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 consi
ders 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.
In the end, the most important aspect of Cold Comfort Farm is how modern it is. The narrative voice is direct, the plot is simple, the comedy is completely undamaged by the passage of time, and the literary playfulness is awesome. Meanwhile, its underlying serious point about people invoking childhood misery – ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed!’ – and using it as a means to exempt them from normal life, and have power over their families, is utterly relevant to the modern world, in which Dave Pelzer is patron saint of victimhood, and the genre now has its own special section in the bookshops. Reggie Oliver called the biography of his aunt Out of the Woodshed for a reason: Stella once wrote that she had not only created the woodshed, but was ‘practically born in the place’. But fortunately, she added, ‘The door happened to be ajar.’6 In the biography, Oliver recalls with pleasure a stage production of Cold Comfort Farm in which the biggest laugh went to the moment when the Hollywood producer, Mr Neck, is removing Seth from the farm, and runs into Aunt Ada Doom. ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed!’ she cries. ‘Did it see you?’ he asks.
Lynne Truss
NOTES
1. Reggie Oliver, Out of the Woodshed: The Life of Stella Gibbons (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 37.
2. Ibid., p. 85.
3. Ibid., p. 123.
4. Faye Hammill, ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars’, Modern Fiction Studies 47: 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 831–54.
5. Oliver, Out of the Woodshed, p. 129.
6. Ibid., epigraph.
A Note on the Text
This Penguin Classics volume of Cold Comfort Farm has been set from the Allen Lane edition of 1938. It had first been published by Longman’s in 1932.
Some minor housestyling to match Classics style has been applied. For punctuation, double quotation marks have been made singles (with doubles inside these as needed); un-spaced em-dashes have become spaced en-dashes and 2-em dashes are em-dashes; no full stop after personal titles (Mr, Mrs, Dr, St) or names at the end of letters; four-dot ellipsis become three; end punctuation follows end quotation marks when not a complete sentence or dialogue (e.g. pp. 11 l.1 and 12 l.33). For spelling, -is- words become -iz- (e.g., realize); hyphenated words now spelled as one (to-night, to-day, tomorrow, good-night, good-bye) are modernized but ‘good-morning’ becomes two words; ‘judgment’ becomes ‘judgement’; and the ligature is removed (‘Phœbe’ becomes ‘Phoebe’). A very few minor errors have been corrected: two commas removed from lists before ‘and’; ‘cow-shed’ standardized to ‘cowshed’ twice; the comma added after a house number twice and the hyphen to ‘Hawk-Monitor’ once. All else has been left in Stella Gibbons’s inimitable style.
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
–MANSFIELD PARK.
NOTE
The action of the story takes place in the near future.
To
ALLAN AND INA
Foreword
TO ANTHONY POOKWORTHY, ESQ., A.B.S., L.L.R.
MY DEAR TONY,
It is with something more than the natural deference of a tyro at the loveliest, most arduous and perverse of the arts in the presence of a master-craftsman that I lay this book before you. You know (none better) the joys of the clean hearth and the rigour of the game. But perhaps I may be permitted to take this opportunity of explaining to you, a little more fully than I have hitherto hinted, something of the disabilities under which I have laboured to produce the pages now open beneath your hand.
As you know, I have spent some ten years of my creative life in the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices. God alone knows what the effect has been on my output of pure literature; I dare not think too much about it – even now. There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.
The effect of these locust years on my style (if I may lay claim to that lovely quality in the presence of a writer whose grave and lucid prose has permanently enriched our literature) has been perhaps even more serious.
The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. 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.
Far be it from me to pretend that the following pages achieve what first burned in my mind with pure lambency ten years ago. Which of us does? But the thing’s done! Ecco! É finito! And such as it is, and for what it is worth, it is yours.
You see, Tony, I have a debt to pay. Your books have been something more to me, in the last ten years, than books. They have been springs of refreshment, loafings for the soul, eyes in the dark. They have given me (in the midst of the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices) joy. It is just possible that it was not quite the kind of joy you intended them to give, for which of us is infallible? But it was joy all right.
I must confess, too, that I have more than once hesitated before the thought of trying to repay some fraction of my debt to you by offering you a book that was meant to be … funny.
For your own books are not … funny. They are records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg or fen. Your characters are ageless and elemental beings, tossed like straws on the seas of passion. You paint Nature at her rawest, in man and in landscapes. The only beauty that lights your pages is the grave peace of fulfilled passion, and the ripe humour that lies over your minor characters like a mellow light. You can paint everyday domestic tragedies (are not the entire first hundred pages of ‘The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare’ a masterly analysis of a bilious attack?) as vividly as you paint soul cataclysms. Shall I ever forget Mattie Elginbrod? I shall not. Your books are more like thunderstorms than books. I can only say, in all simplicity, ‘Thank you, Tony.’
But funny … No.
However, I am sure you are big enough, in every sense of the word, to forgive my book its imperfections.
And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.
It ought to help the reviewers, too.
Talking of men of genius, what a constellation burns in our midst at the moment! Even to a tyro as unpractised as myself, who has spent the best creative years of her life in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices, there is some consolation, some sudden exaltation into a serener and more ardent air, in subscribing herself,
Ever, my dear Tony,
Your grateful debtor,
STELLA GIBBONS
WATFORD.
LYONS’ CORNER HOUSE.
BOULOGNE-SUR-MER.
January 1931–February 1932.
CHAPTER I
The
education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
Her father had always been spoken of as a wealthy man, but on his death his executors were disconcerted to find him a poor one. After death duties had been paid and the demands of creditors satisfied, his child was left with an income of one hundred pounds a year, and no property.
Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.
She decided, therefore, to stay with a friend, a Mrs Smiling, at her house in Lambeth until she could decide where to bestow herself and her hundred pounds a year.
The death of her parents did not cause Flora much grief, for she had barely known them. They were addicted to travel, and spent only a month or so of each year in England. Flora, from her tenth year, had passed her school holidays at the house of Mrs Smiling’s mother; and when Mrs Smiling married, Flora spent them at her friend’s house instead. It was therefore with the feelings of one who returns home that she entered the precincts of Lambeth upon a gloomy afternoon in February, a fortnight after her father’s funeral.
Mrs Smiling was fortunate in that she had inherited house property in Lambeth before the rents in that district soared to ludicrous heights, following the tide of fashion as it swung away from Mayfair to the other side of the river, and the stone parapets bordering the Thames became, as a consequence, the sauntering ground of Argentinian women and their bullterriers. Her husband (she was a widow) had owned three houses in Lambeth which he had bequeathed to her. One, in Mouse Place, was the pleasantest of the three, and faced with its shell fanlight the changing Thames; here Mrs Smiling lived, while of the other two, one had been pulled down and a garage perpetrated upon its site, and the third, which was too small and inconvenient for any other purpose, had been made into the Old Diplomacy Club.