Families can Seldom be Explained

Daughters and Sons – Ivy Compton-Burnett

In this 1937 novel, Compton-Burnett relies on dialogue to tell the story of a troubled family in late Victorian England.

At 84 years of age, matriarch Sabine Ponsonby sees no reason to ease the tyranny she has imposed over her family. Her daughter Hetta proves the adage that an apple never falls far from the tree, domineering and disparaging any expression of defiance. She’s been keeping her brother Gerald since his wife died from childbirth a dozen years before. Gerald is a writer of popular books, “over-praised and over-rewarded,” say his sons, but whose popularity is slipping. As a father, he is as insecure and dithering as a pater out of Jane Austen.

The grandchildren, for all their sarcastic chafing under Hetta and Sabine’s repression, are brow-beaten, self-conscious and ashamed for being fed and clothed. As for the two grand-daughters in their middle 20s, Frances aka France is a budding writer like her father and Clare is defeated, depressed, and eager to grasp any straws that will keep her sanity afloat and get her out of the house. In their late teens and getting ready for college, the two grand-sons are Chilton and Victor, loquacious, witty and theatrical, though Chilton rides Victor with no mercy. The despots have forced youth into their own constricted world within the already claustrophobic family Ponsonby. The despots then blame and shame youth for being narrow and inept in the outside world.

The twelve-year-old grand-daughter Muriel, given life at the expense of her mother’s death, has never had a chance to be loved in such a loveless family. Her brothers and sisters jeer at her for being a “backward child.” Witnessing her grandma and aunt using words to cow and hector the vulnerable, Muriel knows the lie of “sticks and stones …..” Though uneducated, Muriel has developed the ability to identify who holds power in the family. So she sees the soundness in the other old saw, "man is a wolf to man."

To my mind, there is no other word but wicked for the mindless and brutal snuffing of innocence. Like illicit sexual attraction and hanky-panky of various stripes, wickedness in ICB’s novels just happens as an everyday occurrence. The Ponsonbys, shut in on themselves for a long time, have become, in Clare’s word, “sordid.” They don’t know or care there are other people around to witness their fighting. Keeping up appearances has become less essential because anxiety about change is taking up more room in their heads.  With Sabine’s aging and inevitable decline, power relations become unclear and with greater uncertainly for what the future holds comes greater anxiety.

The stress is expressed in uncomfortable situations with friends like the brother-sister twins the Macrons and the Seymours, who comment on the action like a Greek chorus. “So Alfred [the Macron’s nephew] is a tutor now,” said Miss Marcon to her brother Stephen “and people will get the best out of him. I wonder what that will be. People are always at their worst with their families, so we can’t have any idea.” The climax of this novel is one of the most awkward dinner parties ever, one of the worst since Titus Andronicus tricked Tamora into eating that unfortunate pie.

To tell her over-the-top stories of family life, ICB developed a style of focus and flexibility that was totally her own. All that is not necessary is eliminated. No descriptions of furniture or decorations. Very little business related to moving in and out of rooms and carriages. Time of the year, weather  – about zilch. Minimum of telling about appearance or body language. Like Miss Austen, ICB dearly loves springing surprises on the reader, usually with bleakly comic results. ICB expects the reader to just keep up. Focus. Read it twice, thrice.

ICB’s novels are almost entirely in dialogue, with ordinary vocabulary woven in elaborate grammar. She developed a daring technique in which there is the main conversation (often among the powerful) and a muted sub-conversation of comment (usually among the victimized). The despots, of course, know full well that the muffled dialogues are symptoms of discontent and resistance.  ICB captures “blind forces blindly crossing” in a plausible way. Communication fails, with incalculable and destructive results.

Another marker of ICB’s style is she givers her own twist to turns of phrase and proverbs. For instance, she has Charity Marcon observe, “But families can seldom be explained, and they make better gossip without any explanation. To know all is to forgive all, and that would spoil everything.” Shameless gossip Evelyn Seymour explains to Charity the degree of his and his father’s curiosity: “Our curiosity is neither morbid nor ordinary. It is the kind known as devouring.” ICB also parodies the Victorian fondness for funny names: we have a vicar named Dr. Chaucer, a governess Miss Bunyan, and one of the Seymours is Jane, though she is not a wife and not near perfect, which make her a lot of fun.

ICB uses the familiar accessories that we hardcore readers have enjoyed in Trollope and Dickens and Collins – family strife in the country house, plot-driving births marriages deaths, manipulative wills – but throws in sensational elements that curl this reader’s snowy locks. And poker-faced ICB puts our over-civilized people, with the snorting savage licking their chops lurking not far below the surface, in situations that bring out their real selves.

It’s dreadful, funny, amazing.

Reviews of novels by ICB

·         Pastors and Masters (1925)

·         Brothers and Sisters (1929)

·         Men and Wives (1931)

·         More Women than Men (1933)

·         A House and Its Head (1935)