Spotlight on … Ivy Compton-Burnett The Present and the Past (1953) *

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‘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

 

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Gallery

 

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Further

The Ivy Compton-Burnett Homepage
Ivy Compton-Burnett @ myspace
‘London has lost all its Ivy’
‘The deeds and words of Ivy Compton-Burnett’
‘TPatP’ @ goodreads
Douglas Messerli on ‘TPatP’
‘Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Small Economies’
‘Terrifyingly Friendly’
‘Table Talk’
Finding-Aid for the Ivy Compton-Burnett Papers
‘Poison? Ivy? No: merely the least-read great novelist’
John Waters on Ivy Compton-Burnett
Buy ‘The Present and the Past’

 

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Extras

Ivy Compton-Burnett “Dom i jego głowa”

Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

A Family and a Fortune by Ivy Compton-Burnett | BBC RADIO DRAMA

 

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Speed read

 

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Manuscript page

 

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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.

 

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Book

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

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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. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Happy to make the intro. No, I’ve never seen an actual house in central Paris. I guess they must exist, but, oddly, no. Yes, my neighbor currently plays ‘Hotel California’ on virtual repeat at a high volume. And now he’s learned the lyrics and is ‘singing’ along. Help! When you become a self-marketing genius, give classes, or at least a private one for me, thanks. Love making ‘Ivy Compton Burnett’ the most popular Halloween costume this year, G. ** David Ehrenstein, And he’s still around. He just premiered his new film here in Paris last week. I hung out with him a while back. He is one odd bird, but very nice. ** Misanthrope, Oh, that’s interesting. What are you going to do with yourself? The question on everyone’s lips. Put a piece of paper in front of you, snort some coke, pick up a pen, put the nub to the page, and burn off your energy? To break the ice? You sent me … oh, on Facebook, right? I’ll go look. I haven’t checked my messages there in weeks, eek. I think I approach the world with a teen-like wonder, if such a thing exists. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. The problem with Fischerspooner, at least in the States, is that they were way overhyped or overhyped themselves before they really even did anything, pre-albums. They did a gig in LA, super-hyped, at a ‘secret’ location, etc., and everybody who was anybody went, including me, and their show just wasn’t much of anything. At least not yet. And everyone just kind of shrugged. I think they kind of jumped the gun. And by the time they started putting out records, people were already turned off. In the States, at least. But they inspired you, and that’s enough of a legacy right there if nothing else. ** Damien Ark, Hi. Oh, great, about the email/post. Now I’m at denniscoopeer72@outlook.com. Never heard Fromjoy, but that’s a fatal blow right there. Thanks, man. Excited to get the post. ** Bill, Hi. Hm, okay, maybe I’ll see if I can locate the filmmakers somehow. Thanks, B. ** Steve Erickson, Oh, man, that sounds awful. I’ve seen stuff about the Karen Tongson book, and it does seem intriguing. Give me the good or bad word when there is one. Very nice about the Anthology series. Phil Solomon, that’s amazing, So hard to see his work. I’ve never seen that Fassbinder either. I’m not sure I’ve heard of it before even. Does it have anything to do with the famous film of that title? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, C. I’m reasonably fine, thank you. It is a couple of degrees warmer this morning, and my feet are merely chilled in the good way. ‘Ixe’ is a decent place to start, sure. I’ve never heard a cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ that wasn’t weak. I don’t even like the Swans version. But Fall Out Boy … ouch! Rockin’ Wednesday, sir. ** DARB🐊, Coffee burns would be most appropriate. The last time I went to Japan, I spilled scalding hot coffee on my hand the first morning I was there, and I had to spend my entire vacation there with a giant, mummified Mickey Mouse hand on painkillers. When I was an early teen, a boy at my school got electro-shock treatments. He was a whole lot quieter afterwards, and he never smiled again that I saw. That’s it as far my experiences. I didn’t know they still do electro shock treatment. Jesus. That seems really barbaric, no? Surely there are much subtler and more intricate methods by now. ** Right. I decided to unearth this old post that puts my favorite novel by one of my very favorite novelists under a spotlight, and that’s the story for today. See you tomorrow.