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PARTISAN REVIEW
And two stanzas on, Yeats concludes:
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.
In the end, Farrell's nerve fails him in the face of time and reality.
Yeats spits into it.
In Ivy Compton-Burnett, as in Henry Green, all the novel's excess
literary baggage is pitched overboard. In both cases this produces tight
little books, and an astonishingly eerie effect. In Green that effect is
one of magic: he wants words not to mean but to be, and his novels,
when they are successful, are a kind of hallucination without meaning.
Ivy Compton-Burnett, in
The Present and the Past,
produces a hallu–
cinatory effect too, as of seeing too clearly-but seeing too clearly not
actual things, but the moral truth of things.
Among all the species of moral truth, it is chiefly the subversive
kind that Miss Compton-Burnett is interested in, by which the hypoc–
risy and selfishness of formal and established relationships are shown
up. In
The Present and the Past,
two wives (one divorced) show up
their husband, children their father, servants their master. The husband,
father, and master here is Cassius Clare, the bland and feckless head of
a family of gentry set down you are never told exactly where in a big
house
in
the English countryside, at some time in the past you don't
know exactly when, apparently the late nineteenth or early twentieth
century. One never hears an echo of the outside world; it is as if it
didn't exist. All this has the force of metaphor, so that the novel's little
group of people becomes society itself, and the truths exposed in the
course of their fantastically articulate conversations the most universal
truths; though the writer's polite and unpretentious manner would
seem to say that the last thing you might ever catch her doing would
be stating universal truths. I t is all immensely original.
Yet Miss Compton-Burnett's novels are part of the English novel
tradition that begins with Jane Austen and runs through
E.
M. Forster.
And behind this tradition is the modem quality of ironic moderation
which I remarked on in connection with
Cousin Bazilio.
It is not a quality
that leads to the creation of great books, only of very good ones. I
have noticed it recently in another English writer, Thomas Hinde, the
author of
Mr. Nicholas.
These writers strip the novel down to some–
thing concrete, pure, and real, a kind of poetry with poetry's demanding–
ness. What they seek above all is the truth. They shun literature like
the plague.
Martin Greenberg
