Cold Comfort Farm Read Free Page A

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 seemsthat 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 readsthe 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,