The Children of Lovers: A Memoir of William Golding by His Daughter BY Judy Golding (Faber & Faber, 2011) From the Publisher: “Bestselling novelist, author of Lord of the Flies, William Golding was a famously acute observer of children. What was it like to be his daughter? In this frank and engaging family memoir, Judy Golding recalls growing up with a brilliant, loving, sometimes difficult parent. The years of her childhood and adolescence saw her father change from an impecunious schoolteacher to a famous novelist. Once adult, she came to understand some of the internal conflicts which led to his writing. The Golding family life, both ordinary and extraordinary, always kept its characteristic warmth, humour, complexity, anger and love, danger and insecurity. This is a book about family and parents, about lovers and their children, and about our impact on one another — for good or ill.”

“The children of lovers, says the proverb, are orphans.” Presumably referring to her own mother and father, Judy Golding introduces her memoir with this epigraph to suggest that lovers are too involved with each other to make good parents. This bit of proverbial wisdom is soon eclipsed, however, by the author’s compelling portrait of a father-daughter relationship that transcends both the book’s purported theme and its illustrious subject. Lovers may or may not make good parents, but every father is both a hero and a villain to his daughter — especially when they are as alike as William and Judy Golding, whose memoir is a masterful display of psychologically nuanced insight into the emotional havoc wreaked by a powerful father on his equally strong-willed daughter. That Judy’s father happened to be the Nobel-Prize-winning, household-name author of Lord of the Flies is almost incidental to the myth. Distinguished by its sophisticated style and structure, its pacing, character development, and unconventional use of time, the narrative weaves backwards and forwards, reflecting the temperamental shifts of her characters… Writing in the wake of John Carey’s recent William Golding biography, Judy’s insider version of this towering public figure offers readers the intimate details missing from his official life story, yet not, as she admits to her audience at the Telegraph Ways With Words festival, without trepidation at revealing family secrets: “I hesitated hugely… I know that I come over as quite angry and in a sense you have to be fueled by a sort of anger. But I certainly don’t regret it.” So, go at it she does — with a fiction writer’s hand — dramatically portraying the crippling self-doubt accompanying her father’s narcissism as well as the phobias that made him so hard to live with and, paradoxically, drove him to create. How she manages this without indulging in the tasteless revelations common to so many memoirs of famous lives is a mark of her own literary gifts. Distinguished by its sophisticated style and structure, its pacing, character development, and unconventional use of time, the narrative weaves backwards and forwards, reflecting the temperamental shifts of her characters as they react to the dramas orchestrated by the family patriarch. Opening with a heart-stopping real-life maritime disaster paralleling her father’s actual wartime traumas and fictional preoccupations, Judy, as both participant and observer, analyzes the effects of such misadventures on his family: “Life in our boats, sordid by many people’s standards (including those of my grandparents)… became a staple of our family’s experience, shared with a very few other people, and often — later — testing our endurance and courage and loyalty. It was a world with dangers, fierce necessities and obligations, which we all accepted. We would have been different without it. So, I suspect, would my father’s books. And the Seahorse holidays were also the first of our family voyages, those bits of life and perhaps escape, outside normality when — maybe through isolation and hence appreciating each other — we actually talked.” — p. 19 Time and again, Judy and her older brother David are subjected to their father’s similarly obsessive tests of “endurance and courage and loyalty” while their mother, Ann, silently stands by. When David proves unworthy, or, in his father’s eyes, incapable, weak, or disinterested, Bill turns his attention entirely on his daughter. Born with an undeveloped foot, David, seen as “a frail figure” by his mother, is left to her protection. The family lines are drawn early on: Bill’s brave little clone, Judy, on one side and Ann’s “frail,” mentally unstable David on the other. As a child, and even later, Judy revels in her alliance with her daring, deliberately rumpled, heroic father in his “unsmart” clothes and “straggly beard.” To the consternation of her stunning ladylike mother, she affects Bill’s mannish, unkempt posture, slinks around with her hands in her pockets, and imitates his low husky voice. Though inwardly cowed by him, the adoring but unusually clear-eyed girl nonetheless maintains enough objectivity to acknowledge her father’s “Faustian… dangerous side, mostly though not entirely hidden from his daughter. The trouble was it held some of his strength along with the danger” (p. 39).

The word “trouble” reappears frequently throughout the book, as the adolescent Judy grows increasingly disillusioned with her beloved role model. Chastising him on one occasion for his drunkenness and rude behavior, she is startled by her father’s “ferocious” response — “‘Your trouble is you want everything to be smooth’” — but has sufficient presence of mind to recognize his disingenuousness, his tendency to set one standard for himself and another for her. “He really didn’t like me to upset people — especially him,” she observes wryly. “He taught me to revere establishment rules, while he could show contempt for them. In that way we would always differ. It was not something I was brave enough to emulate. He had taught me too well” (p. 48).

Characterized by this interplay of narration and commentary, the book at times reads almost like a play, the author stepping out of character to offer asides on the action. Most often this device is handled deftly and works well. It is less successful when the psychological speculation reads more like a clinical diagnosis and hampers the story’s dramatic momentum. Ruminating on Bill’s struggles with writer’s block is one example of this tendency:

Such diagnostic passages might appeal, however, to psychologically sophisticated readers who can identify with the author’s dilemma. How else to explain (or cope with) a father whose opinions, tastes, fears, and demands fluctuate with the winds?

As Bill raises the bar, adding a new set of intellectual expectations to the physical endurance tests, Judy strains to accommodate him until — failing her final semester Greek exams and forfeiting an Oxford scholarship — she suffers a nervous breakdown and must leave school. Driven by her shameful failure to attempt suicide, she is finally sent to a psychiatrist. Amazingly, instead of rallying on her behalf, her parents “bowed down their heads in shame.” By now accustomed to her mother’s coldness, Judy looks to the father she has idolized and emulated all her life for comfort, only to have him turn on her brutally. “Sometime in the autumn my father and I had the terrible conversation about my wanting to die, with his level, bitter reproach – ‘I know you’re sick….’ There was the hate and contempt.” Soon after this confrontation Bill leaves on his own for an extended stay in the United States. “I missed him terribly, crying hysterically when he left. I still thought of him as that large, comfortable shape from my childhood. In reality it had not just gone to America — it had vanished altogether. Of course, none of this was said, even to the psychiatrist…” (pp. 179-180).

Judy slogs on gamely until her father returns, still “hoping for a change in me.” When there is no change, and she is sick enough to take fourteen pills a day, with the prospect of becoming a mental hospital in-patient, like her brother David, seemingly inevitable, she no longer looks to her father for rescue. In fact, it is she who becomes the rescuer on a trip they make together to the Cannes Film Festival, when Lord of the Flies is passed over for first prize and a devastated Bill goes on a drunken spree. Mustering her own “heroic” resources, Judy tosses out her fourteen tranquilizers and antidepressants and takes charge: “… finally, the huge figure from my childhood had begun to shrink” (p. 183).

Realizing now that her salvation lies in leaving home, she obtains that Oxford scholarship — this time on her, not her father’s, terms — with a major in English literature rather than Greek. Outwardly, leaving home brings freedom; but the excruciating see-saw relationship with Bill continues throughout her university years, her career as a copy editor, her marriage, and even as she buys her first home and starts a family. Now the physical and intellectual endurance tests of Judy’s childhood and adolescence give way to raw, unconstrained psychological abuse. “His behaviour was monstrous and would have been so if directed against anybody. Against his supposedly much-loved daughter, it was simply extraordinary” (p.210). But why now, when she is a grown woman and safely out of reach?

Earlier in the book Judy alludes to her father’s fear of incest as a possible reason for his hostility toward her, a plausible explanation that only comes to life in the final heartbreaking chapter, when the hidden wellspring of forbidden love generating that “monstrous” abuse bursts forth at a party, on the last night of her father’s life. Everyone is drinking; Bill is already quite drunk. A guest innocently asks what he would say to Judy if he knew they would never meet again.

This poignant scene signals both the end of their fraught relationship and, in a symbolic dream later that night, Judy’s release from her own long struggle with writer’s block. When Bill is found dead the next morning, it is as if, corroborating the dream, her father himself has freed her to tell their story. And tell it she does — beautifully — with the courage and wisdom borne of her loss.