Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Bells and Whistles *

* (restored)

 

Bells

“Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.” — Ivy Compton-Burnett

“There is something bleached about Miss Compton-Burnett: like hair that has never had any colour in it.” — Virginia Woolf

‘There’s no middle ground with this novelist—you’re either bewildered by her or you become an addict.’ — Maria Aitken

“Ivy Compton-Burnett embodied a quite unmodified pre-1914 personality. Her jewellery managed never to look like jewellery but, on her, seemed hieratic insignia.” — Anthony Powell

‘A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics.’ — Mary McCarthy

‘At first sight her work strikes you as clumsy and heavy-fisted; her figures, though solid, are not what is called “life-like”, and she composes her books on highly defined and artificial designs. In fact, she is open to all the reproaches laid upon the founders of post-impressionism. And it is still as useless, I think, to put her work before the general public as it was to put that of Cézanne a quarter of a century ago.’ — Raymond Mortimer

‘She was very, very clever. You’d have to be very tasteless not to see she had something unique to give her age.’ — Rebecca West

‘Ivy Compton-Burnett is Jane Austen on bad drugs.’ — Francine Prose

‘Some concentration is needed. A great deal, I should have said. Whenever I travel on a holiday abroad, I save space in my luggage by taking with me only one book, a Compton-Burnett novel, since I have long since learned that, such will be its denseness and complexity, it will keep me busy for at least a week, even though I may well have read it at least twice already.Hesperus is a small firm with the declared aim ‘of bringing near what is far’. — Sue Townsend

‘Right up to the end of her life, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s irritable, nitpicking, obsessive love of words never ceased. According to the great biography Ivy, by Hilary Spurling, an old friend came to visit Ivy and she woke up from a catnap and snapped, “I’m not tired, I’m sleepy. They are different things. And I’m surprised that you should say tired when you mean sleepy.” That Ivy! She was a real laff-riot. Her last spoken words before death? “Leave me alone.” I have to. I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself.’ — John Waters

 

 

‘Ivy Compton-Burnett is a puzzle. She was born in 1884, within a year or so of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, but her particular originality could hardly be further from the strenuous pioneering effort, the stylistic shock tactics and underlying romanticism of the giants of the Modern Movement. Her tone is cool, dry, sharp, irreverent and ironic. She was over forty when she made her debut in the 1920s alongside a much younger generation of novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, with whom she had in some ways more in common than with her own contemporaries, whose imaginations had been formed and furnished before the First World War.

‘(Her work’s) wit, acidity and quiet cynicism were picked up at once in Vogue by the young Raymond Mortimer, who would be one of the first to recognise in the strange, condensed and abstracted forms of I. Compton-Burnett’s early novels the closest it was possible to come to post-impressionism in fiction. For Mortimer and others like him between the wars, she represented the last word in bold and daring innovation. … If the young were enthusiastic, the literary establishment responded with understandable caution to works that seemed to embody all the more unwholesome, frivolous and unsettling tendencies of decadent modern youth. I. Compton-Burnett’s second novel, which became something of an intellectual rallying point for bright young things in 1929, had been turned down in manuscript by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press (“She can’t even write,” he said), and her growing reputation in avant-garde circles over the next decade continued to give his wife Virginia sleepless nights.

‘From the beginning lvy’s mystery strengthened her appeal. Nobody knew who she was or where she came from, and the few who met her were deeply disconcerted to find a nondescript, retiring, resolutely uncommunicative character who dressed and behaved more like a Victorian governess than a radical iconoclast. … By the time she died in 1969 she had become a legend, a public image so forbidding and remote that, when I set out soon afterwards to write her life, I found it hard at first to credit the fond, sociable, disarmingly absurd and affectionate creature described by friends who sorely missed her. The discrepancy was only one of many contradictions about her life and work for, as Anthony Powell pointed out, the two could not be separated, nor could the mystery of the one be solved without recourse to the other. It was as if the Victorian trappings provided, in both fact and fiction, a protective cover behind which her penetrating subversive intelligence might operate unsuspected, freely and without constraint.’ — Hilary Spurling

 

 

 

 

Whistles

“It is a pity when we cannot judge by the surface, when it is so often arranged for us to judge by it.” — from Mother and Son

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“It is the dead we do not speak evil of, and I shall treat my father as living for as long as I can. It is treating the old with more sympathy to speak evil of them.” — from More Women than Men

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“People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.” — ICB

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“… familiarity breeds contempt, and ought to breed it. It is through familiarity that we get to know each other.” — from Two Worlds and Their Ways

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“People cannot really give at all. They can only exchange.” — from Daughters and Sons

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“A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.” — ICB

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“You should be careful what you say.”

“I dislike people who have to do that. I have nothing to hide. It is better to talk honestly.”

“I think it is much worse,” said Walter. “It means all sorts of risks. Honest people can even say: ‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ after they have said it. And they cannot know before. Dishonest talk is far better. I should like to hear myself described insincerely.” — from A Heritage and Its History

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“Well, of course, people are only human. But it really does not seem much for them to be.” — from A Family and a Fortune

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“I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.” — ICB

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“All institutions have the same soul.” — from A Heritage and Its History

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“Marriage: So dangerous, these fusions of personality, don’t you think?” — Ivy Compton-Burnett quoted by Hilary Spurling in Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett

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“It is unworthy to show off yourself at the expense of others. I do not mince my words. To say openly what is to be said! Ah, how much braver and better!”

“I think it is much worse. I can’t tell you how bad it seems to me. And I never admire courage. It is always used against people. What other purpose has it?”

“I have said what I had to say. I shall not add another word.”

“I hope not, unless you mince it,” said Fanny. — from A Heritage and Its History

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“Well, of course, people are only human… But it really does not seem much for them to be.” — ICB

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“Self-knowledge speaks ill for people; it shows they are what they are, almost on purpose.” — from Parents and Children

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“Time has too much credit,” said Bridget. “It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.” — from Darkness and Day

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“You must trust me,” said Magdalen.

“But that is what I cannot do. At any time you might act for my good. When people do that, it kills something precious between them.” — from Manservant and Maidservant

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“My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.” — ICB

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“Of course truth comes out of the mouths of babes. They are too simple to suppress it.” — from Mother and Son

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“Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.” — from Darkness and Day

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“A thing is not nothing when it is all there is.” — ICB

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“Virtue has gone out of me.”

“It has,” said Reuben. “We saw and heard it going out.” — from A God and His Gifts

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“You will find my casual methods a change,” said Catherine. “I hope you will not mind them.”

“Ursula will not. I will mind them very much. But wild horses would not drag it from me. Though I hardly think wild horses do as much to drag things from people as is thought.” — from The Present and the Past

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“As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.” — ICB

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“Well, the English have no family feelings. That is, none of the kind you mean. They have them, and one of them is that relations must cause no expense.” — from Parents and Children

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“Perhaps that is the difference between a bad person and a good; that the one reveals himself, and the other has the proper feeling to hide it.” — from The Present and the Past

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“At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.” — ICB

 

Media

Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

Ivy Compton Burnett : L’Excellence de nos aînés

 

Speed Read

 

Mss. page

 

Conversation

 

Margaret Jourdain: We are both what our country landladies call “great readers,” and have often talked over other people’s books during this long quarter of a century between two wars, but never your books.

Ivy Compton-Burnett: It seems an omission, as I am sure we have talked of yours. So let us remedy it.

M. J.: I see that yours are a novel thing in fiction, and unlike the work of other novelists. I see that they are conversation pieces, stepping into the bounds of drama, that narrative and exposition in them are drastically reduced, that there is less scenery than in the early days of the English drama, when a placard informed the audience that the scene was “a wood near Athens,” and less description than in many stage directions. There is nothing to catch the eye, in this “country of the blind.” All your books, from Pastors and Masters, to the present-day Elders and Betters are quite unlike what Virginia Woolf called the “heavy upholstered novel.”

I. C. B.: I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel. They are not of a play, and both deal with imaginary human beings and their lives. I have been told that I ought to write plays, but cannot see myself making the transition. I read plays with especial pleasure, and in reading novels I am disappointed if a scene is carried through in the voice of the author rather than the voices of the characters. I think that I simply follow my natural bent. But I hardly think that “country of the blind” is quite the right description of my scene.

M. J.: I should like to ask you one or two questions; partly my own and partly what several friends have asked. There is time enough and to spare in Lyme Regis, which is a town well-known to novelists. Jane Austen was here, and Miss Mitford.

I. C. B.: And now we are here, though our presence does not seem to be equally felt. No notice marks our lodging. And we also differ from Jane Austen and Miss Mitford in being birds of passage, fleeing from bombs. I have a feeling that they would both have fled, and felt it proper to do so, and wish that we could really feel it equally proper.

M. J.: I have heard your dialogue criticised as “highly artificial” or stylised. One reviewer, I remember, said that it was impossible to “conceive of any human being giving tongue to every emotion, foible and reason with the precision, clarity and wit possessed by all Miss Compton-Burnett’s characters, be they parlourmaids, children, parents or spinster aunts.” It seems odd to object to precision, clarity and wit, and the same objection would lie against the dialogue of Congreve and Sheridan.

I. C. B.: 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. It seems to me that the servants in my books talk quite differently from the educated people, and the children from the adults, but the difference may remain in my own mind and not be conveyed to the reader. I think people’s style, like the way they speak and move, comes from themselves and cannot be explained. I am not saying that they necessarily admire it, though naturally they turn on it a lenient eye.

M. J.: The word “stylised,” which according to the New English Dictionary means “conforming to the rules of a conventional style” has been used in reviewing your books, but the dialogue is often very close to real speech, and not “artificial” or “stylised.” It is, however, sometimes interrupted by formal speech. Take Lucia Sullivan’s explanation of her grandfather’s reluctance to enter his son’s sitting room without an invitation. “It is the intangibility of the distinction (she says) that gives it its point.” Lucia Sullivan is a girl of twenty-four, not especially formal at other times.

I. C. B.: I cannot tell why my people talk sometimes according to conventional style, and sometimes in the manner of real speech, if this is the case. It is simply the result of an effort to give the impression I want to give.

I should not have thought that Lucia Sullivan’s speech was particularly formal. The long word near the beginning is the word that gives her meaning; and surely a girl of twenty-four is enough of a woman to have a normal command of words.

M. J.: Reviewers lean to comparisons. Some have suggested a likeness between your work and Jane Austen’s. Mr. Edwin Muir, however, thinks it is “much nearer the Elizabethan drama of horror”—I can’t think why.

I. C. B.: I should not have thought that authors often recognised influences. They tend to think, and to like to think, that they are not unduly indebted to their predecessors. But I have read Jane Austen so much, and with such enjoyment and admiration, that I may have absorbed things from her unconsciously. 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.

The same might apply in a measure to the Elizabethan dramatists, though I don’t think I have read these more than most people have.

M. J:. Mr. Muir in an earlier review says that you remind him of Congreve—a formidable list, Congreve, Jane Austen, Henry James and the Elizabethan dramatists—and the odd thing is that they are all disparate.

I. C. B.: The only explanation I can give, is that people who practise the same art are likely to have some characteristics in common. I have noticed such resemblance between writers the most widely separated, in merit, kind and time.

M. J.: I see one point of contact between your novels and Jane Austen’s. She keeps her eye fixed upon the small circuit of country gentlefolk who seem to have little to do but pay calls, take walks, talk, and dine, in fact—the comfortable classes; she does not include people in what Austen Leigh calls “a position of poverty and obscurity, as this, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it.”

I. C. B.: I feel that I do not know the people outside my own world well enough to deal with them. I had no idea that my characters did nothing but call, walk, talk and dine, though I am glad you do not say that they only talk. Their professions and occupations are indicated, but I am concerned with their personal lives; and following them into their professional world would lead to the alternations between two spheres, that I think is a mistake in books. I always regret it in the great Victorian novelists, though it would be hard to avoid it in books on a large scale. And my characters have their own poverty and obscurity, though of course it is only their own.

I feel I have a knowledge of servants in so far as they take a part in the world they serve. This may mean that the knowledge is superficial, as I have often thought it in other people’s books.

The people in between seem to me unrelated to anything I know. When I talk to tradespeople, their thoughts and reactions seem to have their background in a dark world, though their material lives may not differ greatly from my own.

M. J.: I don’t see any influence of the “Elizabethan drama of horror,” nor much of Jane Austen. I think there is something of Henry James. What about the suggestion that the Russian novelists affected you—not Tolstoy of course, but Tchekov or Dostoievsky. Dostoievsky’s method, “a mad jumble that flings things down in a heap,” isn’t yours. And how about the Greek dramatists?

I. C. B.: I am not a great reader of Henry James, though I have seen it suggested that I am his disciple. I don’t mean that I have any objection to the character, except in so far as it is a human instinct to object to being a disciple, but I hardly think I have read him enough to show his influence. I enjoy him less than many other writers. He does not reveal as much as I should like of the relations of his characters with each other. And I am surprised if my style is as intricate as his. I should have thought it was only rather condensed. If it is, I sympathise with the people who cannot read my books. The Russian novels I read with a sense of being in a daze, of seeing their action take place in a sort of half-light, as though there was an obscurity between my mind and theirs, and only part of the meaning conveyed to a Russian came through to me. I always wonder if people, who think they see the whole meaning, have any conception of it. So I am probably hardly influenced by the Russians. But, as I have said before, I think that people who follow the same art, however different their levels, are likely to have some of the same attributes, and that it is possibly these that lead them to a similar end. The Greek dramatists I read as a girl, as I was classically educated, and read them with the attention to each line necessitated by the state of my scholarship; and it is difficult to say how much soaked in, but I should think very likely something. I have not read them for many years—another result of the state of my scholarship.

M. J.: There is little attention given to external things and almost no descriptive writing in your novels, and that is a breach with tradition. Even Jane Austen has an aside about the “worth” of Lyme, Charmouth and Pinhay, “with its green chasms between romantic rocks.” And there is much more description in later novels, such as Thomas Hardy’s. In The Return of the Native, the great Egdon Heath has to be reckoned with as a protagonist. Now you cut out all of this. The Gavestons’ house in A Family and a Fortune is spoken of as old and beautiful, but its date and style are not mentioned.

I. C. B.: I should have thought that my actual characters were described enough to help people to imagine them. 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. As regards such things as landscape and scenery, I never feel inclined to describe them; indeed I tend to miss such writing out, when I am reading, which may be a sign that I am not fitted for it. I make an exception of Thomas Hardy, but surely his presentation of natural features almost as characters puts him on a plane of his own, and almost carries the thing described into the human world. In the case of Jane Austen, I hurry through her words about Lyme and its surroundings, in order to return to her people.

It might be better to give more account of people’s homes and intimate background, but I hardly see why the date and style of the Gavestons’ house should be given, as I did not think of them as giving their attention to it, and as a house of a different date and style would have done for them equally well. It would be something to them that it was old and beautiful, but it would be enough.

M. J.: I see a reviewer says that Elders and Betters—which has the destruction of a will by one character (Anna Donne) who afterwards drives another to suicide—has “a milder and less criminal flavour than most of its predecessors.” There is a high incidence of murder in some of your novels, which is really not common among the “comfortable classes.” I remember, however, talking of the rarity of murders with a lawyer’s daughter, who said that her father asserted that murders within their class were not so rare. He used to call them “Mayfair murders.”

I. C. B.: I never see why murder and perversion of justice are not normal subjects for a plot, or why they are particularly Elizabethan or Victorian, as some reviewers seem to think. But I think it is better for a novel to have a plot. Otherwise it has no shape, and incidents that have no part in a formal whole seem to have less significance. I always wish that Katherine Mansfield’s At the Bay was cast in a formal mould. And a plot gives rise to secondary scenes, that bring out personality and give scope for revealing character. If the plot were taken out of a book, a good deal of what may seem unconnected with it, would have to go. A plot is like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression or signs of experience, but the support of the whole.

M. J.: At the Bay breaks off rather than comes to its full stop. A novel without a plot sags like a tent with a broken pole. Your last book had a very generous amount of review space; and most of the reviews were intelligent. Elizabeth Bowen found a phrase for one of your characteristics; “a sinister cosiness,” but the Queen tells one that “if one perseveres with the conversations (evidently an obstacle), a domestic chronicle of the quieter sort emerges.” How do you think reviews have affected you and your work?

I. C. B.: It is said that writers never read reviews, but in this case it is hard to see how the press-cutting agencies can flourish and increase their charge. I think that writers not only read reviews, but are subject to an urge to do so. George Henry Lewes is supposed to have hidden George Eliot’s disparaging reviews, in case she should see them; and if he wished to prevent her doing so, I think it was a wise precaution. I think that reviews have a considerable effect upon writers. Of course I am talking of reviews that count, by people whose words have a meaning. I remember my first encouraging notices with gratitude to their authors. Much of the pleasure of making a book would go, if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people; and it sometimes seems that I do so; but I would not write for no one.

I think the effect of reviews upon a writer’s actual work is less. A writer is too happy in praise to do anything but accept it. Blame he would reject, if he could; but if he cannot, I think he generally knew of his guilt, and could not remedy matters. I have nearly always found this the case myself.

Letters from readers must come under the head of reviews, and have the advantage that their writers are under no compulsion to mention what they do not admire. I have only had one correspondent who broke this rule, and what he did not admire was the whole book. He stated that he could see nothing in it, and had moreover found it too concentrated to read. Someone said that I must have liked this letter the most of all I had had, but I believe I liked it the least.

Some writers have so many letters that they find them a burden. They make me feel ashamed of having so few, and inclined to think that people should write to me more.

 

 

According to John Waters …

Want to go further in your advanced search for snobbish, elitist, literary wit? Of course you do, but I should warn you, you’ll have to work for it. Try reading any novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was English, looked exactly like the illustration on the Old Maid card, never had sex even once, and wrote twenty dark, hilarious, evil little novels between the years 1911 and 1969. Pick any one of them. They’re all pretty much the same. Little actual action, almost no description, and endless pages of hermetically sealed, stylized, sharp, cruel, venomous Edwardian dialogue. “Once you pick up a Compton-Burnett,” Ivy commented about her own books, “it’s hard not to put them down again.”

Since Darkness and Day has been called “one of her strangest novels,” I guess I’ll recommend you start with this one. She wrote it in 1951, when she was sixty-seven years old. It is her insanely inventive revision of Oedipus Rex. A family returns from exile to reveal the deep secrets of their accidental incestuous marriage only to learn that their innocent truths cause even more complicated shame. Ivy Compton-Burnett was obsessed with the exact meaning of language, and she hated describing anything that wasn’t included in what her characters actually said. She would paint a verbal picture of the people in her books but once and only once (usually when they are first introduced) and you’d better remember it, because often there are thirty pages of dialogue before someone else is identified again. When readers finally reach these tiny islands of rest between speeches, they steady their eyes, take a deep breath, and plunge back into Ivy’s turbulent whirlpool of language. No wonder a critic called Miss Compton-Burnett “a writer’s writer.” Her dialogue constantly deconstructs what her characters actually mean to say. Once you get the rhythm, the sparkle, the subtle nuances of family dominance in her character’s words, you will feel superior to other people and how they struggle to speak in real life.

Sure, you’ll get lost reading Darkness and Day, maybe hypnotized, probably even bored. But as soon as you realize you aren’t concentrating, not paying enough attention, BANG! A great line will hit you right between the eyes and give you the intellectual shivers. You certainly can’t skim this book. One editor complained after reading long passages of dialogue, and having to turn back page after page to figure out who was saying what to whom, that the author had forgotten to write that one of the characters was speaking on the telephone. Ivy grumpily admitted he was correct and added two words to the text to explain: “He said.”

The monstrously intelligent and all-knowing children in Darkness and Day speak like no other children in the history of youth. “Do you remember your Uncle?” a relative asks his nieces Rose and Viola. “You used to be younger,” Rose says with steely reasoning. “That is true,” the uncle answers, “and I feel as young as I did.” “People do feel younger than they are,” she quickly responds. “They don’t get used to a new age, before they get to the next one. I feel I am nine, and I have been ten for a week. I am in my eleventh year.” “I don’t often think as much as that,” her sister Viola comments. “I always think,” answers Rose with a vengeance.

Simple truths are told in the book in bafflingly elegant ways. “You can’t help what happens in your mind,” one character comments. When the family worries about a scandal, a member logically surmises, “People don’t forget things, unless they do.” After the housekeeper catches little Rose reading in bed past her bedtime, she scolds, “Dear, dear! I did not see you hide that book.” “Well if you had, it wouldn’t have been hidden,” Rose answers without flinching. Even something as simple as saying good morning can be tortuously debated. When the children don’t answer, the teacher makes another attempt. “Well, I will try to do better. Good morning to you both again.” “We don’t say things like ‘good morning,’ ” Rose answers, “we don’t see what use it is.” “Well, perhaps you are not old enough to realize that,” the teacher tries to argue. “We don’t want to be old,” Rose answers back, “people don’t really know much more. They only learn to seem to.” When the children have so tortured their teacher that she quits after only two days’ work, she tries to put her frustration into words. “The use of patience is not to encourage people without proper feeling to be intolerable,” she says, but the children are unmoved. As their governess discovers a mean prank the children have pulled involving the teacher’s chair, she tries to discipline them. “The thing that occurs to me, is too bad to be true.” “Then it can’t be true,” Rose answers, ever the debater. “I don’t dare ask about it,” the governess proclaims. “Then there is the end of the matter,” the children declare with intellectual victory.

And on death, Ms. Compton-Burnett’s writing can be just plain brutal. After the children in Darkness and Day are told of a passing in the family, they are asked to “run upstairs and forget what is sad. Just remember the happy part of it.” “What is the happy part?” wonders Viola. “There is none,” answers Rose. “Why do people talk as if they are glad when someone is dead? I think it must mean there is a little gladness somewhere.”

Right up to the end of her life, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s irritable, nitpicking, obsessive love of words never ceased. According to the great biography Ivy, by Hilary Spurling, an old friend came to visit Ivy and she woke up from a catnap and snapped, “I’m not tired, I’m sleepy. They are different things. And I’m surprised that you should say tired when you mean sleepy.” That Ivy! She was a real laff-riot. Her last spoken words before death? “Leave me alone.” I have to. I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself.

 

 

My favorite IC-B novel

Ivy Compton-Burnett The Present and the Past
University of California Press

‘Cassius Clare is the father of five children; two by his first wife from whom he is divorced, and three by his second wife who conscientiously tries to be a mother to all five. The first Ms. Clare implores Cassius to let her visit her children. At first flattered by the suggestion of a harem implicit in the situation, then maliciously foreseeing the predicament which is likely to arise, he consents. To his dismay, the tactless return of the first Mrs. Clare results in an intimate friendship between the two women who have shared this singularly unlovable husband; neither pays any heed to him.’ — copy

‘Ivy Compton-Burnett is an acquired taste. A friend lent me The Present and The Past a year ago saying I had to read it. For the first couple of chapters I didn’t who was who or understand what was going on. Was this even a novel? It just seemed to be a lot of dialogue in artificial archaic speech. Somewhere in the third chapter I suddenly, in a flash of revelation, ‘got it’. I understood the tragi-comic ‘tone’ and understood that by concentrating on the subtle nuances of dialogue all the usual content/interest of a novel would become evident. There are distinct characters interacting and there is definitely plot – quite elaborate convoluted, even melodramatic, plot. But all the usual narrative devices of commentary, scene setting and transitions between scenes have been reduced, almost eliminated.

‘The storytelling occurs through the dialogue. All the characters speak in a stylised formal way, even children. This dialogue has a sophisticated ironic tone that is blackly comic (it frequently makes me laugh out loud), yet explicitly expresses a tragic sense of the hopelessness and tragedy of life. The main distinction between characters is where they stand in the hierarchy of the Victorian household in which all Ivy novels seem to be set. In other words these novels are about power, guilt and complicity: the mind games and power games into which we are all locked – the Victorian household and its characters becoming universal archetypes. (It may be a far-fetched comparison but I think that in both the settings and the rigorously `minimalist’ style Ivy is to literature what Japanese director Ozu is to cinema, with a similar emotional punch.)

‘Because of the concentrated nature of the dialogue, reading Ivy is very intense and she is probably best read in small doses, one chapter at a sitting. But, apart from that, once you `get it’ then reading Ivy becomes easy and addictive. It’s not like reading Finnegans Wake. I’ve now read several more Ivy novels and they are all similar, though Present and Past remains my favourite. It’s quite short, focused, funny and poignant. We have Cassius, a typical Ivy father/husband: part tyrant part baby. His previous wife suddenly reappears. This appeals to Cassius’s narcissism. He thinks he has formed a kind of harem in which he wields absolute power. But then (a little like the infamous harem scene in Fellini’s Eight and a Half) the previous wife and the present wife start to bond with each other and power begins to ebb from Cassius: his ego, his sense of self and then his very existence begin to crumble. Even the children start to deride him. And then a series of extraordinary plot twists… which you’ll have to read the book to find out!’ — hj

 

Read it all

 

Excerpt

“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” said Henry Clare.
—His sister glanced in his direction.
—“They are pecking the sick one. They are angry because it is ill.”
—“Perhaps it is because they are anxious,” said Megan, looking at the hens in the hope of discerning this feeling.
—“It will soon be dead,” said Henry, sitting on a log with his hands on his knees. “It must be having death-pangs now.”
—Another member of the family was giving his attention to the fowls. He was earnestly thrusting cake through the wire for their entertainment. When he dropped a piece he picked it up and put it into his own mouth, as though it had been rendered unfit for poultry’s consumption. His elders appeared to view his attitude either in indifference or sympathy.
—“What are death-pangs like?” said Henry, in another tone.
—“I don’t know,” said his sister, keeping her eyes from the sufferer of them. “And I don’t think the hen is having them. It seems not to know anything.”
—Henry was a tall, solid boy of eight, with rough, dark hair, pale, wide eyes, formless, infantine features, and something vulnerable about him that seemed inconsistent with himself. His sister, a year younger and smaller for her age, had narrower, deeper eyes, a regular, oval face, sudden, nervous movements, and something resistant in her that was again at variance with what was beneath.
—Tobias at three had small, dark, busy eyes, a fluffy, colourless head, a face that changed with the weeks and evinced an uncertain charm, and a withdrawn expression consistent with his absorption in his own interests. He was still pushing crumbs through the wire when his shoulder was grasped by a hand above him.
—“Wasting your cake on the hens! You know you were to eat it yourself.”
—Toby continued his task as though unaware of interruption.
—“Couldn’t one of you others have stopped him?”
—The latter also seemed unaware of any break.
—“Don’t do that,” said the nursemaid, seizing Toby’s arm so that he dropped the cake. “Didn’t you hear me speak?”
—Toby still seemed not to do so. He retrieved the cake, took a bite himself and resumed his work.
—“Don’t eat it now,” said Eliza. “Give it all to the hens.”
—Toby followed the injunction, and she waited until the cake was gone.
—“Now if I give you another piece, will you eat it?”
—“Can we have another piece too?” said the other children, appearing to notice her for the first time.
—She distributed the cake, and Toby turned to the wire, but when she pulled him away, stood eating contentedly.
—“Soon be better now,” he said, with reference to the hen and his dealings with it.
—“It didn’t get any cake,” said Henry. “The others had it all. They took it and then pecked the sick one. Oh, dear, oh, dear!”
—“He did get some,” said Toby, looking from face to face for reassurance. “Toby gave it to him.”
—He turned to inspect the position, which was now that the hens, no longer competing for crumbs, had transferred their activity to their disabled companion.
—“Pecking him!” said Toby, moving from foot to foot. “Pecking him when he is ill! Fetch William. Fetch him.”
—A pleasant, middle-aged man, known as the head gardener by virtue of his once having had subordinates, entered the run and transferred the hen to a separate coop.
—“That is better, sir.”
—“Call Toby ‘sir’,” said the latter, smiling to himself.
—“She will be by herself now.”
—“Sir,” supplied Toby.
—“Will it get well?” said Henry. “I can’t say, sir.”
—“Henry and Toby both ‘sir’,” said Toby. “Megan too.”
—“No, I am not,” said his sister.
—“Poor Megan, not ‘sir’!” said Toby, sadly.
—“The last hen that was ill was put in a coop to die,” said Henry, resuming his seat and the mood it seemed to engender in him.
—“Well, it died after it was there,” said Megan.
—“That is better, miss,” said William.
—“Miss,” said Toby, in a quiet, complex tone.
—“They go away alone to die,” said Henry. “All birds do that, and a hen is a bird. But it can’t when it is shut in a coop. It can’t act according to its nature.”
—“Perhaps it ought not to do a thing that ends in dying,” said Megan.
—“Something in that, miss,” said William.
—“Why do you stay by the fowls,” said Eliza, “when there is the garden for you to play in?”
—“We are only allowed to play in part of it,” said Henry, as though giving an explanation.
—“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” said Eliza, in perfunctory mimicry.
—“William forgot to let out the hens,” said Megan, “and Toby would not leave them.”
—Toby tried to propel some cake to the hen in the coop, failed and stood absorbed in the scramble of the others for it.
—“All want one little crumb. Poor hens!”
—“What did I tell you?” said Eliza, again grasping his arm.
—He pulled it away and openly applied himself to inserting cake between the wires.
—“Toby not eat it now,” he said in a dutiful tone.
—“A good thing he does not have all his meals here,” said William.
—“There is trouble wherever he has them,” said Eliza. “And the end is waste.”
—The sick hen roused to life and flung itself against the coop in a frenzy to join the feast.
—“It will kill itself,” said Henry. “No one will let it out.”
—William did so and the hen rushed forth, cast itself into the fray, staggered and fell.
—“It is dead,” said Henry, almost before this was the case.
—“Poor hen fall down,” said Toby, in the tone of one who knew the experience. “But soon be well again.”
—“Not in this world,” said William.
—“Sir,” said Toby, to himself. “No, miss.”
—“It won’t go to another world,” said Henry. “It was ill and pecked in this one, and it won’t have any other.”
—“It was only pecked on its last day,” said Megan. “And everything is ill before it dies.”
—“The last thing it felt was hunger, and that was not satisfied.”
—“It did not know it would not be. It thought it would.”
—“It did that, miss,” said William. “And it was dead before it knew.”
—“There was no water in the coop,” said Henry, “and sick things are parched with thirst.”
—“Walking on him,” said Toby, in a dubious tone.
—“Eliza, the hens are walking on the dead one!” said Megan, in a voice that betrayed her.
—“It is in their way, miss,” said William, giving a full account of the position.
—Megan looked away from the hens, and Henry stood with his eyes on them. Toby let the matter leave his mind, or found that it did so.
—“Now what is all this?” said another voice, as the head nurse appeared on the scene, and was led by some instinct to turn her eyes at once on Megan. “What is the matter with you all?”
—“One of the hens has died,” said Eliza, in rapid summary. “Toby has given them his cake and hardly taken a mouthful. The other hens walked on the dead one and upset Miss Megan. Master Henry has one of his moods.”
—Megan turned aside with a covert glance at William.
—“Seeing the truth about things isn’t a mood,” said Henry.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** T, Cardboard is life’s unsung hero or one of them. With me? Mostly film bullshit. Heavy encouragement to finish those short fiction samples, man. Kind of a no brainer, or, err, an  brainer, I guess, right? I think I have no control of the keyboard either until I edit. Then I’m a fascist. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s kind of refreshing to think about cardboard, isn’t it? And relaxing? Maybe that’s just me. I used to be into handwriting analysis but I haven’t thought much about it in ages. I don’t remember how, but it was discovered that I had a knack for it when I was a teen, and I would practice to on my friends when we got bored. I read a lot, so your love is going to go broke eventually. Love paying you €1000 every time you breathe in, G. ** Misanthrope, I like the first album. The second has moments but they’re already gentrifying unpleasantly for me on that one. Oh, god, that’s very stressful about your mom. I hope against hope against hope that there’ll be a healthy way forward. So sorry, George. Hugs galore. ** Bill, Good old Shellac. Cool! ** Brendan, Hi. Wow, off to NYC, you’re like, uh, I don’t know, Terry Richardson without the evil creepy stuff and a billion times more handsome? ** _Black_Acrylic, Why would they kill the WiFi at a time like that/this? Are they afraid people will get too upset? Strange. ** Sypha, I, of course, have never heard of Mr. Budge before. Nice name. I felt actual jonesing sensations while reading your description of that mini golf course. If only France had courses that weren’t just flat, rectangular grass patches with holes at one end. Very nice. For you. ** john christopher, I can see you, but I cant hear you, no. Good music? Wait, PJ Harvey. that’s good music. Music that sounds ugly and new would describe everything I listen to. So I say you’re a lucky dog. ** Tosh Berman, Terrif! Everyone, Tosh Berman has posted his all-time favorite albums on his substack, and obviously you might want to solve the mystery of what’s on it. Easy! I love that Lewis Furey album too. ** Steve Erickson, Definitely great news about the Daney collection. He’s so great. He let me publish an essay by him on Bresson in my Little Caesar Magazine back in the early 80s. I saw Richard Meltzer perform a one person show about his own life once, if that counts. A one-man show about Rex Reed might be fun. ** Robert, Hi. Can you recommend a specific album by them to try? Mm, getting to an age where death is not very far around the corner no matter what I do does make it more ominous and seemingly unfair hateful, yes. ** Okay. I haven’t done a post on the great, great, great Ivy Compton-Burnett in a long time, so I decided to restore this big shebang on her work from ages ago. Enjoy her rulership. See you tomorrow.