Thursday, 4 July 2024

"Parents and Children" by Ivy Compton-Burnett


Money is running out for the Sullivan family. Fulbert and Eleanor may live an idle life surrounded by maids in the large house owned by their in-laws but their nine children must be (haphazardly) educated so they can enter gainful employment. And Fulbert needs to go to South America to sort out his dad's business interests. 

The story is told almost entirely through dialogue, and the dialogue is very formal; this gives the prose an unnatural feeling. The characters seem to speak their thoughts rather more than most of us. Here's a typical example, from Luce who, to be fair, is an adult and tends to speak more formally than the rest of them: "Mother, I don't think Father much liked my saying that about your money. But it did seem a  fair point to make. I should not have been at ease with myself, if I had not said it." (Ch 1) It gets faintly ludicrous when the sentence is tortured for the sake of formal but archaic grammar: "Father has not a wife who will make things harder for him." (Ch 1) It becomes even stranger when the younger children use 'whom' correctly and terms such as 'polyandry'. 

Bertolt Brecht, the playwright of The Good Person of Szechuan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mother Courage, and The Threepenny Opera amongst other dramas, asked his actors to narrate their characters rather than impersonate them; he wanted the audience to realise that the drama performed on stage was an artificial construct. This formality of dialogue, added to the almost complete lack of described setting, or characters, and the unlikelihood of the plot, seems Brechtian in its deliberate artificiality. Verisimilitude is repeatedly undermined. As well as creating a barrier between the writer and the reader, ICB's technique makes her prose hard to read, the reader needs to concentrate.  Nevertheless, the attentive reader swiftly builds up the characters. For example, Daniel repeatedly puts his brother Graham down, often making belittling comments in which he refers to Graham in the third person which makes an interesting counterpoint to Neville, the three year old, who refers to himself in the third person. Graham makes comments which suggest that he is perceptive to the undercurrents of emotion running through the novel. The oldest sibling sister Luce is a family peacemaker although she criticises her mother when Eleanor wants to read Isabel's private letter. James is a school-shy rebel who wants to be left alone to read. Isabel is very clever and she knows it. Gavin and Honor are budding rebels. The father Fulbert is flippant and spoiled and very lazy; more than once he is complacent about being ignorant of something. Grandfather Sir Jesse is the patriarch of the family (in the Old Testament, Jesse is the father of David who becomes King of the Israelites after slaying Goliath) and makes his displeasure plain by walking out of family discussions; they all contort themselves to make sure that he is pleased because, ultimately, he holds the purse strings. But the dominant personality is the grandmother Regan. Eleanor the mother is a contradiction; she hates living as a dependent on her husband's family, though it is hinted that in the early days the family only survived because she had money. She has had nine children but has farmed out their care to maids and governesses; the boys go to school or university while the girls are educated, poorly and incompletely, at home. The whole family are indolent parasites. Furthermore, on the estate is a cottage containing a brother and two sisters who are allegedly orphans from South America and they too are supported - though meanly, in their opinion - by patriarch Jesse; one wonders whether they are his children. And there are a family of friends consisting of Paul and his children Ridley and Hope and their stepmother Faith: these four intrude upon the family at the worst of times and say outrageously frank things. 

In the first half of the book almost nothing happens. We are introduced to the family and their nine children who exist in three groups of three: the adults Luce, Daniel and Graham, the two boys both in their final year at Cambridge; the middle three James (normally at school which he hates and survives by repeatedly throwing sickies), Isabel and Venice; and the youngest in the nursery Gavin and Honor - who conspire to give their new governess a torrid time - and 3-year-old Neville. Already there are too many characters and some of them such as Venice never really become more than ciphers while others (Honor and Gavin, Luce and Daniel?) remain enigmas. Perhaps the mystery is deliberate; it is, at least, rather more genuine than the thought-revealing dialogue.

One of the major themes of this book is dependency. The nine children are dependent upon their parents and, as they grow older, they resent this dependency: the young ones such as Gavin and James and Isabella rebel in typically childish ways: they are truculent and disobedient in minor matters. The adult children rebel in their words. Miss Mitford the governess says things that challenge the expectations put upon her to the point of rudeness. But there is also a family of three dependants living in a cottage in the grounds and with them, and in the house, we see how the dependency relation damages the patron as well as the patronised: Jesse, like Eleanor and Regan, is stingy with what he gives and yet expects subservience and gratitude. Those who feel themselves to be superior in this highly stratified hierarchy are not about imposing their will by force, such as when Eleanor reads Isabel's letter or when Gavin is forced to hand over his drawing. 

The book charts the ways in which the pecking order continually readjusts itself. It challenges the status quo. For example, Eleanor employs maids and governesses to care for her nine children and yet she feels she is owed respect for her maternal efforts: "It is more difficult to make other people do things then to do them yourself." But her adult children and others repeatedly challenge her assumptions and presumptions. Furthermore, she is both a bully and bullied. The book starts with her wanting to leave the stately home of her husband's parents and, when the chance comes, she proposes to move out even though this involves leaving her children. But when push comes to shove, she won't sacrifice her creature comforts to do this. Fundamentally all those characters in this novel who are dependent know on which side their bread is buttered and so their rebellions are muted and they toe the line, at whatever costs to their characters. 

It's difficult to read. There is very little description. The dialogue is excruciatingly formal. There is little pretence at verisimilitude. And yet this is a work of literature that creates characters who challenge the reader to think.  I have wanted to read a novel by Compton-Burnett since I read Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader in which Queen Elizabeth II is imagined encountering a mobile library in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and borrowing and reading an ICB book because she has met her. He describes ICB's writing as 'dry'. I'm not sure that ICB would turn anyone on to literature (and I'm not that impressed by Alan Bennet after reading and watching The Madness of King George). But he's right: ICB might be quaint and old-fahioned and mannered and strange but her writing is certainly thought-provoking and I fully intend to give her another go.

Selected quotes:

  • "She had loved thirteen people, which may be above the average number." (Ch 1)
  • "It was the family practice to economize in materials rather than in time. It seldom struck Eleanor or Regan that a few shillings might be well spent. Shillings were never well spent to them, only by necessity or compulsion." (Ch 2)
  • "Hair and clothes disposed in a manner which appeared to be her own, but had really been everyone's at the time when she grew up." (Ch 2)
  • "Sir Jesse ... was inclined to refer any subject to himself." (Ch 4)

July 2024; 285 pages



This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

An ICB bibliography with links to novels reviewed in this blog:




on
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)