an antique fashion shows
The cover was off-putting. A boy in a garden, glancing slyly back at an illicit meeting, in the unctuous watercolors so popular for mass market literary paperbacks of a certain age. I refer, of course, to a Penguin edition of First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin, which, as a book, rather reminded me (not to give too much away) of the The Go-Between – but then L.P. Hartley is to Turgenev as Noël Coward is to Ibsen. 1
The novel, set within the double frame of men recounting their first loves after dinner one night, and the unexpected, unsettling confession/recital of the narrator in a letter, is uncanny in its representation of desire and what is means to desire – how so often it is desire not for the happiness of the beloved, but for the imagined goods (cachet, self-respect, envy) the beloved could potentially bring. It flows neatly and then twists, revealing heartbreak rather than the more common disillusionment.
Although I did not think much of it at the time, the ungainly formality and suggestion of melodrama irritating as a long-winded dinner guest, yet I can think back on it over a year later and feel its freshness. In memory, the story becomes new in a way it never was on reading. 2
- A hyperbolic statement, but one should not dismiss it entirely on that account.[↩]
- I see, looking at my notes from soon after reading First Love, that I had meant to write about Byron. But I can’t at all remember what I had intended to say.[↩]