The Go-Between

What’s up, after reading this remarkable post i am too cheerful
to share my experience here with mates

This is the sort of spam that arrives. It is atypical only in that usually it’s a desire to share my stuff with their mates, if they have any, and the World Wide Web.

A reader has stopped reading (and I don’t blame her) because these posts are too much like tracts that were read to her at school; so here is today’s lesson.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Sorry, no prize for recognising the opening line of The Go-Between by LP Hartley, published in 1953. It was also used in the 1971 film which was, unusually, as good as the book; great cast and director, script writer, composer: Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter, Michel Legrand.  These lines by Emily Brontë appear on the preceding page.

But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers,
The bright blue flowers and velvet sod,
Were strange conductors to the bowers
Thy daring footsteps must have trod.

It introduces the G-B rather well. Incidentally, LPH was a prolific author, now completely out of fashion. The only other one of his that I have read is The Hireling and it’s not as good as the G-B. I am puzzled as to why Emily B has an umlaut. As usual, Wiki has an answer – though I cannot vouch for its accuracy.

The Brontë family can be traced to the Irish clan mac Aedh Ó Proinntigh, which literally means ‘son of Aedh, grandson of Proinnteach’. Aedh is a male name derived from Aodh, meaning “fire”. “Proinnteach” (“the bestower”) originated as a byname for a generous person. Literally meaning “banquet hall,” the word is composed of the Irish proinn (“banquet”) (a cognate of the Latin prandium “meal”) and teach (“house”, “hall”).

Ó Proinntigh was earlier anglicised as Prunty and sometimes Brunty. At some point, the father of the sisters, Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), conceived of the alternate spelling with the diaeresis over the terminal “e” to indicate that the name has two syllables. It is not known for certain what motivated him to do so, and multiple theories exist to account for the change. He may have wished to hide his humble origins. As a man of letters, he would have been familiar with classical Greek and may have chosen the name after the cyclops Brontes (literally ‘thunder’).

All sounds to me like a load of bollocks.

My edition of the G-B, seventh impression 1963, is annotated. The original owner wrote in the margin in pencil “this boy  12 to 13 years of age obviously suffers from hallucinations and urgently needs treatment for remedy by a psychiatrist”. This completely misses the point of fiction. The whole idea is for fiction to be a distortion of reality, not an exact reflection. It should, like theatre and music, evoke emotion. It should allow a suspension of disbelief. This is as true now as when Coleridge espoused the concept in the early 19th century. Hartley himself wrote, “it’s better to write about things that you feel, than things that you know about”.

The final line of The Go-Between evokes the first line of Rebecca.

… I turned in at the lodge gates, wondering how I should say what I had come to say, when the south-west prospect of the Hall, long hidden from my memory, sprang into view.