The Dark Side of William Golding

Upon reading Lord of the Flies, I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t leave any children with the author. But upon reading his memoir, I’m fairly certain that I myself wouldn’t be left alone with him.

William Golding, who penned the dark tale of innocence lost, Lord of the Flies, was a jack of many trades including schoolmaster, a sailor, an actor, and a musician. He was also a rapist.

This new information emerges as John Carey, a professor of English literature at Oxford University, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding – who carefully guarded personal information during his life – for 20 years.

He confessed to the incident in an unpublished memoir, called Men, Women & Now, which he wrote for his late wife of 54 years in an effort to explain how his own “monstrous” character had developed.

The attempted rape involved a Marlborough girl, named Dora, who had taken piano lessons with Golding. It happened when he was 18 and on holiday during his first year at Oxford.

Golding seems to excuse the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was “depraved by nature” and, at 14, was “already sexy as an ape.” Though she fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: “I’m not going to hurt you,”

he says in the journal he had been sure the girl “wanted heavy sex.”

Indeed, two years later, the pair met again and had [consensual] sex in a field. Golding recounts the girl’s foreplay remark: “Should I have all that rammed up my guts?”

The journal suggested that the Dora had later plotted to get his father, a grammar school teacher in Marlborough, to watch them having sex in a field through binoculars. Golding tells how Dora persuaded his father to spy on the two of them having sex. She suggested he take his binoculars with him on two specific days to a playing field where they would be. However, she knew that his other son Joseph, William’s older brother, would also be there with his girlfriend having sex.

“It was Dora’s revenge,” writes Carey, The Sunday Times’ chief reviewer. “She wanted to show him that his two sons were not exemplary.” Golding was convinced her approach to his father was a deliberate attempt to discredit him and his older brother.

The journal tells other disturbing stories such as Golding’s psychological experiments with his classes at Bishop Wordsworth’s school, in Salisbury, caused his eyes “to come out like organ stops.”

He divided pupils into gangs, with one attacking a prehistoric camp and the other defending it. This is probably how Simon, Ralph, Piggy and the other characters in Lord of the Flies may have been born.

The boys stranded on the island display man’s innate dark side, as well as the concept of good and evil. Golding’s theme in his book is a horrifying display of survival of the fittest.

Carey says that Golding “was aware of and repelled by the cruelty in himself and was given to saying that, had he been born in Hitler’s Germany, he would have been a Nazi. Dora seems to have played her part in this self-knowledge”.

A later girlfriend, Mollie, whom he also treated badly, was another local from Marlborough whom he later let down by breaking off their engagement, due to her cold personality. Mollie finds a place in his 1959 novel Free Fall, as Beatrice.

His work is said to reflect much of the horror of his time as well as an understanding of it. Will this new information change the way you understand his works?

c.2009