Hilary Mantel on the drawing-room depravity of Ivy Compton-Burnett
As pitiless as Austen, Compton-Burnett’s tales of 1930s Brits behaving badly escaped the perils of popularity . Now, they demand to be read
13 March 2021 • 11:00am Enough had happened to her, perhaps, for her to make up her mind what human beings were, or could be : Ivy Compton-Burnett
Credit: Cecil Beaton/Conde Nast/Getty
Written by Ivy Compton-Burnett in 1935, A House and Its Head is the merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read. It begins on Christmas Day, 1885: it is breakfast time, and having prepared presents for the children, the patriarch prepares his weapons. When his wife observes that the children are down late, Duncan Edgeworth makes no reply. To further harmless pleasantries, he makes no reply either. But instead, “put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck”.
The contradiction,
Is crucifixion.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
This simple but heartfelt couplet (translation above by James Michie in 1969) is the best-known Latin love epigram – a short poem in elegiac metre – that survives from Ancient Rome. Composed by the poet Catullus around 55 BCE, number 85 of his book of 116 poems, it pithily encapsulates the searing conflict of emotions that he claims to be experiencing in the course of his affair with a younger married woman, who is addressed in other poems as his ‘girl’ (
puella) and by the pseudonym ‘Lesbia’. But for such a short poem – just 14 words in Latin – it has raised a whole host of questions, and hundreds of pages have been written about it. What is the point of the poem? How should it be translated from the Latin? How does it relate to the poet’s life and feelings? Its psychology comes across as complex and strikingly modern, as does much of Catullus’s poetry; to some, the questions it raises