The Victims That Folly Creates
DUNBAR, GEORGIA SHERWOOD
The Victims That Folly Creates A Heritage and Its History. By Ivy Compton-Burnett. Simon and Schuster. 249 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Georgia Sherwood Dunbar Associate Professor of English, ...
...Faced with so formidable an array of praise the reviewer approaches her latest novel with caution and respect, but also with doubt...
...Clearly, all 10 critics admire her for the same reasons and virtually to the same degree...
...Sir Edwin dies, Hamish recovers sufficiently from his disappointment over Naomi to marry someone else, and then, just as Simon has become more or less resigned to seeing the property remain foreover out of his grasp, Hamish conveniently and suddenly dies of heart failure and Simon enters into the long-sought inheritance at last...
...The dialogue runs true to form, however, and completely dominates the novel...
...Such encomia, by their very impressive-ness, breed suspicion, almost as much as would the comments from obscure reviews...
...Almost the entire novel consists of appallingly frank conversation, and, as in all of Compton-Burnett's work, the cumulative effect is the creation of a nightmare in which certain aspects of human weakness are seen with hideous clarity, certain emotions intensified almost beyond endurance, and in which the protagonists are largely helpless, the doomed victims of the plot that their own folly creates...
...Admiration soon leads to affection, and Rhoda, whose marriage to Sir Edwin is purely one of friendship, becomes pregnant with Simon's child...
...Reviewed by Georgia Sherwood Dunbar Associate Professor of English, Hofstra College...
...Simon does not hide from Sir Edwin his wish for his uncle to die...
...A Heritage and Its History is a good example of Compton-Burnett's style, but it is not her best work...
...Although, at this point, the reader familiar with Compton - Burnett's other novels will expect several more convolutions of plot and several more startling revelations, from here on the story unravels rapidly...
...Simon is forced to tell the history of Hamish's birth and stands disgraced before his own children to whom he has been a painfully strict and righteous parent...
...Sir Edwin and his brother have been the closest of friends, more devoted to each other than to any other persons, and Simon...
...Three of them call her the most original of all living English novelists, and all use superlatives lavishly: Her novels are "wildly funny as well as sharply wise," and "individual, complete and stunning...
...The story really begins when the sudden death of his brother plunges Sir Edwin into such unbearable loneliness that he marries Rhoda, one of a pair of sisters who had long been family friends...
...Even more notable, perhaps, is the unanimity apparent...
...Sir Edwin's older nephew, has always been looked upon as the inevitable heir of the title and property...
...Lecturer, Columbia University THE COMMENTS on the book jacket of Ivy Compton-Burnett's latest novel, A Heritage and Its History, show that she is a very special sort of writer...
...the reader who expects less will probably be much amused and pleased...
...The reader who expects the consummate masterpiece promised by the jacket will be disappointed...
...Sir Edwin does not hide his scorn of Simon...
...Hamish's marriage to a highly individualistic and much older woman and the incipient romance between Simon's two youngest children, who remark that incest seems to run in the family, lead the reader to expect a spectacular fireworks of surprises at the end, but these relationships turn out to be red herrings, and the biggest surprise in the novel is the lack of climactic surprise which, in most of Compton-Burnett's other novels, leaves the reader with a pleasant feeling of having been brilliantly outwitted in the chess game of the plot by a superb opponent...
...Fanny and Simon proceed to have a large family, and in due course Simon's daughter, Naomi, and Hamish, Sir Edwin's "son," who is simultaneously her half-brother and her cousin, fall in love...
...Most characteristic of all, behind the nightmare, creating an effect of wit even when nothing witty has been said, permeating the whole from beginning to end, is the author's Olympian amusement, enormous, utterly detached, utterly calm...
...Every character, including the very proper butler and the youngest children, speaks with great formality, perfect grammar and merciless honesty...
...Rather than create scandal, Sir Edwin decides to acknowledge the child as his own, and Simon suddenly finds himself shorn of what, all his life long, he has considered his rightful heritage, shorn by his own lapse and his own son...
...The story, most of whose elements have been made familiar by Compton-Burnett's other novels, concerns a childless English baronet and the effect of his great country house and substantial fortune on his brother's family who have been brought up in his house...
...Simon has been impatiently and rather too frankly awaiting his inheritance, but he has also worked to learn to manage the estate in which his life is centered...
...Certainly this one suffers by the expectation of overwhelming genius thereby created...
...He then marries Rhoda's younger sister, Fanny, and he and his mother and youngest brother move out of the great house to a modest one on the edge of Sir Edwin's estate...
...Simon's children criticize him at length to his face...
...After preliminary horror at the news of the marriage, Simon comes to admire Rhoda's tactful behavior with his mother, who had been mistress of the great house throughout her marriage and whom Rhoda has no intention of displacing...
...These seem, perhaps, too good to be true...
...Her publishers have not needed to ferret obscure reviews out of obscure journals to find favorable remarks: The 10 quotations come from impeccably eminent sources...
...and the butler, when asked, points out the faults of all...
...Can this novel, can any novel, live up to such a reputation...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 35
