The Go-Between (3 page)

  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 grum-blingly, 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 pen is 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 on 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

  PROLOGUE

  THE PAST is a foreign country: they do things
differently there.

  When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the
bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a
small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had
filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two
dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small
one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled
up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination
lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and
one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use
was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had
belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite
clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the
first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had
meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as
perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate
pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early
ownership—feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.

  It was a roll-call in reverse; the children of the
past announced their names, and I said “Here.” Only the diary
refused to disclose its identity.

  My first impression was that it was a present
someone had brought me from abroad. The shape, the lettering, the
purple limp leather curling upwards at the corners, gave it a
foreign look; and it had, I could see, gold edges. Of all the
exhibits it was the only one that might have been expensive. I must
have treasured it; why, then, could I not give it a context?

  I did not want to touch it and told myself that this
was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and
disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a
blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and
suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I
remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of
touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my
show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for
I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and
this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and
let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect,
however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until
the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost
exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as
to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click
and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the
same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the
secret of the diary flashed upon me.

  Yet even then I did not want to touch it; indeed my
unwillingness increased, for now I knew why I distrusted it. I
looked away and it seemed to me that every object in the room
exhaled the diary’s enervating power and spoke its message of
disappointment and defeat. And as if that was not enough, the
voices reproached me with not having had the grit to overcome them.
Under this twofold assault I sat staring at the bulging envelopes
around me, the stacks of papers tied up with red tape—the task of
sorting which I had set myself for winter evenings, and of which
the red collar-box had been almost the first item; and I felt, with
a bitter blend of self-pity and self-reproach, that had it not been
for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be
different. I should not be sitting in this drab, flowerless room,
where the curtains were not even drawn to hide the cold rain
beating on the windows, or contemplating the accumulation of the
past and the duty it imposed on me to sort it out. I should be
sitting in another room, rainbow-hued, looking not into the past
but into the future; and I should not be sitting alone.