Cold Comfort Farm (2 page)

The boughs of the almond tree, averted from the wind, trembled with exquisite perversity. Hill thought they were like a frightened virgin, but Stamer realised that they, like everything else, were meaningless. Leila looked at them and narrowed her eyelids. She was, as usual, quite inscrutable.
¹

Many comic writers start out with parody, of course; but one wonders whether, at any point in her writing life, Stella Gibbons consciously aimed to be a comic writer. She preferred to
think of herself as a serious poet, and she revered Keats above all. But she was a sharply intelligent reader, and if a training in journalism does anything, it encourages in alert, quick-thinking people a concision of expression which can make them quite impatient with (and inevitably sarcastic of) woolly writing, clichéd thinking and ludicrous metaphors. In the mock-dedicatory letter to
Cold Comfort
Farm (addressed to ‘A
NTHONY
P
OOKWORTHY
, E
SQ
., A.B.S., L.L.R.’), Stella apologizes for her journalistic background, but the reader knows exactly what she is saying:

You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

To be honest, I was quite surprised to learn about Stella Gibbons’s early career in journalism. After all, this was in the 1920s – and of course, one knew all about Dorothy Parker polishing her put-downs at the
New Yorker
, but I simply had no idea that a clever young British woman with a diploma and no influential connections could live, in this period, on her wits – could work for a press agency in London, as Stella did, or be a staff writer for the London
Evening Standard
, while contributing poems to T. S. Eliot at the
Criterion
. After the deaths of both of her parents in 1926, Stella became the principal breadwinner for the family, and moved with her brothers to a house in the Vale of Health in Hampstead. (She was to live in Hampstead and Highgate for the rest of her life.) She had a doomed love affair, interviewed Lillie Langtry and Hugh Walpole, observed the literary scene, advised readers (among other things) on the best way to wear a scarf, and started noticing the fashion for lurid rural novels.

From the
Evening Standard
, she moved in 1930 to
The Lady
to ‘one plum of a job’, where she wrote on an array of subjects
and controlled the books page. The continuing fashion for rural novels started to get annoying. Her brief summaries of these books are gems. Take
Gay Agony
by H. A. Manhood. ‘This is about a young man called Micah born in a place called Thrust,’ wrote Stella. Edward Charles’s
Sand and the Blue Moss
evidently contained the tediously repetitive Lawrentian passage:

‘Go out, my lad – go out, my lad – turn your face to the sun and when it’s brown and the girls can love you, love them all, and the sun be with you. They’ll have children every one, and bless you and love you. They’ll have children and bless you and love you so long as you leave ’em alone in the sun – in the sun.’
²

To which Stella added, tartly, ‘We are only too willing to leave ’em alone.’

*

Masterpieces are hard to account for, of course. Even armed with some understanding of Stella Gibbons’s background, sensibility and skill, we can’t explain away the genius of
Cold Comfort Farm
. For its author, the astonishing impact of her first book was a mixed blessing. Few people nowadays know that she wrote anything else; in fact, they assume that she wrote one perfect comic novel and then just retired to prune roses. Reggie Oliver tells us that his aunt preferred not to name the book aloud, and in later life would refer to it as either ‘That Book’ or ‘You Know What’, or would just hum the words as ‘Hmm, Hmm-Hmm, Hmm’. In 1966, she wrote an essay, ‘Genesis of a Novel’, in
Punch
, and likened
Cold Comfort Farm
to ‘some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore; skipping about, and reminding you of the days when you were a bright young thing. To him, and to his admirers, you have never grown up … The old monster has also overlain all my other books, and if I do happen to glance at him occasionally, I am filled by an incredulous wonder that I could once have been so light-hearted – but so light-hearted.’
³

It’s the light-heartedness that is perhaps the key. But it is also the sheer comic confidence of the authorial voice that makes this book a joy.

Judith’s breath came in long shudders. She thrust her arms deeper into her shawl. The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it. (
Chapter III
)

The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think. (
Chapter IV
)

Adam laughed: a strange sound like the whickering snicker of a teazle in anger. (
Chapter V
)

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists call a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake. (
Chapter VI
)

A thin wind snivelled among the rotting stacks of Cold Comfort, spreading itself in a sheet of flowing sound across the mossed tiles. Darkness whined with the soundless urge of growth in the hedges, but that did not help any. (
Chapter XVI
)

This is fabulous, unparalleled stuff. Of all the glories above, it’s the throwaway phrase ‘and well they might be’ in the bit about the agitated trout-sperm that cracks me up each time. I can’t explain it. But I do know that it’s because she was herself such a good, detailed descriptive writer – the ‘long’ screams of the owls; the mossed tiles – that Stella Gibbons earned the right to draw the line between the pure and preposterous exactly where she wanted to.

Meanwhile, timing counted for a lot, too. It certainly accounted for the book’s success on first publication. It seems
that other readers had started noticing the annoying fashion for the rural novel, and were even getting a bit tired of D. H. Lawrence and his tumescent buds as well. The only trouble with the critical reception of
Cold Comfort Farm
when it was published in 1932 (apart from the interesting assumption made by one critic that it couldn’t possibly have been written by a woman, and must have been the pseudonymous work of Evelyn Waugh) was that all this talk of it being a ‘wicked’ parody began. It is even sometimes called ‘cruel’. Reading the book now, it seems very clear to me that no wickedness or cruelty comes into it – and that perhaps casual misogyny has been at work in the collective critical mind again. Women being funny are nearly always said to be nasty with it. A truly wicked parodist of the loam and lovechild school would just have pushed all the Starkadders down the well, or strangled them with their sukebind.

No, the key to its success as a novel – as opposed to some sort of undergraduate skit that would indeed have perished with the genre it parodied – is that Stella Gibbons is personally quite torn between the values of Flora and the values of, say, Flora’s cousin Elfine, who flits across the Downs behaving like something out of Wordsworth. Nature called to Stella. The natural world was as much of a solace to her as books; and most of her poetry was concerned with it. Her own descriptions in
Cold Comfort Farm
are sometimes breathtaking. The book satirizes the rural genre in just one very pointed way: it corrects the idea that nature (and, by extension, country life) is all brute doom and chaos, and shows that equating man with beast is simply a reductive thing to do. Even a Lawrentian sexual powerhouse like Seth Starkadder may turn out – if you bother to enquire deeply enough – to be just a normal bloke who enjoys going to the pictures. Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés – rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(1988), who famously drawled her existential plight, ‘I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.’ Flora helps each character out of his or her difficulties and they quickly find happiness. She is a character in a novel who reads
the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people. It’s the ultimate narrative miracle. No wonder other writers revere
Cold Comfort Farm
.

So, I hear you ask, why isn’t there a great critical literature associated with this magnificent literary work? Why is poor Brian up a gum tree with his book report? Why do we find ‘No results’ on the book search, and just one or two critical articles in the learned journals? Didn’t this woman Stella Gibbons invent words that joined the language and come up with ‘Something nasty in the woodshed’? Well, there is one excellent article by Faye Hammill in the journal
Modern Fiction Studies
in 2001 which throws light on the way literary reputation works, and one can’t quite escape the conclusion that Stella Gibbons had a number of factors working against her if she ever wanted to find herself in the literary canon (which she probably didn’t).
⁴
For a start, being a woman and funny, she was immediately classified as ‘middlebrow’ – a label that would most certainly not have attached itself to
Cold Comfort Farm
had it in fact been written by Evelyn Waugh. Also, the book was published, not by a literary publisher such as Cape, Hogarth, Chatto or Faber – but by Longmans (initially, in 1932), and subsequently by Penguin in 1938, which Birmingham University’s English Studies Group sums up as ‘by then the most successful of the new distinctively middlebrow publishing ventures’.

In the age of ultra-serious modernism, comical debunking was not the route to a critical reputation, either. Nor, I imagine, did the commercial success of the book endear Stella Gibbons to her literary peers. By 1949,
Cold Comfort Farm
had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paper. Stella’s winning of the Prix Etranger of the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (a major literary prize) for 1933 is mentioned in a letter from Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen on May 16, 1934:

I was enraged to see they gave the
£
40 to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamond [Lehmann] can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is this book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.
⁵

Gibbons also overtly rejected the literary world with her dedication to Pookworthy – A.B.S. and L.L.R. stand for ‘Associate Back Scratcher’ and ‘Licensed Log Roller’. She didn’t move in literary circles, or even visit literary squares, or love in literary triangles. Moreover, to satirize the sexual values of D. H. Lawrence at this time was to outlaw oneself deliberately from any intellectual elite. Intellectuals were enslaved to Lawrence – especially the men, of course, for whom his gospel of sexual freedom chimed very nicely with what they actually wanted to do. One of the most important passages in
Cold Comfort Farm
is the one in which Flora explains to Meriam, the hired girl with four illegitimate children, that her reproductive system doesn’t have to keep pace with the annual appearance of the sukebind – or, at least, not without ‘some preparations beforehand’.

But what really did for Stella Gibbons as a subject for critical study, I think, was that she was a normal writer whose talent developed and led her to more thoughtful work – which is why she published a further twenty-three novels, plus collections of short stories and poetry, just writing what she felt she should write, in defiance of those who thought she should have kept writing
Cold Comfort Farm
. She also married and had a daughter, Laura – and always felt that a normal life was more worthwhile than a literary one. None of her subsequent books has the utter light-hearted glory of
Cold Comfort Farm
, but they are all by the same hand, and issue from the same heart; they are often concerned with the same struggle between romanticism and practicality, and there are gems among them. The one I personally know best is
Westwood
(1946), which I adapted for BBC radio in 2004, and grew to love very much. It includes one of her best characters, Gerard Challis, a pompous and hypocritical playwright who writes lines such as, ‘Suffering is the anvil upon which the crystal sword of integrity is hammered’ – when in fact he doesn’t know the first thing about it.

I say that she is a writer’s writer; and there is one tiny particular skill of Stella’s that I admire enormously: she could invent, nearly always as a comic aside, simply perfect parodic
titles and plots. In
Westwood
, Challis’s plays include
Mountain Air
, ‘the one about six women botanists and a male guide isolated in a snowstorm in a hut on the Andes’, and also
The Hidden Well
, ‘which concerned the seven men and one female nurse on the tsetse fly research station’; and in her 1936 novel
Miss Linsey and Pa
, she has a Bloomsbury intellectual writing a book called
Work
, about Yorkshire herring fishermen. This skill was already fully formed in
Cold Comfort Farm
, where Seth goes to Beershorn to see films with titles such as Red Heels and
Sweet Sinners
, and in London Flora briefly considers taking her cousin Elfine to see an existential play called
Manallalive-O!
(‘a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a man employed as a waiter in a restaurant who dreams that he is the double of another man who is employed as a steward on a liner, and who, on awakening and realizing that he is still a waiter employed in a restaurant and not a steward employed on a liner, goes mad and shoots his reflection in a mirror and dies’,
Chapter XIII
), but thinks better of it and takes her to see Mr Dan Langham in
On Your Toes!
at the New Hippodrome instead.