Writing on the Wall (17 page)

George’s master, Horace, has previously withstood an attempt on his life by his children, who, tongue-tied with him as usual, neglected to warn him that a bridge he planned to cross was unsafe. Their action spoke louder than words. Like George, his children had been wishing him dead; they had murdered him in effigy by melting a wax image of him, which they first stuck with pins, in the nursery grate. In this novel, as in a bad dream, the wish is father to the thought, which in turn is translated for all to read in the indelible speech of action.

Few thoughts remain hidden in Compton-Burnett. They betray their presence—this is the source of her humor. One of the charms of her characters is their transparency. You can follow what they are thinking as plainly as if they said it aloud, which often they dare not do. This is most striking in her hypocrites, who, true to their name, are always stage-performers. An amusing instance is the text for the day announced by Sir Godfrey Haslam (in
Men and Wives)
to his family assembled for morning prayers. “The eleventh chapter of Corinthians, the fourteenth verse.” If the reader, pricked by curiosity, looks up chapter and verse (there are
two
Corinthians, a quiet joke within a joke), he finds: “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.” Sir Godfrey, in innocent transparence, is preaching against his wife, using the words of the Apostle—she dominates him, and he is ashamed of it.

The unspoken thought comes alive, in Compton-Burnett, so that you can almost hear it breathing. Something similar happens with figures of speech—metaphors. Whatever is figurative in these curious books is likely to become literal, as with Sophia’s cancer or the blindness of Mrs. Doubleday, who illustrates her situation by being unable to read without spectacles. Even such an idle trope as “I can’t put my hand on my glasses,” fatefully calls forth a literal answer from the grave of the metaphor: “They are under your hand.” “I had better put my pride in my pocket,” declares Cassius Clare, absently feeling in his pocket. It is not only husbands and wives who return home after being supposed dead
(Parents and Children, A Father and His Fate);
many a dead metaphor is an Enoch Arden come back to life at an inopportune moment.

Words and phrases talk of their own volition. They are not simply the old family servants of those who use them. Take the word “patience,” which (in
Pastors and Masters)
suddenly throws off its disguise and is found to be a “condensed form” of impatience. “Patience contains more impatience than anything else.” As though the word had been listening until it could bear it no longer.

These procedures, strange in the novel, recall logical positivism and modern linguistic philosophy. Throughout her books, Compton-Burnett has been drawing the consequences from the entrails of habitual discourse. Her vocabulary is small—as has been pointed out, not so very much larger than the vocabulary of Basic English.

This is not an accident; the same reductive, puritan discipline is at work. She is teaching her vocabulary not to be idle. In the same way, she has boiled down narrative to a few basic plot elements not unlike the statements of symbolic logic. Her books never deal with individual destinies but with binomials
plotted
as if on a graph; that is why her people seem “all alike,” although they are not. The logic of language, for her inescapable, works with the key principle of opposition, as stated in such simple pairs as
here, there; this, that; now, then; more, less.
Using these building blocks, what structure can be made? What can be
said
that has meaning? Compton-Burnett’s people are striving to wring meaning out of language, where it must be if it is anywhere. Her books sometimes show an irritation with language and its propensity for abstraction, as though it were only
words.
Unlike Joyce, she does not care for nonsense, which to her ear would be simply non-sense. It is impossible to imagine her
coining
a word. The fewer the better.

Her characters seldom discuss general ideas. That is not in their line. Yet two ideas, which are perhaps only two insistent words, have followed her throughout her work: Nature and Equality.

“It is natural, is it not?”

“It is natural that you should remember it.”

“It is the ordinary, natural thing.”

“We cannot alter our natures.”

There would be no point in counting how many times—in the thousands—the words “nature” and “natural” appear in her books and in how many different senses. Also how often they are implied without being named. A “natural” child, a child born out of wedlock, is an almost standard plot element; he is the cause of incest, since his parent will not recognize him—one touch of Nature, as the poet said, makes the whole world kin. And yet incest is “unnatural.” Parents and children are unnatural in the other sense (unfeeling) and yet when they are most unnatural they are perhaps behaving naturally. “Give me a natural child,” says Cassius Clare; he thinks he means an unprecocious one but he is really yearning for a slightly backward child, a “natural” in the old sense. His wife gives the word the sense Rousseau put on it. “It [a child] is a natural thing. That is why it strikes civilized persons as strange.” To be “your natural selves” is supposed to be good. Yet human nature is appealed to, in the customary way, to excuse some personal frailty. “It doesn’t do to make a tragedy of these things. After all, they are natural.” But “these things” are what tragedy is made of. “Human nature writ large” alludes to some sort of baseness; on the other hand, “I think I am a natural sort of man,” is said in a tone of complacency. “To be natural is known to be the rarest of all things,” but “natural,” “ordinary,” “average” are often, it would seem, synonymous. “Yes, yes, I am an ordinary man.” “They are as natural and ordinary as that.” “I am just an ordinary woman, with an ordinary woman’s feelings.”

Sometimes Nature is only another name for a sort of rough equality in the human product. She is a factory who has made us all pretty much alike at bottom; our natural impulses are the same. Few Compton-Burnett characters claim to be different from other people though some are. When Sophia Stace does it, the claim at once lowers her: “I sometimes find myself marveling at the gulf between myself and the average person.” Or Mrs. Doubleday, seizing on the word “unique.” “I have heard the word applied to myself. Whether rightly or wrongly, I am not the one to judge.” She is blind, of course, to the fact that she is a completely commonplace creature and never more so than in her efforts to distinguish herself. Her quandary is typical of the predicament of the majority: the average person slightly objects to being average or, rather, to being thought so; yet in his heart he is grateful to Nature for having made him as he is. It can happen that an unusual person will pretend to be ordinary, as a disguise in life, and the most evil of Compton-Burnett’s creations, Anna Donne, makes a point of being a plain, ordinary person, and the awful thing is, it appears in some way to be true.

Yet Nature has another side, which is the reverse of tame and ordinary. She has made everyone unequal, “one of a kind.” She is responsible for freaks of Nature, anomalies of every sort, hereditary diseases, and abnormalities. Compton-Burnett’s world is teeming with Nature’s errors, and those who are most sensible of this are the homosexuals and lesbians, who do not mate in the normal, accepted way and cannot reproduce, at least when they couple in the way that is natural to
them.
In this world of paired opposites, they have no place; they are neither
here
nor
there.
They do not interlock; they are misfits, keys without a keyhole, two left-handed gloves. Not being the marrying kind, they are generally outside the plot, looking in with curiosity and sometimes with envy; what
they
do together can have no outcome but only repeat itself. In a similar position are the companions, tutors, nurses, and governesses, ill-favored by Nature in one way or another and attached, as solitaries, to the alien body of a family. Those who breed and those who do not constitute separate races. Genteel dependents and the staffs of schools belong to the non-breeders—sad mule teams under a muleteer.

Such deviate figures appear in all the novels, most overtly in the three that deal with schools:
Pastors and Masters, More Women than Men, Two Worlds and Their Ways.
But the question of abnormality is treated with the greatest force in
Elders and Betters
—the most fearsome and somber of Compton-Burnett’s novels. Freakishly, it is the one that most resembles a “normal” novel, in that it meets a theme frontally. The events and characters are bound together in a dreadful unity. There is nothing sportive about their connection. Early in the book, a father and daughter are heard discussing the evolution of life and how lower forms reproduce by “pieces broken off themselves.” This Darwinian overture gives the key. “Nature is known to be red in tooth and claw,” their relation, the budding murderess, soon remarks, lightly. The theme in fact is the survival of the fittest—in the circumstances a chill mockery of the process of evolution, which here seems to be working backward toward the lower forms, who are better adapted for the struggle. Everyone in the book is a mutant—abnormal or anomalous.

It is a story of two related families, living in adjacent country houses, without other social resources—apparently there are no neighbors to call on them—of faintly Jewish appearance, although Jewish blood is not acknowledged by them, and bearing Biblical names. They are a tribe apart. The motherless Donnes have moved into this sparsely populated area to be near their relations, the Calderons. The youngest Donne boy is a cripple; they have a pair of peculiar lesbian servants, Cook and Ethel; the father has no feeling for his children or indeed for anyone but his sisters; his daughter, Anna, is almost a dwarf, with a head too large for her body, an irregular nose, and an odd, reddish tinge to her hair and eyebrows—the devil’s coloring. Quite soon in the book, she expresses a wish for a standard latch that would open all gates and wonders that it has not been invented.

In the other, happier house is a chronic invalid, Aunt Sukey, who has an invalid’s self-centeredness; she has been a beauty, which also puts her in a class by herself. There is an odd elfish young man, a spinster governess who comes by the day, with her orphan niece, and some original children who have set themselves apart by the practice of a private religion. The boy Julius is heard voicing a heartfelt prayer to his strange god in his Chinese temple in the garden: “Grant that I may grow up into an absolutely normal man.”

Having observed his relations, the child is afraid for himself. Nearly everyone in the book is afraid, Aunt Sukey of death, Cook of a shriek in the night; in her unfamiliar bed, the housekeeper, Jenney, screams out in a nightmare; the children implore their god to protect them against the unknown—their cousins. Unlike the other books, this one has an aura, an atmosphere, created from the outset when a long-vacant house is opened. Though the father of the Calderon household is a scientific freethinker of the type of George Henry Lewes and has given his children Greek and Latin rather than Biblical names, he has not been able to banish the mold of superstition. Unlike the other books too,
Elders and Betters
is devoid of comedy, except of a spectral kind, while a good deal of the wit is simply an expression of animosity.

It is unique in another respect: the children’s mother is afraid of doing wrong, the sole instance of this in the canon. Jessica Calderon is a completely unselfish person—the greatest anomaly of all.

Scrupulous, imaginative, good, and perpetually guilt-ridden, she is a born human sacrifice. By a monstrous reversal, she is driven to kill herself by her dwarfish niece, Anna, who persuades her that she is evil. The goodness of Jessica, which culminates in an almost supernatural penetration, is received by Anna with cowering fear, and this fear is not simulated; to Anna, goodness inevitably appears as evil since it is the opposite of herself.

To herself, Anna is fighting for survival, as though literally for her life, in a power struggle involving her Aunt Sukey’s will. It is either her or her Aunt Jessica; there is not room for both. She cannot imagine co-existence (as well as between the sun and the moon!) and naturally she sees herself as a daylight, open person and her aunt as a dark force. Anna’s will is stronger than Jessica’s, for Jessica only wants to know the truth—something her niece cannot even understand.

But Jessica has already been marked for elimination, on the day there were thirteen at the luncheon table (or so it was thought, by a miscount). According to the superstition, the last to sit down in a party of thirteen is slated for death. Jessica watches her two families—brothers and sisters, parents and children—all jockeying not to be last, and is found quietly standing when the rest have taken their seats. Then she sits down. Her willingness to be an odd number (the oddest of all numbers, prime and one over a dozen) disqualifies her as
unequal
to the struggle.

The idea of equality—or inequality—is bound up with the idea of Nature, which seems to pronounce on both sides of the question. Originally social inequality was regarded as natural; this faith, however, has been shaken by the time of the novels, though no one in them knows exactly when or how.

“I wonder who began this treating of people as fellow-creatures,” says a character in
Manservant and Maidservant.
“It is never a success.”

“Once begun, it is a difficult thing to give up,” another character answers.

“It seemed such an original idea,” a third says, as if with a sigh.

“We can see how unnatural it is by what comes of it,” the first retorts.

But, once introduced, the idea of equality does appear natural, not only as a “self-evident” proposition in political philosophy but by the very fact of having entered a number of minds. At the same time, social equality does not seem to square with the facts of life, some of which are the facts of Nature as well.