Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Ivy Compton-Burnett's 'Brothers and Sisters' Combines Artistry, Insight IN his introduction to the American edition of Ivy Compton-Burnett's Brothers and...
...In fact, one can imagine that a modern Gilbert and Sullivan might make a musical show of it...
...Melodramatic situations are useful to her because of what they enable her to do with characters, and in her high-handed way she makes the most of them...
...Christian Stace dies soon afterward, and Sophia, always a domineering woman, makes the most of her bereavement to impose her will upon her children...
...When the children are in their twenties, a new family comes to the village of Moreton Edge, a Mrs...
...Consider the story: After the death of her strong-minded father, Sophia Stace marries Christian Stace, her father's adopted son...
...And of course there in the background is the actual if unwitting incest of Christian and Sophia Stace to give the idea substance...
...In time Dinah and Andrew come to an understanding with another brother and sister, Edward and Judith Dryden...
...One might ask why her plots so often hinge on illegitimacy, but then one might also ask why this theme is so prominent in 19th-century melodrama...
...The great question, as Mr...
...As Dinah neatly and dutifully points out to the Drydens, the Stace children have only one grandfather...
...The other theme is that indicated by the title...
...Lang reveals to Christian Stace that she is his mother, although she dies without telling him who his father was...
...Then comes the revelation that Christian's mysterious father was none other than his guardian and Sophia's father...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Ivy Compton-Burnett's 'Brothers and Sisters' Combines Artistry, Insight IN his introduction to the American edition of Ivy Compton-Burnett's Brothers and Sisters (Zero Press, $3.75), Asa Benveniste writes: "As in all her books, we know that the action takes place some time between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th...
...No one is more adept at the writing of social comedy, and no one who writes it ventures closer to the edge of tragedy...
...The answer is that the extremity of her egotism mesmerizes her husband, the children and the faithful old housekeeper...
...This is too much for the Drydens, who take their affections elsewhere...
...There is no furniture whatever...
...As in Mother and Son, which was written later than Brothers and Sisters though published earlier in this country, the central character is an egotistical and assertive woman...
...Lang and her son and daughter, Gilbert and Caroline...
...Like Thornton Wilder's play, The Matchmaker, Brothers and Sisters combines great artistry and deep insight with a plot that is out of the old-fashioned melodramas satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan...
...The talk, which makes up nine-tenths of the book, is like nothing one has ever heard, but it is wonderfully good, and one comes to accept it as perfectly right...
...This information necessarily puts an end to the marriage plans, but on the whole the young Staces take it calmly...
...They have three children—Andrew, Dinah and Robin...
...In addition to the Stace siblings, the Langs, and the Drydens, there is another pair, Sarah and Julian Wake...
...Sophia dies, and the children prepare to move from Moreton Edge to London...
...Many authors today choose to approach reality by way of unreality, but Miss Compton-Burnett's method is unique, and her mastery of it is perfect...
...It may be said of Brothers and Sisters, as I said of Mother and Son in The New Leader for April 11, 1955, that it is an extreme example of what Willa Cather called "the novel demeuble...
...One can also imagine that Miss Compton-Burnett would accept Wilder's assertion that "literature is an orchestration of platitudes...
...The children, among themselves, bitterly analyze every trick she uses, but we know—such is the author's skill—that they cannot possibly defy her...
...It is outrageous of Miss Compton-Burnett to ask us to accept such a farrago of coincidences and concealments, but she wins a kind of belief by simply not caring much whether we believe or not...
...Although Andrew and Dinah have been vaguely interested in other young people of the neighborhood, they are quickly attracted to the Langs, and a double wedding is imminent when Mrs...
...In each instance the relationship between the brother and sister is unusually close, so close that the idea of incest would be inevitable if all these young people were not so remarkably bloodless...
...Miss Compton-Burnett's situations do exist in time, but she is rarely explicit about either time or place because neither is important to her...
...For her, however, tragedy does not lie in the deaths that are so common in her pages but in sudden moments of self-discovery when the soul is bared...
...I don't believe he means quite what he says...
...Benveniste points out, is how Sophia Stace maintains her power, since everyone sees through her...
...As usual, the characters, whatever their faults may be, are overwhelmingly articulate...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 1
