The Go-Between Read Online Free Page B

symbolical meaning for me. Their appeal
was to my mind—my subconscious mind perhaps— rather than to my
mind’s eye. They were obsessive, not aesthetic, an integral part of
the story intended to deepen its meaning, not an embellishment to
increase its artistic effect and help the reader to visualize it.
But I have never deliberately introduced a symbol into any of my
books. As with the deadly nightshade, so with
The Shrimp and
the Anemone
: the symbolic meaning was implicit before I became
aware of it. It is plain to me now, as it must be to any reader,
that Hilda the anemone was devouring Eustace the shrimp; but it
wasn’t plain to me at the time. Some people have told me that my
novels are best when most symbolical. But symbolism is, to my
thinking, an ingredient that, like garlic in cooking, should be
used sparingly; in a realistic or semi-realistic novel you can
easily have too much of it. We all have moments when the external
world appears to us in the guise and with the intensity of symbols,
but these moments, for most of us, are rare.
      “And what shall I more say? For the time would fail
me to tell of”... many things that I should like to tell of. I once
asked a bookseller his opinion as to why
The Go-Between
was the best-liked of my novels, and he replied “Because there is
something in it for everyone.” One or two of my friends seemed to
think this was an ignoble reason for the public’s preference, but
to me it seems as good as any.
     
      — L . P. HARTLEY
      August 1962
     
     
     
     
      PROLOGUE
     
     
      THE PAST is a foreign country: they do things
differently there.
      When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the
bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a
small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had
filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two
dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small
one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled
up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination
lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and
one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use
was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had
belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite
clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the
first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had
meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as
perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate
pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early
ownership—feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.
      It was a roll-call in reverse; the children of the
past announced their names, and I said “Here.” Only the diary
refused to disclose its identity.
      My first impression was that it was a present
someone had brought me from abroad. The shape, the lettering, the
purple limp leather curling upwards at the corners, gave it a
foreign look; and it had, I could see, gold edges. Of all the
exhibits it was the only one that might have been expensive. I must
have treasured it; why, then, could I not give it a context?
      I did not want to touch it and told myself that this
was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and
disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a
blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and
suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I
remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of
touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my
show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for
I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and
this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and
let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect,
however, I would close my