THERE'S NOTHING LIKE IT
SPRING BOOKS
By ROSAMOND LEHMANN "You would hardly believe about families," said Edith. "Or many people would not." To those of us who already know what to expect from Miss Compton-Burnett, this laconic statement, thrown out off-hand towards the middle of her sixth and latest novel, is fraught with menace and significance. Once there was a time when we would hardly have believed ; but that time is past.
Once more Miss Compton-Burnett is herself. We have by now the happy certainty that she cannot be less : always fully herself, or a little more so. The standard of cleverness and honesty is as extreme, as idiosyncratic, as rigidly maintained as ever.
Here is one more study of family feeling so to speak isolated, concentrated into a scheme from which all activities irrelevant to its essential structure have been eliminated. Once more the dark internal plot is spun in country-house society among family groups of leisure, breeding, culture, academic distinction. Once more the only physical activity of these families is to pay visits to one another. The generations are ranged one behind the other, the older overshadowing the younger. The matri- archal system is still in force, the supreme will rooted in the domestic tyrant and branching out in subsidiary patterns of deadly protection and destruction. "It isn't possible," says one of its victims, speaking for once in tones of simple helpless- ness and protest, "that all our lives should take shape from one person's pattern " ; but once again it is more than possible. As ever, the despot, brutal, spoilt, capricious, megalomaniac, assumes the stature of nobility, a classic grandeur ; and the iron pressure leads on through jealousy, treachery, frustration to catastrophe. This time it is matricide : though of a more indirect and diluted brand than that in Men and Wives. As ever, the wit spurts out crackling on every page. Wry generalisa- tions bring one up sharp ; moral maxims take an unnerving twist. The characters follow without deviation their formal and static convention. Thrust out in groups, as on a puppet- stage, presented in the fiat, with clearly seen and memorable faces, they appear and vanish with some arbitrariness. As usual the younger groups are employed both as chorus and prota- gonists, involved in the doom yet detached from it, commenting upon it in that vein of ironical banter which, maintained as it is on a taut, even monotonous level of intellectual brilliance, is Miss Compton-Burnett's unique achievement.
It is striking in these books to what extent age prevails over youth. Only in the older is the active destroying principle at work. There is a sense that the young have been at birth over- thrown, and are fixed now unrebelliously, almost serenely, in their defeat. Conditioned in infancy to a diet of gall and worm- wood, they are able now to digest, even to relish, all the poisons of human baseness. Almost totally inert in the sphere of action, their powers of observation are developed to what might be called an uncanny degree. Their stony eyes miss nothing and their tongues dwell for choice upon the things one simply can't say. Observing that" Father is a delicate piece of work " ; or : "Our mother is in her prime. I can hardly tell you how utterly she is in it," they await in ceremonious ranks the fatal outcome of such facts. It is true they do in a sense sometimes win ; but it is a victory of exhaustion, emptied of life : as Fortinbras wins in the last act of Hamlet. And the matrimonial re-shufffings they frequently undergo at their creator's hand are too casual, too business-like to be considered in any serious way as a release. Whatever happens, we feel, the compulsion is not broken. Back to their chains they will, they must, slip at the first opportunity.
The female of the species is more deadly than the male ;
Daughters and Sons. By I. Compton-Burneu. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) but less ignoble. Man's part is more purely ludicrous, more pompous, vain, windy, posturing ; more good-natured ; feebler in dissimulation. Woman's part in relation to them is to bolster them up and essentially betray, emasculate them. The young men in particular are a sorry crew ; unmanly to a marked degree ; assuming with blandest lack of self- respect the position of permanent nephews at the drawing- room tea-table. Women come off best in every sense. In each novel, and Daughters and Sons is no exception, good is embodied in the persons of independent, shrewd, rather donnish women past their youth ; nature's spinsters, if not actually unwed : for Miss Compton-Burnett does not believe in marriage. An unambiguous respect is accorded to friendships between such women. Indeed, these are the only relationships to emerge unscathed. In all other instances, what preoccupies the author is the violent cleavage between public behaviour and private motive. To intrude upon these creatures' secrecy, to note the flicker, the one gesture which betrays them, to watch the passion in them climbing, swelling up through crevices, to hear the cries and lamentations with which they at last break forth is, to speak seriously, appalling. Then immediately afterwards : "We will take this meal in silence," muttered Victor. " Grandau need not say it."
"'If only we had had silence when she said,' said Miss Marcon." The pit closes up again. The ice-like polished surface is re-established.
Miss Compton-Burnett has been called a modern Jane Austen ; and the comparison will stand in so far as both deal with country-house society, and have in common a malicious wit, an unerring eye for sham. Both draw a narrow frame around their subjects, completely excluding all contemporary social or political issues. There is a likeness too although Miss Compton-Burnett follows a more inelastic rhythm—in the exquisite light balance and economy of their prose. But the comparison, suggesting as it does agreeableness, light or at least equable spirits, a tempered faith in human nature, is in a general sense superficial and misleading.
Miss Compton-Burnett is probably the purest and most original of contemporary English artists. Her followers form a devoted and ever-growing band ; but as to her popularity, —a different question—what is to be done ? To the young, severely, increasingly unwilling as they are to allow importance to any fiction without a political-moral basis, she might be recommended as a study of the leisured, privileged, propertied class, brought by rigid segregation within the bourgeois family system, by lack of contact with external realities, by in-breeding and over-education, to the contemplation of their own decay and death.
Or again, let her be commended to eminent men—statesmen, business magnates and such, who (with the exception of Mr. Baldwin, that Lone Wolf) find relief and escape from the pressure of their destinies in the realm of detective fiction. For a few pages she seems like hard work ; but once the game is grasped, its moves and manoeuvres can be followed without effort, and should prove as bracing and relaxing as any Crime Club choice. Then as regards those who like to be made to laugh : no one is more amusing in a highly particular vein than Miss Compton-Burnett. It is not simple, healthy fun. It is invariably double-edged. Dismay springs equally with pleasure from it ; but there is no denying what fun it is.
Finally, for those who like reading aloud, she is a wonderful treat. Not a boring page, not a banal phrase, not one damp squib, not a joke below sample. But all the same—Miss Compton-Burnett must forgive me—she will never be a popular writer.
Previous page
