Cupboards for skeletons: the world of L. P. Hartley
John Bayley
Everyone has seen the film of The Go-Between; a lot of people have read the book. But do they connect it with Hartley's other books, or with the survival of his literary reputation? Has that reputation in fact survived? Is he still seen as an estab- lished novelist, with a developing 'signifi- cant' body of work to his credit? Or a fuddy-duddy writer with outmoded atti- tudes and ideas, who hit the jackpot on one occasion?
'The first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world', pronounced Philip Lar- kin. He certainly did it himself, as poet and novelist, as did the maiden he rescued when she was shunned by the dragons of publishing, Barbara Pym. That sentence is the first in his essay on her. So far as I know he does not mention Hartley, but I should be surprised if he did not read and relish him, although Larkin was an admir- ably unpredictable critic, and he might just as well have thought nothing of him at all. Hartley's chivalrous brand of misogyny could have appealed to him, as did the crueller comedy in that line of de Month- erlant. But he would have perceived that the chief charm of the Hartley world is its refusal to be modish in any way. Hartley was the one writer of his time to work the neglected vein of old fashionedness, in which the novel form once paradoxically specialised, and which was as cunningly exploited by Sir Walter Scott as by Henry James.
Hartley worked it independently and imperturbably, perhaps hardly realising he was doing so. A comparatively wealthy rentier, he detested surtax and the welfare state, thought wrongdoers should be hanged or sent to jail for long periods, enjoyed rowing on the river and giving friendly little dinner-parties for six or eight. In his own special way he was a snob in both directions, fascinated sexually and somatically by the doings below stairs as he was by those of the grand and titled. (Anthony Powell's memoirs have a nice story of a large bottle of gin conspicuous on Hartley's dressing-table when the Duke of Wellington was showing his house-party round the bedrooms.) All this comes into his novels with complete unselfconscious- ness, sometimes prolix, more often shrewd, droll, and elegant, with his own mildly helpless air of sending himself up. Compared with Hartley, Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis are reactionaries so re- morselessly up-to-date, so determinedly selfconscious, that they look like rebels in disguise.
Hartley's father was a Peterborough solicitor who became rich through develop- ing brick works, his mother a 'superior' person with the strongest of wills, who doted on her son and on his modest success at Oxford and in literary London. Leslie Hartley wrote to her every day. A sister, the Hilda of the trilogy, inspired the childhood day-dream of inseparable play- mates in a childhood world of repression and evasion, the will and its willing victim. All Hartley's plots are day-dreams that begin beautifully and end badly.
But his sense of real children is as sure as that for real places. East Anglia, St David's, Hythe, Wiltshire, the Wye Val- ley, are all hauntingly and imaginatively exact, sustaining a cast whose convincing- ness as individuals is apt to vary in inverse ratio to their importance in the plot: because children and servants are so good his books can support a surprising number of wholly stagey adults. As a very young man he was briefly in the army at the end of the first war, and the coming of the second filled him with such horror and dislike that it uncorked the writer's block from which he had suffered for years. Novels, at first about his childhood and the past, poured out from then on in a steady stream which never ceased until his death in 1972. Some are more gripping than others, but all are set in what had become the special Hartley world.
It had taken him time to discover it. He began with a small, very Jamesian nouvelle called Simonetta Perkins, written in 1924 in Venice, where he often stayed. A young American girl falls in love with a gondolier, flinches from the chance of consummation, and leaves by train thinking she will never forget him. Although 25 years of silence 'I suspect him of being a plant.' followed this first slight effort it already has the humour and the detail which are what matter in the later full-length novels, and the predicament carries the disembodied erotic charge which will be the most potent aspect of his plots. There is never any public going to bed in Hartley, but the idea of it is genuinely tingling, his own brand of development from Jamesian eroticism. Homosexual transposition is evident in his work, though never explicit, but his sense of sex — any sex — is always both touching and disturbing. As characters find in A Perfect Woman — Hartley's own favourite among his novels — it makes them 'stran- gers to themselves by growing the less strange to each other'.
Love inspires terror, as well as the gentleness so moving in Irma, the Austrian girl of A Perfect Woman. Along with Leadbitter, the chauffeur in The Hireling, she reveals the author's unexpectedly ten- der probing of an emotion more often wilful and destructive in his books (Cathy in Wuthering Heights was Hartley's favourite fictional character) and usually leading to violence or betrayal. His femmes fatales, like Vera Cross of The Boat, can be genuinely frightening, and to step unwarily inside love's field of force is to invite catastrophe. But Hartley is not a natural tragedian, and humour generally bumbles in as hero or heroine return to their right minds.
Plot will not always permit this: Hartley could be a stickler for a properly sensation- al ending. A Perfect Woman takes a leaf out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, contriv- ing a double love affair out of a husband and wife's attempt to hand over Irma to her would-be seducer, the celebrated wri- ter who is their patron. A very Hartley- esque figure, always on the look-out for copy, he is the target for some splendidly tongue-in-cheek reviews, advising him to show more 'compassion', to be 'adult' and 'challenging', and to write novels about 'Ron and Don and Des and Les'. Like many Hartley novels A Perfect Woman gets itself into an ingenious impasse, in which drastic action on the author's part is required to put things right, or rather wrong. But the staged denouement is part of the pleasure, and more suited to the author's outlook than are the slightly pre- tentious endings of The Go-Between, and of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy.
I should say that The Boat, A Perfect Woman, and The Hireling are in the end his most Hartleyan and re-readable books, with The Go-Between and The Sixth Heaven (the middle one of the trilogy) very close behind. His short stories, once praised, have no space to deploy his leisurely charms and are too dependent on his brand of melodrama. Day-dreaming in print was really his thing, and sharing with the reader his idiosyncratic way of doing so. His plots show the fun he had in 'improvising', as he once put it, 'a cup- board for a skeleton'.
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