'I Have Never Known That I Thought It'

“She remains the most rewarding writer of her time, the writer of the best English, a classic writer.”

No one will guess who is being described in this blurb-like testimonial. Even those who have read the writer in question will be stumped. I have no intention of defending its accuracy but suspect Cicely Greig, writing in Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir (Garnstone Press, 1972), is on to something. Compton-Burnett’s rivals for that title are sparse, the most prominent being Evelyn Waugh.

Greig was Compton-Burnett’s typist and friend for the last twenty-three years of her life. In her monograph she mixes memoir and criticism, and pays close attention to the way Compton-Burnett arranges words on the page:

“Her sentences have the authentic music of a sentence from Cicero, they are cast in his mould, that perfect balance of synthesis and antithesis, comparison and contrast that Lyly, centuries later, was to turn into a game called Euphuism. Cicero’s music is delightful wherever his influence lingers.”

Greig confirms that Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), though never a classicist, studied Greek and Latin at Royal Holloway College, now part of the University of London. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) orated in elaborately paced periodic sentences that often remain unresolved until the final phrase. The style is not “modern” and certainly not colloquial – we might think of it as “Churchillian,” -- but in Compton-Burnett’s hands it becomes pleasingly elastic and well suited to her novels which are written largely in dialogue. In defining “Ciceronian,” Greig cites a passage from the preface to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: “I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules. Wherever I turned my view there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be regulated.”

And I would cite this, from Johnson’s Adventurer#78, published on this date, Dec. 15, in 1750: “Yet it seems to be the condition of our present state, that pain should be more fixed and permanent than pleasure. Uneasiness gives way by slow degrees, and is long before it quits its possession of the sensory; but all our gratifications are volatile, vagrant, and easily dissipated.”

Greig juxtaposes her Johnson selection with the opening sentence in Compton-Burnett’s novel Brother and Sisters (1929), pointing out its “authentic music”: “Andrew Stace was accustomed to say, that no man had ever despised him, and no man had ever broken him in.” Less convincingly, Greig claims to hear Compton-Burnett in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Compton-Burnett, citing a well-known exchange in Henry IV, Part 1:

“GLENDOWER:

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?”

Compton-Burnett’s novels are cold, grim, dark and very funny. She never flatters the human race. You can understand why Turner Cassity loved them. Last night I read for the first time her slender second novel, Pastors and Masters (1925), set in a boys’ prep school. The headmaster is seventy-year-old Nicholas Herrick, who says of patience and its opposite: “The one is a condensed form of the other. Patience contains more impatience than anything else, as I judge.”

His half-sister Emily agrees: “How profound you are, Nicholas! I have always thought that. Though I have never known that I thought it. Think how it is with everything; how tolerance, for example, is only condensed intolerance, and how it holds more intolerance than anything else. It is just a case for intolerance to be kept in. And think how religion holds more dislike of religion than anything else! . . . I think that good is bad condensed, and holds more bad than anything else.”

Greig says of Compton-Burnett’s use of language: “A novelist who refuses to write in the idiom of her day appeals inevitably to a minority.” A happy minority.