'Rejoiced in the Follies of Human Beings'

Consider this yet another futile pitch for the austere pleasures of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s twenty novels.

In 1979, ten years after her death, the journal Twentieth[-]Century Literature asked seven English writers, most of whom had known Compton-Burnett with varying degrees of intimacy, to assess her literary reputation. The accompanying headline states the dominant theme: “Major/Minor: A Symposium.” Compton-Burnett is one of those writers about whom critical and readerly consensus is likely to remain impossible. For some readers, major/minor turns unreflexively into good/bad. Others take a broader, more nuanced view: who would want to live without Landor, Beerbohm, Stevie Smith, J.V. Cunningham – and Compton-Burnett?  

  

Rosalie Glynn Grylls, who published a biography of the novelist in 1971, writes:

 

“It is the spark of genius that matters and whether it makes for major or minor output is not something by which an artist can be graded. There are mountains and there are hills (who shall say which are greater? Bigger, yes, and more difficult to climb but that is another thing) and there are volcanoes whose eruption permanently changes the nature of a landscape.”

 

That’s a little overripe but the judgment is valid. In keeping with the geologic metaphor, carbon comes in the forms of graphite, coal and diamonds. It’s all a matter of heat and pressure.

 

Michael Millgate, the Hardy biographer, addresses Compton-Burnett’s one-of-a-kind quality as a novelist. She is “unique,” to use a frequently misused word:

 

“There is no one quite like her, and, since she is clearly and even triumphantly successful within her chosen limits, she must be allowed to have done certain things better than anyone else has ever done them—or will ever do them. That does not seem quite enough, however, to propel her  into the ranks of the unquestionably great . . .”

 

Robert Liddell, who knew Compton-Burnett and published in 1955 one of the first critical books devoted to her work, gets catty:

 

“For her intelligence was the supreme value, and that is perhaps the reason for her greatness: in comparison with her, E.M. Forester had (like his own hero Rickie [Elliott, in The Longest Voyage]), a ‘secondrate sensitive mind.’”

 

James Lees-Milne, the architectural historian whose twelve-volume diary makes for good gossip, writes:     

 

“I don't say for a moment that Ivy was my favorite novelist. I did not always enjoy her books. But I was always flabbergasted by them. They were no relaxation. They were a sort of penance. One had to feel well and work hard to understand them. As a writer she was relentless.”

 

About Compton-Burnett as a person, Lees-Milne writes:

 

“I greatly enjoyed her company and her humor. One laughed with her ceaselessly. She adored trivial gossip and rejoiced in the follies of human beings.”

 

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

 

[Dispatch from the Clinical Front: Readers have asked about my Covid-19 status. I tested positive on Wednesday, my wife the following day. I’m taking Paxlovid and something for the cough. I trust that within a few days my throat will stop producing unpleasant things.]