Thus in Chapter 15 when Leo finds Ted in his kitchen “with a gun between his knees, so absorbed that he didn’t hear me,” it is clear that he is in the presence of a powerful and irresistible force. Just as he had been transformed by Marian’s attention, now he is ready to bask in Ted’s raw sexual power. The reader cannot resist wanting Ted and Marian to prevail because Leo cannot resist either of them. He is longing for them with all the more zeal and passion because he will be destroyed and pulled under by them and will not recover. He watches Ted, “the muscles of his forearms … moved in ridges and hollows from a knot above the elbow, like pistons working from a cylinder” as “he pushed the wire rod up and down” while cleaning his gun. Ted makes him hold the gun. “I got a strange thrill from the contact, from feeling the butt press against my shoulder and the steel cold against my palm.”
The meeting between them is sodden with sexual charge. Hartley erased a later passage in which Ted teaches Leo to swim: “I could hardly wait to get my clothes off. The impulse towards nudity which had assailed me ever since I came to Trimingham, the longing, half physical, half spiritual, to get everything off, to feel the sun on my skin, to have nothing between me and the elements, to be at one with the summer, now had the compulsion of a passion … The galloping approach of fulfilment drummed in my ears; I tingled with expectancy.” With Ted as his teacher, Leo comes to feel the freedom of the water, “a freedom which the touch of his hand, guiding me this way and that, keeping the soft pull of gravity at bay, did nothing to diminish.”
Hartley was right to cut this passage. It made too much too clear. It is, in any case, written between the lines of the book, which turns out not to be a drama about class or about England, or a lost world mourned by Hartley; instead it is a drama about Leo’s deeply sensuous nature moving blindly, in a world of rich detail and beautiful sentences, toward a destruction that is impelled by his own intensity of feeling and, despite everything, his own innocence.
—COLM TÓIBÍN
THE GO-BETWEEN
TO MISS DORA COWELL
But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers,
The bright blue sky and velvet sod
Were strange conductors to the bowers
Thy daring footsteps must have trod.
—EMILY BRONTË
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
I HAVE sometimes been asked what gave me the idea for The Go-Between, and have always found the question difficult to answer. What makes a thought come into one’s head? One moment it isn’t there and the next moment it is. But of course something—some habitual train of ideas—has hatched it. It isn’t an isolated phenomenon in one’s consciousness, however much it may appear to be.
I think the most operative stimulus of The Go-Between was my memory of the summer of 1900. I was four-and-a-half and it was the first time I was consciously aware of the weather—at least it was the first time the weather made a mark on my memory. From then on, for many years, I always hoped that the long succession of hot days would be repeated, but unless my memory betrays me it never was, in England at any rate, until 1959. It became for me a kind of Golden Age—almost literally, for I think of it as being the colour of gold. I didn’t want to go back to it but I wanted it to come back to me, and I still do.
Some time ago a critic, who perhaps belongs to the school which thinks it is a novelist’s duty to write about the present, said The Go-Between was decadent. Not decadent in the moral sense, he was kind enough to add, but decadent because it looked back with nostalgia to the past, and was the work of a writer in advanced middle age—on the downward slope, as he put it—and was therefore bound to be decadent.
I don’t think there is much general truth in this criticism. In particular instances a middle-aged writer may look back with nostalgia to the past, but it isn’t a rule, any more than it’s a rule that a writer’s, or any artist’s later work is inferior to his earlier work. (Even if you take the moral sting out of “decadent” it remains a term of reproach.) But it is almost a rule that novelists, however wedded they may be to the present, write best when they are recalling—or can identify themselves with—episodes or atmospheres or states of mind belonging to their youth, because that is the time when the deepest impressions, or the impressions most fertile for literary creation, are made. The great work of Proust is a signal proof of it. For Proust la recherche du temps perdu wasn’t only an aesthetic necessity, it was a philosophy, almost a religion. It gave him a kind of mystical happiness, which in his novels he tried to communicate.
People who have this feeling about the past aren’t necessarily comparing it to the present, to the disadvantage of the present. It has nothing to do with that, or not much. It is a desire for certain kinds of emotion which can no longer be experienced by the writer: not necessarily pleasant emotions. It is possible that a self-made millionaire may think with nostalgia of the days when he was poor.
Someone, perhaps wanting to please me, pointed out that many of the greatest novels had been written about periods of time forty years before the date at which the novelist was writing—and this is roughly true of War and Peace, Vanity Fair, and Wuthering Heights. Their authors found it was the point of time—not too near and not too far away—on which their imaginations could most easily focus.
But to turn from great matters to small, there is another reason why I, and other authors of today, find it easier to write about the past than the present. Since the First World War the changes in the structure of society—the changes in the whole set-up of material civilization—have been so violent and so rapid that a realistic novel of contemporary life becomes “dated” almost as soon as it is written. A novel about the poor or a novel about the rich which was conscientiously true in detail of its period is at once outmoded by, for instance, the legislation which resulted in the Welfare State. The Welfare State has done more than change the pattern of people’s lives. The novels that immediately preceded it have almost become historical novels. But the reader’s imagination can’t accept the recent changes as it accepts the different state of affairs that exists in a historical novel. The recent changes suggest something that is old-fashioned and outmoded, and yet sufficiently like the present for its unlikeness to be at once apparent. A work of art, like a dress, may be made of the best materials, but if it is out of fashion it doesn’t give pleasure.
And there is another element today with which novelists of the past did not have to contend. There is not only change but the expectation of change. To take the most obvious example: we have the hydrogen bomb hanging over us, threatening the most drastic changes. To write as if it was not there, as if the threat did not exist, would be to falsify the life of our day. But sixty years ago these changes were neither apparent nor thought to be pending, and in writing of the present the novelist believed he was also writing of the future. He had the benefit of that illusion—the illusion of stability so helpful to fiction. Now he cannot have it: the scene is changing as he writes. But the reality of the pre-change period is still there if he can evoke it, and if he can endow it with “period charm,” so much the better.
The Go-Between is, I suppose, a period piece and it contains a number of anachronisms which have since been pointed out to me. The Mermaid rose didn’t exist at that date, nor did the statue of Sir Thomas Browne; English people didn’t take lemon in their tea or talk about being “on top of the world.”
How much does an anachronism matter? I think it depends on the reader. For some readers even a slight anachronism destroys the illusion of period which the author is trying to create. They can no longer accept his imaginative reconstruction as valid. Yet two of the world’s greatest novels are violently anachronistic: La Princess de Clèves and La Chartreuse de Parme.
But I didn’t choose the year 1900 for its period possibilities. I wanted to evoke the feeling of that summer, the long stretch of fine weather, and also the confidence in life, the belief that all’s well with the world, which everyone enjoyed or seemed to enjoy before the
First World War. No doubt those with their ears to the ground detected creaks and rumblings in the structure of international relations; the young Max Beerbohm, pondering over his cartoon of the Three Centuries, guessed that something was seriously wrong. But the average person didn’t; to the average person the idea of a world war that would involve everyone in tragedy was unthinkable. The Boer War was a local affair, and so I was able to set my little private tragedy against a general background of security and happiness. No novelist can do that now; he has to remember that in most people’s lives tragedy has been the rule, not the exception.
Well, so much for 1900. It did have, for me, the promise of the dawn of a Golden Age.
A few years later I went on a visit to the home of a school-friend, and my mother used to say that I wrote her a letter, asking her to tell my hostess that she wanted me back. I can’t remember doing that but I remember feeling strange and homesick among so many people I didn’t know; and certain features of my visit have always stuck in my memory: the double staircase stemming from the hall, the cedar on the lawn, the cricket match against the village, and most vividly of all, the deadly nightshade growing in the outhouse. I can still see it, it was enormous, like a tree, and I remember wondering if I ought to warn my hostess about it. Otherwise there was little resemblance between the two visits: I wasn’t asked to play cricket for the Hall, still less the part of a go-between.
A friend pointed out to me, something which I hadn’t noticed myself, that Leo was a natural go-between, it was his function in life, and the epilogue to the story was necessary if only to show that the moment he was asked to resume his job, he did. He had, as he believed, ruined his life by taking messages between two people, yet when Marian asked him to take a message to her grandson he willingly, if grumblingly, consented. Fifty years later he was still the same person: his character was his destiny and it hadn’t changed. His only life was in the lives of other people: cut off from them, he withered.
More than any other part of the book, the Epilogue has been found fault with. The Prologue and the Epilogue together, critics said, made a frame too heavy for the picture. I should have done better to stop with the discovery of the lovers in the outhouse and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.
I still feel that the story had to have an epilogue, not necessarily the one I gave it, but something to round it off. You can’t help wanting to know “what happened in the end” if you are at all interested in the characters in a novel. I certainly wanted to know, and I couldn’t have known without writing it down, for my ideas only take shape when the penis in my hand. Others didn’t object to the Epilogue qua Epilogue; they complained that it was out of key with the rest and left one feeling flat. Why drag in Marian again when she was so different from what she used to be that you could hardly tell she was the same person?
But I wanted to point a moral and perhaps it was the moral more than the Epilogue itself that some people found redundant.
A novel grows imperceptibly in the writer’s mind and it is difficult to remember, afterwards, what one’s intentions were at different stages—how they developed, what changes and modifications they went through. Also, in retrospect, one’s own thoughts about a book get mixed up with other people’s—who, in some ways, have a clearer impression of it than one has oneself. I originally meant The Go-Between to be a story of innocence betrayed, and not only betrayed but corrupted. I was and still am irritated by the way the bad boys and girls of modern fiction are allowed to get away with the most deplorable behaviour receiving not reproof, but compassion, almost congratulation, from the author. My story, I thought, shall be of a quite different kind. There shall be a proper segregation of sheep and goats and the reader shall be left in no doubt as to which of the characters I, at any rate, feel sorry for. I didn’t know what was to become of Marian and Ted, but through their agency Leo was to be utterly demoralized. “Now find excuses for them if you can,” I meant to ask.
But as the story went on I softened towards them. I found I hadn’t got it in me to draw their portraits in such dark colours and should only make a mess of it if I tried to rank them with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, or with Monsieur de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil. I found I wanted them to be ordinary flesh-and-blood people—perhaps with too much flesh and blood—driven by forces stronger than themselves; and I wish I had made it clearer that Marian was under great pressure from her mother to marry Lord Trimingham. That was one reason why she treated him so badly—she couldn’t take it out of her mother so she took it out of him as a sort of revenge for the double game she was being forced to play.
But I agree with Dr. Leavis that a novel should be concerned with moral issues, and from moral issues it is only a short step to moral judgments. I thought that Marian behaved very badly and Ted only less badly, and one reason why I wrote the Epilogue was to show how her sins found her out. Altogether she ruined at least half-a-dozen lives, but she didn’t get off lightly herself. She was condemned by the strength of her feelings (which in my view was her best quality) to live in a place she hated in order to be near the grandson who she must have known disliked her. I was afraid that the critics would say I had portrayed a monster but they didn’t: indeed one of them said that though it was obvious I disapproved of Marian he was on her side, because she represented life in its richness and complexity. And several people have told me that they liked her or at any rate found her attractive.
Of course any novelist would rather have it said that he had drawn an attractive woman than that he had upheld the Moral Law.
I am not altogether a pessimist, and another reason for the Epilogue was that it gave a slightly more hopeful ending to the story than it would have had if it had finished with Ted’s death. At last Leo gets a glimpse of the South-West prospect of Brandham Hall—the good side of it, so to speak—which had always been hidden from his memory. To his memory the whole episode had been an unrelieved disaster, so unrelieved as to turn him into a misanthrope and virtually to cut him off from human fellowship. With the recognition that there had always been a silver lining to the cloud we are to suppose that his attitude relaxes and that by acting as go-between for Marian and her grandson he re-enters the world of the feelings. Something may have come of his second talk with Edward—a lifting of the “curse,” perhaps, and a clearing of the way for the young man’s marriage to his cousin.
A word about the “curse.” How far Leo believed in his magical powers I shouldn’t like to say. With one part of his mind he undoubtedly did, or he wouldn’t have felt the compulsive need to concoct the brew which was to cast a spell on Marian and Ted and break up their relationship. It was to be a spell not a curse, and he measured its potency by the emotional and spiritual distress the casting of it cost him. If it had been a curse my task would have been easier, for then the story would have been seen as the working out of the curse. I shouldn’t have required the reader to believe in it, any more than Hawthorne requires us to believe in the supernatural element in his novels, but Leo would have believed in it and been consumed by guilt and remorse. But that would have been another story. As I saw it, Leo was too fond of Ted and Marian to have cursed them, even if he thought a curse could have harmed them, demi-gods that they were. The curse that Marian spoke of could be construed as the logical outcome of several people behaving in a very irresponsible manner, of whom she was the chief offender.
I can’t remember at what point in the story I began to identify Marian with the deadly nightshade, perhaps not until the moment when Leo pulls it out of the ground. Even now I am not sure whether the plant stood for Marian alone, or for the whole principle of sex, in which beside the beauty and attraction there is also a strong dose of poison. At the time, Leo felt he was destroying something that was entirely evil; later on, he had his doubts.
In destroying the belladonna I had also destroyed Ted and perhaps destroyed myself. Was it really a moment of triumph when I lay prostrate on the ground, and the uplifted root rained down earth o
n me?
The withering plant and the dry grains of earth symbolize the coming desiccation of Leo’s nature. Like Antaeus, held in mid-air by the grip of Hercules, he could no longer draw his nourishment from the ground.
The Go-Between is pregnant with symbols. The deadly nightshade is the most obvious one, but the landscape and the climate also had a symbolical meaning for me. Their appeal was to my mind—my subconscious mind perhaps—rather than to my mind’s eye. They were obsessive, not aesthetic, an integral part of the story intended to deepen its meaning, not an embellishment to increase its artistic effect and help the reader to visualize it. But I have never deliberately introduced a symbol into any of my books. As with the deadly nightshade, so with The Shrimp and the Anemone: the symbolic meaning was implicit before I became aware of it. It is plain to me now, as it must be to any reader, that Hilda the anemone was devouring Eustace the shrimp; but it wasn’t plain to me at the time. Some people have told me that my novels are best when most symbolical. But symbolism is, to my thinking, an ingredient that, like garlic in cooking, should be used sparingly; in a realistic or semi-realistic novel you can easily have too much of it. We all have moments when the external world appears to us in the guise and with the intensity of symbols, but these moments, for most of us, are rare.
“And what shall I more say? For the time would fail me to tell of” … many things that I should like to tell of. I once asked a bookseller his opinion as to why The Go-Between was the best-liked of my novels, and he replied “Because there is something in it for everyone.” One or two of my friends seemed to think this was an ignoble reason for the public’s preference, but to me it seems as good as any.
—L.P. HARTLEY
August 1962