'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.

FrightFest 2019 - Day 4

Day 4

SPIRAL

Kurtis David Harder, 2019, Canada

In the ‘90s, Malik and Aaron (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman and Ari Cohen) move into the suburbs with an eye to improving their general quality of life and that of their daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte). But being a same sex couple, they do stand out a little, even in this apparently accepting community. Pretty soon there’s an old man lurking outside, house break-ins and what seems to be weird rituals going on in the house over there. Bowyer-Chapman’s performance is exemplary so that it’s painful to watch this character being broken by malicious external forces. So grounded and real is the context that Harder’s deceptively non-intrusive direction and Bowyer-Chapman’s performance creates that even when the other stuff closes in, this central character and his struggle never feels undermined.

The look is clean, a little washed out in a stylish hue, like a spread in a home-and-lifestyle magazine. The feel is all increasing paranoia and something sinister closing in. With its starting point being that those that are different are the most vulnerable and with an ending that draws a direct straight line to modern prejudices, ‘Spiral’ is disturbing and upsetting with none of the catharsis of ‘Get Out’. The dread is palpable with Colin Minihan and John Poliquin’s script tapping into that most troubling of genre themes, that the worst can happen to good people for no reason, or because they’re trying to improve their lives.

EAT BRAINS LOVE

Rodman Flender, 2019, USA

An agreeable enough zombie rom-com: he’s a slightly dim slacker and she’s somewhat of a popular girl and they are finally bonded when they contract a sexually-transmitted virus that turns them into zombies. It’s bright and sometimes amusing without really bringing anything new to the table. Well, there is a full-on naked zombie banquet… You know how it is: zombiedom symbolises, X-Men style, outsiderism and the persecuted with our blighted couple soon going with the idea of being zombie vigilantes whilst pursued by shady military interests. And little forbidden love when one of the pursuers has a crush on the undead guy. More interesting is the Cronenbergian aspect of the zombie outbreak as a STD, also a touch of ‘Scanners’, but aside from the banquet shocker, this is a bright, cheerful but standard young adult horror. Entries such as ‘Warm Bodies’ and ‘Anna and the Apocalypse’ utilise zombie tropes for youthful angst but never quite aim for more than just romantic superficialities (although previous FrightFest film ‘Life After Beth’ is one of the best).  

DANIEL ISN'T REAL 

Adam Egypt Mortimer, 2019, USA

Mortimer’s ‘Some Kind of Hate’ showed a filmmaker with a genuine affinity for capturing that uncomfortable edge of self-hatred and -harm that haunts young people, and ‘Daniel Isn’t Real’ taps into that same vein of troubled psychology. By turns an Imaginary Friend horror and a phantasmagoria shuffling the protagonist’s reality, ‘Daniel’ was almost as visceral and trippy as ‘Bliss’: the interludes with the void accompanied by an overwhelming ambient drone sounded transcendental on such a big screen and big sound-system (“By the producers of ‘Mandy’” will perhaps help sell it you).

Luke (Miles Robbins) had an imaginary childhood friend Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger) that he banished when things got a little weird, but now Daniel is back to give Luke confidence in adulthood; the imaginary friend now a kind of Brett Easton Ellis rich kid narcissist lifestyle advisor. He's big on toxic masculinity. A highlight is Sasha Lane as an anarchic skateboarder-artist with oddles of charisma, providing yet another example of a tough and assured FrightFest female character without the recourse to the tired cliché of being kick-ass. The trajectory from one person’s mental health to cosmic horror conveyed the failure of reality to protect against the genre and, throughout this festival, offered as much tragedy as disturbance. With the people I spoke to, this was a festival favourite.

READY OR NOT

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, 2019, USA

Grace (Samara Weaving) is marrying Daniel (Adam Brody), who is part of the mega-rich Le Domus family – and a rich family is usually eccentric and dangerous in horror and the Le Domus’ aren’t an exception. She’s genuinely excited to be joining the family – she’s an orphan – but it involves playing one of those ritualistic party games that the rich like to play, in this case, a lethal game of hide-and-seek. There’s a lot of humour in the bad guys trying to learn on-the-hoof how to hunt – it gets a lot of mileage from the crossbow – a lovely location in the huge house and a lot of satisfaction in Grace having a no-nonsense response to her predicament. Considering the current climate when it’s high in our political consciousness, horror about class divides isn’t likely to take a back seat soon.

As proceedings become gleefully ridiculous and cruel, and although the entire cast are finely attuned to the material so that it doesn’t crumble under predictability, Weaving’s performance centres it all with a vulnerability and resolve that fleshes a character that could have been just two-dimensional. No, she doesn’t feel like an incapable victim. As long as the rich are targeting and abusing the lower classes is prevalent, horror will always have payback tales. But this one is fast, fun, peppered with nastiness and knowing performances. Like ‘Crawl’, it’s a crowd-pleaser.

NEKROTRONIC

Kiah Roache-Turner, 2018, Australia

It starts with one of those animated expositions and narrations that warn you this is going to be chock full of stuff that could be found in Black Metal lyrics. But here, demons get you through social media. I have never found the internet scary and adding demons doesn’t make it more so. A couple of sanitation workers – a Chosen One and his Dim Comedy Relief friend – find themselves caught up in the battle between the Underworld Queen (Monica Belluci, obviously having a great time) and Nekromancers, who are on permanent kick-ass mode. There’s 3D-printing of demons, and… 

Well, you see, where other off-the-wall titles like this do so with self-awareness and gonzo-humour (‘Bullets for Justice’ and ‘Ghost Killers vs Bloody Mary’) or even just jet-black humour (‘Why Don’t You Just Die!’), ‘Nekrotronic’ seems to want us to take it seriously as an epic. This means that whilst we are meant to be having fun, it wants us to invest genuine emotion to the plight of the one-dimensional sisters. But it’s full of deux ex machinas, overly complex world-building and the humour has long drained away by this point.

'The Prodigy' by Herman Hesse: nature vs eduction

‘The Prodigy’ – Herman Hesse

Originally ‘Beneath the Wheel (Unterm Rad), 1906 

Peter Owen Publishers translation, ‘The Prodigy’, 1957

Translated from the German by WJ Strachan

Herman Hesse’s bildungsroman 'The Prodigy' - the original title of 'Beneath the Wheel' is more explicitly aggressive -  focuses on Hans Giebenrath, an intelligent and sensitive boy, eager to please and excel from his provincial origins. But having successfully entered a theological school, he finds that its focus on the technical rather than the emotional education of the young drives him to a breakdown. Hans’ ambitions, wants and needs rest between the poles of the natural and educational worlds and the establishment falls far short of meeting these. 

School in ‘The Prodigy’ is a serious business which, if it is not openly abusive, is oppressive and devoid of compassion. There is no satirical take on teachers as in Mark Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ (1876), or elongated sequences where the classroom is a chamber of humiliation and physical punishment as in James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ or David Storey’s ‘Saville’ (1976). In Joyce’s ‘Portrait’, the protagonist rejects the source of his torment, namely Catholic education, and, even if he is not happy by the book’s close, he has survived. Storey’s ‘Saville’ also features a prodigy, a son of a miner who, by strength of natural intellect, may ascend from his class origins; yet he is unable to escape the front room of his home and subsequent destructive bitterness sets in. In ‘The Prodigy’, it is not outright cruelty and sadism that defines the boy’s experience but simple indifference to whom Hans may be – an emotional depravation. It is Hans’ inability to truly rebel that is finally his fatal flaw. His friend Heilner personifies all the youthful and successful rebellion and bitterness that Hans cannot achieve and barely acknowledges within himself. Heilner is to some extent Hans’ inverse reflection, a parallel set up upon the first time that they meet. Both boys are strolling alone in the woods and meet at a lake. Both flatly agree upon the beauty of the place: their friendship is sealed. With Heilner as a companion, Hans can gradually fail his school and survive the consequences; but when Heilner is gone, Hans is lost, friendless and at the mercy of lessons and expectations, which leads to a breakdown. Friendship then emerges as a natural element, a counter-active force to the unnatural climate of education. 

In Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (1884), education is – albeit humorously – something to be avoided and the knowledge of the natural world becomes central and superior. Civility is to be satirised. Tom Sawyer may not be able to reject society absolutely – he always needs an audience to play to – but Huck can manage alone just fine. He is smart, cunning and eloquent in an effortlessly self-educated sense, and these qualities make him a survivor. He can take or leave culture. And not for Hans the precocious insubordination of the boys of Kipling’s ‘Stalky and Co.’ (1899), or Compton’s ‘Just William’ who quite happily pal up to upset establishment. It is not learning in itself that pressurises Hans – indeed, he has a voracious appetite for it – but rather the demands and concepts that culture has of education as an institution. There are a number of passages in which Hesse lays out this institution for indoctrination and compliance:

There was something wild, untamed, uncultured in him that must first be broken, a dangerous flame that must be extinguished and stamped out.

And: 

...it is the school’s job to break in the natural man, subdue and greatly reduce him; in accordance with the principles sanctioned by authority is its task to make him a useful member of the community and awake in him those qualities, the complete development of which is brought to a triumphant conclusion by the well-calculated discipline of the barrack square.

 [Penguin edition 1973, pg. 43]

It is not blatant brutality or unkindness that breaks Hans but rather that the education is at the expense of humanity, ignoring his sensitivity for his propensity for learning: school as a passive-aggressive tool for dehumanisation.

***

In 'The Prodigy', there is a moment when the order of narrative seems shuffled: the book begins with a brief account of Joseph Giebenrath’s life and then his son Hans’ candidacy for the ‘Lendexamen’; it is only late in the book [chapter five] that Hans’ earlier childhood pre-candidacy is detailed. Having “failed” at school, Hans returns home and visits the Falken where a host of memories come back to him as a prodigy. It has not always been local priests and teachers that have educated Hans. There is his brief but densely sketched friendship with a sickly orphan Hermann Rechtenheil [pg. 114] who taught Hans how to fish, to “study the weather” and a whole litany of practical and observational tricks. Even in this Hans has been an excellent pupil for his friend, but Rechtenheil dies quickly and leaves way for the subsequent influences of Heilner’s friendship. He too disappears and Hans’ need for a stronger, educating friend leaves him vulnerable and lost. But in Rechtenheil, Hans’ need for being taught and for the natural world had once been perfectly embodied. This sequence in which Hans’ early life is conveyed comes latterly in order to show that which he had forgotten and has lost in his quest to become a great student. 

Hesse endows Hans’ world with lengthily and beautiful passages on rivers and woods and nature, almost as eloquent and poetic as those of Laurie Lee in ‘Cider With Rosie’ (1959) (“almost” because ‘Rosie’ is pretty much peerless). Fishing is tied to Hans’ bond with nature and with giving him the respite and autonomy he desires as much as academic skill. When Herman is attracted to a girl, the imagery is of animals and (with the cart) the threat of civilisation and technology:

… this one was so lively and talkative and so indifferent to his presence and awkwardness that he drew in his horns helplessly and, slightly offended, withdrew into himself like a snail brushed by a cartwheel. 

[pg. 123]

It’s a lovely passage evoking the shyness and inelegance of first crushes and feelings of perplexing attraction. A similar mixture of the natural world and feeling runs through his desire, expressed by the imagery of breezes, of gardens, of clutching fences and stopping halfway across bridges listening to rushing waters. [chapter six] This isn’t quite innuendo, but the symbolism is clear. It’s overwhelming to Hans, being the susceptible soul that he is.

After a night of revelry that puts his observations and extroversion to the test, Hans is found drowned: but was this an accident or was it suicide? The ending argues that if we do not balance nature with nurture then disillusionment, alienation and self-destruction is, perhaps, the tragic end for sensitive souls who cannot cope. How we failed them. Or certainly this is how sensitive souls like to tell their narratives. This is a typical outcome for fictions based on outsiders of some form victimised by society (early texts exploring female roles who always seem driven to death, for example) and here it blends tragedy, suffering and a kind of wistfulness. If perhaps this sides too much with victimhood, Hesse nevertheless presents a fine tirade against education as a tool of indoctrination, and as such as antithetical to individualism and the natural self.