Picked-Up Pieces (38 page)

This author’s life was not, to use her own word, “deedy.” Ivy Compton-Burnett was born on June 5, 1884, the first child of the marriage of Dr. James Compton Burnett, a homeopathic physician large in size and formidable in intellect (philology was his private passion), and Katharine Rees, a young woman of distinguished family and striking beauty—her mane of bright gold was so wonderful that even now a nephew in his eighties remembers “the glory of Aunt Katie’s hair.” It was not the Doctor’s first marriage; fifteen years older than Miss Rees, he had had five children by his first wife, a chemist’s daughter, who died when the youngest was an infant. The new bride brought a hyphen to the family name (“to make the name sound grander”; the Doctor and her stepchildren never used it) and added to the household seven children, of whom Ivy was the first. Four sisters and two brothers followed. (A remarkable fact, which Miss Sprigge declines to emphasize, is that
not one
of Dr. Compton Burnett’s eight daughters ever married.) Ivy—“a small child … with grey-blue eyes and long fair hair which, although lacking her mother’s brilliance of colour, was very pretty”—grew up, then, amid
siblings and step-siblings, servants and tutors, in a comfortable hubbub of charades and family prayers, of incestuous cross-currents and precocious inklings, all presided over by a “splendid, great, bearded” father and a mother haloed by her glorious hair. The Doctor’s office was at 86, Wigmore Street, and his immense household finally settled at 20, The Drive, an ornate red brick mansion in Hove. Throughout her long creative life Ivy’s imagination never left that crowded, prosperous household and its late-Victorian ambience. “I do not feel,” she told an interviewer, “that I have any real or organic knowledge of life later than about 1910. I should not write of later times with enough grasp or confidence.” As with Nabokov’s Russia, disaster sealed shut an enchanted cave. Both her parents died rather younger than demigods should: her father, suddenly, at the age of sixty-one, in 1901, and her mother, after “last sad days” that became “a sore trial to her family,” in 1911, at the age of fifty-six. Ivy, in 1902, had gone to Royal Holloway College, founded by the manufacturer of Holloway’s pills and ointments in order “to give women of the middle and upper middle classes the educational advantages afforded by universities to young men.” She read Classics and won a scholarship. Back home at Hove, while tutoring her younger sisters, she began to write, and in 1911 she published, to enthusiastic reviews, her first novel,
Dolores
. Later that year, upon her mother’s death, “Ivy at the age of twenty-seven became the undisputed head of the household.” Miss Sprigge’s discreet phrasing can only hint at the ominous quality of the next years: “She enjoyed this power and became something of a tyrant, which was difficult both for Minnie [their old nurse] and for Ivy’s sisters, particularly for Topsy and ‘Baby,’ who were still in their teens and far from happy.” So far from happy, indeed, that in 1916 Topsy and Baby, the younger pair of sisters, committed suicide together, in the house to which all four sisters, led by the older pair, Vera and Judy, had fled Ivy’s tyranny a year earlier. Vera and Judy later found a cottage in Hertfordshire, and still live there. After her sisters had revolted against her rule, there was little for Ivy to do but sell the family home and, alone in the world (her brother Guy had died, in 1904, of pneumonia, and her other brother, Noël, was killed in battle in 1916), to make herself one of a pair. Her first companion, Dorothy Beresford, was something of a tyrant herself—a vivacious, argumentative woman “determined that Ivy should not ‘come the blue-stocking over her.’ ” However, Miss Sprigge tells us, “Ivy does not appear to have resented Dorothy’s tyranny,” and
the two shared a flat in Bayswater until Dorothy married, in 1919. That same year, Ivy began living with Margaret Jourdain, a woman of letters and furniture expert, who, like Dorothy, appeared to outsiders to be the dominant of the two. Their happy relationship continued until Miss Jourdain’s death, in 1951; Ivy “could not forgive Margaret for having left her,” and lived, uncompanioned, until her own death, in 1969. She had resumed writing fiction at about the time Margaret Jourdain came into her life, at the end of a decade that, if not “deedy,” had seen more than its share of family tragedy. In 1925, fourteen years after the publication of
Dolores
, she began, with
Pastors and Masters
, in her mature style of scarcely adorned conversation, the succession of more or less biennial novels that were to win her her little iron niche in English literature.

This efficient and seemly book reminded me of another biography recently read—Chris Albertson’s life of Bessie Smith. The two women, so unlike, were both born late in the 19th century, into large families, and after obscure, unhurried apprenticeships emerged with an artistic power so confident and pure that their lives could not trouble it. Bessie Smith was cheerfully bisexual, while Ivy Compton-Burnett dryly described herself as “neuter,” and the one’s alcoholic binges and Pullman-car road tours are a far cry from the other’s four-o’clock teas and weekends in Dorset; but in either case a social calendar quite fails to penetrate the mystery of a consummate talent. The biography of an artist is hollow because, unlike that of a general or a billionaire, an artist’s life is not the sum of its incidents. As we read about Bessie Smith, we can at least put on her records, and let her bottomless, winsome voice override the clutter of dates and liaisons and anecdotes. With a writer, there is no such way to apprehend simultaneously the life and the oddly disparate thing that was made of it. Though Miss Sprigge quotes reviews (in wise moderation) and gives us her own acute though never critical appraisal of each novel as it comes out, only in one place do we get Ivy, as it were, hot. That is in the interview she concocted with Margaret Jourdain in 1944, when they were living in the country to escape the London bombing. If Margaret Jourdain’s questions were actual, she talked remarkably like a character in a novel by I. Compton-Burnett:

The answer knits itself into place:

With the same absolutely firm diffidence, the novelist turns aside a number of common objections to her work: “I think that my writing does not seem to me as ‘stylised’ as it apparently is, though I do not attempt to make my characters use the words of actual life. I cannot tell you why I write as I do, as I do not know. I have even tried not to do it, but find myself falling back into my own way.” To the complaint that her books contain almost no description she replies, “However detailed such description is, I am sure that everyone forms his own conceptions, that are different from everyone else’s, including the author’s.” Both these responses appear to emphasize the artist’s modesty, but by the end of the interview an astonishing subordination of life to art has been proposed. To the question of how closely she derives her characters from real people, Ivy Compton-Burnett responds that “people in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough or comic or pitiful enough.” Further,

Astonishing! Almost every other novelist in this century, noticing that life has somehow ceased to coagulate into plots, has sought to bring art into adjustment, by making novels plotless or by relocating plot among the shifts and nuances of virtually formless daily existence. Only a superb tyrant like Miss Compton-Burnett could assert that life, not art, is at fault, and could then in exercise of her grudge thereat manufacture twenty plots whose pivot points of murder, retribution, proposal, inheritance,
and deception are not softened by the slightest padding of plausibility or gradualness. As a demonstration of
character
—her own—her work is grand. The perfect, relentless appositeness of her dialogue is but another way of her insisting, in the tea parlor of her
oeuvre
, that manners be observed—manners derived not from the slovenly example of reality but from the precedent of other books and the capabilities of language itself.

But, as a character in
Mother and Son
states, “we must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.” That Ivy Compton-Burnett did stand aside from life, unapologetically, was a great gesture—of greater artistic value, it may be, than the novels themselves. The most deeply felt praise of her has come from Nathalie Sarraute, at the end of the essay “Conversation and Sub-Conversation”; the writer, striving with the seriousness peculiar to the French of the fifties to analyze and solve by decree the formal crisis in fiction, takes the English spinster’s shameless, hyper-articulate dialogue to be a step in the direction of her own (Sarraute’s) verbal staccato of “little movements” within experience, “somewhere on the fluctuating frontier that separates conversation from sub-conversation.” The tribute is strong but a shade theoretical. Reading several Compton-Burnett volumes recently, I myself was reminded of two other critical remarks, on two other writers. (1) Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare: “A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth.” (2) Clifton Fadiman on Gertrude Stein: “My notion is that Miss Stein has set herself to solve, and has succeeded in solving, the most difficult problem in prose composition—to write something that will not arrest the attention in any way, manner, shape, or form.” Miss Sprigge’s book quotes Pamela Hansford Johnson’s opinion that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels “have an extraordinarily good effect upon the critic, because they enforce his entire attention. It is absolutely essential to read every line … because to miss a single one turns the whole book gibberish.” Which is a nice way of saying that the books demand a fearful effort from the reader, whose attention keeps slipping. Whole pages of malicious banter about ham fat or some microscopic impropriety slide by while the eyes mechanically shuttle. I reread the entirety of one novel without realizing, as handwritten notes in the back of the book proved, that I had read it before. Such tenuity, like life’s plotlessness, may be not the artist’s fault; it sometimes feels, as
we read Ivy Compton-Burnett, that she is trying to force our brain to operate along entirely novel circuits, like those grammar-school penmanship teachers who wanted us to write with our forearms instead of our fingers. The last of the Victorian novelists, she makes the 19th century seem another planet—adamant, mischievous, claustrophobic, cruel—from which her messages emanate with an arresting, exasperating semi-intelligibility. Her planet is so much her own we are pleasantly surprised to read, in this biography, that for a time she inhabited ours.

M
ILTON
’
S
P
ARADISE
L
OST
:
Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind
, by John Collier. 144 pp. Knopf, 1973.

No clue is offered, on the jacket flap or in the author’s rather testy “Apology,” as to what possessed John Collier to turn John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
into a screenplay. Was this a commercial, practical project—after all, Cecil B. De Mille mined Exodus and Judges for a pretty penny—from whose shipwreck the writer salvaged his script? Or was it always to be a curiosity purely literary—a “Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind,” as the title page advertises? Sumptuously produced by Knopf in a kind of Loew’s Orpheum Art Deco, it begins as space opera, 2001-plus: “We are moving upward into a region where the blue is lighter and clearer”; a distant star becomes a comet; the comet’s tail becomes a torrent, a waterfall whose mist is bubbles, and each bubble “is made of six or eight living creatures. These are gigantic and glorious beings with beautiful, stricken faces and flying hair. They wear minimal golden armour, such as we are accustomed to associate with demigods or angels.” They
are
angels, dressed like Barbarella, millions of them, and then we see them charred and writhing in a lake of lava, and Satan himself, “burned to incandescence, like a log that is red all the way through, ready to fall to pieces.” But he does not fall to pieces; instead, inventing magic on the spot (one of Collier’s anthropological updatings of Milton’s version), he pulls himself together and then invents oratory, announcing to the lake of the tormented, “All is not lost. The unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit nor
yield.” These three lines from Milton are the only ones Collier quotes entire; elsewhere he resists the delicious thunder of Milton’s pentameters and for cinematic speed substitutes his own tinny
vers libre
. Satan’s rhetorical question in Milton