IVY COMPTON-BURNETT, NOW IN her eighties, is the author of seventeen novels that are supposed to be as alike as peas in a pod. A Family and a Fortune, the seventh in the series, originally published in 1939, is the first to appear in Germany.* It is not the one I should have chosen, though like many of her books it deals with a family and an inheritance. Classically in Compton-Burnett, the money in a family is held within four walls, passing from father to daughter or resident aunt to niece, just as her characters are prone to commit incest or what they think is incest until matters are cleared up. Here there is a slight and interesting variation. The inheritance comes from outside, a pure windfall, which enables the author to show a power structure (the family) and how relations within it are modified by the introduction of a certain quantity of fresh money, neither too large nor too small, as in a controlled scientific experiment. Too small a quantity would affect no significant changes, and too large a quantity would blow up the cell being studied.
Two inseparable brothers, Edgar and Dudley Gaveston, have passed their lives together in an English country house. The time is 1901. Dudley, the unmarried brother, is attached in parasitic fashion to the married Edgar and his house and children. The two brothers are often seen walking on the garden path, arm in arm—a picture that commands sentimental approval from the family watching at the window, although the closeness of the relation, as of oak and embracing ivy, might appear to a dryer eye rather suspect. Edgar, whose children are mostly grown-up, has long ceased to be a conjugal husband to Blanche, who is older than he (all the men in this novel are married to women older than themselves, as though illustrating the folkways of some queer little pocket of civilization), and his entire affection is given to Dudley. The model brothers are in fact an abnormality—one person, as it were, with two dissimilar faces, a sort of voltaic couple. The relation, which looks parasitic, may be a symbiosis. Each is the other’s second self or “better half.” There is much play in the book on the idea of everyone’s having a second self, the primary self being hidden from view. The second self, as in the expression “It has become second nature to me,” is the public one we practice until we have made it, as we hope, perfect.
Symmetry rules like Nemesis in Ivy Compton-Burnett. As the novel opens, Blanche’s relations—her old father and unmarried sister with a dependent female companion—are attaching themselves to the family as a parallel parasitic growth. Having lost most of their money, they have written to ask if they can rent the “lodge,” a small house on the property. Unlike Dudley, who has “grown into” the family, the new arrivals require readjustments of the host body. The Gavestons feel it as a sacrifice that they must give their in-laws the lodge at a lower rental than would have been asked from a stranger. And they will have to redecorate suitably, lend their carriage, set extra places at table several times a week; in short, there will be a hundred calls on their generosity. But, as soon becomes evident, what is generosity to the giver is a sharp disappointment to the receiver. This “law” of human nature is demonstrable. The receiver is always imagining how much more his benefactor could have done, had he been willing, and the benefactor is always reminding himself of how much less he could have done, if he had been someone else. Neither is able to see the other’s point of view, to get the other’s “angle,” which is literally a question of place: big house-little house, rich man’s mansion-poor man’s cottage. The lodge shrinks and expands, according to who is looking at it (to Blanche, naturally, it is “a good size,” while to her father it is a “hutch”), just as a rich man’s money multiplies in the fancy of others and contracts to a bare sufficiency in his own. The points of view, in human geometry, will never meet, even if the poor relation turns into the rich relation. Only the people will change places. That is what happens in A Family and a Fortune.
Uncle Dudley, overnight, inherits a small fortune from a forgotten godfather and at once, as he himself notices, he acquires a new psychology, that of a rich man. Exaggerated reports of the size of his inheritance make him start to feel poor in comparison, and to his shame he finds himself weighing the claims of others on his generosity. What shall he do with the money—he, a bachelor in his fifties, a permanent guest in his brother’s house? The attitude of his brother, his niece and nephews, even his sister-in-law’s sister—the cripple, Aunt Mattie, in the lodge—leaves him in no doubt. He should give it to them, of course; in their minds, the only question is how it should be divided up. A large slice for repairs to the house, which, with the advent of money, is suddenly discovered to be falling down, an allowance for the nephew to live as a Fellow at Cambridge, extra pocket money for the younger boy, new dresses for all the females, an allowance to Aunt Mattie, and so on. Dudley, a generous individual, is soon left almost poorer than he was in the first place. And at that moment a natural desire—the primary self—asserts itself in him: to have something of his own. He too has discovered a use for his money. He decides to marry, producing consternation in the family, for if Uncle marries, he will want his income for his wife, the allowances will be cut off...
His brother, as head of the household, meets the crisis in a manly way. His own wife having died, he appropriates his brother’s fiancée. That pair is now seen walking on the garden path, arm in arm. Dudley yields her up, as though, like his fairy-gold legacy, she could never really have belonged to him, and he prepares, when the honeymooners return, to step back into his familiar place in the family—the money will be theirs again since he no longer has a use for it. But another surprise is in store for him. He has been dislodged. His former fiancée has replaced him at his brother’s side. Edgar no longer has a use for him. At this Dudley rebels; he flees into the winter night, encounters Miss Griffin, Mattie’s ill-treated companion, who has been put out of the lodge into the snow. Eventually, wandering about, he falls ill and nearly dies. Nursed back to health by Miss Griffin, he is brought home again. He is reconciled with his brother, who has found, when death threatened to take him, that he could not spare him after all, and the two walk, arm in arm, on the garden path, which, for the family watching at the window, makes a happy ending.
This tale, as can be seen, is proverbial, a series of “graphic” illustrations, like some old framed series of colored prints, with such mottoes as “Out in the Cold,” “A Friend in Need,” “Reunited.” It is strange among Compton-Burnetts for its gusts of old-fashioned sentimentality. Whenever Compton-Burnett writes about sickbeds and nursing, there is an unaccustomed tremor in her voice, but A Family and a Fortune has two long and very quavery bedside scenes: Blanche Gaveston’s illness, which proves to be fatal, and Dudley’s. In both cases, as in Victorian novels, there is a “crisis,” a sort of medical Rubicon which the patient dramatically crosses to the accompaniment of quickened prose. “The crisis came, and Dudley sank to the point of death, and just did not pass it. Then as he lived through the endless days, each one doubled by the night, he seemed to return to this first stage, and this time drained and shattered by the contest waged within him...But the days which passed and showed no change, did deeper work...” Similarly, Dudley’s flight and meeting with Miss Griffin, to whom he gives his coat, their battle together with the elements, recall climactic episodes in Victorian novels that anticipated silent films, with frenzied program music played by the house organist. All this is well done of its kind, but it is curious to find it in Compton-Burnett, who is noted for her asperity. In fact, this is the most Dickensian of her novels and not only in the bathos. Here, for instance, is the description of Edgar: “He had thick, straight, speckled hair, speckled, hazel eyes, vaguely speckled clothes...” That is pure Dickens, only Dickens would have carried it further until Edgar became one gigantic speckle. Quite a few of the characters in A Family and a Fortune (as in several of her earlier books) resemble Dickens’ people in being lopsided, like personifications of a single tic or twitch of behavior, though Dickens’ mythic extravagance is missing, just as the impulse, here, to sentimental effusion is dryly checked, as if an inner prompter had frowned and shaken her head.
A Family and a Fortune is an unexpected throwback to the Victorian novel. But it is also a sharp revision and correction of it. Take Justine, Edgar’s thirty-year-old unmarried “only” daughter, as she always emphasizes, as though she pictured herself cheek to cheek with her parent (who in fact is wholly indifferent to her) in a large group photograph. She is like a Dickens heroine—an older Little Dorritt, the mainstay of her family—but regarded, as it were, through corrective twentieth-century glasses. To the modern reader, a figure like Little Dorritt is unbearably irritating, and that is the case with Justine; the difference is that Compton-Burnett permits her to irritate everyone, and not just the reader. It is as though Compton-Burnett, impatient with the reading matter of her youth, had taken a Victorian author by the scruff of his neck and forced him to live, day in, day out, with one of his models of virtue. Not that goodness is unbelievable. It exists, as a cross that others have to bear. Eager, helpful Justine is a trial to her family because she is unfailingly eager and helpful. Her mother, a tall woman, must be for her “Little Mother,” and her young brother, of course, is “little boy.” Her finger seems to be constantly uplifted, pointing, like a guide showing a recalcitrant group through a picture gallery: “It is a pretty picture, isn’t it? Dear Grandpa, with his white hair and fine old face; and Aunt Mattie, handsome in the firelight, vivacious and fluent, and no more querulous than one can forgive in her helpless state; and dear, patient Miss Griffin, thinking of everyone but herself.” For her, everything instantly composes itself into a tableau: “Look. Oh, look, indeed! Here is something else before our eyes. What led me to the window at this moment? It is inspiring, uplifting.”
Brave, lecturing Justine, always looking on the bright side, always exhorting herself and others, always mediating, is a real heroine, not a false one. What is wrong, then? What is wrong with virtue when it is not a mere mask for vice? For Compton-Burnett, that is a central puzzle, which A Family and a Fortune seems to be bent on resolving, at least provisionally and on an empirical basis, and this probably explains the book’s Victorian machinery and atmosphere, since virtue, especially in the form of service, was the great theme of Victorian fiction.
In a Dickens novel, Justine would be the Good Angel of her family. Here she is a painful instance of someone who is all second self, whom practice has made horribly perfect, like a child’s piano lesson. Her primary self has been firmly eradicated, and instead of being a triumphant illustration of what can be done by will power, she is an embarrassing rebuttal of the case for self-sacrifice, of the “example” she is trying to set everyone around her—her brothers, her mother, her aunt. “Where is that stoic strain which has put you at our head, and kept you there in spite of all indication to the contrary? Where should it be now but at Father’s service? Where is your place but at his side?” The suppression of the actual claims of self has made her unremittingly self-assertive and smug in conversation. Similarly, Miss Griffin, another model of self-sacrifice, is shown to be exasperating to live with. Her self-effacement and capacity for service have their natural home in the sickroom—that sickroom which in the Victorian novel so often pre-empts the center of the stage.
Justine’s opposite in the novel is her malevolent Aunt Mattie, who, as a cripple, feels entitled to exercise power. Her physical powerlessness is her claim on everyone’s attention, just as her lack of money constitutes a lien on Dudley’s. She is all primary self. Not in a position to give, she is ungenerous in receiving, which is another way of saying ungrateful. Mattie is a false martyr (she is too egotistic to mind being a cripple), coupled with a real martyr, the unfortunate Miss Griffin. Like Justine, she is a compulsive talker, but Mattie’s speeches are intended to be read between the lines. Her specialty is insinuation. Her true meaning, usually the reverse of what she says, slowly becomes apparent, like writing in invisible ink when dipped in the appropriate chemical. In short, Mattie is the covert as opposed to the overt, exemplified by the blunt Justine. What is shocking in Mattie, though, is her failure decently to conceal her naked, primary self. When she turns Miss Griffin out into the night, she shows her true colors, but in fact she has never hidden her hatred, envy, and malice; she has only feigned to hide them, as she feigns not to understand the meaning of her own words or, for that matter, the words of anyone else, which she likes to take in their opposite sense, twisting them to her purpose.
The principal verbal contests in the novel are between Mattie and Justine, closely matched partners, with Justine playing umpire as well, naturally, and seeing “the good side” of her aunt. Her adamant insistence on doing so may even constitute a victory, which suggests that virtue is more crushing than vice. The relation between aunt and niece is complementary, like the relation between Edgar and Dudley—two halves of a whole. There are no “complete human beings” here, only halves or fractions. At bottom, A Family and a Fortune discloses a dichotomy in human nature, a “law” which enjoins a separation between one and one’s true self as radical as that between the rich relation and the poor relation. Those in whom the true self gets the upper hand, if only briefly, are dangerous; the true self, like the poor relation, must be taught to keep his distance. Yet those who have conquered their worse selves or do not possess one have no real place at all. The moral would seem to be that everyone ought to have something to hide but they ought to hide it successfully, as Blanche Gaveston has done until her deathbed delirium, when abruptly this devoted mother, who has lived only for her children, makes clear her disappointment at life’s ungenerosity. “Are you my beautiful daughter?...The one I knew I should have? Or the other one?” Justine does not recognize the unspeakable. “I am your Justine, Mother.”
February, 1967
* A review written for Der Spiegel of the German edition of A Family and a Fortune.