,
Salisbury.|leftSon of Alec Golding, a science master at
Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), and Mildred () William Golding was born on 19 September 1911 at his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise,
Newquay,
Cornwall. The house was known as
Karenza, the
Cornish word for love, and he spent many childhood holidays there. The Golding family lived at 29, The Green,
Marlborough, Wiltshire, and Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where their father taught. Golding's mother was a campaigner for female suffrage. She was
Cornish, and was considered by her son "a superstitious
Celt" who used to tell him old Cornish ghost stories from her own childhood. In 1930, Golding went to
Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read
natural sciences for two years before transferring to English for his final two years. Golding's original
tutor was the chemist
Thomas Taylor. In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding admitted that, as a teenager during a vacation, he tried to rape a teenage girl with whom he had previously taken piano lessons, perceiving her to have "wanted heavy sex". Golding took his B.A. degree with second class honours in the summer of 1934, and later that year a book of his
Poems was published by
Macmillan & Co, with the help of his Oxford friend, the
anthroposophist Adam Bittleston. In 1935, Golding took a job teaching English at
Michael Hall School, a
Steiner-Waldorf school then in Streatham, South London, staying there for two years. After a year in Oxford studying for a Diploma of Education, he became a schoolmaster, teaching English and music at
Maidstone Grammar School from 1938 to 1940, before moving to
Bishop Wordsworth's School,
Salisbury, in April 1940. There, Golding taught English, philosophy, Greek, and drama until joining the navy on 18 December 1940, reporting for duty at
HMS Raleigh. He returned in 1945 and taught the same subjects until 1961. Golding kept a personal journal for over 22 years from 1971 until the night before his death; it contained approximately 2.4 million words in total. The journal was initially used by Golding to record his dreams, but over time it began to function as a record of his life. The journals contained insights including retrospective thoughts about Golding's novels and memories from his past. At one point, Golding described setting his students up into two groups to fight each other – an experience he drew on when writing
Lord of the Flies.
John Carey, an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University, was eventually given 'unprecedented access to Golding's unpublished papers and journals by the Golding estate'.
Military service During
World War II, Golding joined the
Royal Navy in 1940. He served on a destroyer which was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of the German battleship
Bismarck. Additionally, Golding participated in the
invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a
landing craft that fired salvoes of
rockets onto the beaches. He was also
in action at Walcheren in October and November 1944, during which time 10 out of 27 assault craft that went into the attack were sunk. Golding rose to the rank of lieutenant.
Crisis Golding had a
troubled relationship with alcohol; Judy Carver notes that her father was "always very open, if rueful, about problems with drink". Golding suggested that his self-described "crisis", of which alcoholism played a major part, had plagued him his entire life. John Carey mentions several instances of Golding's
binge drinking in his biography, including Golding's experiences in 1963. Whilst on holiday in
Greece when he was meant to have been finishing his novel
The Spire, Golding would, after working on his writing in the morning, go to his preferred "
Kapheneion" to drink at midday. By the evening, he would move on to
ouzo and
brandy, and developed a reputation locally for "provoking explosions". Following the publication of
The Pyramid in 1967, Golding experienced a severe
writer's block, the result of a myriad of crises: family anxieties,
insomnia, and a general sense of dejection.
Tim Kendall suggests that these experiences manifest in Golding's writing as the character Wilf in
The Paper Men; "an ageing novelist whose alcohol-sodden journeys across Europe are bankrolled by the continuing success of his first book". By the late 1960s, Golding was hopelessly addicted to alcohol – which he referred to as "the old, old
anodyne". Golding's first steps towards recovery came from his study of
Carl Jung's writings, and in what he called "an admission of discipleship," Golding travelled to
Switzerland in 1971 to see Jung's landscapes for himself. That same year, Golding started keeping a journal in which he recorded and interpreted his dreams; the last entry is from the day before he died, in 1993, and the work came to be thousands of pages long by this time. The crisis did inevitably affect Golding's output, and his next novel,
Darkness Visible, would be published twelve years after
The Pyramid; a far cry from the prolific author who had produced six novels in thirteen years since the start of his career. Despite this, the extent of Golding's recovery is evident from the fact that this was only the first of six further novels that Golding completed before his death. ==Career==