The BURIED Book Club discussion

Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 ::
“In the 20th century, novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett also wrote novels almost entirely in dialogue, as did early Aldous Huxley and late Henry Green, culminating in 1975 with William Gaddis’s J R...” [78]
“Like a novel in dialogue by Compton-Burnett or Gaddis., the Zohar begins.....” [193]
“...a novel in dialogue, or ‘dramatic novel,‘ a form that would soon be adopted (as we’ve seen) by Pietro Aretino in Italy, Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos in Portugal (he wrote three dramatic novels in the 1540s and ’50’s, most famously Eufrosina), several Spanish novelists of the 16th and 17the centuries, the Marquis de Sade in France (Philosophy in the Bedroom), and eventually by novelists such as Peacock, Firbank, Compton-Burnett, and Gaddis.” [307]


In Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction ::
“One need only mention names like (in order of difficulty) Barbara Pym, Jean Rhys, Christina Stead, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Isak Dinesen, Nathalie Sarraute, who all received the accolade of serious recognition very late in life.” [CBR “Illiterations”, 56] (I’m still waiting for accolades for Marguerite Young.)
“...[H.D.] chose as friends and acquaintances the avant-garde of Europe: Ivy Compton-Burnett, Dorothy Richardson, Viola Hunt, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Robert McAlmon, D.H. Lawrence, the Sitwells, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Kenneth MacPherson, Virginia Woolf (and William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, whom she had know in Pensylvania).” [Linda W. Wagner-Martin, “H.D.‘s Ficiton: Convolutions to Clarity”, 148]
“As reader reflecting on on the traditional elements of decor (description), character analysis and presentation, social commentary and plot, [Nathalie Sarraute] briefly and approvingly sketches some examples of innovative strategy in that realm: Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, Camus--later Ivy Compton-Burnett and Virginia Woolf.” [Germaine Brée. 
Experimental Novels? Yes, But Perhaps ‘Otherwise’: Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig”, 270]


Ivy Compton-Burnett (English, 1884-1969) is as good as BURIED. She has two popular books, A House and Its Head (148 ratings) & Manservant and Maidservant (122 ratings), both in print (at the moment) by NYRB. A third book, Pastors and Masters (41 ratings) appears to be in print by Hesperus Press.

From wikipedia, her bibliography looks like ::
Dolores (1911)
Pastors and Masters (1925)
Brothers and Sisters (1929)
Men and Wives (1931)
More Women Than Men (1933)
A House and Its Head (1935)
Daughters and Sons (1937)
A Family and a Fortune (1939)
Parents and Children (1941)
Elders and Betters (1944)
Manservant and Maidservant (1947, published in the US as Bullivant and the Lambs)
Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
Darkness and Day (1951)
The Present and the Past (1953)
Mother and Son (1955)
A Father and His Fate (1957)
A Heritage and Its History (1959)
The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
A God and His Gifts (1963)
The Last and the First (published posthumously in 1971)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Comp...
Some gr=librarian work is probably in order.

She still lives on the Internet :: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/ivy/i...


A short discussion, including (a link to) book porn ::
https://www.goodreads.com/user_status...

Ali's provided links to two articles ::

"Poison Ivy" by Richard Davenport-Hines 17Dec2011
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/7481...
"It was not until 1925 that Compton-Burnett published Pastors and Masters, the first of her novels about the atrocities of English upper-class domesticity. They are like no one else’s books. All but one have a stylised late Victorian or Edwardian setting. There are railways and telegrams, but neither motor cars nor telephones. Ivy had so little visual sense that in railway termini she could not see from which end trains would leave platforms. Accordingly, her protagonists inhabit featureless manor houses in smudged landscapes. Unlike other country gentry, they never sit in a rose garden, attend the races, hold picnics, play cards, perform charades, visit the London theatre. There are no sports or pets. Her families have inquisitive neighbours but no other visitors. The Gavestons in A Family and a Fortune ‘see no one and go nowhere’."


"Poison? Ivy? No: merely the least-read great novelist: There is no one quite like Ivy Compton-Burnett, writes Brian McFarlane" 29Aug2012
http://inside.org.au/poison-ivy/
'WHEN a mobile library fetches up outside Buckingham Palace in Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, the Queen decides to investigate. Seeing a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett on the shelves, she takes it down reflectively, recalls that “I made her a dame,” and decides to borrow one of her books. Well, she just can’t get on with Ivy, finds her too demanding, but encouraged by a member of her staff she does become addicted to reading. Some months later, when she is back in the mobile library having got the hang of reading, she decides to give Ivy another go, and this time finds the dame with the pie-crust hairdo “unsentimental, severe and wise.”
'Those three adjectives constitute an admirable accolade for the wittiest and most unsparing of twentieth-century English novelists. Just look at the following, surely one of the most perfectly phrased sentences of the modern novel: “Miss Burtenshaw had retired from missionary work owing to the discomfort of the life, a reason she did not disclose, though it was more than adequate; and was accustomed to say she found plenty of furrows to plough in the home field …” (A House and Its Head, Chapter 2). If the Queen had come to appreciate prose like that, she had indeed become an uncommon reader – unlike all those more common but less perceptive readers who say dull things like, “Her characters all sound the same” or “You can’t tell who’s talking,” unaware of the acid test they are failing.'


Thank Ali ::
https://www.goodreads.com/user_status...

Interesting, I've been meaning to read her for ages, and am always pulling her off the bookshop shelves to investigate, but I always thought she was well known! But even her hits are relatively modest ones.

Nate D wrote: "but I always thought she was well known!"

Yep. I think there's a certain phenomenon regarding a certain stream of modernist writers that they seem well known, but then try to find anyone who's read them. I'm thinking of H.D. (esp. her HERmione or Dorothy M. Richardson or even Gertrude Stein (er, at least her name means to me, The Making of Americans, which is mostly only parodied and not read. But, generally, yeah, there is a certain class of, I thought they were well known. Most of them still new names to me these very recent years -- most of them names dropped in there above where I quoted stuff.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Nate D wrote: "but I always thought she was well known!"

Yep. I think there's a certain phenomenon regarding a certain stream of modernist writers that they seem well known, but then try to find ..."

Hilda's "Helen In Egypt" will be getting read soon.

Same can be said for someone as well known as Pound. There ain't a way that all 3500 of them REALLY read the Cantos. Things drop off pretty swiftly fr'there.

I've a "Mrs Reynolds" by the Missus Stein. Might be too political for my taste.

Bringing up Compton-Burnett made me realize that I should have long ago added in the name of one of his followers, William Mode Spackman, as Goodreads refers to him. Here is my review of Dalkey's omnibus The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman, which has garnered only a handful of Goodreads reviews:

"Spack" was my literary mentor. It is a great pity that so few people have read this book. It's true that Spackman was of another era, but he was a great literary stylist, a winner of the Vursall Award when it meant something, when style wasn't confused with showing off. He was also very funny. And he was published by Knopf.

Spackman isn't for everyone. The title of one of his novels is "An Armful of Warm Girl." Enough said. But his women are certainly less silly than his men. His fiction is for pleasure.

Spackman wrote some when he was young, but all of his best work was written in his late 70s and 80s.

Rather than comparing Spackman with other authors, let me list three of his favorites, all of them stylists: Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Muriel Spark.

Start with A Little Decorum For Once or A Difference of Design. For those who love old-fashioned and singular literary style, Spackman will be a great find.

Robert wrote: " William Mode Spackman,"

I panic'd for just a second cuz Spackman is six feet under. But, lo, there is a thread for this man bless=by Mr Moore ::

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Drop a link there as will, would you be so kind?

Just wanted to add a note that I have now completed icb, and read her bio. I can without doubt say she is one of the greats of 20thc lit. She ploughs her own entirely unique furrow - with brutal wit and an extremely complex use of dialogue. The first of hers I tried I hated, then two years later I tried again and something just clicked…so give her time. A House and its Head was prob the best if you were only going to read one…