When William Golding submitted Lord of the Flies to Faber in 1953 it had already been rejected at least seven times, maybe as many as 20. Charles Monteith could tell from the dog-eared typescript that it had done the rounds, and a reader for Faber called it “absurd and uninteresting … Rubbish and dull. Pointless.” But Monteith, young and new to the job, could see the book’s potential, and suggested ways that Golding – then a Salisbury-based schoolmaster in his early 40s – might improve it. More radically cut and revised than Monteith expected, the novel became a school syllabus classic. Thus began an author-editor friendship that lasted 40 years.
Their early exchanges by post were formal in the extreme: it took two years for Dear Monteith, Dear Golding to become Dear Charles, Dear Bill. But as provincial grammar school boys who both read English at Oxford, the two were attuned to each other. And after the rescue act performed on his first novel, Golding remained humbly grateful for whatever help he could get: “I’m in your hands as usual. I’ve no particular feeling of possession over the book.” Monteith’s touch was gentle for the next few years: enthusiastic, even effusive, he reassured Golding that his drafts of The Inheritors and Free Fall were the finished product. With later novels, such as The Spire and Rites of Passage, editorial feedback was tougher and more extensive. But there were no fallings out. “I’ve always had a feeling of you there, present but not breathing down my neck!” Golding said. He never seriously considered moving to another publishing house.
Not that he stopped worrying, whether about writing too few books (“I realise what an unsatisfactory contributor to your list I am”) or selling too few copies (“universally admired, but unread”) or, when success came, getting too rich (“your accounts dept keep sending us incredible quantities of money”, “Am I being contaminated with commercialism”?). Anxious that his work wasn’t up to scratch, he disparaged the drafts he sent in: “this sanguinary mess”, “load of cod’s wollop”, “I seem to have written the whole thing with one arm tied behind my back”. In his draft of Free Fall he used the words “fuck” and “fucking”. Monteith didn’t object (“the silly little genteelism of f-k would, in the context, look foolish”) but pointed out that the Book Society might do so, which would damage sales. Golding relented: in the published novel “fucking liar” becomes “sodding liar”.
Over time, with invitations to lecture abroad, film rights sold and two academic co-authors (“heavenly twins”) critically acclaiming him, his confidence grew. In the US he was “spoilt, lionised, made much of, entertained pleasantly to death” in an atmosphere of “pernicious Anglophilia”. Back home he was awarded a CBE, which made him feel “at once proud and shy like a girl with illegitimate triplets”. Conscious of the risks of over-praise, he accused himself of vanity and fretted about becoming “a bit embalmed if not mummified”. But rReviews terrified him (“how incredibly dependent I find myself on praise or blame – quite revoltingly so”) and he made sure to be out of the country on publication day, “when the various hatchets fall”. He hated being interviewed and turned down most approaches.
Although they frequently met as friends, Monteith had his work cut out to keep up his author’s spirits, as did the other Faber colleagues to whom these letters, excellently annotated by Tim Kendall, were also sent. Book titles were a nightmare. Till Faber lit on Lord of the Flies, Golding gave it the tedious title Strangers from Within and for what became The Spire he half-jokingly suggested An Erection at Barchester. Though Monteith’s tone was desperate not to offend, he pushed to see new work and speed it along. He’d a dream early run, till Golding hit a mid-patch when, distracted by travel, lecture tours and heavy drinking, he couldn’t write fiction. Then came the triumphant late phase that includes his sea trilogy. Golding dismissed the first instalment, Rites of Passage, as a “load of old rope” but it won the Booker prize.
The author’s heavy drinking isn’t much mentioned in the letters, nor his son’s mental health problems, two sailing catastrophes, his wife Ann’s mastectomy and the Nobel prize. Nor are the agonies he suffered when Monteith was slow (as long as a week!) at getting back to him about new work he’d sent in: “My heart is not so much in my boots as down below them and buried” goes one journal entry, quoted here in the introduction. It’s a close and rewarding friendship (“There is a way in which I am as a writer at least partly your creation,” he tells Monteith) but the letters aren’t as intimate as his journal. Towards the end, when he’s writing to other editors, including Matthew Evans and John Bodley, they’re shorter and more businesslike. All credit to Faber’s loyalty in bringing out a book that, at 600 pages, can’t hope to reach a wide market. You just wish for a little more malicious wit and deadly gossip among the to-and-fro of correspondence.
Monteith was also the publisher of Larkin, Hughes and Heaney, and his work in bringing Lord of the Flies into being is on a par with Maxwell Perkins’s on The Great Gatsby, Edward Garnett’s on Sons and Lovers and Ezra Pound’s on The Waste Land. In later years, Kendall points out, he would travel down to Cornwall to stay with Golding for several days, editing his work over bottles of wine; even when retired, he kept up the role of mentor and enabler. The book reveals the minutiae of the job: the coaxing, contracts, deadlines and prizes. It’s good to see all the quirks too, such as Golding’s complaints about being pestered by schoolboys who claim that Piggy’s spectacles in Lord of the Flies could not have been used to make fire, or his discomfort about a publicity photo in Vogue, reproduced with other photos here, that “makes me look as though I were seated in a police station trying ingratiatingly to explain away my possession of a packet of dirty postcards”. It’s a lost publishing world – boozy lunches and dinners rather than rushed sandwiches at a desk; scrawled letters rather than emails – but fascinating all the same.
• William Golding: The Faber Letters edited by Tim Kendall is published by Faber (£60). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
