Father and Dame Ivy

During a vacation trip to England years ago, I became aware, to my surprise, of my father’s fascination with two British writers: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

He’d read me Warner’s Lolly Willows with relish; this novel during which a British woman, driven by the constraints of respectable middle-class life, becomes a witch escapes its apparent realism for a trip into mystery. As for Dame Ivy, her dozens of novels are a chorus of underground chuckles at the absurdities of that same life, with a keen eye for the duplicities of women trapped in families. The one I’m reading now, published after her death, The Last and The First, showcases a venomous mother and stepmother who, under the righteous guise of martyring herself taking care of her four grown offspring, make their lives intolerable.

Father had experienced both a stepmother and a step grandmother, neither of whom he discussed, although now and then a referral to “Vi”—perhaps for Vivian, but just as likely for vicious—would creep out. He had learned first-hand the power of officially powerless women to rule the roost, as in the below:

“Well, Mater or not, I am no tyrant,” said Eliza. “People are not afraid of me. Sometimes, I think, too little.”

“That is not likely,” said Hermia (the daughter who is escaping.) “Fear goes a long way. I may or may not have courage, but I have not been quite free from it. I have been afraid of provoking your outbreaks. Perhaps more than of the outbreaks themselves. You may have made me afraid of myself.”

“The outbreaks, as you call them, have their reason,” replied Eliza. “Things that are wrong must be rectified.”

“Whatever I call them, they add to the wrong.”

“I did not know you were so much on the side of righteousness. I have not recognized the signs of it.”

At the end of many more pages of badinage—if it can be called that when it draws blood—Eliza breaks down in tears on her husband’s shoulder, complaining that no one understands her.

This tat-a-rat-tat dialogue, often without the name of the speaker and with no other details supplied—setting, appearances, time of day, era—is hard to keep up with; the reader must have her wits about her to figure out who is who. But that is a part of its charm, like a wild game of badminton where the little white bird gets caught in a tree. And certainly Dame Ivy’s very British, very dry wit with its vein of cruelty appealed deeply to Father, who may have been party to family talk of this kind when he was growing up: nothing is said directly but a great deal is implied, especially of judgment and dislike.

Since Father showed little interest in contemporary U.S. women writers, except for Shirley Jackson, whose short story, “The Lottery,” rattled many readers when it was published in The New Yorker, I was impressed when he took time to go and visit Dame Ivy when we were vacationing in London. This was to be his special treat, a respite from the travails of being a worthy father; I was not invited to go along. He came back glowing, although if Dame Ivy spoke as she wrote, it must have taken a lively attention to figure out what was going on.

My books never took this course, which would have been anathema to U.S. readers and publishers. But years later, when Father suggested, after reading some of my dark short stories, that I try to write “Drawing room comedy,” it was not Noel Coward he was thinking of but the granite charm of Dame Ivy.

In My Family, Writing Barry Bingham Sr.