The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

INTRODUCTION

The author of The Go-Between is one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his creation is composed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the processes of human thought and feeling, especially of its queerer and more whimsical processes: he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic imagination that reveals itself now in a fanciful reverie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness. Further, both observation and imagination are given significance by the fact that they are made the vehicle of an intense moral vision. It is not a comfortable vision. Man, as seen by Mr. Hartley, is born with a soul that instinctively desires virtue and happiness. But some original sin in himself and in the nature of things is at work to thwart his strivings towards them and brings them, more often than not, to disaster—a disaster he accepts as largely deserved.

Such is the vision of life presented in Mr. Hartley’s novels. We find it also in this volume of his collected short stories. With a difference however. In the novels the diverse elements are fused into a single whole; in the stories, one or other tends to dominate. In some the ‘Gothic’ strain in its author’s talent gets it head, as it never does in the novels. Like his eighteenth-century forebears, Mr. Hartley goes in for tales of terror. Sometimes the terror is earthly: The Island, The Killing Bottle, The Travelling Grave are stories of crime. More often the terror is unearthly, an affair of the supernatural. But both earthly and unearthly are steeped in the same atmosphere of eerie and sinister evil. Perhaps this atmosphere suits the unearthly stories best; now and again Mr. Hartley’s criminals are too like evil spirits to be wholly convincing as human beings. There is no difficulty, however, in believing in his ghosts. They and their stories assault the imagination with the compelling horror of nightmare. Yet like that of nightmare, their horror is founded on waking experience. For though Mr. Hartley’s sense of reality plays a subordinate part in these stories, it is effectively there. The nightmare events are more terrifying because they are interspersed with details drawn from their author’s exact and humorous observations of the real world. Rumbold, in A Visitor from Down-Under, listens to a programme for children on the wireless, ignorant that it will soon be the medium by which he is brought into communication with the ghost of the man he has murdered.

After this it is the ghost’s turn to take over: and his intervention is all the more macabre by contrast with what has gone before.

Mr. Hartley’s moral preoccupations also have their place in his tales of terror. His ghosts are never inexplicable elementals, but spirits of vengeance or manifestations of spiritual evil. This moral element in his tales give them a disturbing seriousness not to be found in the ordinary ghost story. Like those of Henry James and Walter De La Mare, they are parables of their authors’ profounder beliefs.

Mr. Hartley’s Gothic imagination predominates then in one section of his stories; others display his interest in the by-ways of human psychology. He is much concerned with neurotic compulsion and neurotic frustration. Oswald Clayton in Witheling End suffers from strong compulsive fits of constraint which have the effect of blighting all his friendships: Mr. Amber in A Tonic is possessed by a frustrating fear of death that stops him telling his symptoms to the specialist he has gone to consult, lest they should reveal that his disease is fatal. Akin to these tales, but standing apart from them, is the brief novel called Simonetta Perkins, in which is described the gradual steps by which the fastidious and sophisticated Miss Johnson of Boston finds her carefully preserved philosophy of living compulsively undermined by a violent physical passion.

Mr. Hartley’s pictures of these different psychological troubles is wonderfully convincing and his insight into the working of neurosis alarmingly acute. But it is always the insight of an artist. His interest is imaginative, not clinical; these stories are not mere efficient studies in morbid psychology. For we see them through the transfiguring medium of Mr. Hartley’s subtle ironic temperament. Here is the hypochondriac Mr. Amber waiting to see the specialist.

Finally Mr. Hartley’s sympathetic imagination enables him to endow his psychological ‘cases’ with a more universal interest, Clayton and Amber and the rest of his frustrated heroes are revealed as representatives of the human condition. Their particular quirks may be odd and even ridiculous, but they are only comical examples of the kind of weakness that afflicts all of us. As I have said, Mr. Hartley does not take a hopeful view of the human lot. Most of his dramas end in frustration if not in anything worse; and if Oswald Clayton and one or two others do contrive to extract themselves from their troubles, it is through a chance stroke of luck. The one story in the collection that ends well, in the full sense of the word, is the delicate little anecdote called The Price of the Absolute. Its last paragraph sees Timothy Carswell going off with the Celadon vase which he has so recklessly purchased, in a state of confident rapture; for he feels himself to be the possessor of Absolute Beauty incarnate. Can this mean, we wonder, that Mr. Hartley thinks that art is to be trusted even if life is not? that the experience given by a work of art can be perfect, in a way that an experience given by life never is? Such an implication seems implicit in the tone with which he describes the vase.

This passage is memorable not only for the light it throws on Mr. Hartley’s beliefs, but also as an example of his art at its beautiful best; the precise and exquisite expression of an exquisitely refined sensibility.

D.C.