You Can't Choose Your Family

Men and Wives – Ivy Compton-Burnett

This novel from 1931 is set in the late 1880s. Lord and Lady Haslam have three sons and one daughter, all grown. Harriet Haslam’s untreated sleeplessness is having the usual consequences of long-term insomnia: depression, anxiety, low motivation, difficulty dealing with minor irritations, and worst of all, decreased ability to enjoy or foster family and social relationships. In short, she is wearing down the patience and love of her family

I am a torment to you all, and a burden on your hours that you never escape! But I am as much of a burden on my own, ten thousand times more of a burden. Griselda, my darling, don’t look distressed; don’t waste a thought on your harrowing old mother. Don’t think of me. Be happy.

Though she gives a lot of lip-service to serving God and carrying out His Will, she is convinced that her plans for her husband and children are just and sensible so she is determined that they bend to her will. Ironically, she really does know better than they do. She reasonably urges one son to hang out more with people his age, not a coterie of middle-aged women. Predicting their plans will blow over, she wisely counsels her oldest son to hold off marrying a flighty materialist. She controls the finances in the family because her husband, with the sense of a frog in a well, would be conned out of his estate in about a minute. In their inexperience and insensitivity they laugh at her.

Harriet has a nervous breakdown and has go live in seclusion in a sanitarium. To her shock on her return home, she discovers that her family members have thrived in her absence. Her wise friend Lady Rachel Hardisty puts down some home truths:

I have come home to find they can live with me away.

Of course they can. You must not force people to do things, and then complain of their doing them. People don't feel as much as you want them to.

The characters are the draw in this novel. Lord Godfrey Haslam is, as another character observes, a father right out of Miss Austen. The allusion goes right over the head of the dithering, neglectful, pathetic father who expresses his self-regard and self-delusion in a never-ending torrent of words words words. By never shutting up, he accordingly drives everybody else quietly nuts. Like the children in Brothers and Sisters, the Haslam offspring are witty about their parents, themselves and their ordeals.

Rector Bellamy is a posing pastor who frankly admits his weakness and helplessness are such that he must marry a strong woman. His ex-wife Camilla is happily corrupt, and sets her cap on three different men in the course of the novel. As seen above, Lady Rachel, old and wise, is past getting upset at the inveterate stupidity and hypocrisy of the people she has to rub elbows with.

Lawyer Spong loses his wife and becomes a theatrically sad widower. Instead of living a genuine social and emotional life of his own, he contents himself with witnessing all the doings of the dreadfully eventful Haslam family. The youngest, gayish Haslam son spends way too much time with a middle-aged household of widowed and unmarried sisters. Finally, the deadpan butler Buttermere gives everybody the creeps but it never enters anybody’s head to run him off the property.

ICB took a degree in Classics from Holloway College. Hilary Spurling says ICB didn’t read the classics in her adult life, but the reader will feel the influence of tragedy. The stories are serious, as Aristotle says tragedies must be, but they are shot through with modernist irony and dry English wit. At the center of the story is the tragic hero, whose tragic flaw is intemperance (lack of restraint); Harriet frankly admits, "I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt in them to go further, and driven on to the worse." The other characters comment on the fallout of the flaw through the templates of virtues like wisdom or vices like jealousy and malice that come out of untamed irrational passions.

ICB the artist couldn’t care less about moralistic stands or virtue ethics, however. She wants to examine familiar human beings in their primary group, the family. The elaborate conversation, depending on amazingly intricate grammar providing the framework for mannered vocabulary, gives an overall effect that’s hypnotic, difficult to grasp but strangely satisfying. Comparisons are odious, as a character observes (probably quoting), but reading ICB’s handling of words as she describes, kind of, motive and mood is like listening to challenging music. Every character, every conversation, and every incident all fit together so tightly that it requires alert reading, the first time to track the unfolding of the story (to take in the excruciating events), and the second reading to appreciate the artistic choices made.