The Go-Between Read Online Free

match against the
village, and most vividly of all, the deadly nightshade growing in
the outhouse. I can still see it, it was enormous, like a tree, and
I remember wondering if I ought to warn my hostess about it.
Otherwise there was little resemblance between the two visits: I
wasn’t asked to play cricket for the Hall, still less the part of a
go-between.
      A friend pointed out to me, something which I hadn’t
noticed myself, that Leo was a natural go-between, it was his
function in life, and the epilogue to the story was necessary if
only to show that the moment he was asked to resume his job, he
did. He had, as he believed, ruined his life by taking messages
between two people, yet when Marian asked him to take a message to
her grandson he willingly, if grum-blingly, consented. Fifty years
later he was still the same person: his character was his destiny
and it hadn’t changed. His only life was in the lives of other
people: cut off from them, he withered.
      More than any other part of the book, the Epilogue
has been found fault with. The Prologue and the 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.
      I still feel that the story had to have an epilogue,
not necessarily the one I gave it, but something to round it off.
You can’t help wanting to know “what happened in the end” if you
are at all interested in the characters in a novel. I certainly
wanted to know, and I couldn’t have known without writing it down,
for my ideas only take shape when the pen is in my hand. Others
didn’t object to the Epilogue
qua
Epilogue; they
complained that it was out of key with the rest and left one
feeling flat. Why drag in Marian again when she was so different
from what she used to be that you could hardly tell she was the
same person?
      But I wanted to point a moral and perhaps it was the
moral more than the Epilogue itself that some people found
redundant.
      A novel grows imperceptibly in the writer’s mind and
it is difficult to remember, afterwards, what one’s intentions were
at different stages—how they developed, what changes and
modifications they went through. Also, in retrospect, one’s own
thoughts about a book get mixed up with other people’s— who, in
some ways, have a clearer impression of it than one has oneself. I
originally meant
The Go-Between
to be a story of innocence
betrayed, and not only betrayed but corrupted. I was and still am
irritated by the way the bad boys and girls of modern fiction are
allowed to get away with the most deplorable behaviour receiving
not reproof, but compassion, almost congratulation, from the
author. My story, I thought, shall be of a quite different kind.
There shall be a proper segregation of sheep and goats and the
reader shall be left in no doubt as to which of the characters I,
at any rate, feel sorry for. I didn’t know what was to become of
Marian and Ted, but through their agency Leo was to be utterly
demoralized. “Now find excuses for them if you can,” I meant to
ask.
      But as the story went on I softened towards them. I
found I hadn’t got it in me to draw their portraits in such dark
colours and should only make a mess of it if I tried to rank them
with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, or with Monsieur de Valmont and
Madame de Merteuil. I found I wanted them to be ordinary
flesh-and-blood people—perhaps with too much flesh and blood—driven
by forces stronger than themselves; and I wish I had made it
clearer that Marian was under great pressure from her mother to
marry Lord Trimingham. That was one reason why she treated him so
badly—she couldn’t take it out of her mother so she took it out of
him as a sort of revenge for the double game she was being forced
to play.
      But I agree with Dr. Leavis that a novel should be
concerned with moral issues, and from moral issues it