The Ivy league ARTS
HENRY TUBE
Time in Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels is not the healer, but the revealer. If there is one thing a character can be certain of as he enters her stately pages it is that he is under the spotlight —no word he utters or deed he does will escape observation, analysis and ultimate judg- ment. His wounds—whether made by pride, weakness, deliberate injury or misfortune—will not be closed before they have been searched. So it is fitting that time should have performed the same service for the author herself, who emerged some forty years ago, writes always of a world that ended with the death of Vic- toria, and still remains the single unassailably avant-garde English novelist alive today.
The fact that the novels are written largely in the form of dialogue has tempted people from time to time to turn them into plays, the latest example being a new production of Manservant and Maidservant in an adaptation by Christopher Sykes and the author, broad- cast by the BBC Third Programme last Friday. And here be pitfalls, though perhaps not the most obvious. It is certainly not a question of the dialogue itself being unspeakable—as it is, say, with Henry James—for Miss Compton-Burnett's powers are centred in the dialogue. In her hands it becomes a precision instrument, exactly as it must for the dramatist.
The difficulty is rather that Miss Compton- Burnett has a strong distaste for action and does not mean to let it corrode her dialogue if she can prevent it. For the most part she relegates the happenings of her stories to terse nuggets of narration, leaving the polished blade of the dialogue clean and free to cope with what really interests her, the moral action. For although she finds that deaths, births, murders, incests and adulteries are neces- sary evils, she clearly does not regard events as having any importance in themselves. The importance lies in the readjustment which follows them, the shifts and subterfuges to avoid their consequences, the inevitable run- ning-to-earth and the greater self-awareness and sell-knowledge which finally come about, Manservant and Maidservant is a particu- larly good example. Set in 1892, it revolves around the household of Horace Lamb, who married his wife for her money, though she married him for love: 'The love had gone and the money remained, so that the advantage lay with Horace, if he could have taken so hopeful a view of his life.' The uneasiness of Horace's own position, the pettiness and meannesses which arise out of it, are all reflected in various degrees through the other characters, so the real action of the story, as opposed to the outward events, is the following of each character like a thread through his failing, his recognition of his failing and his purgation by punishment or repentance. It is an elaborate pattern of mutual injury and forgiveness, ranging from the triangular relationships of Horace, his wife and his bachelor cousin Mortimer at the top, through the children, down to the kitchen, where Bullivant, the butler, presiding over his own microcosm, reproduces in milder form the faults and virtues of his master. The form
is, of course, that of a comedy and not so far from Moliere or Congreve in intention and effect. The difference lies in the method.
Dialogue in a stage comedy combines ex- posure of the characters' failings with the actual creation of events. What the characters say
to each other, what they omit to say and the way they say it or avoid saying it all bring about the next stage in the unfolding. This is not so in Miss Compton-Burnett's novels. Her dialogues are more in the nature of commen- taries, or close examinations of already existing circumstances. Beginning from the nearest cliché —for most circumstances have been covered by previous generations, previous users of the lan- guage—these characters proceed to pick it apart, set the cliché against the light of their own experience, toss it from hand to hand, extracting every possible moral juice from it the while; not so much in order to score off one another, as driven by the urge to open anything that is closed. There is nothing more closed than a cliché, unless it is a fixed attitude to life, a principle. Cliché and principle amount to the same thing in Miss Compton-Bumett's world, and the fine and only course is to expose them both for what they are, hollow pretences, perverters of language and life respectively.
"It was a bad hour for George, when he told the truth about himself," said Mortimer. "It was sad to see him thinking that honesty was the best policy." "Well, he cannot learn too soon that it is not," said Charlotte. "Honesty does not involve a complete lack of reticence," said Horace.' But, indeed in this world it does, as Horace and all the other characters discover. For if there is any prin- ciple Miss Compton-Burnett does propound it is that the truth must be told, and nothing but the truth. Not in order to wound others, but in order to avoid wounding oneself.
An adaptor's difficulty with these novels is to adjust the focus, to give back to the events some of the importance Miss Compton- Burnett, for her own sufficient reasons as a novelist, has denied them. This the adaptors of Manservant and Maidservant never at- tempted, falling back most pusillanimously and disastrously on a narrator. The effect was like the incessant lowering of a curtain in the theatre, partly because the novelist herself de- liberately flattens her narration in contrast to her dialogue, and partly because this particular narrator could hardly have shown less sym- pathy or aptitude for his task.
But the chief fault lay with the producer, Christopher Sykes, as it did with the producer of the West End stage production of A Heri- tage and Its History. With dialogue devoted to such minute and accurate purposes, it is incumbent on the producer to bring the setting, the sense of period, the atmosphere, the every detail to the same high pitch of perfection; and though the cast to a man, and almost to a woman, rose to their lines with evident en- thusiasm and pleasure, Mr Sykes gave them no support in depth. It was another illustra- tion, if another were needed, that the persis- tently low quality of BBC Sound Drama productions lies at the door of the producers, not the actors.
This book is curiously weighted towards its males, in comparison with the author's other work, and the chief honours here were equally shared among a male quartet: Norman Shelley as Horace, David William as his butler, Denys Blakelock as cousin Mortimer and Melvyn Hayes as the erring footman George. 1 could / hardly believe that the producer would choose to introduce one of his obtrusive narrations be- hind Marjorie Westbury as Cook singing 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' over her stove, but he did it and he must have meant to do it. It was not the least of his transgressions.
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