William Golding: Life And Background

Abstract

It would be possible to construct a fragmentary autobiography out of William Golding’s non-fiction writing. It would start with ‘Billy the Kid’ (The Hot Gates, 159–65), an account of his first pugnacious days at school; woven into this essay are hints of the future novelist - Billy’s aggressiveness is mixed with sensitivity; his imagination is obsessed with words. Next would come ‘Egypt from my Inside’ (The Hot Gates 71–82) which describes visits he made at the age of 8 or 9 to the Egyptian section of a museum, where he recognised in the mummies something akin to ‘my own mournful staring into the darkness, my own savage grasp on life’. ‘The Ladder and the Tree’ seems to deal with the following few years. Again, he dwells on his vivid consciousness of darkness and mysteriousness. He stresses his fears about the ancient cellar under his family’s fourteenth- century house and about the bodies in the adjoining churchyard, and his awareness that climbing ‘rung after factual rung’ of the ladder of rationality will still leave the darkness ‘all around, inexplicable, unexorcised, haunted’. In spite of this, he accepted his parents’ desire for him to climb that ladder. There are other glimpses of his childhood scattered through his essays - references to his first visits to Salisbury Cathedral clinging to his mother’s hand (‘An Affection for Cathedrals’, A Moving Target, 14), to lessons at his infant school