'The Go-Between', LP Hartley's novel and film adaptations

The Go-Between

LP Hartley, 1953

 

LP Hartley’s ‘The Go-Between’ is one of my favourites about English repression, along with Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Remains of the Day’. It’s also one of my favourite bildungsroman, being a magnificent capturing of the turmoil of feelings and thoughts of a young man in the early stages of adult understanding, and the trauma of those feeling and thoughts on the rest of an adult life. If you are at all still prone to dwelling and flinching at childhood and teenage embarrassment throughout your adult life, the novel’s bookends are bound to be affecting.

 

In his introduction, Hartley writes, “More than any other part of the book, the Epilogue has been found fault with. The Prologue and 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.”* Which in my opinion is quite wrong and misunderstanding, and would make this a far lesser text. It would be forsaking somewhat the insight into trauma and lifelong repression for far more prosaic suspense and scandal. As it is, there is a resounding sense of pending doom, of a past event never come to terms with, a moment of permanent scarring. Surely exclusion of these bookends would compromise the characters’ lifetime of misunderstanding, the realisation of their self-delusion, the ties of memory, which are integral to the tragedy. The opening reflection where the older Leo is having an argument with his younger self, blaming each other for letting the other own, is a passage I have always found profoundly affecting.

It's the tale of a sensitive Eton boy – with a schoolboy’s tendency towards the sensational – staying at a friend’s English estate during the summer of 1900, and unwittingly and increasingly entangled in clandestine adult passions. Hartley apparently wrote the novel meaning Marrian and Ted to be objected to, only to find that readers sided with the forbidden love. It’s a book surely to find more favour with rule-breakers and romantics. I mean, it opens with a quote from Jane Austen. But, per his introduction, Hartley seems happily to have the strength of his book as maybe something he hadn’t quite planned. Colm Tóibín’s introduction to the NYRB edition speaks of how he “had softened the character of Marian and Ted as he worked on the book and had been too interested in the aura of uncontrolled sensuality between them to bother disapproving of them.”** There is a passage where, having been at Brandham Hall a while, Leo’s happiness overrides the strictures of religion; his flourished sense of ease and joy makes him positively despise judgementalism. Away from the oppression of school and left to his own devices, Leo becomes happy and altruistic. Yet instead of leaving this feeling a triumph, it can be read that Hartley means the subsequent tragedy to be a punishment for this transgression, this blasphemy. Leo is a conservative child and his friend Marcus more so – they’re Etonians – but happiness suits him, kindness enlivens him, but he is left wide open and vulnerable to injury. Hartley is good at the bubble happiness puts a person in. Yet, ultimately it would seem that Hartley’s joy in seeing Leo happy – that is: the Leo from this passage that berates religion for judging people always as sinners – and Hartley’s/Leo’s fascination and bafflement with taboo sensuality makes this a far more empathic story than moral. This is the side that wins out.

 

The centrepiece is the cricket match, which takes up several chapters, bringing to the fore the class conflict which is otherwise always in the background. The themes are obvious, just as the use of signifiers and symbols are evident throughout the novel. For example, Leo eventually takes afront at the green of his suited gifted by Marion, its colour signifying his naivete when he wants so much to be considered adult (this is the early Twentieth Century where the concept if children as mini-adults is standard); the threat of deadly nightshade; blood on an envelope, etc.  But the theme of class war, otherwise just a given backdrop, is bundled up in this sporting confronting between the town and Brandam Hall. The sides seem relatively equal – one side by skill and the other by brute force – but it’s Leo, the outsider and inbetweener – that wins the day. And his catching Ted out is portentous in itself. The rules of the game keep the war in check, but the battle is there.

 

The school rules about a boy’s conduct are an ill guide for Leo’s negotiation of this adult world. Hartley is very good on Leo’s various motivations, at the complex influences on his decisions; for example, on why he reads Marian’s note and the decision arrived at from a schoolboy’s moral code. Leo also turns to greater forces, creates his own religion of “curses” to try react to and control what he can’t. Beneath all the conservatism and rubrics that he’s happy to accord to, Leo is a passionate creature really, sensitive and observant, naïve and imaginative; and the conflict of these opposing sides will eventually lead to a breakdown and lifelong “drying up”. 

There’s also a lot of pathetic fallacy, what with all the greatest summer matching Leo’s happiness and passion – which Leo wishes to get hotter and hotter – and the coming on of storms when things start to go wrong. It also alludes to Leo’s experiences being symbolic of the passing of a century’s innocence, something of the fin de siècle, as he often says his thinking of the promise of the next century and how it let him down. This is, after all, an aging man reflecting in the shadow of World Wars. Perhaps this is the novel’s most tenuous allusion, but there is no doubt that it is moving when he recounts on the subsequent losses during wartime in the epilogue. Yet such evident symbolism throughout the book never capsizes the subtlety and mystery. And note the heady rising of the heat at a moment with Ted… and a feeling like a “feather on a tiger”. It’s total accord with the symbolism and signifiers already established in the narrative and hints at the novel’s greater repression and mystery.

‘The Go-Between’ is not the paradigm of ambiguity like ‘The Turn of the Screw’, nor the Gothic mystery of ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, or such blatant class cruelty such as ‘The House of Mirth’, or the ripe nostalgia of ‘Cider with Rosie’; but it has a little of all of these and walks an eloquent and emotional path across English green fields all of its own.

And here is an excellent de-coding by grumblingappendix of the novel's deep signifiers, signposting what I have been coy about.

 

 

The Go-Between

Director - Joseph Losey

Screenplay - Harold Pinter

Stars - Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard

UK, 1971

 

The tone of the novel’s ominous prologue is well captured by the piano opening of Michel Legrand’s theme for Joseph Losey’s film adaption of ‘The Go-Between’. It is choppy and more resonant of doom-laden horror before delivering its flourishes of melodrama. This is an apt and astute choice, evoking the impending tragedy and emotional devastation of the novel’s prologue, creating the atmosphere of pending doom.

 

The scenes at first are rapid, with some narrative and some temporal play creating clues and a little abstraction. It instantly conveys that this is a story that resounds from one end of a life to the other; it reminds of Nicolas Roeg dicing around with time. Harold Pinter’s screenplay and Joseph Losey’s direction immediately know that this is the strength of the piece, as well as that primal scene, no matter if critics told Hartley that the bookends were too weighty. But then, as Leo settles into long, languid, sweltering summer days at the Hall, the pace discreetly slows as the tale unfolds. In fact, the first time the films pauses and lingers is on Julie Christie’s pretty sunbathing face. Any stiltedness is totally in accord with English Edwardian stately manners and Pinter’s often clipped dialogue conveys the distance between a person’s passion and performance as a personality. He cherry picks some of the best lines and details from the novel– there’s a dog rather than a horse called Dry Toast; there’s a bloodstained envelope – and, of course, starts with its famous and celebrated opening line about the past being a foreign country. Pinter’s sparse, splintering style is superficially at odds with Hartley’s flourishes, but Pinter gets to the nub of it, and Losey’s formal play captures the abstractions. Despite the obvious symbolism, both writers know to hold all revelations at arm’s length.

 

Dominic Guard sets a great rendition as Leo, all naivete and manners; his halting yet precise affectation when speaking capturing how out of depth he is and trying to rely on a certain kind of upper-class conduct. He exudes stiff upper-lipness in the face of anxiety. This hits its mark truly when Leo is in an emotional state, having been hurt by Marian, and badgers Ted into explaining “spooning” (silly word). Sweaty, upset, insistent and clutching in a way he never is elsewhere, it’s a heart-breaking moment of a child desperate to understand an adult world he isn’t prepared for. It’s a moment that Hartley himself seemingly saw as exceeding his own original: “- I wept at the scene where Leo questions Ted about ‘spooning’ – which is more than I did when I wrote my version of it.” Guard, in recollection, says he doesn’t remember being directed much, although he says Losey could be ruthless with others (Guard went on to be a psychotherapist). It’s all performance in the face of unease, of putting on a brave face but being out of depth. Even down to the detail that, by his own admission, Guard looks like he’s in pain when singing to a crowd.

 

My memory of the film is always of Leo running through vast green fields. They even painted some of the grass which surely only adds to a certain dream-like tinge to Leo’s memories. Julie Christie is effortlessly beautiful and disarming, radiating an unaffected charm that puts her as somewhat an outsider just as much as Leo. Edward Fox is effortlessly regal; Michael Gough full of that old man distractedness; Margaret Leighton perfectly glacial. Alan Bates is suitably raw and insecure in a particularly masculine way, his unaffected charm and temper showing how performative the Brandham Hall lot are by comparison. The moments between him and Leo are true highlights, always shuffling round each other and never quite coming to the point, but there’s a true warmth there. He’s someone else out of his depth.

 

It a brilliantly pitched rendition of the novel, where Losey’s playfulness and Pinter’s screenplay keep it from being just a highly respectable adaptation, but something that truly captures the oddness of the novel also.

 

The Go-Between 

Director

Pete Travis

Writer - Adrian Hodges

Stars - Jim Broadbent, Jack Hollington, Samuel Joslin

 

Which is quite what the BBC adaptation is. It’s a more straightforward version. Of course, comparison with Losey’s version is inevitable, and much is anticipated to be lacking. It tries to capture the conflict of Leo’s old and young selves arguing with one another, but it’s literal and it feels a little unconvincing, a little mundanely executed in that BBC heritage fashion. Jim Broadbent staring maudlinly from the train which rheumy eyes sets the tone. None of the crisp English repression here.

 

It is, of course, prettily filmed with the contemporary style of a constantly shuddering camera. The past is gorgeous green and gauzy, again hinting at sentiment rather than clarity. Jack Hollington as Leo is notably younger here, a far more passive entity with some of his verboseness even going to others. For example, he barely asserts himself with Ted Burgess when caught and injured on the haystack. Ted even mentions that he’s a little small for his age, but what we don’t truly get is Leo’s overcompensation by stressing the mannerisms of his Eton status. He is more bashful than anxious. Leo’s a little robbed of agency, but it does accentuate his vulnerability.

 

We get Trimmingham’s (Stephen Campbell Moore) injured face as far more than just an ornamental scar here, which is an improvement. The patriarch is removed, making way for more Trimmingham but missing the point of the there-but-absent patriarch. And the younger ages of Marian and Ted are more appropriate. Ben Batt is far more an obvious hunk here as Ted, rather than say Bates’ bit-of-rough, more erotised with nudity and adorned with a beard that is a little designer trimmed. He doesn’t have Bates’ presence of being and oversized boy. Some of the rough, raw edges of Losey’s version have been sandpapered off. Even little details nod at this: for example, Leo now says “Bad luck!” instead of “Hard cheese!”  There is a sense that everything is made that bit more obvious, less mysterious, knowing looks more readable. It gets increasingly worse when a voiceover is employed by Leo to explain his spells. But then it sidesteps Leo’s confrontation with the deadly nightshade. Even the pathetic fallacy is amped up to have Leo lying in a torrent of rain. It becomes obvious that this version is all Forbidden Love and sentiment instead of the mysteries of passion and misunderstanding. 

 

There’s a sense of a respectable cover version that fails to get at the essence. It replaces the insight and the mystery of Hartley’s tale by reducing it to just romantic tragedy and voiceovers. It's similar to how many adaptations of Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights' focus on Cathy and Heathcliff and forego the wider picture.

**

Ali Smith writes of Hartley's novel, “It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct,” and that’s the oddness and mystery I have referred to. Joseph Losey had already delivered crystalline, slightly untouchable and abstract films on Englishness with ‘The Servant’ and ‘Accident’, and this tone fits perfectly for telling Leo’s sad tale of a life ruined by knowing and not knowing, of innocence and manipulation. Perhaps in some way, the final revelation of “spooning” hinted in Leo’s mind of a love that dare not speak its name, and so he shut down and dried up rather than accept it. But that’s just one enigma to ‘The Go-Between’, a fascinating, lush, eloquent and sympathetic novel of growing up in the oddness and harshness of the English class system. And not to forget that the teenage Leo’s diary ends up written in a code long forgotten and impenetrable to his older self. Childhood is a foreign country too.