The Autocrat at the Tea Table

BULLIVANT AND THE LAMBS (299 pp.)

/. Compton-Burnetf--Knopf ($3).

Few living authors have been deluged with the spate of homage which highbrow critics have loosed on I. Compton-Bur-nett. But as far as the general public is concerned, she might as well be dead--and not even her most passionate admirers (who include Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann) could fairly accuse the public of stupidity and ignorance. For all Compton-Burnett's novels (she has published eleven during the past 37 years) appear at first glance to be out of this world, artificial, aimless.

All are burdened with unexciting, almost identical titles (Pastors and Masters, Daughters and Sons, Men and Wives, Parents and Children, etc.). All are about the same thing--a family struggling under the rule of one or more domestic tyrants. All consist of conversation to the extent that a watermelon consists of water--conversation in which satire and terrifying realism are couched and half-concealed in a difficult, dead-pan prose.

No Colloquialism, Please. All her novels are set in an English country house around the year 1900 (only one, Pastors and Masters, takes place after 1918) and all her characters, regardless of their age and education, talk in a language which is a combination of Gertrude Stein at her clearest and a book of Victorian etiquette at its most pompous ("Will you rise with your unconscious grace and ring the bell?" they say). They talk thus even when they are planning murder, fraud and forgery, or saying aloud the thoughts that living people are most careful not to say. They do their grim talking in dining rooms and nurseries which the author hardly ever describes, but which Critic Edward Sack-ville-West has neatly termed "embowered, rook-enchanted concentration camps." The persevering reader will find that the sum total of all this artifice, melodrama and incredible behavior is a warm, witty, profoundly tragic portrait of married and family life.

Bullivant and the Lambs (which was entitled Manservant and Maidservant in England) is perhaps Author Compton-Burnett's finest novel. Its principal character, Family-Head Horace Lamb, is a typical Compton-Burnett tyrant--one who believes that he has sacrificed his whole life to his family and never misses a chance to remind them of the fact. He has married his wife, Charlotte, for her money, "hoping to serve his impoverished estate, and she had married him for love, hoping to fulfil herself. The love had gone and the money remained, so that the advantage lay with Horace, if he could have taken so hopeful a view of his life." Also dependent on Horace's so-called bounty are his weak-willed, affectionate cousin Mortimer (who is in love with Charlotte), his shadowy aunt Emilia and his five underfed, cheaply clothed children.

"Below stairs" this setup is neatly imitated by Bullivant the butler and Mrs. Selden the cook, who spend the bulk of the day tyrannizing over two minor lackeys named George and Miriam with just the same genteel, long-winded authorita-tiveness that Horace exercises upstairs.

No Need, Only Want. The story starts with stingy Horace in a state of polite agony because extra coal has been squandered on the meager fire, Bullivant politely soothing him, the cook politely torturing Miriam, Charlotte and Mortimer politely plotting to elope and the children politely modeling a wax image of their father and sticking pins in it.

No One Is Obliged. As the days pass, the situation goes from bad to worse. When the children get their Christmas presents (Horace's gift is a nice new school desk apiece), Horace finds it impossible to persuade them that even at Christmas "no one is obliged to give a present to anyone." Cook and Bullivant find it equally impossible to persuade rebellious George and Miriam that half-starved servitude is a noble way of life. A plank is removed from the bridge where Horace goes to stroll; and soon it seems that the victims of his tyranny have determined to destroy him and to start a new life based on liberty, equality and fraternity.

Not for long. When the last of the innumerable words has been spoken, the household is right back to where it was. The tyrants are still frankly tyrannizing, the downtrodden are still lying, sighing, and incapable of real fight. And this conclusion is made the more horrifying by the fact that at heart the downtrodden are relieved that Dictator Horace is still there to persecute them. With Horace gone, they realize, "the trial, the bondage, the safety of their lives would be gone [too]. They would be free, unprotected, dependent on themselves."

The payoff for Author Compton-Burnett's characters simultaneously becomes the payoff for the patient reader. By the end of Bullivant and the Lambs, what seemed at first to be merely an assembly of oldfashioned, improbable types has been changed by mysterious artistry into a vitally authentic household.

The Author. Reticent Ivy Compton-Burnett, who now lives in a London flat, was born at Harrow, grew up in the heart of the world she writes about. After publishing her first novel, Dolores, in 1911, she wrote nothing until 1925, when her present polished prose style emerged in Pastors and Masters.

To those who ask her why she writes about the same sort of people living in the same period, she replies simply that country life at the turn of the century is the only subject she knows anything about ("I should not write of later times with enough grasp or confidence . . . And I have a dislike, which I cannot explain, of dealing with modern machinery and inventions. When war casts its shadow, I find that I recoil.") Her melodramatic plots seem to her the best she can invent in view of the fact that "real life seems to have no plots."

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