Classic on Your TBR Longest. I bought a stack of her novels in the 1990s in used bookstores (remember those?). Only in the last couple of years have I gotten around to reading them. As the Albanian peasant expression goes, “Slowly, slowly. Little by little.”
Manservant and Maidservant – Ivy Compton-Burnett
This story was published in 1947 and is set in the 1890s. The elements of a late Victorian novel are rural setting, big English family, comic miser, in a large house with servants and chasms between the classes. Modern is the author's focus on words and their dreadful power.
Tyrant Horace Lamb bludgeons his household with words. He nitpicks about vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. The result is both family members and servants have learned to keep silent or speak only in the most precise and literal way possible. When poor relation Mortimer Lamb teases the butler Bullivant for causing the fireplace to smoke by jamming a dead jackdaw in the chimney, Bullivant replies, “So far am I, sir, from being connected with the presence of the fowl, that I was not confident, when I took matters into my own hands, of any outcome. I merely hoped that my intervention might lead to some result.”
Horace is such a monster of a skinflint that he enforces economies that literally torture his children. When his elder daughter complains the room was too cold to sit in, Horace hectors her with “Why need you sit? Why did you not stand, walk, run? How often have I told you that exercise is the thing when the blood is congealed or sluggish? You can surely get up and move about? Had anyone tied you to a chair?”
It's no wonder the children feel embattled and guilty for being burdens. Eleven-year-old Marcus rebukes Horace with home truths:
We are afraid of you. You know we are.... Your being different for a little while has not altered all that went before. Nothing can alter it. You did not let us have anything; you would not let us be ourselves. If it had not been for Mother, we would rather have been dead. It was feeling like that so often, that made us think dying an ordinary thing. We had often wished to die ourselves....
Hey, this is how kids talk in ICB novels. Like the Barbie movie comments on the experience of girls and women in odd dialogue and too-bright colors, ICB creates a highly artificial world to give her take on dysfunctional family life in what we tentatively and laughingly call reality. She knows that despite her lack of exposition, convoluted grammar, and epigrammatic campy dialogue, the hardcore reader will figure her method out. ICB does not want readers to identify easy points of reference in her novels and complacently predict what’s coming. She wants us off balance and alert. She doesn’t want us to distract ourselves by identifying with the characters. Though she likes aphorisms that tell it like it is, she eschews lessons, trusting that we are already enlightened enough to have a bead on ‘ought to’s’ like “Know thyself so as not to become a tyrant.”
No prescriptions, just descriptions of how members of unhappy families will drive each other crazy. Mortimer wonders if they are all tied to Horace because he is his own worst enemy, especially pitying the pathological thrift. Horace’s wife Charlotte answers that his state of mind makes him the enemy of everybody. They are both right. Miser Horace’s egotism damages everybody and prevents him from finding peace of mind.
ICB’s uncanny ability to make Horace’s lack of freedom and authenticity funny may well have been one of the reasons why this novel was the only best-seller of her numerous novels in both the UK and USA. Unaware of his own rigidity of thought and action, insufferable Horace is a hilarious figure. An inflexible paper-tiger. Dragged along on the ropes and pulleys, wires and belts of his own narrow thinking habits. Cranks are funny.
But they do damage.
Other Reviews of ICB Novels: click the title to go to the review
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Pastors and Masters (1925) |
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Daughters and Sons (1937) |
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