The Go-Between Read Online Free Page A

is only a
short step to moral judgments. I thought that Marian behaved very
badly and Ted only less badly, and one reason why I wrote the
Epilogue was to show how her sins found her out. Altogether she
ruined at least half-a-dozen lives; but she didn’t get off lightly
herself. She was condemned by the strength of her feelings (which
in my view was her best quality) to live in a place she hated in
order to be near the grandson who she must have known disliked her.
I was afraid that the critics would say I had portrayed a monster
but they didn’t: indeed one of them said that though it was obvious
I disapproved of Marian he was on her side, because she represented
life in its richness and complexity. And several people have told
me that they liked her or at any rate found her attractive.
      Of course any novelist would rather have it said
that he had drawn an attractive woman than that he had upheld the
Moral Law.
      I am not altogether a pessimist, and another reason
for the Epilogue was that it gave a slightly more hopeful ending to
the story than it would have had if it had finished with Ted’s
death. At last Leo gets a glimpse of the South-West prospect of
Brandham Hall—the good side of it, so to speak—which had always
been hidden from his memory. To his memory the whole episode had
been an unrelieved disaster, so unrelieved as to turn him into a
misanthrope and virtually to cut him off from human fellowship.
With the recognition that there had always been a silver lining to
the cloud we are to suppose that his attitude relaxes and that by
acting as go-between for Marian and her grandson he re-enters the
world of the feelings. Something may have come of his second talk
with Edward—a lifting of the “curse,” perhaps, and a clearing of
the way for the young man’s marriage to his cousin.
      A word about the “curse.” How far Leo believed in
his magical powers I shouldn’t like to say. With one part of his
mind he undoubtedly did, or he wouldn’t have felt the compulsive
need to concoct the brew which was to cast a spell on Marian and
Ted and break up their relationship. It was to be a spell not a
curse, and he measured its potency by the emotional and spiritual
distress the casting of it cost him. If it had been a curse my task
would have been easier, for then the story would have been seen as
the working out of the curse. I shouldn’t have required the reader
to believe in it, any more than Hawthorne requires us to believe in
the supernatural element in his novels, but Leo would have believed
in it and been consumed by guilt and remorse. But that would have
been another story. As I saw it, Leo was too fond of Ted and Marian
to have cursed them, even if he thought a curse could have harmed
them, demi-gods that they were. The curse that Marian spoke of
could be construed as the logical outcome of several people
behaving in a very irresponsible manner, of whom she was the chief
offender.
      I can’t remember at what point in the story I began
to identify Marian with the deadly nightshade, perhaps not until
the moment when Leo pulls it out of the ground. Even now I am not
sure whether the plant stood for Marian alone, or for the whole
principle of sex, in which beside the beauty and attraction there
is also a strong dose of poison. At the time, Leo felt he was
destroying something that was entirely evil; later on, he had his
doubts.
     
      In destroying the belladonna I had also destroyed
Ted and perhaps destroyed myself. Was it really a moment of triumph
when I lay prostrate on the ground, and the uplifted root rained
down earth on me?
     
      The withering plant and the dry grains of earth
symbolize the coming desiccation of Leo’s nature. Like Antaeus,
held in mid-air by the grip of Hercules, he could no longer draw
his nourishment from the ground.
      
The Go-Between
is pregnant with symbols.
The deadly nightshade is the most obvious one, but the landscape
and the climate also had a