William Golding's crisis

On the evening of 12 April 1967, in the cosy sitting room of his cottage in Bowerchalke, near Salisbury, the novelist William Golding and his family settled down next to the radio to listen to the latest edition of The Critics, a weekly arts review round-up.

Golding's third novel, The Spire, had just been published, critical opinion was divided, and the author was hoping for a positive boost from the BBC. For a writer who was morbidly sensitive to criticism, this was an occasion fraught with risk. His daughter, Judy Carver, remembers the evening well. "We had a radiogram, with knobs and dials, free-standing speakers, and a lot of varnished wood," she recalls. "There was no way to ignore it."

The programme began and rapidly turned sour. 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". 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 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.

In the studio, the atmosphere was becoming mountingly toxic. At home in Salisbury, the Golding family was first aghast, and then distraught. 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. "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".

Kingsley Amis, Golding's contemporary, always said that you could "let a bad review ruin your breakfast, but not your lunch". 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. Always private, even shy, about his writing, he nurtured a lifelong fear of rejection. A hostile notice such as this was a perfect storm of humiliation. "I think that [programme] really damaged him," says Judy. "The Spire had been a difficult book to write, and this rejection was very unkind."

In retrospect, it marked the beginning of more than a decade in which Golding underwent a profound personal and artistic crisis, drove his wife and children to the brink of despair, and began the obsessive compilation of an extraordinary dream diary that charted his pain. Over more than 20 years, the diary's volumes would run to thousands of pages and some 2m words.

Golding died in 1993. On 17 March a BBC Arena film will show, for the first time, the excruciating dimensions of his crisis. The grim and protracted aftermath of The Spire's troubled publication was all the more poignant because, as a batch of recently discovered colour photographs demonstrates, the 1950s had seen Golding enjoying some of his happiest, most carefree years. Throughout his life, he saw himself, his daughter believes, as "a storyteller and a sailor".

These new photographs, shown here for the first time, cast a fascinating light on Sailor Bill, the novelist as yachtsman, cruising the Channel on board a converted Whitstable oyster smack named Wild Rose.

Lyn Weeks, a family friend who took the pictures, remembers an idyllic sailing holiday along the south coast, rowing ashore to drink at Buckler's Hard, and listening to Golding, a gifted amateur pianist, sight-reading Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin on the pub piano. This was a golden moment.

In the complex lives of William and Ann Golding such moments of family security and happiness were fleeting, and hard won. Lord of the Flies, written during 1952-53, had endured successive rejections before its triumphant publication in 1954. At first titled Strangers from Within, the novel had not only endured almost universal disdain, it was also the desperate last throw of an awkward schoolmaster who had struggled for years to find an audience.

Judy, born at the end of the war, was too young to remember her father writing Lord of the Flies but, she says, "I do remember the parcels [of manuscript] going off and coming back. We lived on a very tight budget, so the postage must have been a significant expense."

The legend of this iconic postwar novel has become hoary with many tellings. When it first arrived at Faber (its eventual publisher), it was a dog-eared manuscript that had obviously done the rounds. Its first in-house reader, a Miss Perkins, famously dismissed it as an "absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless." However, a newly recruited young Faber editor, Charles Monteith, disagreed. He saw that the first chapter (about the aftermath of the bomb) could be dropped, fought for the book, and then, having persuaded Golding to cut and rewrite, steered it through to publication.

Fame and success came slowly. Judy recalls that it was only "five years later, after the film came out [directed by Peter Brook], I noticed that the parents of my friends were suddenly becoming interested in Daddy". Before that, the unpublished Golding had been "Scruff", the shy, oddball English teacher at Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury.

But he was never at ease, even with literary recognition. When I came to know him, many years later when I was an editorial director at Faber and Faber, he was by then garlanded with both the Booker and the Nobel prizes. But he always struck me as someone who was not just socially awkward, but mildly belligerent about his awkwardness, too. His daughter says that, with her father, the touchy subject of class is something "you cannot make too much of". She adds that "the good burghers of Marlborough" (where her father grew up) never failed to arouse the most bitter feelings of social inadequacy. For Golding the class gulf was "as real as a wound", and contributed to terrible episodes of rage throughout his life.

At home, Golding's sometimes desperate moods were a feature of a family life which Judy describes as "interesting" but never "happy". She goes on, "he could be really crazy, but that was rare and was usually as a result of some specific setback. Mostly, he was rumpled and warm and very funny. He was one of the funniest men I knew. And he would laugh at himself. Poor old Dad, one of the roles he felt he fulfilled was that of a clown. In life, he felt he was clownish, in the good and the bad sense." She says that the character of Lok in The Inheritors, Golding's second novel, is an accurate self-portrait of the artist as a simpleton. This imaginative reconstruction of the life of a band of Neanderthals speaks to the side of Golding that always revelled in the primal and the potentially savage.

"Yes," his daughter continues, "he was a very complicated man, with a deep self-loathing, which I cannot really explain. I loved him very much, more than anyone, until I had children. But he was ruthless, and that ruthlessness impacted on all of us." It was not just that Golding was unusually conscious of the incipient darkness in everyday life, a quality exemplified by Lord of the Flies, it was also that, as Judy puts it, "he refused to look away. He was alert to the darkness and this came from the war [Golding served on minesweepers in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War]. And it stayed with him. A lot of people, veterans in the 50s, took a different attitude to the war. They said: 'Well, that was then; this is now,' and got on with their lives. Daddy didn't do that. The war cropped up, as an experience, all the way through my childhood."

It was at sea, aboard the Wild Rose, that Golding could escape the demons of class, inferiority and what we might now call post-traumatic stress that haunted him all his life. "He loved the sea," says Judy. "He was a very good sailor, but he took tremendous risks. I always found it terrifying." She laughs. "It's a miracle we're all still here."

Golding – who coined the term for James Lovelock's concept of Gaia, and who believed the sea is the mother of all mankind, in the sense that it's from the ocean that life first crawled ashore – had an elemental relationship with the sea. It was the sea that precipitated his biggest crisis – a 10-year spiral of drunkenness, despair and disabling self-hatred.

In 1966, Golding traded the Wild Rose for a bigger, better boat, the Tenace: a Dutch racer known as a hoogart, a gaff-rigged cutter with beautiful russet auburn sails that Golding likened to "a double bass". Judy remembers it as "a lovely boat, slightly oversized and varnished, with winches and lee boards. It could sleep eight or nine."

Golding loved this boat, boasting in a Guardian article of its "bowsprit that can be cocked up to 45 degrees and gives her the air of dating from the 17th century". On 13 July 1967 he put to sea with his family to sail to France. "It was 10 or 11 in the morning," Judy goes on, "and we were sailing with quite a good breeze in thick fog." Suddenly, out of the murk, towering above them, came the prow of a Japanese freighter. Golding steered to avoid a head-on collision but the two vessels collided, and the Tenace began to sink. After several minutes of terror on the sea, Golding and his family were rescued, but his pride and joy, the Tenace, was lost. In a sense, Golding went down with his ship.

This dreadful moment of failure and humiliation came to haunt Golding. He was 53 and feeling his age. He vowed he would never again be responsible for the lives of others at sea, and never sailed again. By the late 1960s, says Judy, "he was becoming very troubled, and there were some very bad episodes of drink".

For the family, Golding's personal crisis was exacerbated by the appearance in his life of a devoted literary admirer, the American scholar Virginia Tiger. She was then the wife of the anthropologist Lionel Tiger and had corresponded with Golding about her doctoral dissertation on his work. Usually, he ignored such interest, but this time he responded.

His daughter remembers the impact of her appearance on the scene. "Virginia was very self-assured, very attractive and always very well-dressed. She caused a great furore at home between my parents." Tiger has always maintained that she did not have an affair with Golding, but his daughter says: "There was a very strong attraction, which annoyed and frightened my mother."

Ann Golding, a clever and glamorous woman, who had devoted herself to raising a family like many women in the 1950s, had played an important creative role in her husband's writing life. All at once she found that role being challenged emotionally and artistically.

When he began his dream diaries in 1972, Golding addressed what he called his "crisis" on the very first page with his characteristic refusal to turn away from the dark side of his nature. "I find it difficult to decide when the crisis began," he writes. "You could say that it was intense during 70/71; but you could also say that it began in 60/61; and then again in 54 – or in 1911 [the year of his birth] come to that. But by 71, it was unendurable. Not only did life seem pointless, there was a kind of raw intensity about daylight… On top of that there was an insomniac length to every night when each second had its own weight, its own tiny addition, like a Chinese water torture."

Sleep and dreaming came as a relief. His dreams were often focused on his past – his childhood, his wartime experiences, and his relationship with his parents. There were bizarre episodes on suicide and homosexual humiliation. Golding often dreamed about trees, and some of these dreams have trees performing music. His "recurrent nightmare" is that he is about to be executed. In contrast to such prevailing darkness, Golding maintained that his "dream ego" was childlike and innocent, with dreams of startling beauty and intensity, expressed in vivid primary colours.

Between the dreams, meticulously numbered and recorded in Letts diaries, came the insomnia. "The remedy for this, of course, was drink," Golding writes, "the old, old anodyne. I do not now remember how many times I was dead drunk in this period. Ann can say, perhaps, but it was at least once a week and, of course, each hangover drove me down further… Once or twice I was drunk for more than a day; I said unforgiveable things to Ann, and pulled her about on at least three occasions."

His daughter, Judy, connects this crisis to her father's difficulties with his next novel. This, she remembers, became "the one thing you mustn't talk about". There were so many elements to Golding's crisis that she "is not sure which was the crucial one".

But the failure to write his next novel was, professionally, a huge blow, and it dogged him throughout the 1970s. No longer could he escape to sea. There was the inexorable search for what Golding called his "magic", the creative spark that would light up his novelist's imagination. For years, the struggle was intractable, but by 1976 he had begun to work on the book that he would never, ever, talk about: Darkness Visible. The novel, eventually one of his shortest, ballooned into a massive and unwieldy typescript that became a kind of lightning conductor for the traumas of the crisis, and gradually he recovered his equilibrium. "Once it was written," says Judy, "life was different. The extraordinary thing, looking back, is that he was also working on Rites of Passage at the same time."

This historical novel, that went on to win the 1980 Booker Prize in a head-to-head with Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, reconciles all William Golding's inner conflicts, and transforms them into a work of art. Rites of Passage celebrates a great sea voyage; it tackles vexed issues of class and sexuality; and it shows off Golding's prose at its most edgy and exhilarating. I remember him describing how, when he was working well, he felt as though his prose was flowing down his arm to his writing hand. It was, he said, as if he was taking dictation from his unconscious. That was a typical flight of Golding fancy, but when you look more closely at these photographs of the writer at peace on his boat you see a man who knew how to tune the elements into the rare music of great fiction.