Dear Reader,
I’m back from the Berkshires, resplendent in June glory, and maybe you have been going a bit further afield as well. Allow me to introduce you to this snapping turtle, who appeared to be casing my front yard in Stockbridge one evening for a nest site.
I would like to explore themes of the pastoral and the rural this summer, and I also want to read across a wider range of genres. So in that spirit I’m pressing a splendrous parody of the pastoral into your hands this week.
Review
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Penguin Classics, 2006
233 pages
$16.00
It’s a risky business being active and alert in this era of democratic backsliding, overlapping disasters, and accelerating extinction; among other things, we risk losing our sense of humor. We may tend to operate in a narrow range of modes that include sober analysis, earnest contemplation, lyrical observation, righteous indignation, liberal guilt, anticipatory grief, determined optimism, and bunker-stocking fatalism. The sunny, the silly, the sly, and the hilarious can all become victims of a crowding out effect. When everything matters so urgently, there are no laughing matters.
In an effort to correct this potentially serious imbalance of literary electrolytes, I humbly offer for your consideration Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons (1902-1989). Gibbons grew up in working class Kentish Town in London with her parents and two brothers. Her father was a respected physician and an abusive alcoholic. In his daughter’s formulation he was “a good doctor and a bad man.” Both parents died unexpectedly in 1926 and Stella Gibbons found work as a journalist to support herself and her siblings after they were orphaned. In the late 1920s she wrote poems that attracted the favorable attention of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and then she published this comic masterpiece in 1932. It was an instant commercial success. Cold Comfort Farm has been in print continuously for 89 years and has been dramatized many times over.
The book begins with two big bangs. Bang One is a faux letter accompanying a copy of the book addressed to Anthony Pookworthy, Esq., A.B.S., L.R.R. Pookworthy is a famous writer of serious fiction (“records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg, or fen”) and Gibbons notes that after honing the craft of concision as a journalist, “I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favorable reviews, to write as though I was not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.” She announces that she is writing for those who “work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure if a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle,” and for their benefit has marked the finer passages with the stars used by travel guides. After Bang One we know we will be having fun with famous writers, various genres and the literary establishment. Gibbons meant A.B.S. and L.L.R. to stand for Associate Back Scratcher, Licensed Log Roller.
Bang Two is the first sentence of the novel, in which Gibbons introduces us to our heroine with a flourishing doff of the cap to Jane Austen.
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.
We’re off to the races. While the heroines of Austen and George Eliot had to get on without much formal education, Flora got an elaborate one; unfortunately, it’s useless to her in this moment of crisis. In a perfect first sentence we learn that like many a great heroine, Flora Poste will have to live by her wits. She’s got them to spare.
Like Anne Elliot, the heroine of Austen’s Persuasion, who relies on the advice of Lady Russell, Flora has an important older woman in her life to guide her. Mrs. Smiling (performed with plummy relish by Joanna Lumley in the 1995 movie version of Cold Comfort Farm) is a rich, young widow of a racketeer with a townhouse in Lambeth and a butler named Sneller. She collects brassières and also handsome men with nicknames like Bikki and Swooth. Mrs. Smiling counsels Flora to take a typing course and get a job, but Flora has other ideas. “. . .[N]o limits are set, either by society or by one’s own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one’s relatives.” And off she goes to her mother’s cousins, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in deepest, darkest Sussex, fearing she may have a cousin with grimy hands named Seth, or Reuben, who will need tidying.
The farm was crouched on a bleak, hillside whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away. Its stables and outhouses were built in the shape of a rough octangle . . .
Fanged with flints? Octangle? These are just early entries in Gibbon’s parade of parody and portmanteau. With surgical finesse, she skewers the ‘loam and lovechild’ conventions of rural novels by authors like Mary Webb (Precious Bane) and D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow), as well as Thomas Hardy (The Woodlanders) and T. F. Powys (Mr. Tasker’s Gods).
The ranks of the Starkadder family are stocked with Old Testament names and stock personalities. Father Amos is the brimstone belching lay-preacher. His wife, Judith, harbors an unhealthy obsession with her handsome son, Seth, the local bounder. Seth’s brother Reuben is the yeoman of the bunch. There’s an ethereal daughter, Elfine, who wanders the downs composing poetry in vaguely medieval garb, and a servant girl who is constantly giving birth. Farmhand Ben scrubs the dishes with a thorn twig. The cows are named Graceless, Pointless, Aimless, and Feckless. And the proverbial madwoman confined to the upper reaches of the farmhouse is Aunt Ada Doom, the force keeping all these people stuck on the farm and trapped in its mire. There are mutterings about “rights” and ravings about “something nasty in the woodshed.” Beware the porridge.
Undaunted, Flora telegrams Mrs. Smiling: “worst fears realized darling seth and reuben too send gumboots.” She even has to cope with a toxic writer dude, Myburg, who, in a Lawrentian mode, sees practically every tree as a phallus, and every bud as a nipple. Myburg is writing a book arguing that Charlotte Bronte’s brother actually wrote Jane Eyre, and he won’t stop hitting on Flora or criticizing her as inhibited. With a very modern nod to Austen’s Emma, Flora has a comprehensive scheme that involves a rich mix of matchmaking, contraceptive counseling, Hollywood contacts, and a copy of the “Internationally Progressive Farmer’s Guide and Helpmeet.” I won’t say too much more, because there are just so many great bits. We know we are on our way out of the wind-scoured downs and the sucking mud, when there’s a fancy dress ball. A wedding in Sussex sunshine can’t be denied us to cap things off.
I couldn’t help thinking of Stella Gibbons last week, when I saw that the British author, Jeannette Winterson had burned copies of her own books.
These were advance copies of two reissues. Winterson was incensed by the “cosy” blurbs, which she felt categorized her books as “wimmin’s fiction.” She also said, “I wouldn’t buy one of my books with those suburban blurbs.” Wimmins fiction? Suburban blurbs? Literature or flapdoodle? Winterson follows in the line of literary artistes like T.S. Eliot who inveighed against “suburban democracy” and Louis Macneice who wrote of “suburb-dwellers, spinsters, schoolteachers” looking for “an uncritical escape from their daily lives.”
Notwithstanding all the fun Gibbons had with genre and style in Cold Comfort Farm, its wide audience appeal resulted in her being pigeon-holed as a middlebrow, not a literary, writer. Virginia Woolf complained bitterly in a letter to a fellow writer when Gibbons won the Prix Femina vie Heureuse for the book in 1933. Gibbons wrote 22 more novels, many with suburban settings and middle-class themes, but she never received much critical attention or praise for them. Lots of her books were out of print until recent years. Gibbons didn’t seem to mind too much. She wasn’t interested in publicity or running with a highbrow crowd. She was pleased to be writing for Punch.
Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow has done the most, and inspired other critics, to advance our understanding of Gibbon’s achievements. Dr. Hammill generously shared a trove of Gibbons scholarship (including an article of hers that includes those Eliot and Macneice quotes above) with me this week, and it is refreshing to see that Stella Gibbons’ feminism is being explored extensively. Hammill argues that Cold Comfort Farm is written from an implicitly suburban viewpoint, “balancing between urban modernity and pastoral, between the conventional and the ex-centric” and moving toward “subtle yet far-reaching subversion and challenge.”
The word that keeps rolling back to me is comfort. Gibbons made it clear in later reflections that Cold Comfort Farm sprang from her experience as a young girl trapped in an unhappy and scary household. Flora, the unflappable Flapper, is a rescuing angel, here to restore our sense of humor, free us from the forces that are holding us back and bring us comfort in an anxious age. Comfort and laughter can be allies of progress.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Reading Cold Comfort Farm made me think back to my reading of American Harvest by Marie Mockett, and our contemporary urban-rural divide in the United States. The political junkies among you may be familiar with Dave Wasserman’s famous Whole Foods & Cracker Barrel analysis of the U.S. electorate. Wasserman crunched the numbers and discovered that the locations of these two retail chains mapped almost perfectly against the partisan divide in America.
In this contemporary context, I must recommend the sitcom Schitt’s Creek. Schitt’s Creek tells the story of the Rose family, millionaire jet-setters who have lost their fortune and must—without the proverbial paddle—move to the backwater town of Schitt’s Creek, which the father bought as a joke years before. This is a Whole Foods family that finds itself in Cracker Barrel country. Enjoy, and don’t forget to “fold in the cheese!”
Poem of the Week
Strange things befall cows in Cold Comfort Farm. And in this poem, too.
For Your Reading Radar
Scottish journalist Cal Flyn has a new book called Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in a Post-Human Landscape. Flyn visits a series of landscapes that have been abandoned by humans and resettled by other species, from mines in Scotland to factories in Detroit to the communities buried by volcanic ash on the island of Montserrat. Kathleen Jamie describes the book as “fascinating, eerie and strange.”
For Your Calendar
The literary journal A Public Space continues its series of online reading experiences this month taking on The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald and translated by Michael Hulse. I discovered Sebald in the last year thanks to a dear friend, to whom I am forever grateful, as he is now one of my favorite writers. Elisa Gabbert posts reflections daily on Twitter and readers chime in using #APSTogether. Gabbert will host a Zoom conversation at the conclusion of the read on June 22 at 7:30 PM Eastern. Register here.
Bookshop of the Week
There is no shortage of charming bookshops in Surrey. I would love to visit Much Ado Books in Alfriston, East Sussex. It has bright blue barn doors and a matching shepherd’s hut in the forecourt. The owners host lots of events and have a letterpress.
Have a great weekend and consider reporting for duty to the Ministry of Silly Walks. xo Nicie