Of Human Bondage

MOTHER & SON (256 pp.)--/. Compton-Burnett--Messner ($3.50).

"How do you explain the thousands of books that come out every year?" asks a character in Mother & Son. The reply: "I do not explain them. There seems to me to be no explanation." The same answer might apply to questions about the works of veteran Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. What explanation is there for an author who has produced, at almost regular two-year intervals, a string of novels that have all much the same title (e.g., Pastors & Masters; Elders & Betters; Brothers & Sisters'), are about much the same people living in much the same house at much the same period (turn of the century) and conceal in the same cupboards just the same skeletons? Why do all the characters, irrespective of age and class, talk the same language in novel after novel? And why is the terrible secret that they are always hiding always exposed in the same crude, naive way? "There was a letter in the desk; it was hidden by some broken wood," says Rosebery in Mother & Son, explaining how he discovered that the man he has always called "Father" is not really his father after all.

Author Compton-Burnett has used the same revealing piece of wood off and on for 20 years, sometimes broken in a desk, sometimes built into a locked drawer--though once, admittedly, it was widened and made into a bridge over a ravine: the result was nearly neck-breaking. The nearest equivalent to this slice of timber is the distaff which the Greeks put in the hands of the Fates--and man's fate, in the Greek sense, is in fact the essential clue to the mystery of Author Compton-Burnett's long (15) line of novels.

Taking the Lumps. Men and women, she argues, are fated to get into an inextricable situation called life, from which, obviously, only death can release them.

But people refuse to accept this fact: they struggle to release themselves by trying to make their lives different from what they are fated to be. This struggle, enacted with Greek gravity and formality, is invariably the theme of a Compton-Burnett novel. The skill she exhibits in playing witty and tragic variations on it explains why her fans agree with Critic V. S.

Pritchett that she is "the most original novelist now writing in English." Author Compton-Buinett is old-fashioned only in the sense that she writes out of a past in which the center of life is still the big family household--including servants, "companions." nurseries, long corridors, enormous rooms. But her characters are no more untrue to life for this than Oedipus would be for driving around in an automobile instead of a chariot. In Mother & Son, middle-aged Rosebery is in just the same fix as Oedipus: he cannot escape from life with mother. Aged Miranda is seeking to hire a companion because she thinks it is time for her elderly son to stop following her around. But the Fates know that neither mother nor son has any intention of separating. For 20-odd years, for example, Rosebery has let his mother sweeten his tea with "generous lumps," simply because he knows it makes her happy and he has not had the heart to break it to her that he has lost his taste for sugar. The rest of the household lump it more grudgingly: they yearn to be released from the tyranny of Miranda, but they cannot imagine what life would be without her.

Talking Is Real. Fate soon intervenes and shows them. The day comes when Miranda cannot put off telling her passive husband that the doctors have told her she will soon die. On hearing this secret, he is so bowled over that he splutters out an awful one of his own: the three children upstairs are not his dead brother's; they are his own, by a former mistress.

On hearing this, Miranda drops dead--and the slaves are suddenly free. Or rather, they have that illusion, for Author Compton-Burnett devotes the rest of Mother & Son to hammering home a vital truth: those who consent to live under tyranny can never be released from it, not even by the death of the tyrant. The bereaved men make desperate proposals of marriage; eager spinsters hurry to accept them; but it is no use. By the last page, everything is just as Miranda would want it: both her men have proved unmarriageable, bound by force of habit and inclination to the dead regime.

The strength and weakness of Mother & Son lie, as always in a Compton-Burnett novel, in the long dialogues in which characters of every age vie with one another in calling a spade a spade, thereby turning it into a hatchet. Sometimes the talk is mere tasty acid drops ("I have not the courage to live on charity ..." "I have the courage but not the chance"); sometimes it is compactly expressive of universal human attitudes ("Let me persuade you to try our fruit. We can buy much better, but we take a pride in our own"). Many of the remarks are paradoxical but simple ("I need my mother's comfort for the loss of her"); others serve as a reminder that the real problem of life is in having to deal with other people ("You can do as you will with solitude. It does not take you on equal terms"). Some long stretches of these conversations are dull and empty; but pages upon pages of them are superbly funny and brilliantly revealing, until the reader finds reality in all the airy comedy, is ready to agree that "it is voicing things that makes them real."

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