Cold Comfort Farm Read Free Page B

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 parodictitles 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 considers 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’,