Storm Jameson on I. Compton-Burnett
The Last and the First Ivy Compton-Burnett (Gollancz £1.40)
The singular position of Ivy Compton- Burnett, as novelist, in the literature of the past five decades, is not in question. After the appearance in 1925 of her second novel, her reputation, and the admiration of her readers, grew unchecked. Nor are the qualities that earned admiration, indeed devotion—the verbal wit, the coolness with which she laid open hidden motives to judgment, the extreme economy of her writing—in question. But these qualities, rare as they are, are not engaging and would not alone explain why she was able to seize and keep her position as a novelist like no other, inimitable, a position allowed her as readily by readers who find her mortally boring as by those who savour her least meaningful phrase.
Leaving Dolores aside, the first instantly noticeable feature of the novels is her aloofness from them: no writer ever viewed his characters with more detach- ment. The second is the confined space -within which these move. There is a family, two or three generations living under one roof, a few friends and outlying relatives, and servants: their relations with any wider society are minimal. Within this private world—not seldom a private hell—enclosed in it as in a transparent bubble, the several characters act out a drama which turns on the appalling egotism of one or two of them and the efforts of the rest to breathe. The comedy is not only witty or only amusing, it is quite often also cruel. The actors themselves are transparent: either their speeches give them away involuntarily as tyrants or hypocrites or self-deceivers, or they speak their thoughts with naked candour. (Let no one suppose that dialogue of this sort is simple to write.) With the help of brief descriptive passages the dia- logue carries the action, which becomes a cut-and-thrust as mannered, at times as savage, as any Restoration comedy. And to a mind intolerant of repetitive sounds quickly tiring. Dolores appeared in 1911. It was not followed by a gradual evolution towards the now familiar archetypal plot: the creature that emerged from fourteen years of larval silence startles by its unlikeness to a first novel which in parts is unreadable. In Dolores everything is explicit, the charac- ters are conventional symbols or puppets, Dolores is dutiful self-sacrifice (nor does her inventor show a trace of ironical aware- ness that one of her sacrificial gestures in- volves the unhappiness and death of a younger woman she is said to love); her stepmother is irritable jealousy; her father, the Rev Cleveland Hutton, goes through the motions of a simpleminded egoist; the crippled dramatist she loves and four times resigns, echoes every romantic woman's notion of a genius. More surprising than all else, a reader in 1911 would have been forced to think that the writer had no ear: long passages are devoid of sense, or the sense is suffocated by the words. Because one has the later novels in mind, it is pos- sible to catch glimpses of an original writer trying to be born—dimly in the laboured comedy of Hutton and his friends and, more clearly, in the group of female dons
and the chatter of two young women, minor figures. There are flashes of insight, even of gaiety. But none of the pervasive irony, the tartness, the economy, of the novels from 1925 onwards. One must hope that no word of this reprint reaches her austere shade in its underworld.
The Last and the First has the distinctive features of her mature work, a little ema- ciated, like the face of an old woman who has kept intact her clear mind, her wit, her penetrating glance. What she has lost, what is drying up in her, is less the power to feel than the energy and above all the patience to give flesh and blood to emotional situations.
The story is familiar: it centres on two families, the Heriots and the Grimstones, involving three generations, and two auto- crats, Eliza Heriot and her wavering reflection in Jocasta Grimstone, More energy has gone into the creation of the Heriots than into the less clearly imagined Grimstones: the only rebel among the sub- jected younger members is a Heriot, Eliza's elder stepdaughter, self-willed enough to break free. But it is one of the shadowy Grimstones who saves her when she has been defeated by another person's inertia: the fortune she inherits from him allows her not only to rescue her father from his money troubles but to supplant her step- mother as the moral head of the family. It is a simpler, gentler version of the tale of a tyrant and his subjects. The only death is useful and natural (if a creaking device). the misused letter, the eavesdropping, are of no serious consequence. The servants' chorus—Grimstone butler and Heriot housekeeper—is, as always, highly articu- late and knowing. The subjected are not unhappy, Amy Grimstone's adolescent suf- ferings are mild, all except Hermia Heriot submit without pain, Angus Heriot with charm and mocking gaiety. The dialogue is edged, rarely brutal: now and then all it cuts is the empty air: the profound remark turns out on inspection to be hollow.
The simplicity of this final novel, the les- sening in it of emotional pressure, has one unlooked-for effect. In an emancipated body the movement of the skeleton is inescap- ably visible. And what The Last and the First reveals is the essential nature of its author's interest in human beings. The characters of her' novels, from the most highly developed to this last and least complex, do not belong to the same order of creation as the characters of the classic
novelists with whom she has been com- pared: they are intrinsically the actors-out of a drama (or melodrama), they have cer- tain definite traits, fixed in advance of their entry on the stage; in the course of their fictional lives they do not develop to any noticeable degree, if at all. They are humours in a Jonsonian sense—very ob- viously so in the servants who play a part in all the novels, and in other minor characters, and little less clearly in those actors who have been given richer and more complex parts to play. Here it be- comes possible to suggest a reason for the fascination these singular novels exercise on a body of readers. What essentially they offer, their peculiar virtue, is the repetition of one and the same human situation, an acting-out of powerful impulses that run counter to an accepted social morality— brutal truth-telling, repressed family hatreds and loves, including the impulse to subdue weaker and younger members. It is likely that they will hold their place until a newer writer turns up to provide the same ritual purgation in a modern idiom.
Storm Jameson's 'natty hooks include Jour- ney from the North and Parthian Words. She is the wife of Professor Guy Chapman.
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