Ivy's league of admirers
J. I. M. Stewart
The Art of I. Compton-Burnett edited by Charles Burkhart (Gollancz £3) He formed a peculiar idea of comick excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers . . . His personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to ward or strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. His comedies have therefore, in some degree, the operation of tragedies: they surprise rather than divert, and raise admiration oftener than merriment.
This is Johnson's judgement on the plays of Congreve, advanced after he has unconcernedly told us that "since I inspected them many years have passed." Ivy Compton-Burnett, too, appears rarely to have inspected Congreve — or, for that matter, almost anybody else. She clearly felt herself not much influenced by earlier writers. In 1959, it is true, she said roundly to Michael Millgate, "I have a great admiration for Jane Austen and I know her books well "; but fourteen years earlier she had said equally firmly in conversation with Margaret Jourdain, "I do not think myself that my books have any real likeness to hers. I think that there is possibly some likeness between our minds." Professor Millgate tried Henry James. "Henry James I have read very little," Miss ComptonBurnett replied. "What about George Eliot?" the Professor asked hopefully. "I like her books very much . . . I like the first part of Adam Bede." The Professor threw the question open: "Are you aware of any other direct literary influences on your work?" "No, I don't think I am." The Professor took (we may say) another peep in his notebook. "Your dialogue has been compared with that of dramatists like Congreve and Oscar Wilde." "I haven't read either Congreve or Oscar Wilde more than most people read them ... I remember enjoying Congreve's Love for Love. But I haven't read either enough to be influenced by him." At this point Miss Compton-Burnett seems to have feared that Professor Millgate's pertinacity was being inadequately rewarded, and advanced a name off her own bat. "I have a great admiration," she said, "for Chekhov's plays."
If we feel interest quicken here, it is for a reason taking us back to Johnson's characterisation of Congreve. To our own sense, it is Chekhov's rather than Con, greve's plays which have "in some degree the operation of tragedies." But we can see what Johnson means by his rather mysterious "therefore." Congreve's stage is an arena given over to ruthless combat; protagonist and deuteragonist confront one another with an intensity and in a kind of ultimate isolation like Macbeth's and Macduff's, so that we find ourselves more shaken than amused; and thus the effect is tragic, "in some degree." All this holds true of the Compton-Burnett novels, and in their discussion one comes frequently upon the names of Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Webster, and Racine. I think that another possible term of reference is Hardy. Hardy, despite many professions to the contrary, took his novelwriting extremely seriously; the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare were his yardsticks; but although a major writer he falls by a good many degrees short of the full effect of tragedy. Ivy Compton-Burnett is quite as serious as Hardy; she aims as high; and if she doesn't achieve so near an approximation to authentic tragic life it is perhaps because she is to a disabling extent wittier and cleverer.
She is also, of course, a difficult writer, whereas Hardy is as approachable by the common reader as Jane Austen is. The difficulty is made clear in the struggles we meet with in the present volume. This is not exactly, as the title-page asserts, a Collection of Critical Essays.' It consists of a short academic oration pronounced by Professor Norman Jeffares, followed by reprints of two interviews, six reviews (one or two of them nugatory), three obituaries, six essays-more-or-less-proper, and a talk by Mario Praz on Televisione Italiana. Nathalie Sarraute contributes an essay which begins as a slap at Virginia Woolf, continues through fifteen pages with a highly intelligent discussion of the function of dialogue in fiction, and faces up to Miss Compton-Burnett (whom she enormously admires) only in a brief coda. Another admirer, John Preston. thinks "it should be obvious that Ivy Compton-Burnett has very little use for people ", and that the novels offer "a linguistic rather than a psychological scrutiny of human experience." Robert Liddell, on the other hand (as I think it must be called), finds her "strong in the creation of likeable good characters," convinced like E. M. Forster that personal relations are "the supreme value" and at least sufficiently interested in " people " to be able to show how "the little boy, Aubrey, combines something of the peevishness of his maternal grandfather. ... with more of the clearheaded fineness of his paternal uncle." John Ginger judges "the conviction that religion is a dangerous delusion" to have been " one of the principal motives that caused .eighteen remarkable books to be written ", but that this " active irreligiousness " is pursued by "the most compassionate English novelist since George Eliot." (Here, again, it is possible to think of Hardy.) Praz is reminded of "the grim efficacy of the collages of a Max Ernst", and tells us that "at the feet.of a bourgeois bed breaks a stormy ocean and all around is the terrible odour of shipwreck." On the whole, we are in the presence of devotees — a station entirely agreeable in itself, if not of the first critical advantage. But two contributions by Angus Wilson stand a little apart from all this, and I think one begins to hear in them the likely judgement of posterity. Ivy Compton-Burnett's families and their fortunes stand in a solid English tradition — bourgeois domestic tyranny being a percurrent theme of the novel from Richardson to Samuel Butler. In her treatment of it "she immediately invites comparison with the great and yet cannot attain that status." Her art refines itself steadily, but "we have not had that inner development, that gradual unconscious change that we find ... between Scenes of Clerical Life and Middlemarch, which we rightly associate with great novelists." "She will surely," Wilson concludes, "have a high place in English literature — too eccentric to be among the very great, but far toqr, profound to be among the minor." This seems true. A highly idiosyncratic writer, Ivy Compton-Burnett is with Sterne and Joyce, not Peacock and Firbank.
Previous page
