Good evening!
An interesting reading week mon amis, lots of thinking done, lots of things to say. I think that it’s true that some books find you at the right time -- not for emotional reasons in this case, but because I really needed something that would make me think.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
The novel I am referring to is the one I briefly mentioned last week, More Women Than Men by Ivy Compton-Burnett (1933). I found this in a charity shop and despite never having heard of it or the author, I picked it up. This was largely because it had been reissued by Pushkin Press, a publisher that I trust, and because it was written in the ‘30s, which is an era I like reading. I got straight to it because I found that John Waters had blurbed it, with the following quote:
‘Dark, hilarious, evil…I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself.’
A good blurb, in a sea of ‘lyrical and haunting’s, especially considering who it’s from. I’ll come back to this.
More Women Than Men is set in a boarding school, but does not centre on the students -- they’re hardly mentioned, in fact. The principal character is the school’s headmistress, Josephine Napier, who begins the novel welcoming her teachers back before the term starts. She has an opening for an art teacher and appoints her brother’s friend Francis to it, and also welcomes a young woman who has recently graduated university called Helen. Shortly into the term, an old friend Elizabeth visits with her daughter and they are given housekeeper roles.
Compton-Burnett herself was a lesbian, living with her partner Margaret Jourdain, a furniture expert and writer for most of her life. I don’t think you need to know that to recognise that this is queer to its core, with an incredible amount of double meaning in its narrative and dialogue. This is especially apparent in Josephine’s brother Jonathan and his ‘friend’ Francis, who (before Francis’ employment) lived together for many years. There are also a rake of hints towards lesbian relationships between the teachers in the schools which aren’t explored in as much detail as the men’s relationships, but this in itself is most likely a comment on gender and power, which much of the novel is also about.
Even without the double meanings and hints, More Women Than Men is an incredibly camp novel. Josephine Napier is a woman who believes herself to much more power than she actually has, and likes to give the impression that nothing escapes her notice. She convinces very few people, but is completely unaware of this.The arc of the novel sees her finding out something that has been right in front of her the whole time, while trying to maintain the image she believes she has created. When I was reading this, I knew that Josephine herself was a camp character but couldn’t quite put my finger on why, aside from her being a middle-aged stern woman who is slightly foolish.
For this reason, I went back to Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ -- imagine my vindication when I read point 4 which lists ‘the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett’ as one Sontag’s ‘random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp’. I knew it! But why are they camp? Sontag talks much about irony, especially when she says that ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It is not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman but a “woman”. To perceive Camp in objects and person is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.’ In order for Compton-Burnett to talk about her gay characters, she needs to employ double meaning and people literally playing a role in a conservative society. Josephine plays a role for a different reason -- she hides some of the things she has done, and pretends to be a more together person than she actually is. When she speaks, she is largely communicating something else entirely than what she is actually saying, which in turn shows us that she is not what she thinks she is. In point 19, Sontag says that ‘the pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious’, which perfectly summarises Josephine.
I think this, as well as the actual queer characters, is what draws someone like John Waters to Compton-Burnett. Waters, as the king of grotesque camp, employs campness in a slightly different, more updated way than what was available to the earlier writer, but you can see the influence of these more subdued texts. There is a meanness to the foolish characters that isn’t quite cruelty, and instead serves to show us who these people are, which is replicated in films like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Polyester (1981), which also employs facets of camp like giving light to ‘bad taste’. I should also say that some of the meanness in More Women in Men is just extremely funny, like Josephine’s adopted son Gabriel calling the servants ‘foolish virgins’.
Another element of the text that I was drawn to was how much like a play it seemed. Dialogue takes precedence over descriptive action, most likely because Compton-Burnett gives so much weight to double meaning. Most of the pages are made up of conversation, with very little indication of people moving between areas or their physical actions. This reminded me of Oscar Wilde because of how camp the text is overall and because Wilde is most successful in his plays and in the speech in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). It seems a bit obvious to read a text that you can locate as ‘gay’ and say ‘oh like Oscar Wilde’ but there are more things at play here, like the novel’s style. Wilde was, quite famously, all about style, and as Sontag says, camp should be seen ‘in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation.’
My last thinking point is a bit less developed, but I do want to say that it’s interesting that a lesbian has produced something so camp, which has influenced one of the biggest contemporary camp creatives. Lesbians are culturally seen as a kind of antithesis to camp in their stereotypical aesthetics, and yet Compton-Burnett shows a clear grasp of what it means, and contributes something both tangible and metaphorical towards its development and definition.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I’m definitely going to read Gavin Lambert’s The Slide Area (1960) next, because I’m really excited about it. As we all know by this point, I love that man.
Loved this. On the last point, have you read ‘On Dyke Camp’ (the essay)? I think it’s an excellent response to ideas of dyke and lesbian relationships to camp-ness, although I’d say that there’s defs some lesbian aesthetics (the more femme ones, as trad camp-ness is femme I think) that lean towards classic camp already.