The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

First published: 1953

Type of work: Romance

Time of work: 1900, with framing chapters that take place in 1951 or 1952

Locale: Chiefly at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, England

Principal Characters:

• Leo Colston, the protagonist and first-person narrator, a schoolboy visiting a friend at Brandham Hall in 1900
• Marcus Maudsley, Leo’s friend at Southdown Hill School
• Marian Maudsley, Marcus older sister, eventually Lady Trimingham
• Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, the impoverished owner of Brandham Hall, eventually Marian’s husband
• Ted Burgess, Marian’s lover, a farmer on the Brandham Hall estate
• Edward, the eleventh Viscount Trimingham, in fact the grandson of Marian Maudsley and Ted Burgess

The Novel

The narrative structure of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between develops out of the discovery by Leo Colston, the novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, of a diary he kept while visiting his schoolmate Marcus Maudsley at Brandham Hall in 1900. The diary, come upon in 1951 or 1952 in a box of mementos preserved by his late mother, prompts Leo to recall his life at Southdown Hill School prior to his visit to the Maudsleys in July and August. The prologue to the novel details these memories; the epilogue shows Leo returning to Norfolk to fill in gaps in his memory of the nineteen days he spent at Brandham Hall and to determine the degree of his personal responsibility for the catastrophe which occurred there on his thirteenth birthday.

Leo’s diary for 1900 is the key to the action of The Go-Between. Encouraged by his use of magic to defeat the school bullies Jenkins and Strode, Leo arrives in Norfolk half convinced of his ability to bend events to his will. He also arrives with a personal cosmography, derived from the figures of the zodiac printed inside the cover of his diary, to which the adults at Brandham Hall appear to conform. Identifying Marcus Maudsley’s older sister Marian as the Virgo figure in the zodiac, Leo allegorizes the conflict between Marian’s fiance, Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, and her lover, Ted Burgess, as a struggle between Sagittarius and Aquarius.

Dubbed Mercury by the adults who use him as messenger, Leo is ambivalent about both men. Trimingham, the aristocratic but impoverished owner of Brandham Hall, is a heroic figure, scarred during military service in South Africa. Burgess, a tenant farmer on the Viscount’s estate, is the father figure Leo has lacked since the death of his own father in 1899, showing him how to fire a rifle and binding his knee after he cuts it while sliding down the farmer’s strawstack. Leo is attracted to both men, and he is unsure as to which he would prefer to win Marian Maudsley. His dilemma is complicated by the fact that at age twelve going on thirteen, he himself feels a half romantic, half sexual attraction to her.

Aware that Marian and Burgess are using him to arrange meetings, Leo senses that his duties as go-between are morally suspect. His uneasiness comes to a head when Marcus Maudsley tells him that Marian’s engagement to Lord Trimingham is about to be announced. Leo thinks that his efforts have betrayed the Viscount, and he resorts to magic to separate Marian and her lover. The spell Leo plans involves uprooting a gigantic Atropa belladonna, a deadly nightshade, but while wrestling with the plant to secure leaf, berry, and root for use in his spell, Leo is knocked to the ground and symbolically defeated. This struggle with the “beautiful lady” sets in motion the train of events which climax on the afternoon of his thirteenth birthday, with Leo’s discovery of Marian and Ted “together on the ground, the Virgin and the Water-carrier, two bodies moving like one.”

Ted Burgess shoots himself; Mrs. Maudsley, Marian’s mother, has a mental breakdown. Leo himself suffers an emotional collapse and, but for discovery of his diary for 1900, would have continued to repress the experience. Having relived the events of his nineteen days at Brandham Hall through the pages of his diary, Leo returns to Norfolk to piece together his recollections. In the village church, he finds memorial tablets for the ninth Viscount Trimingham, who had died in 1910, and for a son born in February, 1901, and killed in battle in France in 1944. Outside the church, Leo meets a young man who reminds him of Ted Burgess; Edward is the eleventh Viscount, and his appearance accounts for the parentage and birth of the tenth Lord Trimingham.

Edward explains that his grandmother Marian is alive, and Leo visits her, reluctantly accepting her request that he act to reconcile her grandson to the facts of the past and to assure Edward that he does not live under the spell of a curse. “Tell him,” she says to Leo, “that there’s no spell or curse but an unloving heart. You know that, don’t you?”

The Characters

Leo Colston is Hartley’s most fully rendered protagonist. He is also the only one to tell his story in the first person. Presenting his story from the dual perspectives of 1900 and 1952, the elder Leo comments reflectively on the experiences narrated directly by his thirteen-year-old self. In Leo’s character, Hartley treats the problem of moral responsibility, the central concern of his fiction. He also deals with the topic of the past’s effect on the present. When Leo was thirteen in 1900, his ignorance of the facts of life, not merely those about human sexuality, made him unfit for moral insight. The elder Leo’s Proustian effort to recapture past time enables him to perceive moral significance. In token of his capacity to judge and to act, Leo is able to visualize the facade of Brandham Hall for the first time in more than fifty years.

He is also able to see that Marian, Ted, and Lord Trimingham were neither demigods nor callous manipulators of his childhood self. He recognizes that all three were genuinely fond of the boy he once was. They did not seek to hurt him. Leo faces the fact that he conspired in his own deception, by viewing events through the romantic screen of a personal allegory. Hartley’s treatment of these characters stresses both the subjectivity of young Leo and the potential in the three adults for the heroic attributes he assigns them. The tragedy of the love triangle derives from the fact that they fail to rise to the roles assigned them in Leo’s personal drama.

The pivotal relationship is that of Leo and Marian Maudsley. She prompts him to enter the world of his imagination by buying him a green summer suit and playing a flirtatious Maid Marian to his Robin Hood. The bicycle she purchases as his birthday gift is also green. Hartley’s description of the grounds surrounding Brandham Hall stresses their lush vegetation. Yet Leo fails to recognize the potential for evil embodied in the Atropa belladonna in a ruined outbuilding. The plant, looking like a woman standing in a doorway, recalls the sexual temptation of young Robin in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Like so many of the male protagonists in Hawthorne’s stories, Hartley’s Leo is an innocent who walks through a moral wilderness in which the forces of good and evil struggle for his soul. In its association with Marian Maudsley, the belladonna represents sexual initiation, the attraction of lust, and the corruption of innocent love.

Yet the equation is more complex than that. In his relationships with Viscount Trimingham and Ted Burgess, Leo faces a choice between models of male behavior. Frightened by his own sexual feelings, he rejects Ted and both the passion and the love the farmer feels for Marian. He affirms the sterile code of the gentleman embodied by the scarred, perhaps symbolically impotent, Viscount.

Critical Context

Perhaps Hartley’s best novel, The Go-Between was awarded the Heinemann Foundation Prize in 1953. A film version by Joseph Losey, from a script written by Harold Pinter, won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. The novel argues for the existence of a spiritual dimension to life and for a moral imperative, in the tradition of E. M. Forster, to connect oneself with its will.

The moral, even political, conservatism of Hartley’s position, expressed most clearly in the essays collected under the title The Novelist’s Responsibility: Lectures and Essays (1967), has its most aesthetically convincing representation in The Go-Between. By placing control of the story in the hands of Leo Colston, Hartley eliminates the intrusive narrational commentary characteristic of some of his other novels. Here he manages, through a narrator-protagonist who is nearly simultaneously an adolescent boy and an elderly man, both to dramatize the conflict between good and evil, which is his recurring subject, and to set it within a convincing social context.

The nineteen days Leo spends at Brandham Hall in 1900 represent a major change in the class structure of England. Ironically, the aristocratic Viscount Trimingham, the traditional military leader, is forced to turn to the middle-class Maudsleys for the capital and the wife he needs to maintain his status, in the bargain accepting as his own son the child of a farmer.

Bibliography

Atkins, John. Six Novelists Look at Society, 1977.

Bien, Peter. L. P. Hartley, 1963.

Bloomfield, Paul. L. P. Hartley, 1970.

Hall, James. The Tragic Comedians: Seven Modern British Novelists, 1963.

Jones, Edward T. L. P. Hartley, 1978.

Mulkeen, Anne. Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley, 1974.

Webster, Harvey Curtis. After the Trauma: Representative British Novelists Since 1920, 1970.