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constant contact and mutual reliance, and has been further intensified
by common dangers and goals. Then, too, they have had the rare ful–
fillment of knowing that their energies are employed in meaningful
work.
As our society is now constituted, such conditions cannot be widely
reproduced. The "new day" is for most of us still beyond reach. But
thanks to Howard Zinn we have caught a glimpse of its splendors. Mama
Dollie spoke to the right man.
Martin B. Duberman
WHAT IS A NEO-CLASSIC?
A GOD AN D HIS GI FTS. By Ivy Compton·Burnett. Simon and Schuster.
$4.50.
How the heart sinks-where else, as she would say, might it
go?-at the thought of reading Ivy Compton-Burnett's eighteenth novel
(her nineteenth, if you count
Dolores,
an unobtainable and uncharac–
teristically titled work, published ten years before the Blisters and
Blasters series that began in the twenties).
For the uninitiated reader-and who else is to be trusted in such
matters?-the tidy rhyming uniformity of all these double titles, the
"special taste" one is supposed to cultivate for this author's "difficulty,"
like Greek olives or marzipan, and the inescapable comparison to Jane
Austen ("I do not think myself that my books have any real likeness to
hers. I think that there is possibly some likeness between our minds.")–
all point to the dreary Womrath's conclusion that Miss Compton–
Burnett is but a fiercer, tighter avatar of the tireless Angela Thirkell,
turning out a fake Trollope with real toads in it every other year. ...
Though she has taken a degree in classics-which I find no excuse for
all those liaisons with Greek tragedy that have been attributed
to
her
like
La
Lupescu's affairs with exotic royalty-and though she claims she
is "interested in all kinds of literature"-which does not keep her from
making another claim: "I cannot tell why I write as I do, as I do not
know. I have even tried not to do it, but find myself falling back into
my own way"-and even though she is the wittiest writer in English
since Congreve and the meanest since Hobbes, there is no basis for re–
garding Miss Compton-Burnett's works as an exploration of the world,
or as the creation of one. They are only-only!-a judgment, a regres–
sion, and thereby a reiterated self-indulgence, which of r.ourse is what
