William Golding

His Life and Work

William Gerald Golding was born in the village of St Columba Minor Cornwall, England, on the 19th of September, 1911. He was educated at Marlborough College, and then went on to Oxford University, where he studied English Literature, gaining a B .A. in 193 5. After working for a time in the theatre as a writer and actor he trained to be a teacher. In 1939, he married (Anne) and in time the Goldings had two children, a boy and girl. At the outbreak of World War II (1940), he joined the Royal Navy, where he served on battleships, one of which he commanded by the end of the war. He was involved in a good deal of action during the war, including the famous D-Day landings. Golding has admitted that his war time experiences shocked him. He was exposed for the first time to the depravity of which mankind is capable.

After the war, he became a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, in Salisbury. There, he taught English for many years. One of the things he taught repeatedly was what he called the Island books. He was referring to the famous nineteenth century adventure stories for children - the Swiss Family Robinson (1812), The Coral Island (1858), and Treasure Island (1881). Significantly, two of these are mentioned specifically in Chapter 2 of Lord of the Flies. The other one mentioned there, Swallows and Amazons, is a twentieth century children’s classic about a group of children who go on a yachting holiday. What Golding saw in these happy adventure stories was the celebration of life, free from more adult preoccupations with fate, good and evil, and the possibility that human nature was less than ideal. In fantasies of this kind the ‘baddies’ are predictably villainous, but the main characters are resolutely good. Reflecting on his wartime experiences, and indeed looking around him at the boys at the school where he taught, Golding could not help wondering how realistic these island books were. What would really happen if boys were left on a deserted island, without adult supervision?

Out of this idea grew the early manuscript of Lord of the Flies. Golding admitted years later that he became preoccupied with the notion, and wrote the story in a state of considerable excitement, sometimes while sitting in chapel during choir practice. He sent the manuscript off to all the major British publishers, only to find that it was rejected as unsuitable for publication. What an irony, considering the subsequent history of the work. Finally, Lord of the Flies was accepted by Faber, and published in 1954. At first it made little impression, but reissued in paperback, it began to be talked about. Within a short time, it was world famous. What people saw in the novel was of course its allegory (see below) - the dramatic way it depicts in the descent of the boys from a state of happiness and grace into one of frightful barbarity something very like what had been happening to human beings throughout this century. Indeed, it seemed to be a modem recasting of the original idea of the Fall of Man (see below). Pride, fear and revenge steadily convert Jack and the other boys from innocent children into complete savages. Paradise is lost and darkness rules. The moral seriousness of this book does not stop it from being a very easy story to read and one with great power.

Golding went on to write more than a dozen novels, as well as essays and plays. One of his works, Rites of Passage (1980), won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious of English language literature prizes outside America. And in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lord of the Flies has never been out of print since its publication. It has been translated into 30 languages, and sold over

000 copies in Britain alone. The novel is now acknowledged around the world as a great modem classic. Everyone is assumed to have read Lord of the Flies. Golding was knighted in 1988. He died five years later, in Tullimaar, Cornwall, on the 19th June 1993.

Golding’s work in general concerns the moral state of human beings, particularly their capacity for both good and evil. His intention, expressed openly several times, was to make people think.

It is that objective but devoted stare [stimulated by books such as Lord of the Flies] with which humanity observes its own past; and it is in that stare, that attempt to see how things have become what they are, where they went wrong, and where right, that the only hope lies of having some control over our own future.... I believe that man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

A practising Christian, Golding was very much aware as a writer of the moral challenges in life. A number of his works are very difficult reading. However, his earliest and by far the most famous book, Lord of the Flies, deals in reasonably simple terms with his moral preoccupations. That is a major reason why it has been set for school study almost since the time it was first published.

WHY SO PESSIMISTIC?

THE HISTORICAL AND PERSONAL CONTEXT

Because Lord of the Flies is a world famous novel, read and studied by millions of people for over forty years, and beyond any doubt a ‘classic’, we tend to think of it as somehow existing in a vacuum, up there with all the other celebrated works of literature from Shakespeare onward. In fact, of course, like all texts, it came out of a particular time and place, and was the work of one man’s imagination. It helps to have an understanding of how the work expresses a view of life which was very much characteristic of its time. Insofar as Golding was making out a case that mankind has an evil streak, we need to look for events and thinking surrounding the creation of the novel which led to this view.

Golding had lived through one of the most frightening times in all of human history. A sensitive, highly educated man, he was well aware of the torments of people around him, and couldn’t help but express his dismay in his writing. What was he reacting to?

The horrors of the twentieth century

Three years after William Golding was born, a terrible war began. We can reasonably describe it as the worst war in human history (to that point of time). It came to be called the Great War (1914-18). Previously, conflicts had always been localised. This war covered much of the world (Europe, North Africa, Palestine, Turkey, and most of the oceans). No less than thirty-two countries were involved in the fighting. By the time it finished four years later, 65,000,000 men had put on uniforms and gone off to kill and die. The worst trench warfare saw shocking casualties. It was not unknown, as in the notorious battle of the Somme, for 60,000 men to die in a single day! By war’s end, 37,000,000 men had fallen victim to guns, poison gas, or disease, not to mention the additional 10,000,000 civilian (non-military) casualties. No less than 8,500,000 soldiers were killed outright. Golding was a boy of seven when the survivors limped home from this appalling bloodbath.

The First World War, as it is now called by historians, had been dubbed by optimists ‘the war to end all wars’. People in 1918 thought that it had showed how dreadful modem warfare can be, with its use of high explosives, machine guns, and chemical weapons, and that no one would ever again dare start such a conflict. How wrong they were!

The 1920s seemed a period of peace and prosperity. They called it ‘the roaring twenties’ - that is until the Great Depression struck. In October 1929, after the crash of the Wall Street (New York) Stock Market, the bottom fell out of the US economy, and the effects rippled around the world. Banks closed, factories shut down, mortgages on homes and farms were stopped, and people’s property taken from them. Unemployment soared. In America, in certain places, up to one third of the men were soon out of work. People literally starved. It was a human disaster of massive proportions.

Barely had the world begun to emerge from the Depression when more conflicts began. In Spain, a civil war broke out (1936-39) between the right wing government and socialist rebels. The death toll during the war was huge, and when it was over no less than 37,000 were executed by the winning dictator.

In Europe, things were looking just as grim. A dictator named Adolf Hitler had taken over Germany with his Nazi party in 1933. Soon, he built a giant army and started taking over neighbouring countries. The other nations, sick of war, protested, but stopped short of armed intervention. Finally, when he invaded Poland (1939), the other European nations declared war. This Second World War (1939-45) covered the entire globe in a nightmare period of fighting on land, at sea and in the air. The death toll made the earlier world war seem mild by comparison. In total, a staggering 55,000,000 people died, with three times that many wounded or permanently disabled. Russia alone lost 20,000,000 people (more than the entire population of Australia)! Also revealed at the end of the war was what we now call the ‘Holocaust’, the systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazis. Under a program given the innocent- sounding label the ‘final solution’, German soldiers had gassed over 3,000,000 in death camps, shot 1,500,000 in pits and forests, and beaten or shot to death another 500,000 trapped in ghettoes. When Allied troops broke into the death camps in 1945, after the collapse of Germany, found the evidence of so many murders, and saw the handful of skeletal survivors, they could hardly believe what the Nazis had done. Truly, this was absolute evil.

The other horror which became public knowledge in 1945 was the atomic bomb. In an attempt to shorten the war with Japan, the Americans had used the ultimate weapon.

On 6 August, 1945, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a single bomb dropped from an American warplane. Three days later, Nagasaki was devastated. The Americans claimed that about 100,000 died. The Japanese said almost a quarter of a million had died as a result of just two bombs. It was a demonstration of mass murder that horrified the world.

Within two years after the war, the Soviet Union (Russian Communist state) had the atomic bomb too. So began the ‘Cold War’, the confrontation between the USA and USSR which many thought at the time would lead to the final, and annihilating, Third World War, a global nuclear conflict. It is no coincidence that Golding sets his novel in what’s left of the world after a nuclear war.

That didn’t happen, as history shows. Perhaps man had finally learnt that some things are too terrible. But it didn’t stop a smaller war breaking out in Korea (1950- 53), which produced over

3000000 casualties,nor wars in Palestine, China and elsewhere round the globe. In Golding’s 42 years (to the date of Lord of Flies), no less than twelve had been occupied by major wars. The evidence of people’s capacity for hatred and violence seemed unavoidable, and it very much informs the novel.

The problem of religious faith

Up until the twentieth century, most people believed in God and attended church regularly. They may have disputed which denomination was the ‘right’ one, but they all shared a common belief: that a divine being had made the world, was watching over mankind, and would reward goodness and punish badness. There was always the problem of how so many bad things seemed to happen in a world ruled over by a loving God, but in Christian countries that was accounted for as the result of man’s ‘original sin’, the disobedience of Adam and Eve which led to the loss of paradise (the Garden of Eden).

The world was seen as a battleground between Jesus (urging people to follow his teachings of love, to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’) and Satan (urging people to hate and kill). Sometimes the Devil won, and sometimes Jesus. In the end, according to Christian theology, God would be triumphant, and would take all the righteous to be in Heaven with Him. The evil would be consigned to everlasting torment in Hell. In this view, godliness was all important. ‘The meek [innocent and humble] shall inherit the earth,’ said the Bible, suggesting that all one had to do was be good, and things would work out for the best.

This simple account of the moral universe came under increasing attack in the period leading up to this century. A number of philosophers argued that God didn’t even exist, but was a figment of people’s imagination. Charles Darwin described the theory of evolution, which argued that all life is a struggle for ‘survival of the fittest’, a battle, very like the life or death fights that people knew happened in Nature, in which the strong dominated, and the weak perished. Darwin’s scientific investigations threw a literal reading of the Bible into the most serious doubt. How could God have created the world in seven days, as the Old Testament said, when the Earth was millions of years old? How could God have made man in His own image, when there was archaeological evidence that man was descended from the great apes? As science grew stronger, religion went on the defensive, retreating before a barrage of counterarguments .The church slowly lost its grip on people’s minds, and was gradually marginalised.

This century saw the move away from religious faith accelerate. Church attendances have declined, atheism (belief that there is no God) has soared, and the traditional explanations look increasingly doubtful. Already struggling to explain the unexplainable, organised religion was speechless before the horrors of this century. How could a loving God allow 6 000 000 people to be killed in a global war? Where was the divine order when the Nazis were able to exterminate millions of Jews?

Golding’s own experiences

All of these factors can be counted as the context for Lord of the Flies, with its bleak view of human nature. One other factor needs to be born in mind: Golding’s own experience. He was in the war. He saw some of the horrors personally. He saw men burning to death in the sea, and bodies floating on the water. The war scarred him. His childhood belief in a good world could not survive.

Curiously, what we have in Lord of the Flies is a return to the old story of the fall of man, the Bible story of Adam and Eve (see below), though given a savage twist. Golding, a Christian, teaching (at the time he wrote the novel) in a church school, could only account for what he knew to be ‘the darkness of man’s heart’ by seeing the world as a battle between good and evil, in which evil frequently won. In contrast to the optimistic assumptions of traditional Christians, Satan (the ‘Lord of the Flies’) was the dominant one. It is this argument that Golding’s famous novel makes, and whether or not readers agree with the argument, it is a very important one to think about.

Questions

What are the key themes of Golding’s novels?

How did Golding’s upbringing shape his world view?

What religious issues were being questioned in Golding’s lifetime?

What did WWI and II make people question about humanity?

What global issues are causing tension today?

What concerns do you have about the world today?

Excuse the bad formatting above! You get the gist.