Customer Reviews

Manservant and Maidservant (Twentieth Century Classics)

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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.

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 Penelope Lively, the central character of Horace Lamb in this book is nothing approaching a tyrant or oppressor, although he is certainly a fussy old skinflint. I recommend Mrs Lively's typically insightful and illuminating essay accompanying the OUP paperback edition, but I would suggest that you will find she goes over the top, as writers about this author for some reason tend to do. There is not a happy ending to the story, there are actually several happy endings plus at least one more that is not as bad as it might have been, although the story of poor Magdalen is enough to bring tears to the eyes of the hardest-bitten novels-reader. The author's real insight is in understanding that conventional happy endings do not put everything right, and observe if you will how Horace's two elder boys put their finger on this point - he may have recanted, repented and what have you, but to them he has just not understood that it all makes no difference.

To call the writing stylised would understate the matter. Everyone, but everyone - master and mistress, the Uncle-Vanya-like hanger-on Mortimer, the butler, the cook, the waifs and strays brought into domestic service and most strikingly the illiterate Miss Buchanan - is quite extraordinarily articulate. The idiom of the utterances may not vary much, but the characterisation is sharp and incisive, and this author's characters are both individuals and types, another trait of a great novelist. For me, she is nothing less than that. Don't read too much about her, read her for yourself. I found myself going slowly to start with, because if I missed a line I was liable to have missed a clue or at least an aphorism. I got into my stride after a while, and you may possibly have a similar experience. Quite simply, I think she is brilliant.

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.

What is the fuss about this dreadful thing? Why is NYRB bringing another edition of it out instead of leaving it to moulder in the dark, damp corners of libraries unlucky or foolish enough to have it on their shelves?

The plot, such as it is, makes perfect sense. A horrible Victorian daddy, cheaper even than Scrooge, makes his family's life so wretched that his rag-clad, blue-cold children make no attempt to save him when they see him heading off to probable death. His wife has left him; his brother and his aunt are dependent on his charity but clearly hate him as much as his children do; when he fails to die and returns from his brush with mortality a changed man, the consensus seems to be, "too little too late, bub," and everyone goes on hating him. Even his wife, who comes back for no reason I can discern.

Okay. Miss Compton-Burnett is said to be a wonderful writer. I see no evidence of this. She provides no character development, the children's voices are indistinguishable from the adults' voices, the servants are so well-educated that they speak in the same tones and cadences as the family, and no one at all changes in any significant emotional way throughout this book. The one servant who breaks out of service to teach is simply unbelieveable as a character.

All in all, I want my money back, and I want someone to introduce a bill on the House floor asking England for reparations to be paid to all who have suffered at the hands of this awful, awful writer, Ivy Compton-Burnett.