At the end​ of The Coral Island (1857), the teenage castaways are rescued from bloodthirsty ‘savages’ by the arrival of Christian missionaries. R.M. Ballantyne’s most famous book – which was required reading for British and American schoolchildren until the middle of the 20th century – pitches an ideal of Victorian boyhood against godless pirates and backward foreigners. Almost the last line of dialogue, spoken by one of the boys, is ‘Hurrah for dear old England!’ William Golding takes aim at this scenario in Lord of the Flies (1954), which ends with its schoolboy castaways (those who haven’t been speared to death or had their heads caved in with rocks) being rescued from one another by the arrival of the Royal Navy. Golding’s book – which has been required reading for British and American schoolchildren since the middle of the 20th century – pitches a postwar understanding of human nature against the myth of English adolescence cultivated by Ballantyne. The last lines of dialogue, spoken by a naval officer who mistakes the murderous scene he encounters for a game, are: ‘Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.’

Golding was past forty when he began work on the novel. A dissatisfied schoolmaster in Salisbury, he was burdened by several enemies of promise: a young family, a chronic drinking problem and an often paralysing sense of his own inadequacy. The three books he’d previously written remained unpublished. ‘I was tired of the recurrent thud as returned manuscripts fell on the mat in the morning,’ he later said. ‘It was always a depressing start to the day.’ He wrote his fourth over the course of a year, titled it ‘Strangers from Within’, and sent it to Jonathan Cape, the publisher that had seemed most sympathetic to his earlier efforts, on 1 January 1953. A few weeks later, he heard the familiar thud as it was returned to him. He tried several more publishers (at least six, perhaps as many as twenty) with identical results, before approaching Faber & Faber on 20 September. The in-house reader dismissed it as an ‘absurd & uninteresting fantasy … Rubbish and dull. Pointless.’ If her judgment had been allowed to stand, it’s possible that Ballantyne’s novel would still be our defining image of boys marooned on a tropical island.

Charles Monteith, the editor who rescued Lord of the Flies from oblivion, would also have had a different career. In 1952, aged 31 and working unhappily as a barrister, he had written to Geoffrey Faber asking for a job. (Both men were fellows of All Souls and Monteith had recently supplied Faber with a report on Dublin’s Joyce by Hugh Kenner.) He couldn’t have known it, but his letter arrived at a moment of crisis for the company. The previous year it had reported a ‘crushing’ loss of £6500: both Faber and T.S. Eliot had been forced to stump up cash to keep it afloat. Eliot doubted it would survive much longer: ‘I, had I been an outside investor but with my inside knowledge, would never have dreamed of putting a penny into the business.’ In his view, they were lacking talented ‘younger men’ (he and Faber were both in their sixties) who were sufficiently plugged-in ‘to keep us in front, or put us in front, with general literature’.

Monteith seemed a plausible candidate but his references didn’t inspire confidence. John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls, suggested that he had ‘flair but not taste’ and that ‘the coarseness of his fibre’ would soon grate on Eliot. After much deliberation, they decided to try him out for a probationary year. When news of the arrangement reached Sparrow, he wrote to Faber again, clarifying his reservations, which were about ‘the quality of [Monteith’s] mind and personality, both of which I think lack finesse and distinction to a degree which is remarkable. And, his good nature is in danger, I think, of degenerating into a sort of ponderous geniality.’ He concluded by advising Faber to ‘keep him on his toes (if he still has any)’, a spiteful reference to the serious injuries Monteith had sustained in the Second World War.

The stakes were therefore high, for everyone concerned, when Monteith picked up a visibly well-thumbed typescript, ‘bound in rather depressing hairy cardboard’, which was unappetisingly described by its author as ‘an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation’. After the first dozen or so pages, which contained an ‘overwritten’ description of a nuclear war and featured no characters at all, he was ready to put it down again. Perhaps because he was that much hungrier than its previous readers, he didn’t, and once the story closed in on the stranded children he found himself becoming ‘not merely interested but totally gripped’. Having been ‘a fat, spectacled boy’ himself, he ‘squirmed’ at the other characters’ treatment of Piggy. At the next book committee meeting, he said that he’d like to take the novel on. ‘There was general doubt,’ he recalled. The sales director thought it was unpublishable.

Monteith was confident that he could knock it into shape. The most significant changes he envisaged had to do with the structure (as well as the opening description of nuclear war, there were two other sections in which the story pivoted away from the island), the tone (there was a tendency ‘to overemphasise; to make points rather too directly when they could be made more effectively by implication’) and the allegorical content (the character of Simon was ‘too obviously a Christ figure’). He was given the green light to meet Golding and discuss these proposed revisions, on the understanding that he wouldn’t commit Faber to anything just yet.

It’s fairly clear that Monteith’s suggestions were responsible for the conceptual sleekness of Lord of the Flies – its susceptibility to tabloid invocation and classroom explication – and thus to a large extent for its popularity. The finished product is as flattering to a modern worldview as The Coral Island was to a Victorian one, though that doesn’t mean it gets any closer to the truth about human nature. In 2020 the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman unearthed the story of a group of teenage boys who had been stranded on a deserted Polynesian island from June 1965 to September 1966. They’d established a garden, divided food and water equally between them and maintained a constant fire.

Golding’s relationship with Monteith was dealt with pretty thoroughly in John Carey’s 2009 biography, but the publication of their correspondence, expertly compiled and annotated by Tim Kendall, casts light on it from new angles. One of the things that emerges most vividly is the shifting power dynamic between author and editor. Unsurprisingly, at the start of the correspondence, it was slanted heavily in favour of Monteith. Golding didn’t push back on any of the suggested revisions: you get the impression that he would have done just about anything to get the novel published. He readily accepted that ‘Strangers from Within’ was a weak title and for several months the two men kicked around ideas (‘Island Impact’, ‘Hunt the Island’, ‘This Island’s Mine’) that were conspicuously weaker. Monteith’s colleague Alan Pringle eventually suggested ‘Lord of the Flies’. On 11 February 1954 – more than a year after Golding had first sent out the manuscript – Monteith accepted it for publication. Golding was pathetically grateful. ‘I realise that Lord of the Flies and its part-author are a very small pebble on the season’s beach,’ he wrote on 25 June. Part-author. That’s quite an extreme way of acknowledging editorial input.

Although (or because) Golding went on to write novels that were a good deal subtler and more complex than Lord of the Flies, he never had another success on the same scale. The virtues for which he was celebrated in ever more extravagant terms by his admirers – originality, intensity, technical virtuosity – don’t often add up to bestseller status. Nor did he make much effort to carry his readership with him from book to book: each was flamboyantly different from the last. In The Inheritors (1955), which he wrote ‘at a tremendous lick’ in the months after Lord of the Flies was published, a group of peaceable Neanderthals are ruthlessly picked off by a newly arrived tribe of Homo sapiens. The novel inverts anthropocentrism and hardline Darwinism as deftly as its predecessor inverted the conventions of the boys’ adventure story. It’s also a tour de force of speculative psychology – having never developed rationality, the Neanderthals think and communicate largely in images – and defamiliarising angles. Here one of the characters lays eyes on a modern human for the first time:

The new people did not move like anything he had ever seen before. They were balanced on top of their legs, their waists were so wasp-thin that when they moved their bodies swayed backwards and forwards. They did not look at the earth but straight ahead … It was as though something that Lok could not see were supporting them, holding up their heads, thrusting them slowly and irresistibly forward.

This is an extraordinary act of perspective-swapping, and a stylish bit of writing, but many prospective readers must have shared Monteith’s resistance to the subject matter: ‘“O God,” I said to myself, “first it was schoolboys, now it’s cavemen. Bloody cavemen.”’

If Monteith hoped that Golding would return to more saleable terrain after The Inheritors, he was soon disillusioned. It would have been possible, just about, to read those first two novels without realising that Golding was, in some fundamental sense, a religious writer. With Pincher Martin (1956), which charts the nightmarish progress of a soul after death, that dimension of his work became impossible to ignore. It put him at odds with the major currents in postwar British fiction (consider the very different cases of Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch, both of whom also published their first novels in 1954) as well as with the atheistic Monteith. Not only was Golding interested in such unfashionable subjects as eternal life and the fall of man, he approached them with unfashionable earnestness (they are made ‘actual’ in his books, as Frank Kermode memorably put it, ‘like vomit in the mouth’). And although he was championed throughout his career by some heavyweight critics (perhaps most powerfully and consistently by Kermode), and emulated by a wide variety of younger writers (from Ian McEwan, whose early portraits of adolescent degeneracy would have been inconceivable without the example of Lord of the Flies, to Nicola Barker, whose explorations of spiritual transcendence in a contemporary setting owe much to his later work), large sections of the book-reviewing establishment found him insufferably po-faced. The Spire (1964), which follows the dean of a medieval cathedral’s obsessive attempts to build the structure of the title, has over the decades established itself as his second most popular novel. On publication, however, it was marked down for signs of ‘strain’ by V.S. Pritchett in the New Statesman and Francis Wyndham in the Sunday Times, called ‘pretentious’ by Robert Pitman in the Sunday Express, Kenneth Allsop in the Daily Mail and Robert Nye in Tribune, and described as a ‘very, very, very bad book’ by Edward Lucie-Smith on the BBC Home Service.

‘The trouble with both Pritchett and Wyndham was, I feel, a sort of temperamental incompatibility,’ Monteith reassured Golding. ‘It just wasn’t their sort of book – and it was a bit silly, I think, of the two literary editors concerned to send it to them for review.’ After the phenomenal success of Lord of the Flies, the power dynamic had been reset. Golding was painfully insecure – he never delivered a new novel without some self-flagellating comment on its shortcomings – and much of Monteith’s work with him came down to ego management. When the 1961 Prix des Éditeurs went to ‘Samuel Beckett and some Spanish writer whom I’ve never heard of before called J. Borges’, Monteith made out that it was a case of obvious discrimination: ‘I’m afraid it only bears out my prediction that there’d be strong Continental resistance to giving a prize like that to an English writer.’ Another of his regular duties was signalling amusement at the feeble jokes that peppered Golding’s letters. A typical example took the form of a proposed title for the novel that would become The Spire: ‘Think how AN ERECTION AT BARCHESTER would pack them in!’ Monteith claimed, somewhat improbably, that the suggestion ‘rolls us in the aisles’.

There was one joke that Golding felt bore frequent repetition: ‘There could be gold in them thar hills.’ He first trotted it out in 1960 when an American production company inquired about TV rights to Lord of the Flies, reprised it later that year when he was offered a writer-in-residence position at Hollins College in Virginia, and coined a variation on it (‘there ain’t no more gold in them thar hills’) in 1965, when he feared that an editorial shake-up at Holiday magazine would mean he couldn’t keep using journalistic commissions to fund family getaways. His financial situation was one of his most enduring preoccupations. In October 1955 – when Lord of the Flies had shifted more than five thousand copies and rights had been sold in America, France, Germany and Italy – he complained that ‘I have now just about covered my outlay on postage.’ In an internal memo (which Kendall reproduces in a footnote) Monteith remarks that ‘he certainly seems obsessed by the idea that he’s never going to make any money by writing. The answer to this seems to be that he has and is. Perhaps he has no idea at all about the average earnings of novelists.’ By 1964 Golding was by his own estimation receiving ‘incredible quantities of money’, but that only brought new problems in the form of higher taxes. Within a couple of years he was ‘thinking more and more seriously of living abroad because I can’t go on buying the country H bombs.’

The​ 1970s were quiet for Golding. After The Scorpion God (1971), which parcelled a new novella with a couple he’d written several years earlier, he didn’t publish another book until the decade was almost over. Monteith’s career began to take off, however. He became vice chairman of Faber in 1974 and chairman in 1977. These successes were marred by a campaign of harassment directed against him by one of his authors. In a series of rambling letters to judges, MPs and other public figures (including Golding), the travel writer Robin Bryans (some of whose books were published under the name Robert Harbison) outed his former editor as gay and made various other (less plausible or coherent) claims. When Private Eye reported on them, Faber sued. Golding agreed to act as a character witness for Monteith but the case was settled out of court and it’s never explicitly referred to in their correspondence.

It must have been the elephant in the room, however, when they were discussing the two projects that Golding announced in a letter dated 11 June 1977: Rites of Passage (‘I have written … I suppose sixty thousand words and put it away to take out again at some future date … I don’t think it’s all that good’) and Darkness Visible (‘a sprawling monster, all limbs and no body’). Both novels feature sympathetic portraits of men whose lives are ruined by the exposure of their sexual proclivities. In the former – the first in a trilogy set during a voyage from England to Australia in the early 19th century – the callow Reverend Colley literally dies of shame after getting drunk and giving a blowjob to a sailor. Monteith, who had suffered less dramatic consequences when his own sexuality was made public, did seem a bit embarrassed when discussing this aspect of the novel. He claimed not to understand ‘what precisely had happened to Colley’, adding that ‘my obtuseness was due, in part at any rate, simply for not knowing the meaning of “getting a chew off”.’

Mr Pedigree in Darkness Visible (1979), with his taste for young teenage boys, is by 21st-century standards a paedophile, but most contemporary reviewers described him as ‘homosexual’, and it’s likely that’s how Golding thought of him as well. When we first encounter him – teaching at a boarding school where he selects the most beautiful boys for extra lessons in his room – he’s a repellent figure, indifferent to anything but his own gratification, but after he loses his job and spends time in prison, the novel starts presenting him as an object of pity:

He had joined or was in the process of joining the wall-creepers, men of decayed appearance who keep a wall at their side so as to be sure there is at least one direction from which trouble will not come. He was now the sort of man whom a policeman feels in his bones should be moved on; and consequently he began to feel himself that he ought to be moved on and whenever he saw a policeman, moved himself on or sideways round a corner as soon as possible.

Monteith’s reaction to all this isn’t recorded: Darkness Visible provided plenty of other characters and plot strands to concentrate on instead. In many ways, it’s Golding’s most ambitious novel. Where most of them play out over a modest timeframe and in a confined geographical setting (a desert island, a market town, a ship), Darkness Visible ranges freely across decades and between continents. It begins during the Blitz, when a boy walks out of a fire that is melting iron and lead; either a fallen angel or a holy fool, or perhaps a bit of both, he drifts around England and Australia having visions and quoting random Bible verses. Meanwhile, a pair of twin sisters – one of them gets mixed up with drug-runners in Afghanistan and ends up as a terrorist; the other is more into armed robbery and sadistic sex – join forces to plan a kidnap. All this adds up to something undeniably eccentric but also rather magnificent. Because Golding takes the spiritual elements of his plot entirely seriously, the novel is charged throughout with a sense of urgent meaning, though one measure of the distance he’d travelled since Lord of the Flies is that you’d be hard pressed to identify a message.

The laudatory reviews (Monteith was ‘particularly pleased’ by John Bayley’s in the first issue of the LRB) raised the curtain on the triumphant final act of Golding’s career. In 1980 he won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Darkness Visible and the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, and in 1983 he received the Nobel, making him the first English laureate since Winston Churchill thirty years earlier. He began to nag Monteith about proposing him for a knighthood (‘are you kultivating my K?’), a campaign that eventually paid off in 1988, five years before he died. The title ‘gave him enormous pleasure’, according to Carey: he immediately set about getting his name changed on his passport. From that point on he was by any measure the most garlanded living British writer, and he was willing to spend a fair bit of his last years being exhibited by the British Council in settings as far-flung as India, Mexico and Japan.

For his 75th birthday, Faber published a festschrift. Monteith – who had by that point retired as chairman but retained the title of senior editorial consultant – contributed an account of the pre-publication history of Lord of the Flies. Golding rather pompously described it as a ‘time capsule … dug up from the foundations of the Laureate’s monument’. He had a few reservations about the first draft. ‘I think you’re a bit hard on my original opening,’ he told Monteith. ‘And I don’t entirely agree with you about Simon. He wasn’t meant to be a good boy. He was meant to be a saint, prophet, Christ.’ Monteith duly sent him a second draft – a reversal of their original roles that neither man saw fit to comment on. Golding approved the revisions, but in his journal wrote: ‘I’m not happy … if the truth is to be told by Charles’s article on Lord of the Flies.’ He continued to brood and even considered retrieving the manuscript to refresh his memory. Two years later, at a panel discussion in Bangalore, he criticised the edits in public. ‘Some things,’ he said, ‘should’ve been left in which went … Simon should’ve been a lot more.’ ‘This Island’s Mine’ might have been a good title after all.