'I Have This Extra Grudge Against Life'

Some writers take the world as their subject. Anything less than global inclusiveness would amount to shirking responsibility. Think of Shakespeare, of course, Tolstoy and Proust. Others work the microscale and maintain a tight focus on a small domain. Such work can seem repetitive but it’s best to think of it as variations on a theme. For Ivy Compton-Burnett that would be the family and its attendant horrors. “[F]amiliarity breeds contempt, and ought to breed it. It is through familiarity that we get to know each other,” she writes in Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949). The rhythm is characteristic. We read the first sentence, a platitude followed by its endorsement. The second prompts a rereading of the first.

Few readers are indifferent to Compton-Burnett’s twenty novels. They inspire amused devotion or bored indifference. For devotees, few novels are more grimly funny. We read one after another the way some read detective stories. She names characters Almeric Bode and Sabine Ponsonby. Her novels are made almost entirely of dialogue, so there’s little narration to distract from her people, some of whom are coldly vicious and all of whom are articulate. More than Beckett, she makes claustrophobia amusing. If her novels were read more often we might observe a net improvement in the nation's mental health. Compton-Burnett told an interviewer: “As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.”

Compton-Burnett was born on this date, June 5, in 1884 and died in 1969.