Ivy Compton-Burnett Books

Britain's only significant post-modern writer. A national treasure, scandalously neglected in her own country.

Britain's only significant post-modern writer. A national treasure, scandalously neglected in her own country.

Ivy Compton-Burnett's first novel, Dolores, was a sprawling and sentimental romance. She was deeply ashamed of it. In Pastors and Masters we see her own distinctive style first launched, laconic, ironic and understated. The story is set in a private school and contains the usual mixture of upper middle class misfits. It is a style that demands close reading. But it makes you laugh out loud on trains and planes.

Compton-Burnett's artificial prose style takes some getting used to, but her sublime brand of comedy is a rare treat. Characterization is really not the author's forte, but her descriptions of social and familial interaction are packed with blinding flashes of insight.

An interesting novel about the inhabitants of a large Victorian household. It features a pair of over-bearing parents who are dominiating this mysterious home's occupants. The conversations revolve around the makings of successful marriages. It is significant that the white males of the story are always attempting to boss the women around, as if they had no choices to make in any matters at all. An extraordinary work by a feminist novelist of genius.

I'm beginning to become addicted to these little neglected treasures that the NYRB Press is reissuing. Not only are the editions themselves little marvels (with beautiful and well-chosen color covers and gorgeous paper stock), but whoever is making the choices for which books are reissued has near-infallible taste.

A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD, like so many of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels, reads something like a modern updating of a Greek tragedy: most of the novel is told through dialogue, there is a kind of chorus that comments on the action of the principal characters, and the plot involves murder, incest, and familial cruelty. Yet for all these borrowings Compton-Burnett paradoxically remains wonderfully sui generis: no one else has ever mastered her capability for evoking such extreme subtlety in manners that the merest cruel nuances can become evoked (if one reads carefully enough). She is also a master plotter: just when you think you've caught up with the characters' schemes, she allows the other characters in the novel to make similar realizations, and then jumps even further ahead. This is a real page-turner as well as a subtle commentary on Edwardian manners and moral monstrousness.

Ivy Compton-Burnett is an acquired taste. A friend lent me "The Present and The Past" a year ago saying I had to read it. For the first couple of chapters I didn't who was who or understand what was going on. Was this even a novel? It just seemed to be a lot of dialogue in artificial archaic speech. Somewhere in the third chapter I suddenly, in a flash of revelation, `got it'. I understood the tragi-comic `tone' and understood that by concentrating on the subtle nuances of dialogue all the usual content/interest of a novel would become evident. There are distinct characters interacting and there is definitely plot - quite elaborate convoluted, even melodramatic, plot. But all the usual narrative devices of commentary, scene setting and transitions between scenes have been reduced, almost eliminated.

The storytelling occurs through the dialogue. All the characters speak in a stylised formal way, even children. This dialogue has a sophisticated ironic tone that is blackly comic (it frequently makes me laugh out loud), yet explicitly expresses a tragic sense of the hopelessness and tragedy of life. The main distinction between characters is where they stand in the hierarchy of the Victorian household in which all Ivy novels seem to be set. In other words these novels are about power, guilt and complicity: the mind games and power games into which we are all locked - the Victorian household and its characters becoming universal archetypes. (It may be a far-fetched comparison but I think that in both the settings and the rigorously `minimalist' style Ivy is to literature what Japanese director Ozu is to cinema, with a similar emotional punch.)

Because of the concentrated nature of the dialogue, reading Ivy is very intense and she is probably best read in small doses, one chapter at a sitting. But, apart from that, once you `get it' then reading Ivy becomes easy and addictive. It's not like reading "Finnegans Wake". I've now read several more Ivy novels and they are all similar, though "Present and Past" remains my favourite. It's quite short, focused, funny and poignant. We have Cassius, a typical Ivy father/husband: part tyrant part baby. His previous wife suddenly reappears. This appeals to Cassius's narcissism. He thinks he has formed a kind of harem in which he wields absolute power. But then (a little like the infamous harem scene in Fellini's "Eight and a Half") the previous wife and the present wife start to bond with each other and power begins to ebb from Cassius: his ego, his sense of self and then his very existence begin to crumble. Even the children start to deride him. And then a series of extraordinary plot twists... which you'll have to read the book to find out!

No one writes novels quite like Ivy Compton-Burnett: they're really more like novelized plays than anything else, and as Diane Johnson notes in her extremely intelligent foreword to this edition, Compton-Burnett's antecedents are more with Oscar Wilde than anyone else, in her love of savage epigrams and wordplay. her novels are almost impossibly stylized: almost all her characters speak in the same style, so small children and uneducated coooks speak with the same level of sophistication as wealthy educated homeowners. Still, for all of its artificiality, you'd be hardpressed to beat MANSERVANT AND MAIDSERVANT as a superior exercise in style. Compton-Burnett's witty and troubling vision of the effect of a wicked Victorian paterfamilias's repentance is exceptionally striking and thought-provoking, and though this novel is not quite up to the level of A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD (also recently reissued by NYRB Press in a stunning paperback edition), it is one of her best works nonetheless.

It's sad that the one-star reviewer on this page just didn't get it. It happens at some point to all of us. Compton-Burnett is an unusual writer, true. She is not a "realist". "Do people really speak this way?" he asks. Strangely enough, there are no actual people inside the covers of this book - only characters. And characters in literature speak any damned way the author pleases. Did King Henry IV speak in verse? This may not be one of Ivy's top five (I particularly recommend "Manservant and Maidservant"), yet it is still quite distinctive and enjoyable. But it's a highly literary fantasy/satire. If you enjoy Peacock, Firbank, Beerbohm or Schuyler, this is your cup of tea. "Germinal" it's not.

"The rich are different from us," Scott Fitzgerald is reputed to have once said to Ernest Hemingway -- to which the celebrated Nobel Prizewinning author is said to have (obviously with tongue in cheek) replied: "Yes, they have more money." Now whether Hemingway was speaking in a kind of jest, or whether the whole thing, like Oscar Wilde's declaration of his genius at the New York Customs House, was apocryphal, we will never know for sure; yet the point is well taken.

The rich ARE different. But only in an economic sense. Human nature remains human nature. And it seems the novelist's job is to illuminate the conundrums of the human condition for the reader. So why do Compton-Burnett's characters speak in what is best described as an almost inscrutable language? Yes, the characters in her novels are quite different, but it's difficult to believe people do or have ever spoken like this; it's difficult for the reader to identify with or sympathize over characters such as these being portrayed here. It's a Jacobean or a Herculean struggle for the reader to read this odd, quirky, mostly dialog-laden prose of this strange, albeit unique writer.

So to any reader comptemplating dipping into this author's almost impregnable prose, unless doing it out of an academic exercise or personal sense of obligation, I would issue a strong caveat -- be advised: don't. Not unless you're the masochistic type or the type who enjoys the monumental struggle of trying to ferret out meaning from virtually every sentence, having to read twice or thrice, so much so, that quite often the reader is left adrift in a sea of uncertainty as to where he or she is in the course of the story; you'd be well-advised to pass this up.

Still, I am aware that there are reviewers, readers and critics who swear by this author, as being an acute observer of the human condition. Fair enough. But what I would want is to read an author who does not take language and twist and bend it into an instrument of his or her own choosing and give it an almost alien life to that found in this one in which we live. To those who find meaning in her works for them, I say fine, and best of luck. This reviewer doesn't. For communication should be of more substance than merely the esoteric. It should speak to all.

Nevertheless, there are artists who are considered great and are virtually laden with layers of interpretation and enigma, providing commentators and scholars with plenty of work to last some of them -- and us -- a lifetime: Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Picasso, and on and on.

Let there be no mistake: I am not a stranger to difficult writers, having worked my way through a good portion of them. Start with the works of Shakespeare and go on to that of Faulkner, Henry James (with the exception of WHAT MASIE KNEW, which is one of those books James wrote, like the writer under discussion, which seems to be a kind of closet drama and an insoluble puzzle) and Joyce's ULYSSES, the latter twice and well understood. Even Thomas Pynchon in our own time, who is quite a challenge; even he yields much pleasure, much wit. Never, I say, had I had the kind of comprehension struggle with those mentioned, and even boredom I had with Compton-Burnett. Besides, I have been through a great deal of 18th and 19th century British literature; yet never have I encountered the kind of resistance I get with this author.

A FAMILY AND A FORTUNE is the kind of novel one rejoices in seeing come to a merciful conclusion. I think perhaps a large part of the problem rests more with the reader than the writer. Perhaps. For I suspect this is a woman's book, with a woman's perspective and a woman's sensibility. Consider, for example, this kind of sentence:

"Oh, don't let us joke about it. Do let us turn serious eyes on a serious human situation."

Oh. Do people really speak this way? Even English people of the upper classes? I'm not persuaded. Why not say something like this: "Oh, let's not be funny, but do be serious about this." There are oh so many other examples of this kind of thing that could have been cited. But I'll spare the reader further examples.

This reviewer has been visiting the U.K. for over a fifteen-year period in summers and has never had the kind of epic struggle in understanding them (except in Scotland) that I find here.

Again, I cannot recommend this author to most readers who read for pleasure, which, after all, is the goal of almost any book that purports to be published to be read. The other kind is the kind that the writer writes for the writer's own benefit. In other words, a self-indulgent undertaking. But its author is gone, and like the Faulkners, the Jameses, et al. of this world, will never return to remedy and make clear what, in many respects, should have been made clear for the reader in its original incarnation. The only reason I embarked on this arduous struggle is the fact that I had a professor -- highly regarded and respected in his time in matters of taste and subtlety -- who mentioned this in the context of a lecture on MACBETH. In short, I wish he hadn't.