Thoughts on "The Go-Between" by L.P. Hartley

Recently, after coming across an admiring reference to it on Peter Hitchens's blog, I read The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. I had often pondered its famous opening line: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." As well as this, I was drawn by the particular passage in which Peter Hitchens mentioned it: "When I was ten years old I was deeply engaged by the fortunes of Hampshire in the County Cricket Championship...Now, this cricket enthusiasm is a mystery to me, a mystery whose code I can no longer break, like Leo Colston's inability to understand large parts of his schoolboy diary, found years later in a chilly attic, in that fine and haunting novel by L.P.Hartley, 'The Go-Between'. "

Being fascinated by diaries, memory, the past, and curtainless attics, I immediately borrowed the novel, which was published in 1953.

I'm not a big novel reader, and I probably start reading more than novels than I ever finish reading. But The Go-Between held my interest from beginning to end.

The idea of the past as a foreign country is appealing and enticing, for a start. Anyone inclined to nostalgia is going to be drawn by that (although the novel itself is not very nostalgic).

There's something rather curious about the book; everybody seems to have a very different idea of what it's about. For instance, compare Peter Hitchens's blog post to this Guardian article by Ali Hirst. The Introduction to the Penguin edition that I read was very different again.

What is it about, on the most basic level? It's about a boy who visits the country home of a school friend, and finds himself carrying messages between the daughter of his host, and a farmer who lives close by. The situation is complicated by the fact that the daughter is being wooed by an aristocrat who was injured in the Boer War.

The protagonist, thirteen-year old Leo, is a typical schoolboy who is excited by the arrival of the year 1900, the year in which the story is set. Although he had previously disliked hot days, he finds himself hoping that the temperature will continue to soar in the hot summer of 1900-- in fact, he keeps checking the thermometer, hoping for record temperatures. The heat is a symbol of the euphoria and excitement of the new century, and of the various new realms Leo is discovering-- the adult world, the higher social echelons, and sexuality (which both fascinates and repels him).

Leo forms a powerful crush upon Marian, the young woman for whom he is acting as a go-between. The high-mindedness of his attraction is very realistic, as far as my own experience of being a boy with a crush on a woman goes. He craves Marian's approval, while feeling nothing but disgust for "spooning" (his term for displays of romantic affection). Of sex itself he is completely ignorant, which is a significant plot point.

L.P. Hartley. (Not the writer of "Fly Fishing". That was J.R.)

I wasn't terribly interested in the book's themes of sexuality, class and innocence. But various other things in the book pleased me.

The plot device of the diary might be the main one. The story uses a frame narrative, in which the now-elderly Leo comes across his boyhood diary, recounting the events of the book. I love frame narratives. I'm also fascinated by diaries and other records.

The old Leo has suppressed the memory of most of the events chronicled in the diary, and they come back to him as he reads. This sort of thing often seems to happen in stories, but I find it almost impossible to believe. The story is a very dramatic one, and it beggars belief that Leo could have blocked so much of it from his memory. The idea of a man coming across his own fifty-year-old diary is also incredible. People don't keep things that long without revisiting them.

Another motif in the book which greatly appeals to me is the zodiac. The young Leo draws the signs of the zodiac on his diary, seeing them as a symbol of the new century and also as representing various people he encounters. Marian, of course, is the Virgin.

The use of astrological symbols conveys how awe-struck Leo is by the adult and upper-class world in which he finds himself. But it appealed to me for a more personal reason. I was enthralled by two books of astrology when I was a child. Both belonged to my older sisters. One was called Love Stars, and was all about romance between various star-signs. The other was about signs of the zodiac in general, explaining the personality traits that supposedly go along with each.I forget the title. It was rather like a coffee table book in format.

I don't think I ever looked inside Love Stars, but I was impressed by the cover-- a red love-heart against a blue background, both printed in very rich shades. I was also excited by the idea of romantic love (I was a very moony boy), and the idea of astrology.

The other book had a much more powerful effect on me, though I don't remember the title. I think there was a section devoted to each astrological sign and the first was rather like an illuminated frontispiece; it showed the symbol of the star-sign (a ram for Aries, for instance) at the centre, and images depicting other properties of the particular star-sign around the margins. One of these properties was whether it was an air, water, earth or fire sign-- and the imagery by which each was conjured excited me. The illustrations were rendered in pale colours, which made them seem all the more ethereal.

The memory of this book has found a place in my purple notebook, and in the inner recesses of my imagination. I never took astrology seriously, but I was profoundly excited by its mystical atmosphere, and by the splendour of its symbolism. The human spirit seems to hanker for a realm which is above, beyond and outside the realm of ordinary time and space, but which (crucially) stands in a vital relationship to it. It might be Egyptian or Greek mythology, or it might be astrology, or it might be superhero comics, or it might be Jungian archetypes, or it might even be the Wild West. The important thing is that the imagery and atmosphere is not drawn directly from ordinary life, that it is more vivid and heightened and splendid. We seem to have some ineradicable urge to see our reflections in a transfiguring mirror.

So the use of astrological symbols in The Go-Between pleased me, and I was able to relate it to my own childhood.

I was less able to relate to Leo's philosophy of life, as a little boy. He is a product of boarding school and develops an ethic familiar from other accounts of English school life, around this time (including G.K. Chesterton's biography). Stoicism and daring are important features of it. Leo is bullied at the start of the book, but feels no resentment against those bullying him-- it's simply par for the course. Indeed, little Leo has a dread of morality, preferring a rigid and rather amoral set of principles instead. For instance, he is a strong believer in hierarchy, and completely accepts the superiority of the aristocracy over commoners. His relationship with his school-friend is marked by the kind mutual mockery and insult which is familiar to me from literature, and which I regularly hear in everyday life, but which leaves me baffled. I never had that kind of friendship with anyone, and I'm very glad of it.

Leo also engages in feats of physical bravery for the sake of it, something foreign to me both as a boy and today. I grew up on the seventh floor of the Ballymun flats, and I remember little boys hanging from the balcony walls, nothing but a sheer drop between them and the ground. The pointlessness of this baffled me then, and it baffles me now.

Peter Hitchens speaks for me when he touches on another aspect of the novel, Leo's attraction to the houses's rubbish dump. Hitches writes of "the fascination felt by melancholics such as I am for the slightly scruffy back parts of noble buildings, where their true nature is revealed and where you can usually be left in peace by grown-ups or people anxious to make conversation when you prefer none - the servants’ stairs , the kitchen gardens and the half-abandoned outhouses." Though, for me, this doesn't apply to noble buildings but to all buildings. I've always been drawn to the parts of buildings which are not for public view, which seem to be outside the general scheme of things, as I try to describe in this blog post.

Another part of the book that appeals to me greatly is the "House vs. Village" annual cricket match which plays an important role in the story. I imagine one is supposed to appreciate this passage as a dramatization of class and sex tensions in Edwardian England. But I enjoy it simply as an account of a local cricket match, not professional or excessively competitive, but taken quite seriously and conducted with a great sense of event. Is there any equivalent today? Do the staff of local cinemas line up against the staff of local supermarkets once a year? I doubt it, and that makes me rather sad.

Indeed, the daily life of the household portrayed in the book makes me hanker for life before television. For instance, we see that the owner of the house (who is hardly portrayed as a pious person) leads the family, the guests and the staff in prayers every morning. And everybody goes to church on Sunday. Perhaps we are meant to see this as hypocritical, or an empty outward show, and certainly the characters in the book seem to go through with these observances purely as a matter of course, of good form. But I still read about them with envy and nostalgia. Is ordinary life today any richer for having discarded such ceremonial?

Similarly, the sing-song that follows the cricket match (in which Irish songs are fairly prominent), and the parlour entertainments described elsewhere in the book, make me feel rather bad about our box set bingeing and other passive recreations today.

There are little touches in the book which I find particularly pleasing. For instance, the aristocrat who forms one point of the story's love triangle, and who was injured in the Boer War, is portrayed as a jingoistic supporter of British imperialism. But when he sees a cartoon in Punch which mocks the British war effort, and which Leo expects will infuriate him, he actually finds it extremely amusing. Not only does this avoid caricature, but it seems quite realistic-- I can imagine such a reaction in such a person. It feels right.

The book is very reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited, especially since both contain a frame narrative in which the protagonist returns to a country house, one which was played a crucial role in his life, after an absence of many years. Both also feature a commoner who finds himself afloat in the strange world of the aristocracy. This is an experience few of us are likely to have in a literal sense, but almost all of us find ourselves feeling out of place in a strange social environment, at one time or another. Both books also have themes of nostalgia, and of the ways in which we grapple with out past-- the last especially is a topic which preoccupies me more and more. I would definitely recommend The Go-Between. (I haven't seen any movie or TV version of the book-- one is mentioned in the first words of the Introduction to the edition I read, so I take it to be quite celebrated.)