The Hells of Ivy

A HERITAGE AND ITS HISTORY (249 pp.)--Ivy Compton-Burnett--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

The only remedy for life is death. All truth is raw. All faith is blind. Change is inevitable, yet insufferable. Freedom of choice never includes the choice to be free. Love, marriage and the family are heaven's gifts in hell's wrappings.

Out of such paradoxes, Britain's Ivy Compton-Burnett has raised a resigned hymn to fate. Her 16 fictional comedies resemble nothing so much as tragedy. A spinster just this side of 70, Novelist Compton-Burnett is a literary cross between Grandma Moses and a Greek Fury. Her plots, characters and settings are primitive, repetitive, even ludicrous, but the insights she extracts from them are as sophisticated as sin.

Simon Challoner, the turn-of-the-century hero of Heritage, hopes to inherit the sprawling country manor that his father rules and his childless uncle owns. Papa obligingly dies, but seventyish Uncle Edwin refuses to follow suit. (Death is ardently willed and obsessively discussed in Compton-Burnett novels, usually because it is the survivors' only means to get hold oi the estate.) Instead, Uncle Edwin marries a thirtyish neighbor named Rhoda. Since age has made Uncle Edwin's conjugal privileges meaningless, the marriage is a big surprise but, hereditarily speaking, no calamity. In a moment of passion (passion is always momentary in Compton-Burnett), Simon makes it a calamity by adulterously siring a son with Rhoda. Uncle Edwin names the infant Hamish, swears Simon to secrecy, and raises the child to inherit the legacy of the ironically bypassed real father.

Over the years, as Uncle Edwin turns a hale 80 and a hearty 90, Simon watches his proper children being fed the crumbs of poor relations. But the worst is yet to be. As a symbol of that horror which she sees at the core of things. Novelist Compton-Burnett reverts, as she always has, to the crime that affrighted the Greek tragedians--incest. The day comes when Simon's daughter tells him she loves Hamish, whom she does not know to be her halfbrother.

Novelist Compton-Burnett reaps her harvest in a one-crop economy: dialogue. In cumulative context, it gradually convicts the reader--and all men--of the vanity that masks motives and the self-love that salves conscience. Despite her melodramatic devices, Author Compton-Burnett is rooted in the long and highly realistic English fictional tradition of asking where the money comes from and who gets it. The question she asks that is not English, but universal, is what life is and how one gets through the labyrinthine hell of it.

Like her plots, Ivy Compton-Burnett's flat in London's solidly middle-class Kensington section has resisted change for nearly 40 years. The wispy author, who wears her hair in a halo, pitter-patters about in a set of high-ceilinged rooms in which the light seems to have died long ago. The drawing room is her workshop and, since she does not know how to handle what she calls with distaste "a typing machine," she writes in longhand at a heavily scrolled oak desk, flanked by the ornate and the austere. Gilt chairs and pedestals topped with alabaster vases rest on bare, creaky floor boards while heavy gilt mirrors stare at the half-empty room.

Dressed in black from head to toe, sipping dry sherry and thinly warmed by two small electric heaters, Author Compton-Burnett speaks with dry severity of her books, classing them as "between novels and plays." None have been staged, though six have been adapted for radio. She writes in dialogue because "it just came naturally--I think in conversation." But she will not tolerate "frivolous" topics, as, for instance, the date of her birth ("Such matters are gossip").

Early sorrow, in the death of her mother and two brothers while she was in her 203, shadowed Compton-Burnett's life and doubtless her fiction. A lonely woman, especially since the death of her companion, Journalist Margaret Jourdain, in 1951, she is no recluse. She is a theatergoer and relishes the Angry Young Men. Modern art, on the other hand, baffles her: "Recently I went to an exhibition of sculpture and saw what I thought was a swordfish. But I was told it was a family going out for a walk." Actually, this is a rather apt description of an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, except that the family would be a shark.

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