PARTISAN REVIEW
But the most persistent and peculiar refusal to bargain with the
present is to be seen in the case of Miss Ivy Compton Burnett, in
all
of whose mature novels, without exception, time has come to a
stop somewhere in the 1890s. The consequence is that time
refus~
to function in a normal way in any of her plots. The seasons, except
for a pervading bleakness, are shut out. A child may put a saucerful
of water on the nursery windowsill, to see if it freezes, or someone
may be sent into the garden to gather flowers for the table; but such
details, while they infallibly enforce a dramatic sense of the character
concerned, do very little to convince us of the time of year. The
garden no more (and no less) exists than the garden outside a win–
dow on the stage, and the snow on the window is so much theatrical
cotton-wool. Though perhaps none of the novels would transfer to
the stage, I think
it
might be true to assert that
Men
and
Wives,
for
example, contains a greater condensation of dramatic and psycho–
logical insight than almost any play written this century. But how–
ever well the novel may adapt itself to a dramatic intention, it will
not suffer the same kind of adaptation again and again. Dramatic
timelessness
is
all
very well on the stage, but in the enforced leisure
of a novel it is bound to lead to a degree of desperation. In some
of Miss Compton Burnett's latter novels it
is
hard to resist the idea
of one of her more determined characters, having easily won the con–
versational skirmish at the breakfast table, getting up, going surrep–
titiously into the hall, throwing the calendar into a drawer, and giving
that stubborn clock another despairing shake.
Even so, to shut out time is a better solution to the problem
than Gertrude Stein's of driving the clock crazy, of smashing up the
time-sequence even within the syntax of a sentence. In the case of
Virginia Woolf time flows back into prose on the tide of poetic
obsession, of sibylline trance. In her most centrally characteristic novel
time becomes a suspensory element in which the characters float and
revolve, imprisoned within the clear symmetry of the novel's form.
The sense of time as trance sharpens the vision, but even in so doing
it tends to reduce
all
things to an equal degree of importance or fu–
tility.
And it sees from a distance which tends to equalize individual
motives. People almost cease to act upon each other in order to sub–
mit to the all-pervading .action of time. And, curiously, this sense
of time as a mystic process tends to throw up in emphatic and nerv-
