Ivy Compton-Burnett in later life

I’m busy rereading an old favourite, the second volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. I have read the first volume and ironically, that is where all the tragedies and ‘events’ of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s life take place. The tyrannies of step-parents; the deep-seated family conflicts and plots around money and inheritance; the death of her beloved brother Noel on the Somme; the sudden deaths from an overdose of veronal of her two younger sisters; the battle with her step-sisters over the family inheritance and finding independence from them; the near-fatal Spanish ‘flu that almost killed Ivy as a young woman.

 

The second volume describes Ivy living a settled life with her friend Margaret Jourdain, resigned to life as a spinster because all the likely men had died in the First World War ( I used to think this was an excuse until I read more widely on the phenomenon. All the eligible men really did die and many thousands of women did not find husbands), a woman to whom nothing dramatic would really happen again until her death in 1969. She remained in many ways an unmodified character from the Edwardian society of her girlhood, formal and respectable and aloof.

 

Her books however tell a very different story. She explored the cruel and terrifying details of family tyranny, murder in the family, incest, homosexual passions and the position of servants trapped in domestic service to heartless  or uncaring employers, the vulnerability of children bullied and tormented by wilful and vicious adults. Her novels are like the ancient Greek tragedies in their unsparing analysis of power relations in the absence of love.

 

If I hadn’t read and loved Spurling’s biography I might never have persisted with the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. I still have trouble telling them apart and have read all of them several times. They are deceptively Victorian and very dry in terms of description. The brilliance reveals itself in dialogue and flashes of insight, odd asides and the terse fast-moving plots. There is nothing like them in English literature, they are as strange as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in terms of not fitting with contemporary fiction. Ivy wrote right through Modernism into the post-war novel years, into the 1960s. Yet her novels are of a piece and owe very little to their social or historical context. Again and again, writing in longhand in notebooks while comfy in a black velvet armchair, sweets and magazines at hand, Ivy Compton-Burnett returned to her childhood and youth to create archetypes of dysfunctional families, the oppressors as admirable as their intended victims.  her characters show humour sweetness and courage along with unflinching self-knowledge and very little remorse. This is human nature at its worst and most pitiful, unlovely but fascinating. Truth blazing out in the darkness.