Writing on the Wall (19 page)

Being an immortal, the author is manifestly a god, just as God is an immortal fictional character (perhaps Compton-Burnett’s favorite villain) described in the Good Book. Such an author, Hereward Egerton, is the epic hero of her latest novel,
A God and His Gifts.
He is named after Hereward the Wake—an allusion to Charles Kingsley’s novel and to an early literary forgery. The “creative” writer has figured in a minor way in many of the novels, but he has usually been a failed writer or a failing one, like John Ponsonby in
Daughters and Sons.
Here he expands into a cosmic joke, filling the whole sky.

Hereward Egerton, a popular novelist, is a household word. His fertile imagination has brought happiness to the multitude. He breeds best sellers and the other kind of progeny, as is fitting for a “genius,” begetting them on his wife, his wife’s sister, his son’s fiancée. He is “at work” on the fiancée of a second son when his course is finally arrested. The names of the fiancées are italicized in the text, like titles. “‘Her name is
Beatrice,
and she is called
Trissie.’”
His amorous history somewhat recalls Dickens’; Dickens had a popular magazine which he called
Household Words.

Owing to his copious royalties, Hereward descends in a shower of gold on the Danaës of his household. The mystery of capital, which has the power of breeding when invested, is much discussed by his old parents, whom he supports. Hereward is the family capital, the goose that lays the golden eggs; he is a talented fool, who, his father feels, is practicing a womanish profession that unaccountably
pays.
Like capital, Hereward’s tendency is monopolistic. As he says to his son Merton, who is trying to be a “serious” writer: “One writer in a house is enough.”

One breeder in a house would be enough too, if Hereward were left to follow his natural inclinations. Like all full-grown males still at the breeding age in Compton-Burnett, he resents having younger full-grown males under his roof. By his own unaided efforts, his family is multiplying. His Jovian relation with his sister stops just short of incest; he has found a better use for her, as the partner of his toil.

Power over the word, which Hereward enjoys
ex cathedra
as head of the family, has been extended to power over words, which makes him “a law unto himself,” the usual claim of authors. Vicariously, through his books, he has entered thousands of homes. It is this that gives him licensed access to all the females in his family. He feels himself as all-pervasive, like light. The young women he impregnates are his public—admiring readers, in short, pushovers. When he was young, he wrote for the few (and had a single, unproductive mistress), but now, in his maturity, he writes for the many. Godlike, he expects gratitude for the gifts he brings, the “seed” he has sown. He does not get enough to suit him. Like most domestic tyrants in Compton-Burnett, he has a sense of martyrdom—which he shares, of course, with the Christian God, who made himself the archetypal Martyr. No human return could be adequate to Hereward’s thirst for appreciation.

Hereward’s promiscuity has its literary side. The chief fault of the creative species is its indebtedness to life. Hereward is no exception; he borrows his material from the life around him—even, it is indicated, from the characters and events of his most intimate experience. As always, this indiscriminate practice is frowned on by those he “uses.” From Hereward’s point of view, his little loans are amply repaid by the debt society owes him as a creator. The relation between life and literature—a final antinomy—is one of mutual plagiarism.

In this ultimate volume, the literary theme, like a wonderful sponge, has absorbed all the others: Death, Incest, Illegitimacy, Nature, Inequality. The literary theme was present at the outset in the multiplying manuscript of
Pastors and Masters,
which turned out to be an exhumed piece of juvenilia and a miserable plagiarized copy. The obvious reason for plagiarism is a desire to shine plus a deficiency of talent. There is not enough talent to go around, though everybody secretly feels he could be a writer if he tried. Or that his life, “written up,” would make a book. A natural wish has met with an unjust distribution of goods. The result, as in George’s case, is crime.

Plagiarism—petty literary theft—is a crime peculiar to the educated classes; a number of Compton-Burnett’s characters yield to its temptation: the don and the schoolmaster in
Pastors and Masters
(one of whom is stealing from himself); the children who copy in
Two Worlds and Their Ways;
Megan, in
The Present and the Past,
who copies a poem for the mole’s epitaph and offers it as her own; Dominic Spong, who copies his own grief-stricken letter announcing his widowerhood and sends it to all his female correspondents. Plagiarism in reverse, as befits the bottom of the heap, is practiced by the uneducated young nursemaid Mullet
(Parents and Children),
who tells the children nightly “chapters” from her life-story—a made-up tale transparently “inspired” by cheap literature. In Mullet’s case, the deficiency is not in talent but in the
un
inspired poverty of her real history, which drives her to invent. A respectable kind of plagiarism is the scholarly biography, described by Charity Marcon
(Daughters and Sons),
herself a biographer, as made in the British Museum from material lifted from other books and mixed together. “Books are very like plants...they come up out of each other and are all the same.” Hereward is too “big” for these minor forms of plagiarism; he lifts his material wholesale directly from life and even though detected is compensated by royalties.

One of the excuses Hereward gives himself for his domestic misconduct is the excuse of social utility: he has lived to “serve” the many. He also sees himself as an “instrument,” a sort of Aeolian harp. The idea of social service combined with large profits is a typical capitalist notion; Hereward regards his “investment” of himself in his work as a meritorious act which rightly pays dividends—exactly the attitude of the “creative” businessman, which is what Hereward really is.

It is said (sometimes as a compliment) that Compton-Burnett has no interest in social problems. The world she has made, because there are no factories or slums in it, is mistaken for Jane Austen’s “little bit of ivory.” But the poor in Compton-Burnett are, precisely, made conspicuous by their absence—to be inferred by the reader, if he is paying the slightest attention, from the horrible scarves, shirts, and petticoats charitably knitted and sewn for them by the idle classes. The toiling, spinning masses are invisible and unheard, like the silent chorus of schoolboys whose marmalade is being watered. Remarks are made
about
them, and the worst are the “feeling” ones: “We should remember the less fortunate people when we are in want of nothing ourselves.” Compton-Burnett has as much belief in philanthropy as Karl Marx himself. Whatever her voting habits, in her writing she is a strict economic realist with no partiality for the well-to-do. Her writing is extraordinary in its lack of social snobbery. Here she is far ahead of Jane Austen and of most of her own contemporaries. She does not even have an interest in social climbers, a sure sign of secret snobbery in an artist. That is probably why her books, despite the swarms of servants in them, have not found a larger public. They evoke “a vanished world” of privilege too unsparingly. Nor can a liberal reader flatter himself that the disappearance of a servant class has lent these novels a “documentary” interest; conditions have changed, but the condition has not.

What flashes out of her work is a spirited, unpardoning sense of injustice, which becomes even sharper in her later books. In her own eccentric way, Compton-Burnett is a radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics. It is the eccentricity that has diverted attention from the fact that these small uniform volumes are subversive packets. If their contents had to be reduced still further, boiled down to a single word capable of yielding a diversity of meanings, the word might be “necessity.” From strict to dire. From “constraint or compulsion having its basis in the natural constitution of things” to “the condition of being in difficulties or straits, esp. through lack of means; want; poverty.” Not omitting its uses in phrases and proverbs or “a bond or tie
between
persons,
Obs. rare.”
It is a deep word, like her works.

November, 1966

More on Compton-Burnett

I
VY COMPTON-BURNETT, NOW IN
her eighties, is the author of seventeen novels that are supposed to be as alike as peas in a pod.
A Family and a Fortune,
the seventh in the series, originally published in 1939, is the first to appear in Germany.
*
It is not the one I should have chosen, though like many of her books it deals with a family and an inheritance. Classically in Compton-Burnett, the money in a family is held within four walls, passing from father to daughter or resident aunt to niece, just as her characters are prone to commit incest or what they think is incest until matters are cleared up. Here there is a slight and interesting variation. The inheritance comes from outside, a pure windfall, which enables the author to show a power structure (the family) and how relations within it are modified by the introduction of a certain quantity of fresh money, neither too large nor too small, as in a controlled scientific experiment. Too small a quantity would affect no significant changes, and too large a quantity would blow up the cell being studied.

Two inseparable brothers, Edgar and Dudley Gaveston, have passed their lives together in an English country house. The time is 1901. Dudley, the unmarried brother, is attached in parasitic fashion to the married Edgar and his house and children. The two brothers are often seen walking on the garden path, arm in arm—a picture that commands sentimental approval from the family watching at the window, although the closeness of the relation, as of oak and embracing ivy, might appear to a dryer eye rather suspect. Edgar, whose children are mostly grown-up, has long ceased to be a conjugal husband to Blanche, who is older than he (all the men in this novel are married to women older than themselves, as though illustrating the folkways of some queer little pocket of civilization), and his entire affection is given to Dudley. The model brothers are in fact an abnormality—one person, as it were, with two dissimilar faces, a sort of voltaic couple. The relation, which looks parasitic, may be a symbiosis. Each is the other’s second self or “better half.” There is much play in the book on the idea of everyone’s having a second self, the primary self being hidden from view. The second self, as in the expression “It has become second nature to me,” is the public one we practice until we have made it, as we hope, perfect.

Symmetry rules like Nemesis in Ivy Compton-Burnett. As the novel opens, Blanche’s relations—her old father and unmarried sister with a dependent female companion—are attaching themselves to the family as a parallel parasitic growth. Having lost most of their money, they have written to ask if they can rent the “lodge,” a small house on the property. Unlike Dudley, who has “grown into” the family, the new arrivals require readjustments of the host body. The Gavestons feel it as a sacrifice that they must give their in-laws the lodge at a lower rental than would have been asked from a stranger. And they will have to redecorate suitably, lend their carriage, set extra places at table several times a week; in short, there will be a hundred calls on their generosity. But, as soon becomes evident, what is generosity to the giver is a sharp disappointment to the receiver. This “law” of human nature is demonstrable. The receiver is always imagining how much
more
his benefactor could have done, had he been willing, and the benefactor is always reminding himself of how much
less
he could have done, if he had been someone else. Neither is able to see the other’s point of view, to get the other’s “angle,” which is literally a question of place: big house-little house, rich man’s mansion-poor man’s cottage. The lodge shrinks and expands, according to who is looking at it (to Blanche, naturally, it is “a good size,” while to her father it is a “hutch”), just as a rich man’s money multiplies in the fancy of others and contracts to a bare sufficiency in his own. The points of view, in human geometry, will never meet, even if the poor relation turns into the rich relation. Only the people will change places. That is what happens in
A Family and a Fortune.

Uncle Dudley, overnight, inherits a small fortune from a forgotten godfather and at once, as he himself notices, he acquires a new psychology, that of a rich man. Exaggerated reports of the size of his inheritance make him start to feel poor in comparison, and to his shame he finds himself weighing the claims of others on his generosity. What shall he do with the money—he, a bachelor in his fifties, a permanent guest in his brother’s house? The attitude of his brother, his niece and nephews, even his sister-in-law’s sister—the cripple, Aunt Mattie, in the lodge—leaves him in no doubt. He should give it to them, of course; in their minds, the only question is how it should be divided up. A large slice for repairs to the house, which, with the advent of money, is suddenly discovered to be falling down, an allowance for the nephew to live as a Fellow at Cambridge, extra pocket money for the younger boy, new dresses for all the females, an allowance to Aunt Mattie, and so on. Dudley, a generous individual, is soon left almost poorer than he was in the first place. And at that moment a natural desire—the primary self—asserts itself in him: to have something of his own. He too has discovered a use for his money. He decides to marry, producing consternation in the family, for if Uncle marries, he will want his income for his wife, the allowances will be cut off...

His brother, as head of the household, meets the crisis in a manly way. His own wife having died, he appropriates his brother’s fiancée. That pair is now seen walking on the garden path, arm in arm. Dudley yields her up, as though, like his fairy-gold legacy, she could never
really
have belonged to him, and he prepares, when the honeymooners return, to step back into his familiar place in the family—the money will be theirs again since he no longer has a use for it. But another surprise is in store for him. He has been dislodged. His former fiancée has replaced
him
at his brother’s side. Edgar no longer has a use for him. At this Dudley rebels; he flees into the winter night, encounters Miss Griffin, Mattie’s ill-treated companion, who has been put out of the lodge into the snow. Eventually, wandering about, he falls ill and nearly dies. Nursed back to health by Miss Griffin, he is brought home again. He is reconciled with his brother, who has found, when death threatened to take him, that he could not spare him after all, and the two walk, arm in arm, on the garden path, which, for the family watching at the window, makes a happy ending.