Ivy Compton-Burnett’s forgotten genius

In her lifetime (which extended all the way from the 1880s to 1969), the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was widely read, praised by the critics, and generally reckoned to be bound for literary immortality. The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: ‘Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure…’ David Holloway was equally convinced: ‘It is certain that Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels will be discussed a century hence.’ But here we are, after much less than a century, and Ivy’s novels are mostly out of print, read only by a community of devoted addicts (of whom I am one) – and fitfully present in the modern field of ‘queer studies’ – but otherwise more or less forgotten, unlike those of the other ‘candidate for greatness’, Evelyn Waugh.

It is worth noting that Shrapnel classifies Miss Compton-Burnett as a comic novelist. This is not how she is thought about today, but in her heyday – from the 1930s to the 1950s – she was read for her comic value as much as anything. It is comedy of the darkest hue – the comedy of suffering, you might say – and it takes a while to get the taste for it. Suffering – in particular the suffering inflicted on each other by the members of a too-close family – was something Ivy knew all about, and her own family life, as it was lived in the early years of the 20th century, gave her all the material she needed for her novels. She grew up in a large, complicated and troubled Edwardian family. Her doctor father died when Ivy was 16, and her grieving mother became a fearsome, emotionally manipulative domestic tyrant – a role that the imperious Ivy seems to have taken over after her mother’s death. Two favourite brothers died young – one of influenza, one in the Great War – she herself nearly died in the postwar influenza epidemic, and her two unhappy youngest sisters died in an apparent suicide pact. ‘One was a good deal cut up by the war; one’s brother was killed, and one had family troubles,’ as she later summed up, with typical understatement. From all this, she emerged as a fully formed novelist with Pastors and Masters (1925), a tale of literary plagiarism set in a preparatory school, which established the template for all that was to come over the next four decades and more. Once launched as a writer, she settled into the life of a grande dame, holding court in a handsome mansion flat in Kensington with the equally grand Margaret Jourdain, a formidably well-connected furniture historian. No one knew if they were lovers – none would have dared to ask – but they attracted a coterie of gay young men, and obviously gay characters recur in Ivy’s novels, where homosexuality is simply taken for granted as a fact of life.

Ivy Compton-Burnett’s literary method is quite unique, relying almost entirely on dialogue to drive the action. There is very little exposition, scene-setting or character drawing, and plot, as such, is perfunctory, often drawing on creaky devices from Victorian fiction. ‘As regards plot’, she wrote, ‘I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.’ Compton-Burnett’s dialogue is quite extraordinary – it has to be, as it has so much weight to carry. Her characters talk endlessly in long, formal, finely nuanced conversations which seethe with dark subtext, unspoken motives and fierce passions. These have to be read with close attention to discover – gradually or, often, explosively – what is really going on. It could be anything, up to and including murder. You have to be on your toes even to keep track of who is speaking, as these conversations often involve several people, sometimes talking over each other or aside. It’s rather like listening from outside a door – something Ivy’s characters frequently do, in the course of uncovering what is really going on. They also have a habit of suddenly materialising from nowhere, like Jeeves.

All of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, right through to the 1960s, are set in, roughly speaking, the Edwardian period, and in a social milieu some way north of middle class. Each depicts a small, airless, claustrophobic world – usually domestic, sometimes institutional – and at the heart of each is the endless scope for tyranny and suffering furnished by a large family living on top of each other. Typically, the psychic mayhem is observed and commented on by the children, who are always drawn with care and affection, and act as a perceptive, precociously wise chorus.

The opening paragraphs of Compton-Burnett’s novels establish the emotional milieu with deadly precision. Here is how Manservant and Maidservant (her own favourite) begins:

‘Is that fire smoking?’ said Horace Lamb.
‘Yes, it appears to be, my dear boy.’
‘I am not asking what it appears to be doing. I asked if it was smoking.’
‘Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,’ said his cousin. ‘But we seem to have no other.’
[The fire is indeed smoking – there’s a dead jackdaw in the flue.]

And here is the opening of A House and Its Head:

‘So the children are not down yet?’ said Ellen Edgeworth.
Her husband gave her a glance, and turned his eyes towards the window.
‘So the children are not down yet?’ she said on a note of question.
Mr Edgeworth put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.
‘So you are down first, Duncan?’ said his wife, as though putting her observation in a more acceptable form.
Duncan returned his hand to his collar with a frown…

It is unlikely that these novels will ever again have a wide appeal – they are too challenging, in too many ways, for a modern readership – but it would be a sad loss if they were forgotten. Ivy Compton-Burnett is a true one-off, and her novels are like nothing else in fiction: others, including Henry James and Ronald Firbank, have written novels in dialogue, but they are nothing like Ivy’s. She even, it seems, defeats AI’s mimetic abilities: I recently challenged a chatbot to produce a passage in Compton-Burnett style and the result was thoroughly unsatisfactory – whereas Firbank came out well. Ivy herself once said, ‘Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.’ It is well worth resisting the urge.