The Go-Between Read Free

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