COLD COMFORT FARM
STELLA DOROTHEA GIBBONS, novelist, poet and short-story writer, was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949), The Shadow of a Sorcerer (1955), The Snow Woman (1969) and The Woods in Winter (1970). Her short stories include ‘Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm’ (1959) and ‘Beside the Pearly Water’ (1954). Her Collected Poems appeared in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb, who died in 1959. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
LYNNE TRUSS is a writer and broadcaster. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times, followed by four years as a sports columnist on the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work on Woman’s Journal and is now a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. In 2002 she presented Cutting a Dash, a well-received Radio 4 series on punctuation, which led to the writing of the international bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide and was Book of the Year in 2004. Her most recent book is Talk to the Hand.
STELLA GIBBONS
Cold Comfort Farm
With an Introduction by LYNNE TRUSS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in 1932
Published in Penguin Classics 2006
1
Copyright © Stella Gibbons, 1932
Introduction copyright © Lynne Truss, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Foreword
COLD COMFORT FARM
Introduction
In March 2002, a desperate chap called Brian posted a message on a mainstream literary internet forum, in the very slim section devoted to the author Stella Gibbons. ‘Hey!’ he wrote. ‘Does anyone know where I can find a book report on the book Cold Comfort Farm? I’ve tried every site! Sparknotes, cliffsnotes, pinkmonkey, everything! Please email me if you can help me. It’s my senior book report, and it’s due in two weeks. Thanx, Brian.’ Three days later, he received the following reply from a correspondent named (rather improbably) ‘X. Y. Zedd’: ‘Here’s a great idea. Write your own! The book is worth it.’ At which pithy expression of excellent good sense, of course, one could only applaud, while muttering censorious, old-codgerish comments about the casual plagiarism that appears to come so naturally to the young.
However, even X. Y.’s cheerfully practical solution didn’t quite clear up the matter; unresolved questions still flapped urgently around the room. Because Brian had put his finger on something a bit peculiar. Cold Comfort Farm is a masterpiece. It has been adapted for stage, radio and screen, and there are people in literary households who routinely reproach their offspring, ‘Oh, child, child, was it for this that I cowdled thee as a mommet?’ regardless of the children’s ability to appreciate advanced literary allusion. Many authors are devoted to Cold Comfort Farm. I was once on a literary radio quiz, and my co-panellist Sue Limb could not only lovingly outline the plot of Cold Comfort Farm in the 30 seconds provided, but name the date of publication (1932) and give the first words accurately from memory: ‘The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged.’ Yet, until Gibbons’s nephew Reggie Oliver published a biography of his aunt in 1998, there was almost nothing written about this most popular of authors. Of her twenty-three other novels, not one is in print. On another site recently, I clicked on ‘Books about Gibbons’ and found the following list, cruelly itemized: ‘For the General Reader – No results. For Scholars – No results. For Undergraduates – No results. For School Students – No results.’ So that was that, then. Like the hapless Brian, I must write my own book report and be brave about it. But I was still resentful on Stella’s behalf. Was it for this that she cowdled Cold Comfort Farm as a mommet? Surely, as X. Y. Zedd had put it so succinctly, the book is self-evidently ‘worth it’?
My own history with Cold Comfort Farm is not the usual one. I did not discover it independently when I was ten years old, laugh at the names of the cows (Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless), and re-read it once a year ever afterwards, each time letting more of its humour reveal itself to me. No, for many years, in fact, I held back from Cold Comfort Farm; I was suspicious. Here was a book that was generally described as a ‘wicked parody’ of the rural novels of Mary Webb (Precious Bane, The Golden Arrow), which were immensely popular in Britain between the wars, but had since sunk rightfully into obscurity. Evidently it was a hilarious conceit on the part of Gibbons to take a bright young practical metropolitan woman – Flora Poste – and insert her into a gloomy ‘loam and lovechild’ setting with characters named Seth and Reuben, a farm that crouched in a hollow of the Sussex Downs like a beast about to spring, a lot of far-fetched rural vocabulary (‘rennet-post’, ‘sukebind’, etc.), and an old, mad woman called Aunt Ada Doom who controlled her family with the melodramatic eruptions, ‘There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort!’ and the immortal, ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed.’
In my pre-enlightened days, I took the view that one couldn’t enjoy a parody (even a wicked one) if the targeted genre was deader than a doornail – which was a bit small-minded of me, I admit. However, I now believe I was merely acting on shockingly bad critical information because, while Cold Comfort Farm was, yes, specifically inspired by the excesses of the rural genre (which is broad enough, in any case, to include such familiar authors as Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence), the huge delight of Stella Gibbons’s novel is the way Flora approaches an eternal and universal difference of temperament: as a brisk, cheerful person, she discovers a whole farmful of people wallowing, self-thwarted, in chronic misery and simply makes them stop it. Old Adam Lambsbreath has been mournfully ‘clettering’ the
dishes with a thorn twig for many decades. Flora recommends a nice little mop with a handle, and buys one for him when she next goes to town. Flora is like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, unintimidated by people who talk nonsense, refusing to be drawn into their mad world.
After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: ‘I ha’ scranleted two hundred furrows come five o’clock down i’ the bute.’ It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was it a complaint? If so, one might say, ‘My dear, how too sickening for you!’ But, then, it might be a boast … Weakly, she fell back on the comparatively safe remark: ‘Did you?’ in a bright, interested voice. (Chapter VII)
In a manner that ought surely to endear her to modern literary critics, Flora enters the novel Cold Comfort Farm and alters it from within. In psychoanalytical terms, Flora is the Superego organizing the Id. And in symbolic terms, well, don’t get me started on the symbolism. Part of the brilliance of the book is that by creating a character – Mr Mybug, the corpulent and harmless devotee of D. H. Lawrence, who sees every bud as a phallus and every hill as a breast – who actually personifies symbolism, Gibbons releases her readers from their usual symbolism alertness duties – and then playfully gets away with loads of it under their noses. For heaven’s sake, it’s Flora that lets the bull out. Anyway, suffice to say, poor old Mary Webb need not feel aggrieved by the continued publication of Cold Comfort Farm. It is not about her at all.
It was Stella Gibbons’s first book, written when she was in her late twenties. Born in 1902, Stella was the eldest child of the depressive and volatile Telford Gibbons, a doctor in Kentish Town, north London. Her mother Maudie seems to have been a comforting presence; and Stella loved her younger brothers Lewis and Gerald – but the household was dominated by the violent temper of her father, who drank and womanized, and occasionally threw knives. Reggie Oliver, in his 1998 book Out of the Woodshed: The Life of Stella Gibbons, describes a key event in Stella’s childhood, when she was about eleven. Telford was threatening suicide; Maudie was begging Stella to persuade him not to do it; and in the midst of the drama Stella noticed that her father was hiding a smile. It was a turning point. Once she realised that misery could be enjoyed, and used as a tool of family oppression, she rejected it. In the Listener in 1981, Libby Purves quotes Stella’s saying of Cold Comfort Farm: ‘I think, quite without meaning to, I presented a kind of weapon to people, against melodrama and the over-emphasising of disorder and disharmony, and especially the people who rather enjoy it. I think the book could teach other people not to take them seriously, and to avoid being hurt by them.’ (p. 639)
Telford Gibbons emerges as a pretty interesting character from Reggie Oliver’s book. His own father had been a similarly tyrannical and adulterous paterfamilias: Grandfather Gibbons even had firearms, and would shoot blank cartridges at the ceiling to quell the noise of his children in the nursery upstairs. When Stella, as a child, asked her father if he would ever be happy, he said, ‘Never! Never though seated at the right hand of God!’ He mocked the pubertal Stella about her weight and appearance, calling her ‘the old bargee’. But if he was a selfish and self-pitying man, he was evidently an effective GP, with good common-sense ideas, and in her autobiographical novel Enbury Heath (1935), Stella remembers his impact as a ‘fresh air doctor’ – who ‘insisted, with oaths, on his patients sleeping with their windows open’:
He realised the curative powers of light and sun some time before they became part of the stock-in-trade of clinics and general practitioners in very poor districts … When his small cheap car appeared at the top of the street, windows would fly up all along its squalid length. ‘Open the winder quick! ’Ere comes Dr Garden!’
On one occasion, Telford saved the life of an asthmatic boy by putting him on the back of a motorbike and taking him for a high-speed ride up Primrose Hill. It was a kind of adrenalin-cure – a jolt to the system – and one can’t help feeling that, if Flora Poste was created as a means of exorcizing Stella’s family ghosts and breaking the pattern of Gibbons misery, her imperious briskness nevertheless owes quite a lot to the behaviour of an old-fashioned GP. Stella Gibbons placed great value on ‘detachment’ as a writerly virtue. Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time.
Stella was educated by governesses until one of them (having been seduced by Telford) tried to commit suicide. After that, she attended the North London Collegiate School – at the same time, incidentally, as Stevie Smith, the future poet. While there, she contributed a paper to the debating society on ‘The Influence of Environment’, a subject that turned out to hold a lifelong fascination. Then, in 1921, she enrolled at London University for a two-year course in journalism. Whether she was ambitious is not clear, but she certainly had confidence in herself as a writer from the start. For the college magazine, she wrote a parodic poem called ‘The Marshes of My Soul’ and also a short story entitled ‘The Doer, A Storyin the Russian Manner’, about a practically-minded chicken farmer who rescues an intellectual from a life of precious inaction.
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 ‘ANTHONY POOKWORTHY, ESQ., 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 c
an 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)