Back to the Classics #20

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic by a Woman Writer: Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) combined elements of realism, modernism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to examine marriage, family concord and discord, and conceptions of domesticity, femininity, and masculinity. I doubt greatly if she considered herself a feminist but she was an individualist through and through. If you want some good, get it from yourself.

Parents and Children - Ivy Compton-Burnett

This 1941 novel examines the closed world of a large land-owning family living in the English countryside sometime in the 30 years before World War I.

The main attraction and challenge is how the author tells the story of family conflict in a difficult style dependent on dialogue. The conversations are made up of words, expressions, and allusions very much from the time in which the story is set. The grammar playfully twists the English language into the most convoluted contortions possible and still remain comprehensible. Skimming ICB does an injustice to both writer and reader; slowing down reveals the distinctive voices of the individual characters.

Another challenge is that this novel opens in a fashion very leisurely and slow. When the reader realizes the characters are two grandparents (Sir Jesse Sullivan, Regan), two parents (Eleanor and Fulbert), nine kids (!), two governesses (Mitford and Pilbeam), two nurse-maids (Hatton and Mullet), a struggling trio of two sisters and a brother, and four neighbors cheekily named the Cranmers, the reader boggles, wondering how ICB is going to make it clear who’s in the room, who’s talking and who’s glancing swiftly at whom.

But somehow ICB does and in an effortless fashion. Miraculous. I had no problem following the dialogues, even in the first reading (I always read ICB’s novels twice), though I readily admit some sentences just bounced off my brain. If nothing else, this can be read as an example of writer setting herself the herculean labor keeping who's doing what clear and pulling it off. Sadly, it is less acerbic and less savagely over-the-top than the novels listed below.

The nine children, naturally, have fallen into three trios, the oldest (Luce 23, Daniel 21, Graham 20), middle (Isabel 15, Venice 13, James 12) and youngest (Honor 10, Gavin 9, Neville 3). Given the presence of so many kids, we read scenes of kiddish humor and play, a first in the six ICB novels I’ve read. For instance, Mullet gravely agrees to tell the youngest ones the corny-sad stories of her family’s fall from affluence to poverty, which are complete fabrications.

Yes, I will give you the last chapter of my childhood … I was often by myself for hours as I had no equal in the house and I preferred my own company to that of inferiors. Well, there I was sitting in my shabby, velvet dress, swinging my feet in their shabby, velvet shoes; my things were good when they came, but I was really rather neglected; and there came a ring at the bell, and my father was in the house. “And what is this?’ he said, when he hastened to my place of refuge. “How comes it that I find my daughter alone and unattended?”

What’s really funny is the kids remember everything she relates – of course - and they ask probing questions to trip her up on the details of her tall tales. Mullet says she owes her ‘being’ to her father and Honor shrewdly suggests that it may be the other way around. Getting fun out of creating and telling stories, Mullet says, “Sometimes I can hardly believe myself in my own early life.”

With the young children there are scenes with a lot of antics and horse-play. But this is ICB, remember. Sure, some frolics are just for fun. Other games express parental love. And others are attempts to insinuate the initiator into a child’s affections. Horseplay, too, has its dark side and not just the usual tears at feeling left out.

ICB also invites us readers to consider family photographs. What do family photographs mean? Do the moments they capture mean everything to survivors, so much that it’s photo albums people grab with the laptop and jewelry when there’s a fire? If a photo could talk, would we dare to listen? Is it wise to trust the feelings and indulge the moods induced by gazing at a photograph? 

Serious fiction can carry examinations of, as in this novel, self-disclosure and styles of parenting, more telling than any other art form. All fiction writers have to decide what to include and what to exclude. Excluding description, exposition, ideology, stereotypes, and other inessentials, ICB means to explore the ambiguities of human experience in families, giving accounts of tyrants bullies, cowards, sneaks so sorry and pathetic the reader can’t help but feeling them just  “… poor wretches creeping over this earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath (The Good Soldier).” Such convoluted problems we face in life and so lamely are our hearts and minds equipped to deal with them. But we push on, determined not to become what we dislike in others.

Other Reviews of ICB Novels: click the title to go to the review

·         Pastors and Masters (1925)

·         Brothers and Sisters (1929)

·         Men and Wives (1931)

·         More Women Than Men (1933)

·         A House and Its Head (1935)

·         Daughters and Sons (1937)

·         A Family and a Fortune (1939)