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>From a review by John Carey of Blake Morrison's biography of William Golding:
'...His parents were socialist, pacifist, atheist, teetotal and musical.
Golding later regretted their lack of warmth, but he inherited their hatred of
the class system. He knew it from Marlborough, a town divided between the posh
school and the local one, and re-experienced it at Brasenose College, Oxford,
where he was the only grammar-school boy among 71 entrants. He graduated with
an indifferent degree, ran up debts which he didn't repay for more than 20
years, and when interviewed by the university's appointments committee, for
careers advice, was marked down as "Not Quite" ("not quite a gentleman") and
NTS ("Not Top Shelf").
'Teaching was the obvious career, but for several years Golding drifted,
writing poetry, playing the piano and acting. He also met his wife Ann: bright,
beautiful, sporty and fiercely Marxist, though marrying her meant ditching his
fiancée – more cause for self-recrimination. Then came the war. "I have always
understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature," Golding said, and it
could be argued that going to war against them was the making of him, or at any
rate the making of Lord of the Flies. His experiences in the navy were a
mixture of courage, intelligence and frightening incompetence, and Carey
describes them in fascinating detail. The low point was an accident with a
detonator that put him in hospital for three months, the high point
successfully commanding a craft during the D-Day landings – though what he saw
that day ("ships mined, ships blowing up into a Christmas tree of exploding
ammunition, ships burning, sinking") scarred him for life.
'Back home he finally settled into a teaching job in Salisbury. To those who
knew him he seemed a changed man, brooding and withdrawn. He had grown a beard
while a naval officer, and having shaved it off when demobbed now grew it
again, as though more comfortable showing less of his face to the world. It
marked him out as a disgruntled outsider (a forerunner of beatniks) and ascetic
seafarer ("a cross between Captain Hornblower and Saint Augustine", as Michael
Ayrton put it). His pupils nicknamed him Scruff and found him less than
diligent: he'd set them work to get on with while he furtively scribbled in a
notebook. It was known that he had literary aspirations, but few on the staff
thought they'd come to anything. His first three books were all turned down.
'To begin with he had no better luck with Lord of the Flies. Dog-eared after
its rejections by other publishers, the typescript (provisional title:
Strangers from Within) eventually reached Faber, whose reader, Polly Perkins,
dismissed it as an "absurd & uninteresting fantasy" and consigned it to the
slush pile. It was rescued by a new recruit at Faber, Charles Monteith, who
could see it had potential, provided Golding would agree to major cuts and
rewrites. Thus began a 40-year relationship as crucial as Scott Fitzgerald's
with Max Perkins or Raymond Carver's with Gordon Lish. "I am quite convinced I
never wrote it. It's much bigger than I am," a grateful Golding said when the
novel came out, and Monteith played midwife to every book that followed, easing
his author's prenatal fears and birth-pains. But for him Golding would probably
have died an unknown schoolteacher...'
On Aug 16, 2012, at 7:33 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/16/12 8:29 PM, Nick Fredman wrote:
> > Lord of the Flies anti-capitalist? Even reading it for school around age 14
>> it was obviously about the nastiness of human nature. So much was of the
>> curriculum was come to think of it. Animal Farm. Day of the Triffids. A bit
>> later King Lear. No wonder we became morose and listened to The Smiths.
>>
>
> https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2004/09/07/lord-of-the-flies/
>
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