The Go-Between Read Free Page 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