The Go-Between (2 page)

  Hartley worked on
The Go-Between
with an
intensity unique in his writing life, remaining alone in a Venice
that seemed to him increasingly alien, leaving behind an England
that seemed like a foreign country. In June, he wrote to a friend:
“I began to write a novel: this has occupied me rather
obsessively—indeed, there was a moment when, if I had kept the pace
up, I should almost have rivaled Stendhal who... wrote the
Chartreuse de Parme in about six months ... Now I have slowed down,
but still done quite a big chunk.” By October, the book was
finished and he began to revise it.

  Later, he wrote that he “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... 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.” It
was vital for Hartley to believe, as his world crumbled, that he
had known such an England and could evoke it quickly, simply,
effortlessly. Thus the relationship of weather to landscape, of
servant to master, of village to big house, of England to Empire is
perfectly in place. Only two things are not, and these become the
novel’s subject: Leo is out of place, and Hartley can describe that
feeling in sensuous detail, moment by Proustian moment, down to the
meals, the voices, the newcomers, the quality of the heat, and the
quality of his own discomfort. The book’s power arises from the
boy’s rich way of noticing, his desperate attempt to become a
reliable narrator, absorbing and recounting detail and episode and
sweet sensation. He is especially alert to the prospect of
humiliation, on the lookout for mockery or attack.

  Out of place too is the secret love affair between
Marian and Ted. It is clear from letters and articles that Hartley
disapproved of their affair and expected the reader to do so as
well. He set out, he wrote, to produce “a story of innocence
betrayed, and not only betrayed but corrupted.” When he gave a talk
at Leicester a few months after the book’s publication, he was
surprised to discover that his audience had sympathy with Marian
and Ted. “I wonder,” he wrote to his publisher, “what the Midlands
are coming to.”

  The Midlands, however, had drawn their inspiration
directly from Hartley himself, who had softened the character of
Marian and indeed that of Ted as he worked on the book and had been
too interested in the aura of uncontrolled sensuality between them
to bother disapproving of them. It is fascinating to watch a
novelist working against the grain of his or her own belief,
finding a set of compulsions in the imagination or in the most
secret and hidden parts of the self that will obliterate mere
opinion.

  The writing is full of sensuous detail. “And the
heat was a medium which made this change of outlook possible. As a
liberating power with its own laws it was outside my experience. In
the heat the commonest objects changed their nature. Walls, trees,
the very ground one trod on, instead of being cool were warm to the
touch: and the sense of touch is the most transfiguring of all the
senses.” Leo, like the American in Venice twenty-five years earlier
in
Simonetta Perkins
, longs for liberation and
transfiguration. He carries his longing with him as he carries
Marian and Ted’s letters: “I carried about with me something that
made me dangerous, but what it was and why it made me dangerous, I
had no idea.” The pull within Hartley himself between his hidden
sensuous nature and his love of cold dry order is played out in the
cricket match that Leo sees as “the struggle between order and
lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and defiance of it,
between social stability and revolution, between one attitude to
life and another. I knew which side I was on; yet the traitor
within my gates felt the issue differently, he backed the
individual against the side, even my own side ...”

  Hartley’s imagination softening his own strictures
was the traitor within the gates. In an essay on Henry James, he
remarked that James “would never have written a novel which seemed
to mitigate the sin of adultery. “ Hartley sought to put everything
he knew, or thought he knew, about boyhood and England and class
into
The Go-Between
, and add, for good measure, the sin of
adultery and its corrupting effect. Slowly, however, as he worked,
he seemed to argue with himself, so that the reader is left with
the love between Marian and Ted as a great fierce love, worthy of a
writer who admired Emily Bronte as much as Hartley did.

  He understood, like Leo, the sense of treachery that
can be felt by an outsider in a group, but he also began to work
with something more mysterious and powerful—a treachery within the
self, a treachery conjured into existence by the power of the
flesh, by a seductive strength that cannot be resisted, and that
stands at the root of life itself. This was a subject that would
preoccupy many English novelists of Hartley’s generation, including
D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, the idea that the senses, in all
their heat and spontaneity, were the only useful weapons to
withstand the demands of strict, dull, deathly English duty.
Hartley the citizen was on the side of England; Hartley working on
The Go-Between
was not so sure.

  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 TÔIBÎN

  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. 1 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
.