Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
Blake: much quoted. But what does it mean? That joy, though transient, may be captured for ever – that is, transformed into happiness, a more steady state – if no attempt is made to hold it? If this is true, how can we know when the moment of joy has come?
Of course I know that the Declaration of Independence does not mean the ‘pursuit of happiness’ for the individual man and woman. There are countless personal tragedies for each which are unavoidable. It means, in its final form – the unending effort to build the Just Society.
26. I. Compton-Burnett
It is fair to say, and I must say it at the beginning, that she never liked me. Nor did I really like her very much, though I had for her an intense admiration. I used to say that if her books appeared every Monday, like The Magnet (with Billy Bunter), in my youth, I should relish each as much.
The fault for getting off on the wrong foot, was certainly mine. I wrote to her, saying that I had been asked to write an essay for Writers and their Work for the British Council and Longmans Press, on her novels. In reply, she sent me a postcard, in her pellucid handwriting, inviting me to dinner. I gladly accepted.
The point here, if I may make excuses, is that I am by nature pathologically punctual. At seven-thirty, I was outside her flat, in Cornwall Mansions, in a freezing Sherlock Holmes fog: to the best of my belief, half an hour early. This, I thought, simply wouldn’t do. I was, I believed, expected at eight. So I went for a perfectly horrible walk, round and round that Gothic square, and at last, at five to eight, presented myself. Miss Compton-Burnett’s maid greeted me, if greeting it could be called. She said: ‘Madam has been at dinner this past half-hour.’
I had mistaken the time.
I was led over what seemed like acres of parquet into a big, lofty-ceilinged room. At a table in the corner were Miss Compton-Burnett, her friend Miss Margaret Jourdain, both small, and a lady who seemed to me equally small – though this may have been the result of my trauma in the fog – whose name I did not catch. I made my apologies as best I could.
Miss Compton-Burnett, ivorine, sharp-featured, with eyes green as peeled grapes, interrogated me. Was her handwriting illegible? No, I replied, but in fact when I received the card I had been in the midst of a domestic crisis, and had misread it. The questioning continued. Yes. No. I’m awfully sorry. No. But. How–?
At last I was permitted to sit. I do not think the dinner could have been utterly spoiled since the main course was corned beef. And during the next three-quarters of an hour, nobody spoke a word to me. There was a good deal of gossip about displeasing creatures the three of them met, in some place or another. I was silent: though not as a result of rebuke. In fact, I was furious. She did address one sentence to me. This was: ‘Do you know a person called Cyril Connolly? I call him a person.’ (In some way, he must have affronted her.)
At last we rose, and went into another Gothic room, very cold, where someone had set light to a fire of little twigs. No smoking, of course: no appropriate apparatus. (I was luckier, on the next occasion when I met Miss Compton-Burnett. ‘Some of my best friends smoke.’)
At first, whenever I attempted, at some decent hour, to take my departure, a tiny but firm hand – my hostess’s, put me down. As I eventually fought my way to the hall door, I was accompanied by Miss Jourdain. She said to me kindly, ‘You mustn’t mind. Ivy isn’t at her best tonight.’ Outside, I sat on the steps of Cornwall Mansions – still in the fog – and smoked and smoked. I was thoroughly unnerved.
Nevertheless, I had to persist with the work I was doing. This time Ivy – I’m afraid we all thought of her like that, though I myself never addressed her by her first name – asked me to tea. It was an incredibly formal tea – a meal I do not like – with sandwiches, scones, two or three kinds of jam (and God help you if your spoon went in the wrong one), and various cakes. I ate all I could of these carbohydrates. Then I asked her – directly about Dolores, her first novel. ‘It is only juvenilia,’ she said, ‘you may forget about it.’
I explained that if I were to write a remotely scholarly essay, I could not forget about it.
‘If I had a copy,’ Miss Compton-Burnett said, with surprising airiness, ‘I would lend it to you.’ (I later learned that she had several.) ‘I would not’, she added, ‘like to see you go round to the British Museum.’
This, of course, I did: next day.
My third meeting with her was not only happier, but a source of excitement. I had come to ask her how, over the years, her books had been received. She retired for a moment, then came back with a large cardboard box. ‘Here are all my reviews. You may borrow them. You may take them away with you.’ This was an act of generosity, and I appreciated it.
She had begun, by then, to talk to herself. As I leafed roughly through them, I heard her talking busily away above my head, but not to me. It was an uncanny experience.
I returned home with my trophy, and I spent half the night sorting them out all over the floor. Arnold Bennett, writing on Brothers and Sisters, had been the first to discover her great gift. But the final literary accolade did not come till many years later: when the New Statesman, reviewing, I think, Manservant and Maidservant, headed the review: ‘Château Burnett, 1947’.
These were purely personal experiences. I grated on her, she grated on me. But very many of my friends, Francis King, Kay Dick, Kathleen Farrell, Olivia Manning, and many others she loved: and was loved by them. They were all on her wave-length, which I was not. When she died, she left to each of them a mirror.
Whatever Dame Ivy’s personal relations with myself (and I think she would have disdained admitting to have had any whatsoever), I admired her as an artist inordinately. She was a great original. I do not go along with those who think she had strong links with Jane Austen. As an aphorist, she had far more in common with Oscar Wilde. Listen to An Ideal Husband, and see if similarities, especially in speech-rhythms, do not arise.
She was one of the most impressive people I have met. But I have come to the conclusion that impressive people have a compulsion to impress. Look at Queen Victoria. Dame Ivy, unlike Dame Edith Sitwell, would not meet people quite on their own level. No satisfactory life of her is going to be written as yet, though a memoir has been, recently. Frank Birch, a friend of her young brother’s, told me a great deal about the strange life of the Compton-Burnett family in Hove. But Frank is dead, and his statements remain unsupported.
What remains is her work, and its astounding aperçus. Who, entranced by her, can resist the shock of laughter when she hits the nail bang on the head?
Yet it was in part this masterly nail-hitting which added to my unease in her presence. It was not really the subtlety of her character-drawing, as a whole, which was disquieting. What was disquieting was her habit of exposing the hypocrisies of speech in normal social intercourse. Of course, we all use emollients, and are none of us strictly truthful, as we might be if we were fools enough to play some horrible ‘truth game’. But whenever these hypocrisies arose, Dame Ivy was down on them like a ton of bricks. I found myself not so much watching my step – obviously she did not spread trip-wires across her carpets – but my speech: and that I do not care to do, more than is normal. I am not much given to profanity, but on leaving Dame Ivy’s flat, I tended to mutter profanities to myself as a form of relief.
People, of course, she knew about: but a peculiarly circumscribed number of them. She had no idea, for example, of how most people made a living; when it is suggested that one man runs another’s estate, there is never any insight into him when he is doing it. Her servants have been much praised, and delightful they are: but to me few of them ring true. They are far too articulate in a literary sense – or some of them are: one suspects that they are concealing their schooling and the fact that they have come dramatically down in the world. I am sure Bullivant never existed.
Young and adolescent children, she did know about; and her portraits of them are tender. Aubrey, i
n A Family and a Fortune, which I rank among her very finest novels, is a most moving and
I was wrong. Mrs. Hilary Spurling has given us the splendid first part of a two-volume
biography.
beautiful creation. It was the adolescent boys who touched her heart the most. I often wondered, had I brought my sons – young then – to see her, whether we shouldn’t have got on much better.
But her knowledge of people as such? Sometimes profound, sometimes voulu. What she did know about was human nature, in the broadest possible sense, and the fact made me uncomfortable. I suppose few of us like to suspect that we are seen through. Our hypocrisies may be – and usually are – kind: like good manners, they oil the wheels of society, and Lord knows it needs oiling, perhaps more than it ever did.
Oddly enough, I do not think that had I known Marcel Proust he would have made me uncomfortable – irritated at times, perhaps, because I like to sleep at night and not to be summoned (had I been male) for iced beer and conversation at some ungodly time in the small hours – but no, not uncomfortable. And Heaven knows, he knew about people, if ever a man did. But his world is one we are invited to enter as into the Arabian Nights, while the world into which Dame Ivy invited us was her actual drawing-room. One had a gruesome feeling that, for the moment, one had become one of her characters, and not a favourite one at that.
Yet I have a feeling that had I known her well enough to come to her with some troubling personal problem, she would have been kind and, within her own range, wise. But there were some things she would not have understood at all.
Thinking back on her, it strikes me as possible that she would have made a very good reigning monarch in Victoria’s day, if Victoria hadn’t got there first. Presence Dame Ivy had: courage and determination: and, I believe, the absolute conviction that she could never have gone far wrong. Empress of India? She would have made a splendid show. Any attempt at assassination she would have met with the scorn it deserved. Anyway, she was absolutely unforgettable: as Victoria is, to those of us who could not possibly have seen her. Dame Edith Sitwell, whom I did know pretty well, and loved, would have made a good job of it: but her sense of ridicule – of herself – would have got in the way. She might have laughed at all the wrong moments. Dame Ivy, at no wrong moments. She was extremely witty, in her writings: but I could never detect a real sense of fun in herself. Those who really knew her, may feel quite differently. I am pleading a rather brief acquaintance. Well, let us at least say this: I don’t think she would have appreciated a ‘shaggy dog’ story. Dame Edith certainly would, and she made many a practical ‘shaggy dog’ joke of her own. That ‘comparisons are odious’ is one of the most absurd tags ever invented. Many comparisons can be revelatory, and even flattering to the two persons compared. I hope mine are this, because they are meant to be.
However, to return to her work. Some of her novels are quite amoral. The wicked do, like Anna Donne, in Elders and Betters, flourish like the green bay tree. Dame Ivy appears to pass no judgments: but she does so, like a cat passing judgment on some mouse whom it intends to allow, eventually, to escape. There is one oddity that I noted in my British Council pamphlet (since superseded by one by R. Glyn-Grylls, who has brought the novels up to date). In Dolores (1911) the pervasive idea is that of the moral obligation of duty to others, no matter what the sacrifice. In her next novels (she re-started writing after eleven years), all that has changed. The same idea recurs again and again: that to be useful to others is nice for them but not for yourself.
Something had happened, during those long intervening years, to make her change her mind: radically. What?
She once asked me why her novels had such small sales here, and vestigial in the U.S.A. I replied, ‘Because they are so difficult to read without a major degree of concentration, and only a small number of people do read in that way. If one misses a single line of your books, one can get completely lost.’ She remained puzzled and unconvinced, and her publisher bore the brunt of her doubts.
For me, they are endlessly re-readable. If I was not on her wavelength as a person, I am certainly on it with her novels.
I believe her posthumous novel, The Last and the First, is incomplete. She must have had another trick up her sleeve, another reversal of fortune. One can almost hear it coming – the sound of its rustling. But not quite. And now we shall never know what that trick was.
Her physical descriptions of people (descriptions of place were few and perfunctory) were remarkable, though she never refreshed one’s memory after that first portrait. She rarely verges on the lyrical: but her lovely description of the death of Blanche, in A Family and a Fortune, for me the most attractive of all her novels, approaches to that. Improbabilities abound in them, as when a man and wife, presumably lost at sea, return separately home; he to his family, she ill in the next village, secretly succoured by the familiar friend-housekeeper, leaving him free to commit bigamy – almost – he is saved by his wife’s return in the nick of time. In cold blood it seems, and is, ridiculous. But to read it is enthralling.
Murder, incest, the forging of wills, drivings to suicide – under the close mesh of her prose are all these things. And she did appear, from interviews she gave, to believe, most extraordinarily, that they were pretty common in the staunch old English family, circa 1910. Homosexuality, male and female, often appears in the books. It might seem that this would have shocked a less sophisticated public than we, at the time they were written: except that so few of that public had the patience or understanding to unravel her complicated pieces of literary crochet.
She was, of course, a cult writer. Though I know she is now established in the literature of the twentieth century, I cannot be sure what her place will be in the whole of English literary history. I used to think she might find rest in that perimeter, about which stand Firbank, Peacock, Beddoes. Now I am not so certain that she will not edge her way further in. Having been a ‘cult-figure’, however, has its disadvantages: it means that one’s admirers, generation after generation, have to keep up the pressures. If they do, they may bring about an improvement of those elusive sales figures that puzzled, and troubled, Dame Ivy so much in her lifetime.
27. Family Cricket
In 1951, a year after Charles and I were married, we went to Tilbury to meet his brother Philip, his beautiful wife Anne, and his daughter Stefanie – then four years old. I had heard little about them, except that Philip Sr had been Assistant Commissioner in Fiji, for fourteen years.
Not so long after, our Philip was born. What should we call him, which would distinguish him from his uncle? We decided that Philip Sr should be known, Fijian-style, as Philip Levu, the large, and Philip Jr, Philip Lai-Lai – the small. (This could not last for ever, since Philip Lai-Lai rapidly outgrew Philip Levu, but that was years ahead.)
They all came to see us from time to time – we were then living in Clare – and family cricket emerged. At eighteen months, Philip Lai-Lai liked to watch it from his pram (on the top of which sat Buzz, one of our many Siamese cats). Bored on occasions – as who wouldn’t be – he would burst into the song learned (not accurately) from me–
Oh Minnie Mine
[He tells me now that he actually used to think that ‘Mine’ was her surname.]
Where are thou roving?
O stay and hear
Your true love’s coming
That can sing both high and low.
The terrain was pleasing. A smooth lawn, flanked by rose bushes and beds of pansies: to the left, a summer-house, spidery and not particularly attractive, from which led a long path, shrub-bordered (we were rich in exotic shrubs, since the former owner had been a horticulturist) and passing by two little ponds, which I found a dead loss, since whenever I put goldfish into them, I discovered they had disappeared by the following morning: to the left the greenhouse: and then two parallel paths, charmingly flowered, leading down to an arm of the river Stour. Here – though we had wired it off for fear of Philip falling in – w
ere moorhens, and our familiar swans, who would come from a quarter of a mile at call.
As Philip Lai-Lai grew a little older, he had a small cricket-bat of his own: Charles was enthralled. Himself, he had been a useful cricketer: but Philip Levu had captained the Fijian cricket team round the Antipodes. It was Charles’s dream that his son should one day play at Lord’s: but alas, after the first infant enthusiasms, Philip proved as inept – and as gloriously uninterested in any form of games-playing – as I had been myself.
Still, it was fun while it lasted. I always had to take my turn, and on one occasion – a catching match – contrived to beat Philip Levu. I shall never understand this freak of fortune. He was, of course, an excellent athlete, and so was Anne. Stefanie was showing great promise. Charles, despite the weakness of his eyes, was pretty good. It was too early for us to judge Philip Lai-Lai. But Lindsay, Andrew and myself – well, I suppose we did our best, though Andrew would often sidle off and go fishing.
Meanwhile, Philip Sr had become Bursar of Rugby: he had a pleasant house, and a garden well-adapted for family cricket. (To send the ball over the wall into the road was six, and out.) Some time later I met my other brother-in-law, Eric, who was at one time Secretary of the Leicestershire County Cricket Club. His wife Jess was also a considerable athlete: I think she was once Ladies’ Bowls Champion. They, too, had a long garden. So, more cricket.
I didn’t mind, though it was a slight humiliation to be given a bat, when the others operated with a stick.
I had learned a certain amount about the game through Charles, during the early years of our marriage, and I was fascinated. I was not afraid of asking silly questions: indeed, if one is to learn anything, one must. I think he was pleased with me on the day he discovered me watching a Test Match on T.V. by myself.
But it is no use pretending that any form of games really absorbed me. I could always think of something better to do. ‘Games’ – this being a generic term – seem to me so much a matter of the specialist skill that no one who does not possess it comes within touching distance. So why pretend? No one wants to find a place persistently within the second-rate – in my case, it would be the fifth or sixth.
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