Books: Comic Tragedy

BROTHERS AND SISTERS (273 pp.)—Ivy Compton-Burnett—Zero Press ($3.75).

“What? Incest again?” fans of Ivy Compton-Burnett will cry upon opening Brothers and Sisters. Again an old desk, locked for decades, containing a letter containing the terrible truth? Again a hard fate visiting the sins of the father upon the children?

These are among the fixed, solemn bells on which Author Compton-Burnett has managed to ring wild, gay changes for more than 30 years (e.g., Bullivant and the Lambs, Two Worlds and Their Ways). But no matter how worn her plots may be, the conversation is sure to be spangled with jewels that, to her devoted followers, still proclaim her a Cartier of contemporary fiction.

Brothers and Sisters concerns Sophia and Christian Stace, who have been happily married for more than a quarter-century. Then one day poor Christian opens the fateful desk and finds a letter saying that he and Sophia had a common father. How could that happen, even in a Compton-Burnett plot? This way: Christian had never known who his father was. had grown up simply as the “adopted son” of Sophia’s father, old Andrew Stace. In point of fact—as the letter now reveals—he was old Andrew’s illegitimate son by a neighbor of theirs, one Mrs. Lang, and thus, of course, his wife’s half brother. Christian takes this discovery so much to heart (which was never strong) that he drops dead. But Sophia is made of sterner stuff. Bravely burying her husband-half-brother, she murmurs to the children: “So I am Father’s sister. Well, I am not troubled about that. It only seems to draw us closer.”

The children do not take it quite so well. Son Robin, carefully analyzing the situation, speaks rather bitterly of “my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather, my only grandfather.” What makes the case even more difficult is that two of the Stace children were engaged to marry two of Mrs. Lang’s offspring. The engagements had to be broken off, to avoid fresh incest. And when Sophia dies abruptly of “some internal illness that is mortal.” the children really feel it is time for them to go and live somewhere else. The neighbors agree that this is a wise move, though naturally they are sorry to lose a family that has brought so much interesting abnormality into the village and has undergone what is described as “plenty of maturing experience lately.” But the general conclusion is that the Staces have been much luckier than most families because (as an old friend says): “Tragedy is by far the best background, and every one behaves well in it; it is so worth while.” Brothers and Sisters is similarly worth while, and those who argue that it is not as tragic as Oedipus Rex will be the first to agree that it is much funnier.