Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 11

‘I AM ILL AT ease with people whose lives are an open book’ – so says Felix (aptly and most deliberately named) in More Women Than Men (1933). Ivy Compton-Burnett’s happiest, wisest and most uncharitably perspicacious characters are all convinced of the virtue of concealment. As, famously, was their creator, who was apt in her later years to regale learned and inquiring fans with tea, toast, Gentleman’s Relish and advice on (say) how to mend holes in rugs. Her ‘inner’ life – the obsessive family scenarios that fed her fiction – seemed to belong, like her clothes and hairstyle, to a period before the First World War, locked away in the past.

Hilary Spurling, in her splendid biography of 10 years ago, Ivy When Young, rather shared this carefully fostered impression. The tragic passions she unravelled in the lives of the Compton-Burnetts seemed more than sufficient to account for an after-life spent, as it were, writing them up. However, as she says, there turned out to be another story to tell, with its own rather different fascination: the story of how, when ‘family life was in ruins, her last link with the only world she knew had been snapped by the death of her brother Noel on the Somme in 1916, and she herself had nearly died in the great influenza episode of 1918’, Ivy reinvented herself as a woman and as a novelist.

The title Mrs Spurling has chosen – Secrets of a Woman’s Heart – has a teasing irony about it, since what she’s doing this time is exploring secretiveness itself as a strategy for survival. It is, as she shows, by evolving ‘layer by layer the extraordinary protective armour’ that Ivy became so subtle and radical a writer.

The relationship with Margaret Jourdain which sustained her, and which ended only with Margaret’s death in 1951, seems to have held no ‘secrets’ of the sexual sort (they adopted each other, they weren’t lovers). Only, shockingly, it was based on the assumption that living in any ambitious or indeed ‘normal’ way was hideously dangerous. To start with, Ivy played the invalid – there were ‘months, even years, when she lay about the flat eating sweets, reading Wilkie Collins and silently watching Margaret’s callers’ before producing Pastors and Masters in 1925. They perfected what one might call, travestying F. R. Leavis, an irreverent closedness before life. Not in the social sense (their tea parties, like the Mad Hatter’s, were never-ending) but in the sense of an offensive neutrality (‘we are neuters’) in the midst of the permanent state of hostilities represented by marriage and the family.

Like Ivy, Margaret Jourdain was a veteran of that battlefield. Her vicarage family was large, proud, almost penniless and wretchedly quarrelsome, though full of energy and talent. Three elder sisters were teachers (Eleanor eventually became Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford), Margaret herself became an eminent historian of furniture and the domestic arts, brother Frank was a founding father of British ornithology, and Philip was a distinguished mathematician though afflicted, like the youngest sister, Milly, with multiple sclerosis, thought to be hereditary.

Mrs Spurling, who is especially good on this kind of thing, traces their histories in some detail: Margaret’s early poetical leanings, suppressed in favour of furniture; the family’s disgust at Philip’s marriage; Eleanor’s intrigues and forced retirement; Milly’s lucid poems on her own decay. The final score is daunting:

Margaret died, like her four sisters, unmarried, and though the five brothers each took a wife … only Frank had children: they were born before the disease affecting Philip and Milly had declared itself fully, and all three died … without issue, so that by the middle of the century it was clear that the Jourdains like the Compton-Burnetts – families of 10 and 13 children respectively – drew the line at reproducing themselves.

Margaret – formidable, mocking, protective – had had other protégés, though none so (eventually), successful as Ivy. Though it’s clearly not the case, as she once confided to a strange man from Gollancz on a bus, that she was the real author (‘I write all her books’), her strength and her acid wit helped stake out Ivy’s special ‘no-man’s-land’. As did her 1920s Country Life set, which included Firbankian figures like Ernest Thesiger, cousin to the Viceroy of India, actor, narcissist and needleman (nothing was more terrible, wrote Beverley Nichols, than to see Ernest ‘sitting under the lamplight doing this embroidery’), or interior decorator Herman Schrijver (whom Margaret referred to as ‘Ivy’s Jewish friend’) who bet Ivy she couldn’t name one heterosexual male among their acquaintance. The bleak, unillusioned tone of the novels was, as Mrs Spurling points out, part forged in this heretical set, for all ‘Ivy’s old-world style’.

In fact, it matched the times increasingly well. As Edward Sackville-West wrote in 1946, ‘Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the totalitarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families depicted in these books.’ Or, as Mrs Spurling more moderately puts it, ‘the moral economy of Ivy’s books had always been organised on a war footing’. After the war her fame burgeoned. People at the tea parties included Angus Wilson, Nathalie Sarraute, Mary McCarthy … and Ivy perfected her techniques of evasion.

She did, however (especially after Margaret’s death), unbend to some of the younger writers who sought her out, like Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Kay Dick, who provide evidence of her kindness and generosity as well as her more ‘frightening’ habits, like interspersing conversations with muttered asides to imaginary characters. In 1967, two years before her death, she was made a Dame, which it’s hard not to see as a tribute to her tea-table persona, as much as to her writing. She had kept her counsel; her atrocities were committed in the books. Hilary Spurling’s brilliant and meticulous account – studded with scones, sticky with honey – is a study in secret survivalism.