more cold comfort farm!

You know, I’ve just become fascinated with Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm, who met such great success at an early age and is rewarded now, years later, with virtually no one knowing of her wonderful book. It is just such a delightful read — and how many books does a person read these days that ARE that — just plain delightful? I mean, really. There are so many twists of phrase and layers of humor in the way she writes. Her brain seemed to possess this ability to swerve deftly from A to some unexpected B that just makes you laugh out loud. You can read a passage, go back to it later, and howl at something else altogether. She was a comic genius. With Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons wrote a kind of parody on the “natural” novels of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. The public loved it; the critics decried it.

Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Really, it all boils down to this: I have a crush on Stella Gibbons. And please don’t freak out on me. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sex. It’s just … if she were still with us — she died in 1989 — I’d want to be able to sit like a little kid at gramma’s knee and say, “Oh, please tell me a story.” Sometimes you just feel you want to know someone just by the way they write. You’d give anything just to sit silent for hours while they talk and talk and talk. So, see, that’s my crush on a dead woman.

There’s an introduction to Cold Comfort Farm written by Lynne Truss that I particularly like. She discusses the book’s special magic, why it was popular then, why the critics were jerks, why no one knows about the book now. I like this excerpt:

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 had 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 is that Stella Gibbons is personally quite torn between the values of Flora (ed. our heroine) 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 a much of a solace to her as books. 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 ….Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic cliches — rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 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.

And if you read that to the end, BLESS you! And stayed tuned for more excerpts — because I’m pretty sure I can’t stop!!