152
RICHARD HOWARD
they are for the reader as well. As she has it, "doing things in your
own way is not really doing them."
I have been self-indulgent indeed, for I have read all eighteen of
these indistinguishable novels-or at least I know I have read fourteen,
the other four might be anyone of them that I have read twice by
mistake-and it is with mixed feelings (the mixture as before) that I
acknowledge
A God and His Gifts
to be every bit as brilliant, and every
bit as tiresome, as all the rest.
1
It
has the by now familiar features:
a family in a great but decaying house, tyrannized by a larger-than-life
villain who is brought down so terribly that his defeat becomes a source
of appeal; the overheard presence of many generations, split-level
hangers-on from anterior marriages, harmless but straight-talking sene–
scents, hydra-like children (" 'A child is a strange thing,' said Cassius,
as they were left alone.
'It
is a natural thing,' said his wife, 'that is why
it strikes a civilized person as strange.'''), a chorus of domestics who
mirror the gentry's pecking order
en jaune,
the personnel of the Other
Household, a counter-family of just one generation-a menage con–
sisting of a queer brother and sister, for example- who are confessedly
unimportant (though the modesty of such people is rather like that of
Paul Valery telling Einstein he had only the most rudimentary notion
of the tensor calculus).
This dramatis personae talks, my God how they all talk, and what
keeps them at it is the Terrible Event, usually involving incest, bigamy
and adultery (Miss C.-B. prefers all three to be committed at one fell
swoop, so to speak, as here by a father and his daughter-in-law who is
probably
his
daughter by a previous liaison with his wife's sister). The
Event, and the plot which resolves it, is carried forward by the devices
of melodrama: the wrong dose of lethal medicine, the concealed will
that turns out to be forged, the disaster at sea, the purloined letter,
the overheard secret, the sliding panel, the marked deck, the false
bottom.... Yet the author's peculiar genius is most flagrant at pre–
cisely this point: she manages to convey her preposterous tale
even
while
and
because
her puppets are chewing at their lines, a preposterous
scenery of the soul. Miss Compton-Burnett manages, in other words, her
transitions, the refinements of modulation, the inflections in which she
envelops her changes of pace and direction, with astonishing accuracy
and effect. It is not true that these highly fenestrated novels, as Leslie
1
It
betrays, actually, a larger sense of exposure to the World Outside than
the author has ever permitted before. Her talent has been in her exploitation of
"two inches of ivory," but in this latest book, which has a sort of Hall Caine for
its eponymous "hero," she runs the risk of letting fresh air leak into her vacuum.
It is a risk easily absorbed.
