Edmund Gordon · Bloody Cavemen: Golding’s Island

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 The three books he’d previously written remained unpublished.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