because his ideas--about the role of class, about the nature of authority and its abuses, about cruelty (both casual and deliberate) and its consequences--because these themes and others are adequately dramatized, adequately incorporated, they become agents within the novel, actively and interestingly, at work within the fictional setting."

The author faced his harshest criticism to date with the publication of his 1984 novel The Paper Men. A farce-drama about an aging, successful novelist's conflicts with his pushy, overbearing biographer, The Paper Men "tells us that biography is the trade of the con man, a fatuous accomplishment, and the height of impertinence in both meanings of the word," according to London Times critic Michael Ratcliff. Unfortunately for Golding, most critics find The Paper Men to be sorely lacking in the qualities that distinguish the author's best work. Typical of their commentary is this observation from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times: "Judging from the tired, petulant tone of [the novel], Mr. Golding would seem to have more in common with his creation than mere appearance--a `scraggy yellow- white beard, yellow-white thatch and broken-toothed grin.' He, too, seems to have allowed his pessimistic vision of man to curdle his view of the world and to sour his enjoyment of craft."

Some reviewers call The Paper Men a work unworthy of a Nobel Prize winner (Golding had received the award just months prior to the book's publication); reacting to the outpouring of negative criticism, Blake Morrison says in the Times Literary Supplement that "all that can be said with confidence is that Golding's previous novels, even those that were coolly received on publication, have stood up well to subsequent re-readings, and that The Paper Men is certain to get a more patient treatment from future explicators than it has had from its reviewers. As for the author, he will have to console himself with [his lead character's] rather specious piece of reasoning on the poor reception of [his own novel]: `You have to write the bad books if you're going to write the good ones.'"

Departing briefly from fiction, Golding has produced two books of "occasional pieces," works containing essays, reviews, and lectures. The Hot Gates, and Other Occasional Pieces was published in 1965; A Moving Target appeared in 1982, one year prior to the author's receipt of the Nobel Prize. Literary observations pervade A Moving Target. Golding speaks not only of the works of such authors as Samuel Richardson, Alexander Pope, and Jane Austen, he offers "advice" to aspiring writers and, "with pristine clarity, he answers critics, academics and `dangerous' postgraduate students who have subjected his `Lord of the Flies' to `Freudian analysis, neo-Freudian analysis, Jungian analysis, Roman Catholic approval, ... Protestant apprisal, nonconformist surmise, and Scientific Humanist misinterpretation," as Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor John Rechy observes.

But the most moving passage in the book, according to Gabriel Josipovici, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, is a pair of mood pieces that find Golding reliving his youthful infatuation with Egyptology, and a travel essay that finds the boy, a lifetime later, finally exploring Egypt in person. The critic opined: "This volume is fascinating ... because it gives us a glimpse of two Goldings. The pieces about place, about Homer, about fairy-tales, convey the power of his imagination, his extraordinary ability to enter into and convey to us the strangeness and incomprehensibility of the world we live in. The lectures, on the other hand, give us a glimpse of the writer turning into a monument, not graciously but uneasily."

While he has faced extensive criticism and categorization in his writing career, the author is able to provide a brief, simple description of himself in Jack I. Biles's Talk: Conversations with William Golding: "I'm against the picture of the artist as the starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I think I'd almost prefer the word `craftsman.' He's like one of the old-fashioned shipbuilders, who conceived the boat in their mind and then, after that, touched every single piece that went into the boat. They were in complete control; they knew it inch by inch, and I think the novelist is very much like that."

Associated Works

Darkness Visible (Golding, William (Gerald)), Free Fall, Lord of the Flies (Book), Lord of the Flies (Novel), Pincher Martin (Novel), Rites of Passage (Novel), The Inheritors (Book), The Spire

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of William Golding (1911-1993)
• At the time of Golding's birth:
• William Taft was president of the United States
• W.C. Durant established Chevrolet Motor Co.
• New York Public Library opened
• At the time of Golding's death:
• Bill Clinton was president of the United States
• Russian troops smashed revolt against Boris Yeltsin
• North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed
• John Le Carré published Operation Shylock
• The times:
• 1914-1918: World War I
• 1914-1965: Modernist Period of English literature
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1965-present: Postmodernist Period of English literature
• 1982: Falkland War
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• Golding's contemporaries:
• Benny Goodman (1909-1986) American jazz musician
• Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) Polish-born writer
• Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) American writer
• Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) American beat writer
• Octavio Paz (1914-) Mexican poet
• I. M. Pei (1917-) Chinese architect
• Kurt Vonnegut (1922-) American writer
• Selected world events:
• 1913: X-ray tube was invented
• 1916: Albert Einstein presented theory of relativity
• 1926: Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises
• 1941: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
• 1955: Martin Luther King, Jr. led bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama
• 1957: Jack Kerouac published On the Road
• 1963: John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas
• 1974: Richard Nixon resigned from office
• 1978: Pope Paul VI died
• 1982: Alice Walker published The Color Purple
• 1991: Eastern and Pan Am Airlines ceased operations

Further Reading

• Allen, Walter, The Modern Novel, Dutton, 1964.
• Anderson, David, The Tragic Past, John Knox Press, 1969.
• Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 5, Gale, 1991.
• Axthelm, Peter M., The Modern Confessional Novel, Yale University Press, 1967.
• Babb, Howard S., The Novels of William Golding, Ohio State University Press, 1970.
• Baker, James R., William Golding: A Critical Study, St. Martin's, 1965.
• Biles, Jack I., Talk: Conversations with William Golding, Harcourt, 1971.