Writing on the Wall (16 page)

Take another example—
Manservant and Maidservant,
the best known of her works. The action opens with a smoking hearth in the dining-room. A jackdaw is lodged in the chimney, blocking the flue. What is the meaning of this? One of the characters is bold enough to ask.

“Why was it a jackdaw rather than any other bird?” said Emilia, bending her head with her slow smile.

Answer (not supplied in the text): a jackdaw, proverbially, is a loquacious, thieving bird, and we are just making the acquaintance of another loquacious, thieving “bird”—the young footman, George. The jackdaw is also a character in English literature. He figures in the
Ingoldsby Legends,
where he steals the Cardinal’s ring and has a curse put on him; reformed, he is canonized under the name of Jim Crow.

George has been brought up in the workhouse, shades of Oliver Twist. His female opposite number, the young maidservant Miriam, has been brought up in an orphanage. The nursery upstairs might as well be an orphanage, to judge by the children’s condition; ill-fed, cold, ragged scarecrows, they are ashamed to be seen in church among “normal” children. Their miserly father, Horace Lamb (one of the few books the children own is Lamb’s
Tales from Shakespeare),
is too stingy to hire ordinary servants, so that his junior domestics and his children are all of a threadbare piece—charity cases. The cook is a religious fanatic, and the butler, Bullivant, a highly intelligent man whom Horace inherited from his father, is one of those accidents that happen in families; that is, he is a normal being, with no visible defects.

Meanwhile, in the nearby village, a solitary storekeeper, Miss Buchanan, hides her peculiar defect from everyone: she cannot read. This occupational handicap (not to say hazard; she also acts as a letter-drop) is tantamount to blindness. The Lamb children have a tutor whose mother, Mrs. Doubleday, has another form of blindness; because of her egoism, she cannot see what is going on around her: “Mother is blind to the result of following her instincts.” Mrs. Doubleday is unaware of her handicap; she considers herself unusually percipient and fancies that she resembles George Eliot, whose portrait, in reproduction, hangs in her parlor, to call attention to the kinship—that George Eliot was a very homely woman has escaped her notice. Similarly, Horace, who is deaf to human misery, shouts at his household, “Are you deaf?” The Eye of God is invoked by Bullivant to make up for a deficiency in his actual knowledge: “There is One who sees.”

The novel is also a parable: of the good servant and the bad servant. Possibly a parable of the talents as well; the miserly Horace buries his talent in the ground, like Miss Buchanan, who is hiding her light under a bushel. Or again a parable of the loving father and the unloving father, both characters being presented by Horace, who, like the jackdaw in the legend, undergoes a reform. So the subject is corrigibility: Horace is corrigible; George is incorrigible. This makes Horace (the lost Lamb) the prodigal father.

It is evident that Compton-Burnett builds with a rigid symmetry. Opposites are placed in pairs, as in a lesson. “Mother” is balanced by “Mater,” the stepmother. When strict logic is observed, this leads to perspective puzzles, as in
The Present and the Past,
where the children have been taught to call their own mother “Mater,” not to make a difference between them and her stepchildren. But when the older children’s real mother returns, who is “Mother” and who is “Mater” to whom? Events are marshaled in columns, sometimes in contrasting pairs, sometimes in matching pairs. It is in fact a pitiful procession, like the animals going into the Ark or children being lined up, two by two, in graduated order—double file is always more gloomy than single file. A division according to sex runs down the middle of
Two Worlds and Their Ways:
girls’ school, boys’ school; girl cheats, boy cheats. But the book can also be divided in two, like the characters’ feelings, by another stark principle: home, school. Or a third: old, young. The flat bisection is merciless as a ruler.

In lieu of toys, amusements, new clothes, Compton-Burnett’s children have been furnished with hand-me-down maxims, mottoes, and tags—scraps of wisdom from the family ragbag.

“The child is father to the man.”

“They also serve who only stand and wait.”

“True generosity is in receiving, not giving.”

“To know all is to forgive all.”

“A poor thing but mine own.”

“The golden mean.”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

“A failure greater than success.”

“No news is good news.”

“There is more faith in honest doubt...”

“To thine own self be true...thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Such aphoristic sayings, by dint of hypnotized study, become enigmatic, turn upside down, inside out. When time hangs heavy, there is always that resource. You can shake them, stand them wrong side up, take the stuffing out of them, examine their insides. It is a pastime that does not pall, except occasionally on the reader, and is never outgrown. The adults in Compton-Burnett have got into the habit. They speak automatically in saws and proverbs, which they then begin to query. Polonius’ maxim, especially, sticks in their collective mind, coming up in book after book, like a perpetual irritant. In these novels to be true to yourself (if there is such a thing) is—by and large—to be false to everyone else. The characters who are true to themselves prove to be villains, like the young miser Clement in
A Family and a Fortune
or the terrible murdering Anna in
Elders and Betters.
Only a villain would dare to be true to himself.

On examination, many other innocent commonplaces prove to be specious, particularly when they take a paradoxical form—a suspicious sign that a truth has been inverted.
E.g.,
the real fact is that true generosity lies in giving, that success is greater than failure, and that no news is bad news. Compton-Burnett’s own work often has a paradoxical air, which is the result, however, of her empiricism: her interest in seeing how an idea or a verbal structure would behave if subjected to certain slight changes. Moreover, in the angular geometry of her mind forms imply their complements; a form of words prompts her to find its opposite and its converse, without prejudgment as to the outcome. The reversal of an accepted notion may result in a discovery. “To forgive, it is best to know as little as possible” seems almost self-evident in comparison with the original. On the other hand, a familiar maxim may hold an
unexpected
truth, which is the contrary of its common meaning.

“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” “Ha ha, there is something in that,” said Peter. “We have to have things before we can give them.”

The maxims and apothegms are those that would be heard in an ordinary household and heard repeatedly. The penury of ideas, like material penury, encourages resourcefulness. In default of new ideas, the old ones have to serve. If sufficient thought is applied, their meanings can be made to multiply and act as queerly as numbers or converging lines. As someone says in
Pastors and Masters
of the plagiarized manuscript, “You wouldn’t think one book would have to go so far.” And in the same text: “What a lovely family group! An uncle and a nephew and a brother and a sister and an aunt and a husband and wife...all in four people!” In short, the old saws, looked into, become deep—fathomless conundrums.

Compton-Burnett’s people, including the sympathetic ones, are more often than not sententious, prone to balanced utterance, quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible, which are questioned by the lighter and more rebellious spirits. Bullivant is a polished orator, and great promise is shown by the three-year-old Toby in
The Present and the Past,
when he conducts the mole’s funeral service, copying what he has heard in church. To “talk like a book” in Compton-Burnett is not (contrary to what is said by some critics) a proof of inauthenticity. It is a gift.

Quotations and adages are the chief worldly provisions of Compton-Burnett’s people and particularly valued by the lower orders, who have fewer of the other kind. It is this that gives her work a grim sadness, as well as monotony: the sense of a shipwrecked Band of Hope marooned on a desert island (England or the planet) with Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations.
Her people are survivors, battered floating bottles or time-capsules containing the remnants of human wisdom in aphoristic doses. “It is in the books,” says a character in
A God and His Gifts.
“All human life is in them.” As though this were not a credit to literature but a melancholy criticism of life.

The power of speech possessed by Compton-Burnett’s servants is an eerie thing. Their voices, coming from near at hand, strike the ear with an effect of surprise, like talking animals in a fairy tale—the frog prince in the spring, or the horse’s head hanging on the wall, or the speaking fish caught by the poor fisherman. Like those talking animals, the voices waiting at table have the faculty of omniscience, being given to warning and instruction. And the hands and bodies attached to them swiftly execute tasks, as in the fairy tales, beyond the power of ordinary mortals,
i.e.,
the leisured classes. These froggy, fishy attendants wear a menial livery, being bound by an enchantment, and when they remove it, on their day off, they are changed back into human beings.

Something of the kind is true of Compton-Burnett’s children. Their treble contributions make you jump, like a sound coming from an improbable quarter. Audibility equals visibility in Compton-Burnett. Children who are not heard are not seen, just as a servant, waiting at table, usually remains invisible until his voice is raised. One by one, the characters at table materialize in a ghostly way, like lights turning on. Until they gave tongue, you did not know they were there; their place on the stage was dark. It is the
unexpectedness
of the voices that creates an effect bordering on the supernatural and reminds the reader of a sentient world all around him, listening, in the shadows. Children and servants are astral bodies.

By contrast, the family tyrant seldom surprises by his entrance into the conversation. He is already there. His voice is unnaturally loud; Cassius Clare in
The Present and the Past
seems to be equipped with a personal amplifying system. The family tyrant has the floor in perpetuity. Permanently wired for sound, he or she soliloquizes, surrounded by a silence. He harangues, accuses, complains. The questions he addresses to his household are mainly rhetorical—they seldom anticipate an answer, at least not the one they get. Or else they
enforce
an answer, with the dreadful command: “Say something! Are you dumb?” Dependents, whose lot is normally to be mute (that is why their slightest whisper has that mysterious audibility), when speech is briefly conferred on them are constrained to use it. Enforced speech is the monstrous brother of enforced silence. But since the tyrant cannot carry on a monologue indefinitely, he graciously delegates a small portion of his power of speech to his wife or his old father or some other privileged satellite, sometimes his butler, who are summoned up, out of silence and invisibility, to conduct a dialogue with him. He not only has the exclusive right to speech but the exclusive right to silence. He plays deaf when his wife is talking to him, if that is his mood. The refusal to hear is the supreme assertion of his power over discourse; it reduces the voice of his wife (or other dependent) to a meaningless noise.

In
Pastors and Masters,
there is a mute chorus of schoolboys. The same with the boarder-pupils of the Reverend Oscar Jekyll in
A House and Its Head.
We know they are there because of the speeches directed
at
them. Or a sudden rebuke, as was intended, like a powerful searchlight, brings a boy into view. But the very garments of the female ruler are audible: Agatha Calkin “rustles” as she moves toward her tea table in
Men and Wives
—a sound suggestive of the movement of a boa.

Speech is magical power in Compton-Burnett. The revenge of the speechless is underhanded by necessity. First, the murmured or muttered answer. “What is that, Tasamin?” “Nothing, Father.” “Whispering, whispering, always whispering,” complains a female tyrant. “Whispering!” a male tyrant exclaims, as if in agreement. “Whispering and questioning. The two unforgivable things!” Second, mimicry—the frightening gift of Aldom, the butler in
Two Worlds and Their Ways;
the impersonator steals or borrows a voice that does not belong to him. Third, eavesdropping. Servants and governesses listen at doors; children, who are small, behind sofas. There is even a case of someone eavesdropping on a
soliloquy.
The tyrant himself stoops to listen at doors and then reveals himself, striking terror. Listening, except when the tyrant does it, is another sort of theft—a pilferage of the family’s private stores of information. It is tolerated in the butler and governess, because of seniority, and forbidden to the under-servants. After long experience, the family has to admit to itself that the butler, waiting by the sideboard, is not deaf. But an under-servant is forgetting his place if he exercises his normal faculties while he is in service. This is true in the kitchen too, where the cook and the butler alone have licensed access to the Word.

George, the jackdaw footman of
Manservant and Maidservant,
is a cautionary example of the dreadful fate of a servant who does not observe the rule of being deaf and dumb. He starts by answering a question—“Where were you born, George?”—with unseemly readiness, forgetting his place. Next, he is listening at doors. Next, stealing and defying his superiors. It is only a short step then to the primal crime—his master’s murder (which, being less than his master, he fails to achieve). But the crime was already present in his wagging tongue.