Great writers need great editors and William Golding found a dream exemplar in Charles Monteith. Their near 40-year correspondence is a fascinating record of an artistic collaboration and its evolution.
Monteith knew early he had landed a giant marlin of a talent, swiftly publishing Lord of the Flies after rescuing it from Faber’s slush pile. He ignored a freelance reader’s comments that the novel was “Rubbish & dull” – the literary equivalent of Decca turning down the Beatles.
Monteith’s suggestions are extensive, enthusiastic, gently insistent; he doesn’t pester. The excitement of their first project is palpable. In turn Golding humbly admits his “extraordinary inability to put commas and apostrophes in the right place!” Monteith secures a modest advance of £60 (£2,000 today).
Aged 46, Golding eventually pays off his Oxford debt, leaves his council house. But he had impostor syndrome, ever fearful of the critics, perennially worried sick – as with the bright exam kid you knew at school – he was going to fail. The sin of pride was always on his conscience.
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Hubris is a key theme in his works, downfalls: think of Pincher Martin stranded on his personal Rockall or Sammy Mountjoy from Freefall stuck in a Nazi cooler. Golding thought his masterpiece Darkness Visible “jumbled, inconsistent, wallowing”. He fretted he would be “universally admired, but unread”. Monteith is sensitive, very English in his praise and politeness to the future Nobel prize winner. Both speculated hopefully there might be “gold in them thar hills”.
Golding’s reputation as a visionary is secured here. At times he’s as dark as Johnny the painter from The Fast Show (determined to use black); at others drily amusing, a wise Catweazle-like wizard. His ever-fecund imagination teleports itself like a Timelord from the Neanderthal era of The Inheritors through medieval Salisbury of The Spire, on to 1930s rural Wiltshire in The Pyramid.
Golding – a physician of sorts – insisted he looked for “the root of the disease instead of describing the symptoms”. As Ben Okri acknowledges, Golding knew that “beneath the veneer of civilisation lurks unevolved atavism”. Timely then that the BBC plans to screen a dramatisation of Lord of the Flies in 2026, given its sage contemporary message: “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away”.
