Misanthropy Page 21
The point is not that there is no serious gender politics to Sitwell’s novel, but rather that it is held and integrated within a great catastrophic vision – precisely, a shocked appropriation of the world at large – not urged upon on us as a liberal moralism.
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If Ivy Compton-Burnett had little or nothing explicit to say about suffragism, here and there, the novels make some of her views quite clear. She would surely have agreed with Miss Basden in Pastors and Masters ‘that women often equal and surpass men in literary achievements’.23 She wrote the novel only a few years after women won the vote, and obviously approves of a society increasingly ‘equalizing the position of women’ (PM, p. 86). But she would also have taken any notion of ‘equalization’ as meaning that the world was getting better to be frivolous, and she would quite possibly have despised any special pleading as basically feeble. She had quickly moved well beyond the feminisms contemporary with her. In what is perhaps the most granite-hard of all her novels, A Family and its Fortune, she says of the ferocious Matty that ‘she had never met a man whom she saw as her equal’.24 Quite a few of Compton-Burnett’s female characters share Matty’s attitude. Like many women of Compton-Burnett’s generation, they radiate sheer force of character and an acute intelligence in a language so gripping and distinctive as to be almost foreign to us today. But it is no exaggeration to say that they can also kill. Indeed, from time to time, they do.
Self-evidently, for Compton-Burnett, patriarchy was a violent and ludicrous contraption. Her contempt for its worst representatives – the monstrous Duncan Edgeworth in A House and its Head, Andrew Stace in Brothers and Sisters – is patent, however loudly they sometimes make us laugh. In Pastors and Masters, Mr Bentley’s terrifyingly frigid view of himself and his sons – ‘I have never met a man so unfortunate in his children’ – to which one of the ‘unmitigated nincompoops’ responds by gallantly summoning up an occasional pathetic little caper, sends a cold shiver down the spine (PM, pp. 66–7). Brothers can be as bad as fathers. Take the opening lines of A Heritage and Its History:
‘It is a pity you have not my charm, Simon,’ said Walter Challoner [to his brother]. ‘… Can it be that you have death in your heart? What a different thing from charm! To think of the gulf between us!’25
Much of the detail of Simon and Walter’s relationship in the novel will seem to run counter to the narcissism and offhand, devastating cruelty of this; and yet we cannot be sure that, heavily disguised, it does not underlie the relationship throughout. The jocular tone only makes the intensity of the masculine standoff all the more chilling.
This, however, is only to push gently at a door that yields a bestiary. Compton-Burnett turns in exactly the opposite direction to Sitwell, contemplating the nucleus, not the vista: hence her fiction is my example of ‘the private world as theatre of war’. She focuses on small worlds, chiefly the family, sometimes in combination with a genteel or (upper-)middle-class community. In twenty superficially similar novels, she has one interest above all: to conduct a sustained, intense, microscopic, almost clinical scrutiny of the workings of the human monster in a domestic context. In the period of ‘first wave’ feminism, home and the family were very much political themes. Suffragists were calling the domestication of women radically into question. For their part, anti-suffragists were insisting that women belonged in the home and at the hearth, which was where true value lay. Josephine Butler wrote, for example, of the political need for ‘free opening out and giving forth of the influences of homes, as reservoirs of blessings for the common good’.26 Compton-Burnett clearly had no particular interest in the suffragist politics of liberation from the home. With rare exceptions, almost all her characters are confined to it, equally – women and men. But she was also certainly no defender of woman’s domestic role, and the effect of her novels on the idea of the ‘reservoirs of blessings’ is approximately that of a nuclear bomb.
Thirty years before Compton-Burnett published her first major novel, Henry James wrote: ‘I have the imagination of disaster, and see life as indeed ferocious and sinister’.27 Ruthless, predatory beasts prowl through the Jamesian jungle, intent on their own purposes, however obscurely so. They are the more likely to seize their prey in that the jungle does not look like one. It sets a premium on the civilities. But the beasts can flourish there the more successfully in that they have no need to show themselves for what they are, can go about their business by indirection. Yet James was not a misanthropist. As he himself said, his whole interest was in rescuing a presumption of innocence or virtue and its redemptive power from the wilderness. It took modern women writers to strip away the Jamesian consolation, and to imagine the disaster proper. In Compton-Burnett’s novels, as Joseph Baines has noted, ‘Justice is neither done nor contemplated’, not least, justice to innocence and virtue.28 Compton-Burnett repeatedly denied James’s influence, but this is not surprising. She must have thought that he had chickened out.
In Elders and Betters, Anna disobeys her Aunt Sukey’s instructions and burns her will in favour of her sister Jessica and her family, preserving the one that leaves everything to Anna herself. Sukey then dies, and Anna inherits, much to the surprise of the other characters. She brazens her way through some difficult exchanges, with everyone trying ‘to get in some little poisoned shaft’,29 and then confronts her Aunt Jessica. Jessica, perhaps the only remotely decent and sympathetic character in the book, if a weak one, actually wants to find out more about her sister’s state of mind in the closing stages of her life. Anna, however, thinks she is challenging her over the will, even, perhaps, that she is provoking her to admit the truth. She therefore sets out briskly to destroy Jessica both emotionally and psychologically, by showing her, not only that she chronically failed Sukey, but that she has chronically failed her own family, too. Not long afterwards, Jessica commits suicide.
Similar sequences recur in other novels: in Men and Wives, for example, Matthew directs such extraordinary aggression at his mother Harriet that she subsequently threatens to ‘smash up our affection and our daily life’,30 then suffers a mental breakdown and spends months in a home. When she returns – or so it appears – Matthew discreetly feeds her a tablet that kills her, in order to secure his relationship with Camilla, which he fears his mother will break up. In both novels, readers are left incredulous, rubbing their eyes at what they have witnessed. In Elders and Betters, Anna’s case against Jessica is plausible, coherent, lucid, psychologically penetrating, strenuously made, even civilized, apparently energized by real conviction; and yet it is impossible not to suspect that she goes on the offensive for defensive reasons, that the zeal with which she takes Jessica apart is a reflection of her own fierce need to cover her tracks, not least because she has set her cap at Jessica’s idle if articulate son Terence, who is unlikely to agree to marry her without money, since he does not intend to earn any.
Compton-Burnett repeatedly makes us do such double takes. These are conversation novels consisting of people ‘bandying words’ (MW, p. 108), with little or no intervention from the narrator, which means that no voice will even pretend to vouchsafe any truth of things to the reader beyond what the characters say in their articulate, educated and sometimes awesomely clever manner. But conversation in Compton-Burnett is almost unfailingly a means of avoiding contact with others, of not admitting what is likely to be at stake in relationships. The family is the crucible of this stark vision. Behind the cut and thrust of family exchange, there are often hints of an extreme callousness towards others’ feelings that is the predictable corollary of the unrelenting self-intentness the characters generally share. Alternatively, emotional lives seem insignificant to the point of nullity. Thus, at the end of A Family and its Fortune, the hapless Dudley, one of Compton-Burnett’s most egregious victim-figures, finally recognizes this of his brother Edgar: ‘“You had nothing to give. You have nothing. There is nothing in your nature. You did not care for Blanche [Edgar’s wife]. You do not care for your children.
You have not cared for me”’ (FF, p. 236). Compare, in Elders and Betters, Benjamin’s ‘incredulous gratification’ at the seeming fact that at least one of his children ‘did not desire his death’ (EB, p. 124).
But we should press the point further than this. Compton-Burnett comprehensively ruins the ordinary human persuasion that there is at least one sane, healthy normality that we can take for granted. The family and home are in fact scarily unheimlich, unhomely or uncanny. The general idea is familiar from Freud, but Compton-Burnett pursues the Freudian understanding of the family deep down and all the way down. Can the sophisticated voices we hear really be connected with the misdemeanours and horrors we fear we may have glimpsed? With financial skulduggery, certainly, this is England, but drastic cruelty? Psychological torture? Incest? Murder? The point is, not that the answer to such questions must be a resounding yes, but that Compton-Burnett leaves her readers exactly balanced on the point of the question. This is the uncanny in action.
As such, we might hope to keep it in a certain proportion. But if the smooth, formulaic to and fro of language leaves us wondering if the characters ever mean anything they say, sooner or later, abruptly, violently and often for no apparent reason, someone does, and then the results are shocking if not cataclysmic. Compton-Burnett had an expert ear for the savage and peremptory fashion in which, merely through an elegant choice of phrase, the English middle classes can skewer their weaker and more vulnerable members. Matty’s brusque demolition of her impoverished companion Miss Griffin is an obvious example. As with Jessica or Harriet, the point with Miss Griffin is that anyone who does not quite share the social idiom, or get it, or cannot sustain it, does not know how to keep the ball in play, or makes a mess of doing so and, as a consequence, lives too much in honest feeling, is likely to be crushed out of hand.
But this in turn illuminates the nature of the idiom. The triumphs of wit or exquisiteness to which others’ sensitivities are casually sacrificed may be very entertaining. Compton-Burnett knows that, and knows her readers know it, too. But conversation in her novels is also interminably fractious. Everybody takes issue with others, however lightly and amusingly. Everyone wants to steal a conversational march on everyone else, to top the last remark. We might fleetingly call Schopenhauer back to mind: in Compton-Burnett, conversation becomes a succession of minuscule surges of will, a constant skirmish for power, an endless stream of petty self-assertion, a series of tiny territorial gains which yield a small and transitory but psychologically necessary gratification. The doomed are those who miss this, who do not understand the art of the riposte, who fail to recognize that the other is always tinder for one’s flint and steel.
Once again we ask ourselves, can people really behave like this to each other, even when they hardly seem to be doing so, or are apparently so unaware of it? But our incredulity is the author’s point. There is a second kind of uncanniness in Compton-Burnett’s novels, the uncanniness of people’s refusal directly to confront or to express the meaning of what they nonetheless see and obscurely grasp. Because hers is a social world in which adherence to certain norms of civility or urbanity is de rigueur, the characters can get away with being implacably furtive, oblique or discreet, and therefore contrive to keep the unmentionable unmentioned. The idea that Matthew has quietly murdered his mother cannot be borne in a world which, after all, began with Sir Godfrey loudly proclaiming ‘the great, unbreakable bond of family love and fellowship’ (MW, p. 5). The official bombast will no longer exactly prevail at the end; what rather ensues is a complex and subtle cover-up which admits of doubts and hesitations, but nonetheless sustains appearances. It does so, however, not just because the family needs to pass muster socially, but because no one in the novel wishes to conceive of himself or herself as living in a world to which Matthew’s deed or the emotions that drove him must be recognized as integral. So, too, Compton-Burnett surrounds Anna with an array of characters none of whom quite want to broach the thorny question of her conduct, of what may be staring them in the face. They all have their own interests to consult, their own comforts to attend to, their personal horizons beyond which it is easier not to look, and these take precedence. So what they know is also what they prefer not to know, the degree of individual evasion and disingenuousness being the sole variant factor; and here, the characters become their readers’ surrogates or mirror images.
One of the most artful features in Compton-Burnett’s novels is the regularity with which the characters come out with misanthropic judgements – on the irreducibility of egoism, human nature red in tooth and claw, the general prevalence of malignity, self-regard and complicity – that the novels constantly suggest but refuse to quite confirm. ‘We all prey on each other’, says Emma in Mother and Son. ‘The jungle is never dead’.31 Such cynical aphorisms accumulate, gaining ground ominously as the novels draw towards their conclusions, with many if not most of the characters contributing to their continuing plausibility. Yet Compton-Burnett’s people never quite see their misanthropy through to the bitter end. Terence declares that ‘there is horror in every heart, and a resolve never to be honest with anyone else’ (EB, p. 223), and this would seem to be a conclusion to which Elders and Betters inexorably points us – except that, in the very diligence with which it sticks to the surface, it shields us, too, as perhaps we too wish to be shielded.
Compton-Burnett, then, is a superb manipulator of a kind of incipient misanthropy. She encourages the imagination of disaster but also refuses to fix it in place, understanding that both her characters and readers will be tempted by it and nurse misgivings about indulging it. The degree to which those misgivings might be just is never quite ascertainable; the mode of the conversation novel ensures that. Nonetheless, one might think of Compton-Burnett as issuing a wry rejoinder to an imperial and masculine tradition in the novel, running from Conrad and Kipling to Greene, Waugh and Golding, that took male protagonists halfway round the world to encounter its heart of darkness in exotic locales. For hearts of darkness, she seems to say, seek no further than the next room. Elizabeth Bowen grasped the point very acutely when she wrote that, during the war, ‘to read … a page of Compton-Burnett dialogue [was] to think of the sound of glass being swept up, one of these London mornings after a blitz’.32 But it is poor Dudley who might seem to point us to the necessary conclusion: ‘“It is a pity we have to be human. … Human failings, human vanity, human weakness! We don’t hear the word applied to anything good. Even human nature seems a derogatory term. It is simply an excuse for everything”’ (FF, p. 30).
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‘Good morning midnight’, runs the epigraph to Jean Rhys’s novel of that title, ‘I’m coming home’.33 For Rhys, ‘coming home’ involves a special abnegation, an acceptance of an absolute and inescapable solitude which also involves giving up on or growing away from others. The other person is not there, will never be there, to combler la béance, to fill the void. Above all, there is no completion or fulfilment in love, and indeed we could have no idea what that might mean. It is hardly new to suggest that solitude is a major theme of modern literature. But from Byron to Baudelaire to Conrad to Camus the crucial figure in this tradition is man, spiritual hero, intellectual pioneer and metaphysical adventurer. With the major emergence of modern women writers, however, it becomes possible to invent new wastelands of solitude, to think solitude in new ways. In particular, Rhys’s characters become the focus for understanding a drift so far to the margins of the world that, in effect, it and its denizens cease to exist. In Rhys’s case, according to Pizzichini, 1913 was the significant year. By the end of it, she had reached a state that, in some degree, always remained with her, ‘of dawning unconsciousness, of not having to try any more, to comprehend, react, parry words, enter the incomprehensible world of other people’.34 Rhys herself puts the point more figuratively: ‘Everywhere there are placards printed in red letters: This Way to the Exhibition, This Way to the Exhibition. But I don’t want the way to the exhibition – I want the way ou
t’ (GMM, p. 12). From the point of that recognition onwards, solitude empties the world as effectively as a pandemic, leaving no survivors.
Rhys lived under the shadow of her mother’s grim admonition: ‘Nothing is fair’.35 As in Compton-Burnett, there is no justice here. Rhys took this truth to heart; she conceived of herself as living in a world absolutely deprived of justice, yet was also quite unable to hold the soothing unction of good works or political commitment to her soul. Since she was burdened with a preternatural sensitivity to injustice, this left her with ‘a bitter mistrust of the world’.36 Other people often intimidated, brutalized, victimized and humiliated her. Yet she also repeatedly won a certain kind of attention and personal respect, and this was not just a matter of sexual interest, though she had enough of that, nor even the beauty of her writing, but rather of others’ more or less embarrassed sense that she was willing to take certain questions a lot further and more seriously than they were. We can grasp the connection between Rhys’s moral jusqu’au-boutisme and literature in the fact that, for her school friend Myrtle Newton, she was one of those rare creatures who could read aloud from a Shakespeare play as though she felt extremely intimate with and intensely alive to its meaning, as though she lived in it more than she did in the world.37 There was, in the end, a radical idealism to all this, and naturally its consequence could only be suffering from beginning to end.
Rhys was a courageous woman who was not afraid of herself or even, possibly, of what she finally wanted. She derives an exceptional power from defeat, utter depletion, terrible helplessness, the decisive ‘j’en ai assez’ (GMM, p. 112), the ineradicable conviction that she is not ‘of the fold’.38 But its corollary has to be terminal disconnection. There was an immensely dreary side to this: the later obscure life in Beckenham, Cornwall and Devon, the domestic rows, court cases, endless fights with neighbours and indeed neighbourhoods, most of them alcohol-fuelled. But it was also what drove her to write and kept her writing. The world was monstrous beyond belief, and writing alone could bring it to terms. Naturally, it almost goes without saying, men are ‘swine, deary, swine’ (Q, p. 14). But ‘You want to know what I’m afraid of?’ says Sophia: