I do have a real topic in mind, but getting to it involves some probably annoying professorial stuff by way of preliminaries. I also operate under the assumption that if you are reading this essay you are likely to be a reader also of books, including works of fiction. According to Aristotle literature is mimesis, a word usually translated as imitation or sometimes with the phrase imitation of an action. Maybe such words as presentation, interpretation, or description might also serve for the relationship between life as lived experience and verbal narration. I don’t know what your favorite novel is, but I suspect you agree that it tells a story. The novel is a presentation, treatment, or interpretation of life in narrative form.
One of the happier signs of my wife Joan’s improvement in hospital is her desire to read a novel, though the novel she specified surprised me. It is L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). I was surprised because only a year or so ago we read the novel together, out loud, and that was not our first reading of it. The first reading had been at Oxford, probably in 1959. It was among our earliest bonding experiences and has been in our lives, so to speak, for well over half a century. Chances are good that you have read it as well, or seen the pretty good movie version.
The book is the fictional reminiscence voiced by a man looking back in late middle age of a his experience as a young lad in 1900 while on a vacation visit at the grand house of a blue-blooded school classmate. The experience had been traumatic, but in ways it would take years of maturing and reflecting to understand. At the time, he had innocently been a participant in a scandalous and consequential violation of rigid social taboos far beyond his childish knowing. These have to do with sex and social class.
Anyway, Joan asked me to bring her the book. By happy accident I could not find our old paperback Penguin with it yellowing brittle pages. In my undergraduate days at Oxford I had been astounded by the town’s plethora of bookshops, new and used, and by the endless riches of their contents. I was particularly impressed by the variety and cheapness of orange and white Penguin paperbacks, and there are still many crumbling survivors from that era now mouldering on my shelves. I say my inability to find the book was “happy” because I was forced to get another copy pronto. The one I got for less than ten dollars and in less than a week from Abebooks is vastly superior in its physical integrity, and it has a gem of an introduction by another fine novelist, Colm Toibin. Toibin’s essay expanded my understanding of the delicate subtleties of a novel I had thought I already knew quite well. Over the years I have concluded that most of the best critics of fiction are themselves writers of fiction.
Less polite synonyms of “go-between” are procurer or pimp, practitioners of the office of sexual intermediation. Pimps can be male or female. Think of Pandarus in Boccaccio or Chaucer. Pandarus is the name of a literary character from whom we get the generic word. The female model, found in one of Ovid’s elegies, was named Dipsas (“Thirsty,” perhaps). Hence the long cultural connection between drunkenness and sexual debauchery. As the Wife of Bath says, “In woman vinolent [i.e.,bibulous] is no defence, / This knowen lecchours by experience.” Anyone familiar with the contemporary life of our college campuses knows that the overwhelming number of instances of serious sexual misbehavior actually begin in the abuse of alcohol. The biblical model for a supposed campus “rape culture” is King David’s nephew, Jonadab (2 Samuel 13), “a very subtle man” who orchestrates the fate of his female victim, Tamar.
The technique used in The Go-Between plays with what literary critics call “the unreliable narrator”. You cannot be sure that what the narrator tells you is true. Another of our favorite novelists of that period, Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet (four novels) giving brilliant different accounts of more or less the same events, remains in my mind a stunning achievement. And so much great sex! But of course many authors of novels are themselves to a certain extent seducers. How well do we understand even our own stories, those we mentally construct for ourselves? And however often do we later come, often considerably later, to reinterpret past experiences in the light of new and illuminating discoveries or “recovered” memories? How can we expect the novelist in his narration to be more truthful than we are, or even can be, in the narration of our own.
And though the chief purpose of articulate expression is to make significant and reliable statements, accurately transferring understandable articulations from one consciousness to another, our language is seldom an absolutely perfect vehicle. That is why we so often say, or think, “How I wish to could find the right words for this.” On the other hand, language is not hopelessly inadequate either, as some recent literary critics would have us believe. It is not only because of inadequacy in articulation, however, that statements may fail in their intended purposes. They have to be mediated, by the consciousness to which they are addressed. That is, they have to be interpreted. It is very interesting that the old Latin word for a pimp was interpres, that is, go-between. I don’t think that L. P. Hartley had any such learned idea consciously in mind. But I know of few books that better dramatize the wide gap between what we think we know and what we actually know. The opening paragraph of The Go-Between is probably the most famous thing Hartley ever wrote. “The past is a foreign country,” it begins. “They do things differently there.” The distance between 1900, when the novel is set, and 1953 when it first appeared, is barely half a century. But the England depicted in the novel seems a light year away from the world of its first readers, and another half light year from ours. It is one of the wonders of fine books, and a more than sufficient argument for their continuing appreciation, that they can vivify vast areas of vanished human experience with a unique vivacity. As Milton famously said: "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life"
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