Books: Cow Meets Gentleman

THE GO-BETWEEN (311 pp.)—L P. Hartley—Knopf ($3.50).

“Are you Viscount Trimingham?” asked little Leo Colston.

When his lordship nodded, Leo was amazed. “I had never met a lord before, nor did I ever expect to meet one. It didn’t matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being . . . long, long after.”

Leo is not alone in his view. All but one of the impeccable ladies and gentlemen who have been invited to Brandham Hall in the summer of 1900 believe that a lord is a lord first. They have no difficulty in ignoring the fact that Lord Trimingham is, in fact, not only a human being but a tragic one. He has returned from the South African war with a sickle-shaped scar across his face, a “down-weeping, blank eye,” a twisted mouth that distorts his whole face, and (Author Hartley hints) some internal wound that has left him a man in appearance only. “But you mustn’t say [you are sorry] to him, or to Marian either,” the younger son of the house tells Leo, his house guest. “Mama wouldn’t like it . . . Mama wants Marian to marry him.”

A Bit of a Lady-Killer. Little Leo has no idea what Marian thinks about marrying Lord Trimingham. He only knows that she is his boyish ideal of a goddess and that he worships her beauty almost as much as Lord Trimingham’s viscountcy. To fetch and carry for Maid Marian is heaven to Leo—especially when she asks him to carry a secret letter from her to Ted Burgess and rewards him with “an enchanting smile.”

Leo finds Farmer Burgess to be a fine, strapping man, but just a low-class fellow for all that; yet Leo starts asking questions about Ted because any man who has a mysterious bond with Marian is worth investigating. But he gets only short, veiled answers. “Mr. Burgess is a bit of a lad,” says the coachman. “He’s a bit of a lady-killer, but there’s no harm in that,” says Lord Trimingham casually.

A Simple Tune. All month long, Leo acts as Ted’s and Marian’s go-between, carrying the messages which Marian says are business arrangements. Not even Marian’s hardboiled, matchmaking mother guesses that the young boy may be the ruin of her snobbish plans. And when one day Leo glimpses a few lines in one of Marian’s letters (“Darling, darling, darling, same time, same place, this evening”), and is struck all of a heap by the revelation, it is for a disillusioned schoolboy’s reason, not a scandalized adult’s. “How could she have sunk so low? To be what we [schoolboys] all. despised more than anything—soft, soppy . . . a subject for furtive giggling . . . No wonder she wanted it kept secret.”

Gently, skillfully, Author Hartley conducts his tense story to a bitter end, making its adult drama the more effective by framing it always in the eye of a child. He paints a near-perfect picture of country-house life at the turn of the century—its etiquette, its croquet and cricket matches, its exact relation to classes and countries outside its own. He also has a simple tune to play on his symbols—for Leo (the lion) stands for a young England ignorant of the social upheaval that the new century is destined to bring in. with such lawbreakers as Ted and Marian as its forerunners. But not effective forerunners, for Heroine Marian, despite her love and passion for Farmer Ted, is too Victorian to crash the class barrier. When Leo at last asks: “Marian, why don’t you marry Ted?”, she only bursts into tears and wails: “I couldn’t, I couldn’t . . . I must marry [Trimingham] . . . I must. I’ve got to!”

Polish, not Potholes. The Go-Between, a moviemaker’s dream, has also been hailed by British critics as one of the best novels to come out of postwar England. Certainly it is one of the most significant, and worth study by anyone who wants to know where English fiction is heading nowadays. No other novel of recent years is a better example of English writing at its contemporary peak of stylized, aristocratic poise—never a flubbed phrase, never a pothole in the smooth course. Author Leslie Poles Hartley, a Harrow-and-Oxford man with six finely finished novels behind him (Eustace and Hilda and The Boat), was born in 1895—roughly contemporary with the late great D. H. Lawrence—and the theme of The Go-Between is pretty much that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Yet the two books are as different as life and death. Where Lawrence horrified the English-speaking world by treating a sacred cow as if it were a bucking bronco, Author Hartley, 25 years later, shares (with many others of England’s contemporary novelists) a desire to polish rather than pioneer. For all its virtues, The Go-Between is a straightforward case of what happens when sacred cow meets perfect gentleman.