Writing on the Wall (20 page)

This tale, as can be seen, is proverbial, a series of “graphic” illustrations, like some old framed series of colored prints, with such mottoes as “Out in the Cold,” “A Friend in Need,” “Reunited.” It is strange among Compton-Burnetts for its gusts of old-fashioned sentimentality. Whenever Compton-Burnett writes about sickbeds and nursing, there is an unaccustomed tremor in her voice, but
A Family and a Fortune
has
two
long and very quavery bedside scenes: Blanche Gaveston’s illness, which proves to be fatal, and Dudley’s. In both cases, as in Victorian novels, there is a “crisis,” a sort of medical Rubicon which the patient dramatically crosses to the accompaniment of quickened prose. “The crisis came, and Dudley sank to the point of death, and just did not pass it. Then as he lived through the endless days, each one doubled by the night, he seemed to return to this first stage, and this time drained and shattered by the contest waged within him...But the days which passed and showed no change, did deeper work...” Similarly, Dudley’s flight and meeting with Miss Griffin, to whom he gives his coat, their battle together with the elements, recall climactic episodes in Victorian novels that anticipated silent films, with frenzied program music played by the house organist. All this is well done of its kind, but it is curious to find it in Compton-Burnett, who is noted for her asperity. In fact, this is the most Dickensian of her novels and not only in the bathos. Here, for instance, is the description of Edgar: “He had thick, straight, speckled hair, speckled, hazel eyes, vaguely speckled clothes...” That is pure Dickens, only Dickens would have carried it further until Edgar became one gigantic speckle. Quite a few of the characters in
A Family and a Fortune
(as in several of her earlier books) resemble Dickens’ people in being lopsided, like personifications of a single tic or twitch of behavior, though Dickens’ mythic extravagance is missing, just as the impulse, here, to sentimental effusion is dryly checked, as if an inner prompter had frowned and shaken her head.

A Family and a Fortune
is an unexpected throwback to the Victorian novel. But it is also a sharp revision and correction of it. Take Justine, Edgar’s thirty-year-old unmarried “only” daughter, as she always emphasizes, as though she pictured herself cheek to cheek with her parent (who in fact is wholly indifferent to her) in a large group photograph. She is like a Dickens heroine—an older Little Dorritt, the mainstay of her family—but regarded, as it were, through corrective twentieth-century glasses. To the modern reader, a figure like Little Dorritt is unbearably irritating, and that is the case with Justine; the difference is that Compton-Burnett permits her to irritate everyone, and not just the reader. It is as though Compton-Burnett, impatient with the reading matter of her youth, had taken a Victorian author by the scruff of his neck and forced him to
live,
day in, day out, with one of his models of virtue. Not that goodness is unbelievable. It exists, as a cross that others have to bear. Eager, helpful Justine is a trial to her family because she is unfailingly eager and helpful. Her mother, a tall woman, must be for her “Little Mother,” and her young brother, of course, is “little boy.” Her finger seems to be constantly uplifted, pointing, like a guide showing a recalcitrant group through a picture gallery: “It is a pretty picture, isn’t it? Dear Grandpa, with his white hair and fine old face; and Aunt Mattie, handsome in the firelight, vivacious and fluent, and no more querulous than one can forgive in her helpless state; and dear, patient Miss Griffin, thinking of everyone but herself.” For her, everything instantly composes itself into a tableau: “Look. Oh, look, indeed! Here is something else before our eyes. What led me to the window at this moment? It is inspiring, uplifting.”

Brave, lecturing Justine, always looking on the bright side, always exhorting herself and others, always mediating, is a real heroine, not a false one. What is wrong, then? What is wrong with virtue when it is not a mere mask for vice? For Compton-Burnett, that is a central puzzle, which
A Family and a Fortune
seems to be bent on resolving, at least provisionally and on an empirical basis, and this probably explains the book’s Victorian machinery and atmosphere, since virtue, especially in the form of service, was the great theme of Victorian fiction.

In a Dickens novel, Justine would be the Good Angel of her family. Here she is a painful instance of someone who is all second self, whom practice has made horribly perfect, like a child’s piano lesson. Her primary self has been firmly eradicated, and instead of being a triumphant illustration of what can be done by will power, she is an embarrassing rebuttal of the case for self-sacrifice, of the “example” she is trying to set everyone around her—her brothers, her mother, her aunt. “Where is that stoic strain which has put you at our head, and kept you there in spite of all indication to the contrary? Where should it be now but at Father’s service? Where is your place but at his side?” The suppression of the actual claims of self has made her unremittingly self-assertive and smug in conversation. Similarly, Miss Griffin, another model of self-sacrifice, is shown to be exasperating to live with. Her self-effacement and capacity for service have their natural home in the sickroom—that sickroom which in the Victorian novel so often pre-empts the center of the stage.

Justine’s opposite in the novel is her malevolent Aunt Mattie, who, as a cripple, feels entitled to exercise power. Her physical powerlessness is her claim on everyone’s attention, just as her lack of money constitutes a lien on Dudley’s. She is all primary self. Not in a position to give, she is ungenerous in receiving, which is another way of saying ungrateful. Mattie is a false martyr (she is too egotistic to mind being a cripple), coupled with a real martyr, the unfortunate Miss Griffin. Like Justine, she is a compulsive talker, but Mattie’s speeches are intended to be read
between
the lines. Her specialty is insinuation. Her true meaning, usually the reverse of what she says, slowly becomes apparent, like writing in invisible ink when dipped in the appropriate chemical. In short, Mattie is the covert as opposed to the overt, exemplified by the blunt Justine. What is shocking in Mattie, though, is her failure decently to conceal her naked, primary self. When she turns Miss Griffin out into the night, she shows her true colors, but in fact she has never hidden her hatred, envy, and malice; she has only feigned to hide them, as she feigns not to understand the meaning of her own words or, for that matter, the words of anyone else, which she likes to take in their opposite sense, twisting them to her purpose.

The principal verbal contests in the novel are between Mattie and Justine, closely matched partners, with Justine playing umpire as well, naturally, and seeing “the good side” of her aunt. Her adamant insistence on doing so may even constitute a victory, which suggests that virtue is more crushing than vice. The relation between aunt and niece is complementary, like the relation between Edgar and Dudley—two halves of a whole. There are no “complete human beings” here, only halves or fractions. At bottom,
A Family and a Fortune
discloses a dichotomy in human nature, a “law” which enjoins a separation between one and one’s true self as radical as that between the rich relation and the poor relation. Those in whom the true self gets the upper hand, if only briefly, are dangerous; the true self, like the poor relation, must be taught to keep his distance. Yet those who have conquered their worse selves or do not possess one have no real place at all. The moral would seem to be that everyone ought to have something to hide but they ought to hide it successfully, as Blanche Gaveston has done until her deathbed delirium, when abruptly this devoted mother, who has lived only for her children, makes clear her disappointment at life’s ungenerosity. “Are you my beautiful daughter?...The one I knew I should have? Or the other one?” Justine does not recognize the unspeakable. “I am your Justine, Mother.”

February, 1967

*
A review written for
Der Spiegel
of the German edition of
A Family and a Fortune.

The Writing on the Wall

T
HE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM
and Letters of George Orwell
is very sparse in letters. The war and the bombing partly explain it. But Orwell was not much of a correspondent, and the people he must have written to,
e.g.,
his parents, evidently did not save his letters. In four thick volumes, only one to his mother turns up, one to his wife, Eileen, one to Sonia Brownell, whom he married in his last illness, none to his father or his sisters. He writes his publisher that the older sister, Marjorie, has died and he will have to go up to Nottingham for her funeral, and footnotes let us in on the fact that the younger one, Avril, was actually living with him as his housekeeper after his wife’s death and taking care of his adopted son. Did he never leave a note on the kitchen table when he went out for a walk or write her during his absences to inquire how things were going? Not a word from Burma, where he spent more than five years in the Indian Imperial Police; four letters (one partly business) and a postcard from Spain, during the Civil War. It was mainly publishers, editors, his agent, his executor, writer friends—people with office space and the professional habit of filing documents—who duly kept his correspondence. This gives a bleak impression of a life.

From April 1939 to January 1940, there is a blank; you would never know that the war had broken out on September 3 and that he was trying to enlist in the army—quite a reversal since when last heard from he had been violently opposing a war with. Germany, declaring that it would result in the “Fascization” of England and that the British Empire was worse than Hitler. Such epistolary blanks, like holes cut out by the censor, surround the principal events of his life, both in the private sphere (what led to his marriages? did he never write a love letter?) and in the sphere of politics, where so much of his passion as a writer and journalist centered.

Take Hiroshima. It is first mentioned in his regular “London Letter” to
Partisan Review.
You would expect some further reactions in letters to his friends on the Left. Nothing. Ten days after Nagasaki he is writing to Herbert Read about organizing a Freedom Defense Committee,
Animal Farm,
the death of his wife, which had happened some months before, a holiday he plans to take, Labor Party politics, the doings of common friends. Since he has been emphatically approving (May and July 1944, in a polemic with Vera Brittain in
Tribune)
the saturation bombing of German cities, using the argument that “it is probably somewhat better to kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men” (“I...object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon”), the reader is curious as to how he will “take” the atom bomb. Later (October 1945, “You and the Atom Bomb”), he foresaw the enormous significance of nuclear weapons in maintaining an international balance of terror and a political status quo within the super-states, but what happened in between, what caused him to revise his common-sense, let’s-cut-the-cackle defense of the practice of total war, is not revealed in these volumes. There was something in Orwell that made him jib at the atom bomb, maybe what he called “decency,” yet whatever it was, quirk or deep moral sanity, remains to be guessed at.

Or take the gas chambers. Though he was in Germany as a reporter shortly after the surrender, he seems to have been unconscious of the death camps, which just then were being discovered farther east. No letters, apparently, have survived from this period, or perhaps he did not write any. The dispatches he sent to
The Observer
and
The Manchester Evening News
have not been reprinted here (presumably for lack of interest), but in his regular journalism he continues to speak of “concentration camps,” as if he did not know about the extermination camps or as if unaware of a difference—impossible to tell which. He speaks of Dachau and Buchenwald and asks almost in the same breath, “Is it true about gas ovens in Poland?” We never hear the answer. You will not find “Auschwitz” or “Genocide” in the index, and Orwell’s attitude toward atrocity stories is sometimes that of the plain Englishman rendered suspicious of “propaganda”; the departure from the average represented by an atrocity put a tax on his powers of belief. At other times, his interest in atrocities, such as it was, concentrated on the reluctance or eagerness of the public to believe in them. For him it was a wry study in human credulity or incredulity—itself a form of credulity when belief is withheld automatically. He tended to write war crimes off as committed inevitably by both sides and hence, on the balance sheet, canceling each other out. If the crucial fact of Auschwitz finally “got to him”—he lived, after all, until 1950—the record is amnesiac.

In view of the uncanny “natural selection” which has decreed, as though according to his wish (he wanted no biography done of him), that whatever was intimate or revealing in the private letters of the man who became “George Orwell” should perish, the survival of the first letter in this collection, dated 1920, is all the more extraordinary and dramatic. Of the hundreds of schoolboy “missives” he must have penned in his copperplate handwriting, why should this one—and this one only—have come to light? Eric Blair, aged seventeen, is writing to a school friend from his family’s summer home in Cornwall: “My dear Runciman, I have little spare time, & I feel I
must
tell you about my first adventure as an amateur tramp. Like most tramps, I was driven to it...” He goes on to explain how, taking the train from Eton for his summer holidays, he unwisely got out of the carriage at a station, was left behind, missed his last connection, and was stranded for the night in Plymouth with sevenpence ha’penny, where he had a choice of staying at the YMCA for sixpence with no supper or buying twelve buns for the same money and sleeping in a farmer’s field. He chose the second and passed a cramped, cold August night surrounded by neighboring dogs that barked alarmingly at his every movement, reminding him that he could be put in the clink for fourteen days—he understood that “frequently” happened if you were caught on somebody else’s property with no visible means of support. “I am very proud of this adventure,” he ends, “but I would not repeat it.”