'Humiliating Proxies of Ourselves'

The OED gave its imprimatur to the technology-enabled term “binge-watching” in 2018. I can’t say I’ve ever indulged though I have binge-read a handful of writers, including Shakespeare (a long time ago), Henry James and Raymond Chandler. In a particularly heated rush I once consumed most of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, and periodically return to favorites. Composed largely of dialogue, her novels are chilly, misanthropic and inordinately funny. Few concessions are made to “human interest.” Most of her characters are vicious. Plot is secondary. Compton-Burnett is virtually the definition of a cult novelist, and I won’t even try to coax you into reading her. 

“Though we never see their faces, her characters’ utterances plague us; the screen is blank, but the sound is always on. Words fill the debating chambers that their homes are; everyone talks as if raised to his highest power; and the cumulative result over twenty novels, of which this is the last, is a mordant, elegant synopsis of domestic tribal warfare, in which the people do not fare any better for being so verbal.”

 

Fifty years ago, in the September 4, 1971, issue of The Saturday Review, the late Paul West reviewed Compton-Burnett’s posthumously published final novel, The Last and the First. She had died in 1969 at age eighty-five. “[S]eldom,” West writes, “do we take leave of a writer with such an exhilarated sense of having been mentally tuned up, challenged and dominated, made to eavesdrop upon humiliating proxies of ourselves.” For some readers, that will not sound like an endorsement. Maybe, with West’s help, I’ll coax a little:

 

“She emerges from this novel, and the materials that accompany it, as both worldly and unpretentious, a woman whose angular intelligence promoted high society into low comedy and that, in turn, into a high, almost mandarin, art.”