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by Rollyson, Carl E.

  ary friend at this period, however, may have been Lord David Cecil. After leaving Balliol with a second honours degree in 1921, Hartley worked as a reviewer for various periodicals, wrote the stories later collected in Night Fears and The Killing Bottle, and cultivated friendships with members of both bohemian Bloomsbury and British society. His novella

  Simonetta Perkins, a Jamesian story of a young American woman’s inconclusive passion for a Venetian gondolier, was published in 1925.

  Hartley made many trips to Venice. From 1933 to 1939, he spent part of each summer

  and fall there, and he drew on this experience for parts of Eustace and Hilda, The Boat, and My Fellow Devils. Returning to England just before the start of World War II, Hartley started work on the series of novels that earned for him a place in the British literary establishment. Given the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eustace and Hilda in 1947 and the Heinemann Foundation Prize for The Go-Between in 1953, he served as head of the British Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) and on the management committee of the Society of Authors. In 1956, he was created a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In his later years, Hartley gave frequent talks, most notably the Clark lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1964. Joseph Losey won the Grand Prize at Cannes, France, in 1971 for a film version of

  The Go-Between, for which Harold Pinter wrote the script, and in 1973, Alan Bridges’s film of The Hireling, from a script by Wolf Mankowitz, won the same prize. Hartley died in London on December 13, 1972.

  Analysis

  Indebted to Bloomsbury, as shown by a concern with personal conduct and a highly

  impressionistic style, L. P. Hartley betrays affinities with D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell in a more fundamental concern with larger social and moral issues.

  His best books argue for the existence of a spiritual dimension to life and demonstrate that recognition of its motive force, even union of oneself with its will, is a moral imperative. In this emphasis on connection, his novels recall those of E. M. Forster, but unlike his predecessor, Hartley insists that the nature of the motive force is supernatural, even traditionally Christian. In his most successful books, Hartley draws upon elements of both novel and

  romance, as Richard Chase defines them in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), and the uniqueness of the resulting hybridization precludes comparisons with the work of most of his contemporaries.

  Hartley’s moral vision, revealed by the gradual integration of realism and symbolism

  in his novels, is the most striking characteristic of his long fiction. In a book such as The Go-Between, he shows that all people are subject to the power of love, even when they deny it, and that achievement of insight into love’s capabilities is a prerequisite of achieving moral responsibility. This pattern of growth at the center of Hartley’s novels is conven-tionally Christian in its outlines. The protagonist of each book, beginning with Eustace 110

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  Cherrington in the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, accepts his status as a “sinner” and experiences, if only briefly and incompletely, a semimystical transcendence of his fallen state.

  The epiphanic technique Hartley develops in the trilogy to objectify these moments of

  insight recurs in various forms in all of his novels, coming in time to be embodied not in symbolism but in the pattern of action in which he casts his plots. Without suggesting that Hartley’s fiction is about theology, it is clear that his concern with the subject of morality cannot avoid having religious overtones. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, he traces the process of spiritual growth in innocent, morally self-assured, and thereby flawed personalities

  who experience temptation, even commit sins, and eventually attain spiritual kinship with their fellow people. These encounters, in a book such as Facial Justice, occur in settings symbolic of traditional religious values, and so while Hartley’s novels may be read from psychoanalytic or mythic points of view, they are more fully comprehended from a

  metaphysical vantage point.

  There is a thematic unity to all of Hartley’s longer fiction, but after 1960, there is a marked decline in its technical complexity. In one sense, having worked out his thematic viewpoint in the process of fusing realism and symbolism in his earlier books, Hartley no longer feels the need to dramatize the encounter of good and evil and to set it convincingly in a realistic world. His last novels are fables, and in The Harness Room, the most successful of them, the lack of realism intensifies his treatment of the psychological and sexual involvement of an adolescent boy and his father’s slightly older chauffeur. This book brings Hartley’s oeuvre full circle, back to the story of the American spinster and the Venetian gondolier he produced in Simonetta Perkins at the start of his career.

  Eustace and Hilda trilogy

  The three novels constituting the Eustace and Hilda trilogy— The Shrimp and the Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, and Eustace and Hilda—objectify a process of moral growth and spiritual regeneration to be found in or behind all of Hartley’s subsequent fiction. The process is not unlike that which he describes, in the Clark lectures reprinted in The Novelist’s Responsibility, as characteristic of Hawthorne’s treatment of the redeeming experience of sin in The Marble Faun (1860). The epiphanic moments Hartley uses to dramatize his protagonist’s encounters with Christ the Redeemer reveal truths that can be

  read on psychological, sociological, and theological levels.

  In The Shrimp and the Anemone, Hartley depicts the abortive rebellion of Eustace Cherrington, aged nine, against the moral and psychological authority of his thirteen-year-old sister, Hilda. Set in the summers of 1905 and 1906, the novel reveals young

  Eustace’s intimations of a spiritual reality behind the surface of life. Unable to act in terms of these insights, for they are confused with his aesthetic sense, Eustace feeds his romantic inclination to construct an internal fantasy world and refuses to see the moral necessity of action.

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  from Hilda, this time by engineering a socially advantageous marriage for her with Dick

  Staveley, a war hero and rising young member of Parliament. This novel focuses on a visit the Cherringtons make in June, 1920, to the Staveleys, acquaintances who live near their childhood home at Anchorstone. Eustace’s adult epiphanic experiences are more insistent. Less tied to his childish aestheticism, they emerge in the context of the novel as hauntingly ambiguous intimations of a moral and spiritual realm that he unconsciously

  seeks to avoid acknowledging.

  In Eustace and Hilda, the final novel in the trilogy, Hartley brings his protagonist face-to-face with Christ during the Venetian Feast of the Redeemer, the third Sunday in July, 1920. This encounter leads to Eustace’s return to Anchorstone and acceptance of moral

  responsibility for the emotionally induced paralysis Hilda experienced at the end of her love affair with Dick Staveley. Back in his childhood home, Eustace learns the lesson of self-sacrificial love in Christ’s example, and he effects a cure for Hilda by staging a mock accident for her at the edge of Anchorstone Cliff. Because of the strain this involves, he suffers a fatal heart attack, and the novel ends. His death signals the genuineness of the moral growth and spiritual regeneration that had begun in Venice. The interpenetration of realistic narrative and symbolic subtext that occurs by the end of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy objectifies Hartley’s vision of the world.

  The Boat

  Hartley’s equivalent of Ford Madox Ford’s and Evelyn Waugh’s treatments of men at

  war, The Boat presents the mock-epic struggle of Timothy Casson, a forty-nine-year-old bachelor writer, to gain permission to use his rowing shell on the fishing stream that runs through Upton-on-Swirrell. Timothy, settling back in E
ngland in 1940 after an eighteen-year stay in Italy, consciously attempts to isolate himself from the effects of the war in progress in the larger world. He devotes himself to collecting china, to cultivating friends, to raising a dog, and to forcing the village magnates to allow him to row on the Swirrell. In the process, Timothy violates his own self-interest, as well as that of his nation and his class, but he is not the tragicomic figure that Eustace Cherrington becomes in the trilogy.

  In Hartley’s hands, Timothy achieves only a degree of the self-awareness that Eustace

  does, and this enables the novelist to label him the “common sinner” that all people are, a figure both sinned against and sinning.

  Timothy’s desire to take his boat out on the river is an assertion of individuality that po-larizes the community. His attachment to his boat becomes a measure of his moral and po-

  litical confusion, for Timothy is torn between the influences of Vera Cross, a Communist secret agent sent to Upton-on-Swirrell to organize unrest among the masses, and

  Volumnia Purbright, the wife of the Anglican vicar and an unconventional, perhaps mysti-

  cal, Christian. The emblematic names suggest the comic possibilities Hartley exploits in his treatment of the two, but The Boat is a serious novel. Vera represents a social disharmony resultant upon the advocacy of ideology, while Volumnia reflects both social har-

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  mony and personal tranquillity resulting from sacrifice of self. Indeed, when Timothy persists in his protest against the prohibition against rowing and sets forth on the flooded Swirrell with two children and his dog as passengers, Volumnia confronts Vera on the riverbank. Vera attacks the vicar’s wife, and the two women tumble into the water. When

  Vera drowns in the Devil’s Staircase, Volumnia blames herself for the younger woman’s

  death and subsequently dies from exposure and pneumonia. When at the end of The Boat Timothy, who had to be rescued from the river when his boat capsized in the flooded

  stream, dreams he receives a telephone call from Volumnia inviting him to tea, he hears

  Vera’s voice as well as Volumnia’s, and the two women tell him that they are inseparable, as are the moral and ethical positions they represent.

  Near the end of the novel, Timothy prepares to leave Upton-on-Swirrell in the com-

  pany of two old friends, Esther Morwen and Tyrone MacAdam. The two discuss the pros-

  pects for Timothy’s acceptance of himself as an ordinary human being. At the time of the boating accident, he had managed to rescue one of the children with him, but he needed

  the fortuitous help of others to rescue the second child and to reach safety himself. Timothy is clearly partially responsible for the deaths of Vera Cross and Volumnia Purbright, and the “true cross” he must bear is an acceptance of moral complexity. Whether he will

  achieve this insight is an open question at the end of The Boat, and Hartley’s refusal to make the book a neat statement reinforces its thematic point.

  The Go-Between

  Hartley’s The Go-Between, arguably his finest novel, is the only one with a first-person narrator as protagonist. Leo Colston, like the focal characters of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy and The Boat, frees himself from psychological constraints and achieves a measure of moral insight. Indeed, Leo’s story amounts to a rite of passage conforming to the pattern of initiation characteristic of the bildungsroman. More significantly, The Go-Between is a study of England on the verge of its second Elizabethan Age, and the patterns of imagery that Hartley uses to reveal the personality of Leo suggest indirectly that the Age of Aquarius will be a golden one.

  These linguistic patterns, introduced into the novel by Leo himself, derive from the

  signs of the zodiac. On one hand, they are a pattern manufactured by Leo as a schoolboy

  and utilized to explain his conviction that the start of the twentieth century, which he dates incorrectly as January 1, 1900, is the dawn of a second Golden Age. On the other hand, the zodiac motifs, as associated with Leo and other characters in the novel, underscore

  Hartley’s thematic insistence on the power of self-sacrificial love to redeem both individuals and society from error.

  At the start of the novel in 1951 or 1952, Leo is an elderly man engaged in sorting

  through the accumulated memorabilia of a lifetime. Coming upon his diary for the year

  1900, inside the cover of which are printed the zodiac signs, he recalls his experiences at Southdown Hill School and his vacation visit to a schoolmate, Marcus Maudsley. In the

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  body of the novel, the account of that nineteen-day visit to Brandham Hall, the narrative voice is split between that of the thirteen-year-old Leo of 1900 and that of the aged man with which the book begins. Used by Marcus’s sister Marian to carry messages to her

  lover, the tenant farmer Ted Burgess, Leo finds himself faced with the dubious morality of his actions when Marcus tells him that Marian is to marry Viscount Trimingham, the

  owner of Brandham Hall and a scarred veteran of the Boer War.

  In Leo’s mind, Marian is the Virgin of the zodiac, Trimingham the Sagittarian archer,

  and Burgess the Aquarian water-carrier. Determined to break the bond between Marian

  and Ted and to restore her to Viscount Trimingham, Leo resorts to the schoolboy magic

  with which he had handled bullies at school. He plans a spell involving the sacrifice of an atropa belladonna or deadly nightshade growing in a deserted outbuilding, but the ritual goes awry and he finds himself flat on his back with the plant on top of him. The next day, his thirteenth birthday, Leo is forced to lead Marian’s mother to the spot where the girl meets her lover, and they discover the pair engaged in sexual intercourse. For Leo, whose adult sexuality has just begun to develop, this is a significant shock, and he feels that he has been defeated by the beautiful but deadly lady, both the deadly nightshade and Marian

  herself.

  In the epilogue to The Go-Between, the elderly Leo Colston returns to Norfolk to find out the consequences of the mutual betrayal. Encountering Marian, now the dowager

  Lady Trimingham, once more, he undertakes again to be a messenger. This time he goes to

  her grandson Edward in an effort to reconcile him to the events of the fateful year 1900, to the fact that his father was really the son of Ted Burgess. This action on Leo’s part embodies the theme of all of Hartley’s fiction: The only evil in life is an unloving heart. At the end of his return journey to Brandham Hall, Leo Colston is a more vital man and a more com-passionate one. Having faced the evil both inside and outside himself, he is open to love, and the Age of Aquarius can begin. That it will also be the age of Elizabeth II, given the political and sociological implications of the central action, gives Hartley’s The Go-Between its particular thematic rightness.

  Robert C. Petersen

  Other major works

  short fiction: Night Fears, 1924; The Killing Bottle, 1932; The Traveling Grave, 1948; The White Wand, 1954; Two for the River, 1961; Mrs. Carteret Receives, 1971; The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, 1973.

  nonfiction: The Novelist’s Responsibility: Lectures and Essays, 1967.

  Bibliography

  Bien, Peter. L. P. Hartley. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1963. The first book on Hartley’s fiction, important for its Freudian analysis of his novels; its

  identification of his indebtedness to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Emily

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  Brontë; and its examination of Hartley’s literary criticism. At its best when discussing the novels about the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

  Bloomfield, Paul. L. P. Hartley. 1962. Rev. ed. Harlow, England: Longman, 1970.

  Bloomfie
ld, a personal friend of Hartley, focuses on character analysis and thematic

  concerns, providing a brief discussion of Hartley’s novels. Laudatory, perceptive, and

  very well written.

  Fane, Julian. Best Friends: Memories of Rachel and David Cecil, Cynthia Asquith, L. P.

  Hartley, and Some Others. London: Sinclair-Stevenson and St. George’s Press, 1990.

  Fane writes about his friendship with Hartley and others, which helps to situate

  Hartley’s fiction in terms of his sensibility and his time.

  Hall, James. The Tragic Comedians: Seven Modern British Novelists. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Claims that the Hartley protagonist possesses an inade-

  quate emotional pattern that leads inevitably to failure. This neurotic behavior is dis-

  cussed in his major fiction: The Boat, Eustace and Hilda, My Fellow Devils, and The Hireling. In these novels, Hartley demonstrates that confidence is accompanied by a contradictory desire to fail.

  Jones, Edward T. L. P. Hartley. Boston: Twayne, 1978. An excellent analysis of Hartley’s literary work, particularly of his novels, which are conveniently grouped. Also contains a chronology, a biographical introductory chapter, a discussion of Hartley’s literary criticism, and an excellent annotated bibliography. Of special interest is Jones’s

  definition of the “Hartleian novel.”

  Mulkeen, Anne. Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1974. Focuses on Hartley’s fiction until

  1968, stressing the Hawthornian romance elements in his early novels. Particularly

  concerned with his adaptations of the romance and how his characters are at once

  themselves and archetypes or symbols.

  Webster, Harvey Curtis. After the Trauma: Representative British Novelists Since 1920.

  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. The chapter on Hartley, entitled “Diffi-

  dent Christian,” concerns his protagonists’struggles to distinguish between God’s orders and society’s demands. Discusses Facial Justice, Eustace and Hilda, The Boat, and The Go-Between, concluding that Hartley merits more attention than he has been given.