Writing on the Wall (15 page)

The opoponax is an incantation. His source is probably the herbarium Catherine Legrand is making, but from being a medicine he turns into a pain—the pain of love, for which a balm is sought. The identity of the opoponax is the reverse of a civil identity: in the first place, it is a secret. The opoponax is power and defiance. He may also be the love that dares not speak its name—a creature found in convent boarding-schools sitting on the window-sill at dawn. When Valerie Borge consents to love Catherine Legrand, who is now a boarder too, the opoponax, soothed, is no longer heard from: the panacea has been applied.

In the convent, the magical rote of poetry has been replacing the lists memorized in geography drill and nature study in primary school. Individualities among the girls are becoming more distinct, and yet sensation is becoming more blurred and dreamlike. Faces, figures, are beginning to “stand out.” In primary school, the chief distinction for a classmate was to die or to have a little brother or sister die—a mysterious important thing that usually only grownups are allowed to do. First you were marked “Absent,” then your mother or aunt came and said you were sick, then the class tiptoed in to look at you, laid out under a white net with a rosary and a crown of white roses on your head. In the kitchen, your mother would be stringing beans and crying.

Death, for a child, is a pure
on dit,
even when studied at close range, and the emotion of grief—one of the least contagious of human emotions—is embarrassing to watch. It is more interesting to think about dead people being put into holes in the ground—children are interested in holes. There are a great many funerals and viewings of corpses in
The Opoponax;
adults for some reason act as if death ought to be a lesson to children. Yet in the presence of death children are unable to “school” their features or to feel the required emotion; they look for a distraction.

The Opoponax
ends as they
(“on”)
are putting old Mlle. Caylus into a hole in a village cemetery. The pupils, who have already been taken to view the body, have now been conveyed, by bus, to the remote mountain graveyard. Catherine Legrand notes that there are no names on the mounds in this cemetery and that the wooden crosses are awry and neglected. To her and Valerie Borge, death is still unreal. It is cold in the graveyard. Catherine Legrand is saying poetry to herself. The last words of the book, a valedictory, are a verse of Maurice Scève, the sixteenth-century erudite poet of the school of Lyons. The reader shivers, for Catherine Legrand is not thinking of Mlle. Caylus: she is thinking (though she may not yet know it) of Valerie Borge.
“Tant je l’aimais qu’en elle encore je vis.”
“So much I loved her that still in her I live.” The past tense (in French it is the imperfect) is spoken for the first time, among the derelict grave mounds and wet field poppies, together with the pronoun “I.”

July, 1966

The Inventions of I. Compton-Burnett

A
COMPTON-BURNETT IS A
reliable make, as typical of British Isles workmanship as a tweed or Tiptree or ah Agatha Christie. The styling does not change greatly from year to year; production is steady. The specifications for the current model
(A God and His Gifts,
1963) are much the same as those for the original patent
(Pastors and Masters,
1925). An earlier patent
(Dolores,
1911) was allowed to lapse. The setting is standard: a large country house, capable of being converted into a school—with visiting days for parents. There are a great many stairs (hard on the help) and passages, suitable for eavesdropping. At the sound of a gong old and young, brothers and sisters, men and wives, masters and servants muster in the dining-room. Other points of assembly are the nursery, the kitchen, and the common room. The period is late Victorian; the subject is human nature, cut from the old block, ribbed in the Adam pattern of murder and incest. Felix Culpa, an androgyne bookworm, is in the schoolroom, curled up with a popular novel, the Book of Job. His sister, Maxima Culpa, is in the library; a sulphurous smell of will-burning proceeds from the grate.

Detection seems to be natural to the English novel; this is true even in Jane Austen, where a Wickham or a Frank Churchill is “found out.” The traditional English novel, from Fielding on, deals in lost-and-found identities, concealment and discovery. Unlike the Continental novel (or the American), it is a kind of commodity with a warranty of unfailing reader-interest contained in the plot, which works like a factory mechanism—the mills of the gods. One of the mischievous originalities of Compton-Burnett is to have pursued this insular tendency to the extreme, making it her trademark. She produces Compton-Burnetts, as someone might produce ball bearings. (Dickens produced Dickenses, but Flaubert did not produce Flauberts.) Hence the uniformity of labeling in her titles and the open-stock patterns of her incidents and dialogue. The author, like all reliable old firms, is stressing the
sameness
of the formula: senior service. Her books have a magic ingredient—forgettability, which makes them just as good the second time. She has no imitators. The formula is a trade secret. When she consents to give interviews about her work, Compton-Burnett is cryptic, like an oracle or a hermit inventor.

This habit of secrecy (possibly an effect of the genteel tradition, which frowned on trade and manufacture and still more on their inner workings, felt to be
unmentionable,
like undergarments) has given rise, naturally, to legends about her life and her novels—legends which, in the case of her life, borrow from the plots of her novels, though she herself has complained that life does not have plots. As for her novels, criticism quite commonly turns them into a sort of hearsay or third-hand report, and you can read in the New York
Times Book Review
—or the French review
Critique
—that Compton-Burnett “refrains from”—“often omits”—physical description of her characters, when in fact one of the peculiarities of her work is the stiff, almost arthritic care with which physical appearance is
invariably
rendered: “She was a tall very pale woman of about sixty, who somehow gave the impression of being small and whose spareness of build was without the wiriness supposed to accompany it. She had wavy, grey hair, a long narrow chin...” etc. The insistence on getting a “likeness,” as though with the aid of tracing-paper, suggests some naif realist: the Douanier Rousseau or Grandma Moses. The
Critique
authority adds that Compton-Burnett’s characters rarely have a profession (doctors, lawyers, authors, clergymen, civil servants, schoolteachers?) and that she suppresses such “inessential details” as entrances and exits, when actually another peculiarity is her uncannily clear stage directions. The reader always knows, as if by ESP, exactly who has entered and left a room.

An English authority states that she observes a strict unity of place. But the scene shifts from house to house, from house to cottage or church, from a house to a school or schools, and vice versa.
A Family and a Fortune
even has a long and somewhat tremolo fugue, when Dudley flees into the snowy night and meets Miss Griffin, another homeless wanderer—an episode that slightly recalls the flight and last illness of old Stepan Trofimovitch, tended by the Gospel Woman, in
The Possessed.
To stage a Compton-Burnett faithfully would require a great many scene-shifters or a revolving stage.

There is something in her work that seems to encourage false generalizations about it. She has designed her books as curios, and the fate of a curio is to be ranged on a shelf. Though easy to read, she is a hard writer to grasp. Her books slip away from you, and the inclination, therefore, is to “place” them conveniently. Most criticism of her is replete with lists—of “good” characters and bad ones, flat characters and round ones, “likeable” persons and tyrants; her critics are prone to count, divide, and classify, not always accurately, to measure the ratio of dialogue to description on a page. This counting, these laborious measurements, as of an unknown object—a giant footprint or a flying saucer—denote critical bafflement. Doubtless by her own wish, she remains a phenomenon, an occurrence in the history of letters. It would appear to be hubris to try to guess her riddle.

Her work is strewn with big, amateurish-looking clues, like planted evidence to mislead professional pryers in search of meanings, wider applications, influences. She has a fondness for naming her people after the English Poets (no resemblance intended; that is the point), and one of her old women is named Regan—by mistake; her father had thought that Regan was one of Shakespeare’s heroines. The English Novelists too, like a private joke, keep nudging each other in these texts, while the anxious reader asks himself what is the point of allusions to Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens. Is he missing something important? Where is the connection with the story? Many clues lead to Shakespeare (King Lear and his daughters, for instance, in
A Father and His Fate)
, and the reader is early put on the scent of Oedipus, the Jane Austen trail having grown cold. The “incest theme,” already prominent in
Brothers and Sisters,
reappeared in
Darkness and Day,
as though to confirm suspicion. Did the quirky author, hidden like one of her characters in the folds of her narrative, hope to overhear critics fondly talking about Greek tragedy in Victorian dress and the “stichomythia” of her dialogue?

The incest theme is surely a red herring. The coupling between blood relations (or between people who imagine they are blood relations) is never anything but a twist of the plot. The author is capable of the fullest realism in her treatment of the passions, including the sexual ones, but when she shows incest, it is not a passion but an accident. She is strong on presenting temptation, but we never see a character being
tempted
to commit incest, as we do in the case of murder. Anyone who thinks that incest is the “subject” of Compton-Burnett has failed to see her real interests and the real idiosyncrasy of her mind.

Her books are not like other books; they are, as she might say, books apart. They do not “relate” to their material in the ordinary literary way, but crab-wise. The subject of any given Compton-Burnett is simply a cluster of associations and wordplays, while the plot is usually made up of arithmetical puzzles and brain-twisters.

Take
Brothers and Sisters,
which is assumed to be about the “curse of incest,” since the principal couple, Sophia Stace and her husband, are revealed to be brother and sister—half-brother and -sister. There are six pairs of brothers and sisters in the novel, one of which is married. And what is interesting to the author is not the “sin” but its mathematical permutations. A child of incest, as one of them remarks thoughtfully, has only one grandfather; this is viewed as a deprivation. The children of Sophia Stace, thanks to her insistence on marrying her own unsuspected half-brother, are underprivileged. Behind the incest is illegitimacy: Sophia’s husband is her father’s by-blow. This in turn opens up new incestuous combinations at a second remove. Sophia’s husband’s ancient mother appears in the village with her legitimate children, who become engaged to his children, that is, to their half-niece and -nephew, who are both each other’s brothers and sisters and first cousins. What the children of these new unions would be to each other and to their parents and uncles and aunts could best be worked out as a problem in algebra. Relations multiply, as it were cancerously.

And now a new hidden fact emerges: Sophia has cancer. Sophia
is
cancer, the disease at the center of the novel, which contains three doctors, an unusual supply. Her will is a parasite on her family, like a choking organism. So the subject of the novel is Sophia’s will. Her tyrannical will equals power, and power, a malignant disease, equals weakness, since the willful tyrant, who seeks to control the thoughts, acts, and feelings of others, has no control over his own. But the novel began with a will—the other kind, a testament. Sophia’s father’s will, whose disclosure she fears, is the impediment to her marriage; she sets her will against it, seeing his testament as a tyranny. All testatory wills in Compton-Burnett are in fact puns on the enslaving human will, which is plotting to survive death. A will, however, in the literal sense of a document, requires a death to implement it. There are four deaths in
Brothers and Sisters,
and Sophia, a beautiful woman, is a creeping death, like the shiny mistletoe, fastening on her family. She is afraid of death, and avoids speaking its name, just as she avoids self-knowledge, which would “kill” her. Yet all along, behind her back, her children have been calling her “Sophia”; when she is finally dying and powerless, they do it in her hearing. The naming of Sophia by her children proves to her, on her deathbed, that she is known, after all, brought down to the common level, in a word, finalized.

The child of incest has only one grandfather; in
Pastors and Masters,
a semblance of three manuscripts, where there is actually only one, is produced by theft and lying. The same with the pair of earrings in
Two Worlds and Their Ways,
which go their separate ways, crisscross, and seem at one point to be three. Duplicity is a moral case of doubling; many or most of Compton-Burnett’s characters are two-faced. Coincidence, which plays such a part in these novels, is a sort of incest in the household economy of narrative: a single grandfather (a place or time or person) serves two families of events.

Events, in fact, run in families in Compton-Burnett’s novels. The incidents in any given novel have a family resemblance to each other, and this family resemblance, which is often sportive, like the playful behavior of genes, constitutes the form. The novels are “held together,” as a family is, by the accident of their birth—something, by the way, that is never revealed; we do not know the germ, the starting-point, of any of her works. The usual questions put to an author (“Do you begin with an idea or with something you have observed?” etc.) seem as out of place as if one asked God where he got the material for the world. In any case, the member incidents may have nothing in common, really, but a superficial, mocking resemblance, as a grandmother’s eyes may crop up, punning, in a granddaughter who is otherwise quite unlike her. Or the likeness may go deeper, into the structure of the novel.