A Study of Family Life

Pastors and Masters – Ivy Compton-Burnett

I don’t think I’ve read as many family novels so close together as I have in the last six months or so: The Newcomes, The  Mahé Circle, Dream of the Red Chamber and The Forsyte Saga. Those families have selfish small-minded members but none of them are deep studies of family tyrants like this novel.

The tyrants in this novel are adult males. They seek to dominate everybody around them with a variety of techniques. Petty and mean-minded, they make it rough on followers who are disobedient, mainly with mock hurt and relentless harassment. Their invincible ignorance lowers everybody's expectations that the tyrant would be above any meanness, any cruelty, any callousness. Their obtuseness shields them from irony and passive resistance like silence. Their stupidity makes them impervious to reason and logic. They nag. They hector. They play the martyr. They use hyperbole: nobody sacrifices like they do, nobody is more thankless than the ingrates upon whom their sacrifices are lavished.  Reverend Bentley brings his son to tears with this harangue:

You see, John, it is not always an easy thing to bring people to see what is right when one is at the head of a household where people are fond of going their own way, whether it is the right way or not. It cannot be done, my boy, without much of what must seem to people who do not understand - and my family are people who do not understand, I’m sorry to say - to be needless and even trying.  But you will look back upon what your father did, when I am no longer with you, and see that was not done easily.

The followers see that the tyrants, like all bullies and narcissists, have stamina but no strength. Some followers are women who can’t just walk away from tyrants since they would end up as governesses, in the workhouse, or on the streets. The women are more intelligent than the tyrants. They are thus able to call on their bravery, steadfastness, sense, resourcefulness, and comfort to help the tyrant through storms caused by the tyrant. Since the tyrants could not organize a birthday party on their own, the followers manage the household and ensure social obligations are met. 

Other followers are children who are as defenseless and vulnerable as slaves. Keep in mind 19^th century middle-class parents had little contact with their kids, didn’t kiss or hug their kids, and beat them for small infractions. They dressed kids in heavy uncomfortable clothes that restricted playing. Parents badgered kids with exacting warrior values, threats of ever-lasting hellfire and told their kids thunder was God's expression of anger over childish crimes. Parents sent them to boarding schools as soon as possible, putting them in the hands of idiotic mistresses and masters and brutal peers. 

Under such harsh treatment, some kids would be hurt more than others, some less, but nobody could grow up being the target of such harsh treatment without being damaged. Lessons learned? They echo Homer Simpson's code of the schoolyard: don't tattle, always make fun of those different from you, never say anything unless you're sure everyone feel exactly the same way you do.

This novel, like many of I CB’s novels (I gather), is short. So my strategy was to read it through to get a sense of what happens and to get the characters straight. There are numerous pairs of tyrant/followers and an old couple that serve as the stable moral center, stoic and resigned after the robbery of an inheritance and the death of their two sons in the war. Then I read it again, to get what I missed the first time.

I may as well confess that though I’ve read only other I CB novel, Manservant and Maidservant, and that was a long time ago, I knew what I was getting into. For instance, I CB is funny, though I readily grant it’s a comedy that only certain kinds of people will enjoy.

"And I don't think it is incumbent upon a man to keep nothing of his secret doings to himself."

 "Neither do I," said Emily. "We should be afraid of having anybody talk to us."

Nobody talks like this, except for I CB's own family. Her exposition is so spare it amounts to ‘exit – with a bear’ and to keep a bead on who’s talking demands alert concentration. Every incident means something and every utterance carries weight so she demands the same focus and thought as a writer of haiku. I CB only occasionally uses odd words (erraticism) but every aside is charged with meaning that is profoundly English in its understatement and dryness. Her intricate grammar requires patience for paradox and sympathy for devilish double-negatives.

Reading her, even the hardest of hardcore readers will be driven to morbid introspection, “Who am I, that I am reading a story so inaccessible in style, so obviously written by a writer who didn’t give a damn about the response of the reader? What's in me that stays my throwing arm from tossing this novel out the window” 

Well, even if I could explain what combination of life and reading experience leads me to place I CB up there with Miss Austen – and I can’t -  I think a sense of decorum makes it socially necessary for us to keep our secrets to ourselves. Otherwise, people would be afraid to talk to us (See how easy I am to influence? And I can paraphrase with the best of them!).

But I will go far as to say that I respect I CB as an artist that pursued her aesthetic goals in the way she thought was best for her in order to express a bleak message about family life in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras.