5/30/2023 0 Comments William goldings![]() ![]() Always private, even shy, about his writing, he nurtured a lifelong fear of rejection. But Golding, the former school teacher and author of Lord of the Flies, a surprise bestseller, was a much less worldly and more vulnerable character. Kingsley Amis, Golding's contemporary, always said that you could "let a bad review ruin your breakfast, but not your lunch". "She spoke like a navvy in a way I'd never seen before," says Judy, "a lot of words I'd never heard and didn't understand". The moment Lucie-Smith began his critique, Golding himself rushed out of the room, while his wife Ann unleashed a torrent of abuse at the radiogram. At home in Salisbury, the Golding family was first aghast, and then distraught. In the studio, the atmosphere was becoming mountingly toxic. The panel fell into a bitter wrangle about what was, or was not, the appropriate tone to adopt towards such a highly original English writer as Golding. Having launched this intemperate attack, Lucie-Smith then misquoted an American critic's verdict that the novel touched "the Wuthering depths" (a gibe actually directed against David Storey's Radcliffe). The distinguished literary editor Karl Miller found himself defending The Spire against a vitriolic assault from fellow critic Edward Lucie-Smith, who declared it to be "a very, very, very bad book". The programme began and rapidly turned sour. ![]()
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