Manservant and Maidservant

A huge fan of mid-20th century Brit Lit - Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and Anthony Powell being among my faves - I had been meaning for years to get to Compton-Burnett. I ordered a used copy which arrived as good as new. The book itself is interesting, still reading it. Lots of family/neighbor drama, complete with busybodies, under-appreciated servants, poor relations and sad little children. Mostly written as dialog but it moves at a pretty fast clip. If you like this kind of thing I say go for it.

She died in 1969, I see. Back in the 1950's she seemed to be talked about quite a lot among reading people, and I remember myself reading a couple of her novels, as a very innocent 13-year-old, and quite enjoying them even then, whatever level of understanding or the reverse I managed to bring to them. On the back cover of my edition I see the distinguished critic Norman Shrapnel saying 'Of the two candidates for greatness among the comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that seems the more secure.' That, obviously, is not how things have panned out. She seems to be all but overlooked now, and I have greatly enjoyed rediscovering her work and trying to form a fresh view of it. If you will take my advice, don't let your decision whether or not to read this book depend on specific editions or on the commentaries you are likely to encounter. Shrapnel got his prediction badly wrong, but I'd say his estimate of her nowhere near so wrong, although still not quite right. 'Comic' surely does not fit Ivy Compton-Burnett, for instance. Would you call Jane Austen a comic novelist? Ivy Compton-Burnett's mind is darker, but her little ironic darts of commentary are very reminiscent of her great forerunner, and I would even go so far as to say that so is the style of the dialogue. The observations are sharp, they can be very witty, but the total impression is less comic than Chandler, and not at all reminiscent of Waugh to my mind, much less of Wilde. I shall stick with Jane Austen as my point of reference. Both writers were spinsters whose lives were sheltered. Compton-Burnett lived longer, she lived in an era that was starting to be more outspoken, and it would be hard to imagine Jane Austen's personae making serious attempts to murder one another, as happens in this book. However she writes in a circumscribed tone and idiom, and she does not talk about anything of which she has no real experience. The commentators make a bit of a song and dance out of the undoubted fact that Ivy Compton-Burnett's characters do not stir far outside their big houses peopled by an Upstairs/Downstairs cast of masters and servants, and that she gives little or no clue about the precise time in which the action is set. She told them the answer herself, when she said that her imaginative world was set in the period before the first world war; and for good measure this book contains a reference - a single solitary reference - to the Queen. It's not mysterious, it's not timeless, it's all happening around the turn of the 20th century because that is the period the author relates to and understands. It also seems to me that there is a tendency to overdramatise Compton-Burnett and her creations. Her observation is close and her social criticism is incisive, but it is hardly 'savage' or anything of that nature. Indeed there is a real streak, very little noticed, of something dangerously like benevolence in her mental makeup. Pace Mrs

No one writes novels quite like Ivy Compton-Burnett: they're really more like novelized plays than anything else, and as Diane Johnson notes in her extremely intelligent foreword to this edition, Compton-Burnett's antecedents are more with Oscar Wilde than anyone else, in her love of savage epigrams and wordplay. her novels are almost impossibly stylized: almost all her characters speak in the same style, so small children and uneducated coooks speak with the same level of sophistication as wealthy educated homeowners. Still, for all of its artificiality, you'd be hardpressed to beat MANSERVANT AND MAIDSERVANT as a superior exercise in style. Compton-Burnett's witty and troubling vision of the effect of a wicked Victorian paterfamilias's repentance is exceptionally striking and thought-provoking, and though this novel is not quite up to the level of A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD (also recently reissued by NYRB Press in a stunning paperback edition), it is one of her best works nonetheless.