Household Tyrants

By Martha Duffy

THE LAST AND THE FIRST by I. Compton-Burnett. 147 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, who died two years ago at 85, has often been called a "writer's writer." This is a handy term to describe such authors as Ronald Firbank, Henry Green and Saki, whom other writers often cite as important influences but who seldom stay in print.

In Dame Ivy's case, popular neglect is easy to understand. All 20 of her books are family novels set in upper-class England around the turn of the century. Though she wrote about such interesting topics as money, greed, death and incest, she was uncompromisingly austere in her treatment of them. Personally, she was an enigma, a maddeningly discreet spinster who lived quietly in the Kensington section of London, refusing to answer most questions about herself on the grounds that they were either prying or frivolous.

Ignoring Conventions. Her literary influence centers on the astonishing and idiosyncratic approach to dialogue that she developed in her second novel, Pastors and Masters (1925). Ignoring any known conventions of speech, she makes her characters say exactly and unsparingly what is going through their heads. The effect is as if the participants in an operatic ensemble could really hear the others' sung asides (which, among other things, would have cooked Aida's goose in the first scene of the first act). Time has only made her technique seem more relevant, and each passing decade brings Dame Ivy new disciples. Currently they include Angus Wilson, Mary McCarthy and the whole school of France's nouveau roman.

A Compton-Burnett is a recognizable British product, like a Burberry or an Agatha Christie. It is also an entertaining, reliable one. The Last and the First was unfinished when the author died, and it has been stitched together skillfully by her lifelong British publisher, Victor Gollancz. It is wholly typical of her work, and a graceful if muted final statement.

With her customary fearful symmetry, Dame Ivy starts by presenting two households of five members each. As in almost all her books, this one begins in an orderly way, at breakfast. The more important household, Sir Robert Heriot's, is dominated by a vintage Compton-Burnett tyrant, his second wife Eliza.

Near by live the Grimstones, where 84-year-old Jocasta holds sway. As usual, the plot is contrived and unimportant. Hermia, Eliza's elder stepdaughter and the only Heriot who stands up to her, receives a marriage proposal from Hamilton Grimstone, Jocasta's weak, middle-aged son. To Eliza's horror, Hermia declines. When he dies shortly after, he leaves Hermia his fortune anyway--and not a moment too soon, because the Heriots are faced with financial ruin.

Magnanimously, Hermia gives half the money to the Grimstones and bails out her father with the rest of it. Amid the financial flurry, she receives a proposal from Hamilton's nephew; this one she accepts. The scepter passes from Eliza and Jocasta; Hermia is the new and more enlightened tyrant of both families.

Outlet for Energy. Hermia's altruism is untypical of Compton-Burnett's predatory female dictators. Eliza is more in character: "Autocratic by nature, she had become impossibly so, and had come to find criticism a duty, an outlet for energy." When Hamilton's first letter of proposal to Hermia arrives, Eliza wants to answer it herself. When a second comes, she opens it and attempts to hide it. Like her predecessors in earlier books, Eliza is not only shameless, but awash with grandly rhetorical self-pity: "Years of care, of asking little for myself and accepting less, in order to save the family home."

The downtrodden in Compton-Bur nett are the young people: lonely, badly dressed, capriciously mistreated. In Bullivant and the Lambs, perhaps her best book, they are used to create a series of comic tableaux. Asked what they are doing, one replies: "We are waiting for time to pass." Another spends his time rereading his favorite story, the book of Job. In The Last and the First, when the put-upon young Heriots and Grimstones meet for tea, a minor Heriot says, "We have been looking forward to the day." A Grimstone replies: "We would have done so, but the faculty has faded through lack of use."

The Last and the First is even sparer than most Compton-Burnett. At times the dialogue sounds eerily like Gertrude Stein's: "It is what it is and would be." All signs of movement are auditory. One knows a character has entered a room when he joins the conversation --an easy transition, since he has usually been eavesdropping outside. There is absolutely no small talk or incidental detail in Dame Ivy's novels. There are, however, plenty of conversational bromides: the author delighted in characterizing her villains by making them overly fond of banal phrases. "The yoke is not always easy, or the burden light," sighs Eliza.

Because she concentrated so fiercely on the brutalizing effects of power and money, Ivy Compton-Burnett has often been accused of being pitiless and even amoral. She was as unsparing as Ibsen in visiting the sins of parents on their children, and there are few more starkly evil women in literature than the murderous Anna Donne in Elders and Betters.

If The Last and the First departs from the author's past works, it is in its relative compassion. Not that Dame Ivy went soft. But she endowed Hermia, a powerful woman, with both a healthy outlook and a promising future. In a way, like Eliza, she was surrendering some of her sovereignty over her people, and a little welcome warmth came in.

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