Futures in the Past

Two WORLDS AND THEIR WAYS (311 pp.) --I. Compton-Burnett--Knopf ($3.50).

The novels of Britain's Ivy Compton-Burnett have received so much highbrow adulation that there is a growing suspicion that they must be unreadable. The suspicion has some foundation: when Elizabeth Bowen says that "Miss Compton-Burnett is always fundamentally truthful at the expense of realism," she is simply saying that many readers will never have the vaguest notion of what Compton-Burnett is being so truthful about.

The reason for this is that in all her twelve novels, Ivy Compton-Burnett has never tried to tell a convincing story. With her, any old melodrama (even including secret drawers, lost wills, fantastic skeletons in impeccable family closets) passes for plot; all Novelist Compton-Burnett needs is the chance to reveal what she is really interested in revealing--the vices, virtues and idiosyncrasies of human behavior. To this end, too, the people in her novels talk all the time but never talk naturally: unlike real people they always say just what they think, and mean just what they say; when they fail to do so, there is always someone close at hand to do it for them, grimly. Thus, at its best, a Compton-Burnett novel is like an iceberg whose normally concealed 90% has risen to the surface--something apt to make any average man a trifle uneasy.

Savagery Plus. Two Worlds and Their Ways is not Compton-Burnett's best; it does not, for instance, reach and hold the high and extraordinary level of its predecessor, Bullivant and the Lambs (TIME, July 19). It has many more tedious and barren stretches, but they are frequently relieved by Novelist Compton-Burnett's most characteristically brilliant qualities. There are flashes of darting spite ("I hope I am not disturbing you at your luncheon, Mrs. Cassidy." "Thank you, Miss James. It is so kind to cling to the hope") and devastating responses to thoughtless queries ("Why should not school be an open and natural life, like any other?" "Like what other?" said Mr. Firebrace). There are also numerous succinct summings-up whose blandness is more savage than savagery itself: "Maria had also a vein of justice, and though she regretted [her stepson's] existence and his grandfather's, never questioned their right to it."

Like almost all its predecessors, Two Worlds assembles the members of a family in an English country house around the turn of the century and sets them to betraying to one another their inexhaustible human capacity for loyalty and treachery, frankness and cant, courage and cowardice. Its theme, painfully learned by all concerned, is the old, grim and simple text: "Judge not, that ye be not judged."

Old Grandpa Firebrace has reached the age when he is only too happy to pardon all error, especially his own. His former son-in-law, Sir Roderick Shelley, strives to be an impartial judge, especially when it would cause him discomfort to take sides. Sir Roderick's second wife, Maria, who is fighting for respect in a household that is strongly under the influence of the first Lady Shelley's relatives, hopes to win it by chivvying her two children to an impossible peak of perfection. The children in turn, hope to reward her love by achieving the impossible, even by cheating their way to the top of their classes.

Not Strictly Legitimate. When the children are caught, the doting parents are appalled by the news. They blame themselves more than the children, and it is lucky for them that they are so merciful. For, in the very course of probing the children's small sin to the bottom, their own larger sins suddenly escape out of the past and confront them. The family butler turns out to be Sir Roderick's son. One of the schoolteachers proves to be a son of Grandpa Firebrace. And the second Lady Shelley, it turns out, has sold jewelry that does not belong to her.

Readers will find here, gleaming oddly in its transplanted setting, the pattern of the classical Greek drama which was Author Compton-Burnett's favorite reading as a child. Like Sophocles' Oedipus, struggling to gauge the future and discovering that it twists horribly back into his own past, the characters in Two Worlds march blindly to their fate, doomed from the start but always demanding, with the eloquence and dignity of Aeschylean heroes, their right to respect as well as humiliation. They always get plenty of both from Ivy Compton-Burnett.

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