Charles Monteith on Golding

The typescript was unenticing. Bound between two pieces of cardboard, the sheets had a dog-eared, shop-soiled, down-at-heel look. The edges of the first dozen or so were yellowish, evidence that they, and they alone, had been read a number of times; the remainder were whiter but not pristine. Though I had been a publisher for less than a month, I could already spot a manuscript that had been the rounds and this was an obvious example. A short submission letter, written from Salisbury, was attached: “I send you the typescript of my novel Strangers from Within which might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation. I hope you will feel able to publish it.” It was signed “William Golding”.
A Tuesday afternoon in late September 1953. As usually happened on Tuesday afternoons, three or four editors were weeding out the week’s haul of manuscripts in preparation for Wednesday’s weekly editorial committee, appropriately, if somewhat quaintly, called the Book Committee, at which decisions were made. Strangers from Within was in the pile pushed in my direction. Our professional reader — she read for a number of other publishers as well as Faber and also for a leading literary agency — had already given it one of her “quick looks” and her verdict was in green ink at the top of the author’s letter: “Time: The Future. Absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless.” This was followed by a capital R enclosed in a circle, the symbol for “reject”.
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I opened it expecting nothing and after the first dozen or so pages was inclined, like so many readers before me, to abandon it at that point. They described a nuclear war. Re­membering them now, more than thirty years later, my impression is that they were powerful, if occasionally overwritten, and that they contained, initially, no characters at all. Later the focus shifted earthwards and to a hurriedly organized evacuation of schoolchildren destined presumably, for the Antipodes. The planes in which they flew had detachable cabins, “passenger tubes”, which could be released by the pilot in toto to float to earth beneath giant parachutes. The focus altered once again to one particular plane, to a fierce air battle over the Pacific, to the release of the “passenger tube”, to the island and, at last, to some human beings. They were all boys.
As I read on I found that, reluctantly, I was becoming not merely interested but totally gripped. The island was vividly, brilliantly real and the boys were real boys: despite his half promise, Ralph’s betrayal of the secret of Piggy’s nickname; the appalling sycophantic laughter of the crowd; Jack’s authority over his choir. A fat, spectacled boy at school myself, I squirmed for Piggy. I said that I would take the manuscript home to read properly and when I had finished it I found it unforgettable. Indeed, to anticipate a little, as I read and reread it over the next month or two, thought about it, discussed it with colleagues and with the author, it came to dominate my imagination completely. I found that, increasingly, I kept talking about it until friends began to hint that I was becoming a Golding bore.
But I realized that the novel had flaws which seriously weakened it and might, for some readers, make it a partial or total failure. Some were superficial — commas which studded the pages as thickly as currants in a fruit loaf, Piggy’s “common” speech — his “ass-mar”, “them fruit” — laid on with too heavy a hand; but these could easily be put right. Two others were more serious.
The first was structural. In addition to the long description of atomic war at the beginning, there were two further occasions on which the scene shifted from the island to what was happening in the world outside: an “interlude” occurring about half-way through and describing an air battle many miles above the island which culminated in the body of the dead airman, the “Beast from Air”, drifting down by parachute; and, at the very end, an outline of the lethal manoeuvres in which the “trim cruiser”, the whole fleet of which it formed part and the enemy fleet opposing it, were engaged — rather too clearly placed there, I thought, to show that what had happened on the island was a fable, reflecting in miniature what was happening in the adult world. These passages needed severe pruning.
The second flaw, more fundamental and much more difficult, was Simon. Simon was Christ; or, too obviously, a Christ figure. At times he would retire to a secret place in the jungle hidden behind a mat of creepers, where a Voice spoke to him from the green candle-buds as they opened in the scented dusk to reveal their white flowers; a vision assured him with prophetic certainty, and he assured Ralph, at a moment of appalling doubt, that Ralph would get home safely; when the boys’ fragile society began to fall apart and Jack and his blood-smeared hunters began their murderous dances, Simon led the boys, or some of them, on Good Dances on the beach. Alone and terrified he confronted and was not vanquished by the Lord of the Flies — a literal translation of Beelzebub, as Golding later told me. Simon alone, despite his weakness, the threat of epilepsy, taunts that he was “batty”, seemed untainted by an otherwise universal stain. In the end he was murdered.
To put it crudely and insensitively, Simon was not to me, and would not be, I suspected, to most readers, wholly credible. I do not, in fact, think that I fully understood the problem at the time and it is only in the light of Golding’s other novels and later discussions with him that I see it more clearly now. Simon is not only a boy, a fully and totally human boy; he is one of those rare people who are in fact — it is impossible to avoid these imprecise and difficult words — “numinous” or “charismatic”. Nathaniel in Pincher Martin and, most clearly of all, Matty in Darkness Visible are later variations on the same mysterious theme. But Simon, as he first appeared, was not entirely successful. For the reader — or at any rate for me — the suspension of disbelief was a very unwilling one and the only idea I had was that any purely miraculous events in the narrative must be made ambivalent, eliminated or “toned down” in such a way as to make him explicable in purely rational terms. At the same time his importance, indeed his centrality, must be preserved.
At the next Book Committee I reported that the novel was odd, imperfect but potentially very powerful and that I would like to discuss it with the author. There was general doubt, not unnaturally in view of the description I had given of it and the reservations I had expressed; and it was decided that it should have several more readings before any contact was made. Two editorial colleagues agreed with my verdict; Geoffrey Faber took it and was also prepared, though with doubts, to support me. The final hurdle was the Sales Director, who, like our reader, was regarded as a real professional who could tell by instinct whether or not a book would sell. He kept it for a week or two but eventually brought it to a Book Commitee meeting where we all waited for his verdict, which he gave — he was a kind-hearted man — with a ruefully apologetic glance at me. The book, he said, was unpublishable. This led to a heated discussion at the end of which it was decided — this was chiefly due to Geoffrey, who was unwilling to dampen too abruptly a young editor’s enthusiasm — that I could meet the author and discuss the changes I thought would improve the book, but that I must make it clear that the firm was in no way committed to publishing it.
Golding and I first met in early December. I was nervous and so, I suspect, was he: he was the first of “my” authors. In advance I had speculated a good deal about him and had decided that he was almost certainly a young, or youngish, clergyman, for the more I thought about the novel the more its theological substructure became apparent. Brought up a Presbyterian as I had been, with parts of the Shorter Catechism immovably embedded in my mind, I could recognize Original Sin when I saw it: “the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness and the corruption of man’s whole nature, together with all the actual transgressions which proceed from it”.
So the neatly trimmed beard — clerical beards were not so common then as they are now — the grey flannel trousers and tweed jacket surprised me; but when Golding told me he was a schoolmaster I realized that I had been stupid. Only a schoolmaster would know so intimately, and with such precision of detail, how awful boys could be. We talked at length and at the end I felt that a cautious trust and even liking had established themselves between us. I made my suggestions, rather nervously, and Golding, to my relief, promised to take the typescript back with him and, in the light of a rereading, consider them.
About ten days later he sent me some bits of the emended version of my novel — the beginning, the middle and the end. I’ve done away with the separate bits, Prologue, Interlude, Epilogue, and as you’ll see, merged them into the body of the text. Furthermore, Chapter One now begins with the meeting of Piggy and Ralph and I’m allowing the story of how they got there — or all that is necessary of it — to come out in conversation. Simon is the next job, and a more difficult one. I suppose you agree that I must convey a theophany of some sort or else he won’t be as big a figure as he ought. I’m going to cut down the elaborate description of it, though, and try to get the same effect by reticence. Then I’m distributing odd bits and pieces of “Simonry” throughout the text, to build him up .... I’m making Piggy’s speech ungrammatical but not misspelling it.... Rereading the novel as a stranger to it, I’m bound to agree with almost all your criticism and am full of enthusiasm and energy for the cleaning up process. In fact I’m right back on the island.
The changes were even better than I had hoped for. All that I had suggested was a drastic shortening of the “nuclear war” passages, but Golding’s solution was more radical and totally successful. They had disappeared completely and the novel’s new opening could not have been bettered. In my reply I congratulated him and suggested a few other, fairly superficial changes which he accepted a few days later in a letter with which he enclosed the redrafted “Simon” passages. It is clear from my reply - which rereads, I fear, rather pompously — that I was still not completely satisfied.
Here are the “Simon” bits back again, with my tentative emendations pencilled in. I think you have hit on the right approach to this most tricky of all the problems in the novel; and my emendations are again simply “toning down” of emphasis. I think the danger to be guarded against now is turning Simon into a prig, a self-righteous infant who insists on saying his prayers in the dorm while the naughty boys throw pillows at him. In the early stages I feel it is enough simply to indicate that he is in some way odd, different, withdrawn; and therefore capable of the lonely, rarified courage of facing the pig’s head and climbing the mountain top. The allegory, the theophany, is the imaginative foundation and like all foundations is there to be concealed and built on.
Before long, Golding returned the typescript in what was to be, by and large, its final form. He had been ill, running a very high temperature which was partly due to tonsillitis and partly to “the effort of patching —- so much more wearing than bashing straight ahead at a story”. With this version I was, by and large, satisfied, though I thought a few small changes might be made with advantage; and when I reported all this to the Book Committee it was decided, at long last, to accept the book for publication. I suggested we offer Golding what was then our usual advance for a first novel, £50, but in view of the author’s patience Geoffrey Faber made it £60. And so it was settled.
The next problem was the title. In our earliest exchange of letters I had said that Strangers from Within didn’t seem to me right —- both too abstract and too explicit — and Golding did not demur. Indeed, he began at once to suggest alternatives, “A Cry of Children”, “Nightmare Island”, “To Find an Island”. Both I and my editorial colleagues offered suggestions — my own favourite hunting-ground was The Tempest, which is set on an island — but it was Alan Pringle, an editor rightly reputed to be good at titles, who eventually thought of Lord of the Flies. It has turned out to be probably the most memorable title given to any book since the end of the Second World War. Chapter titles were the next problem. Our Production and Design department was adamant that a decent-looking novel must have chapter titles to be used as running heads; and Golding, though he said his instinct was slightly against them, accepted without further protest a list of suggestions I sent him.
The book went into “page on galley” proofs, which looked like galleys but were half the length and it was only then that I carried out a final editorial operation — cutting Ralph’s hair. In the desperate chase at the end, when Ralph is being hunted down by Jack and his pack, his long, unshorn locks keep falling blindingly over his eyes, symbolizing effectively, but perhaps too heavily, the descent of irrationality, instinct, panic, over reason and intelligence. Golding was as patient as ever: “By all means cut Ralph’s hair for him. I had some doubts of it myself.” So I simply took out every other reference to it. The Production depart­ment completed its work and Sales took over.
Before publication we made various efforts to whip up some advance publicity but with only modest success. John O’London’s Weekly, that forgotten literary periodical, was to make it “Novel of the Month” but ceased publication a week before the accolade was to be conferred; a committee set up by the first Cheltenham Festival did not even short-list it for their First Novel award — nor did it have any better luck with the Authors’ Club’s annual Silver Quill. The Book Society, then a very powerful body, promised a reference to it, though no more, in their monthly magazine. On September 17, 1954, Lord of the Flies was at last published, by a curious coincidence exactly a year after it was first submitted. Its early reception by reviewers was usually good, and even, on occasions, enthusiastic. E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis both praised it. Eliot, who had not read it before, was told by a friend at the Garrick that Faber had published an unpleasant novel about small boys behaving unspeakably on a desert island. In some mild alarm, he took a copy home and told me next day that he had found it not only a splendid novel but morally and theologically impeccable. The book began not only to be talked about but to sell and before very long we had to order a reprint. In the United States, where we had great difficulty in placing it, it made little impression at first, but after a year or two, a paperback edition began to spread like forest fire through university campuses, at first on the West Coast and then in the rest of the country. Personally, I was first alerted to what was happening when an article on Golding appeared in the Hudson Review. And finally the book began to be “set” at university level, at A Level, finally at O Level, in Great Britain and then at equivalent levels abroad. By now there are translations of it into twenty-six languages, including Russian, Thai, Japanese, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, Catalan, Icelandic and Persian; and versions in Indonesian and Malayalam are in preparation. Sales of Faber editions alone total over three million copies, but there is no record, so far as I know, of total sales through­out the world. They must be astronomical.
In December 1983 Golding invited me to accompany him and his wife to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremonies; and on the evening of the presentation there was a great ball at which the laureates and their entourages were presented to the King and Queen. Carl XVI Gustav — a spectacled, serious-looking young man — shook Golding’s hand warmly. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding,” he said. “I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.”
Copyright Charles Monteith, 1986.
This article formed a chapter in William Golding, the Man and his Books: A tribute on his 75th birthday, edited by John Carey, published by Faber, 1986.