Cold Comfort Farm / Old-fashioned humour and humanity

Stella Gibbons

READING GROUP

Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm: old-fashioned humour and humanity

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) 

It's a parody that outlived the original objects of its scorn. Just why is Gibbons's novel so enduringly popular?

SAM JORDISON

Tuesday 17 December 2013

Last week, I described Cold Comfort Farm as a virtuoso send-up of early 20th century "loam and love child" books. But this isn't how most people read it. Mary Webb and friends are increasingly distant memories, after all, and you don't need to read a parody to see the funny side of DH Lawrence's novels. There are other reasons Cold Comfort Farm endures, as a contributor called Dowland pointed out:

The reason why CCF has survived so well is that it's a splendid book in its own right. You really don't need to know Lawrence or Webb's work to enjoy the book, since the characters and dialogue are so good. It's a bit like Three Men in a Boat or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the works they make fun of are mostly forgotten now, but the work stands on its own …

If a parody has nothing to say other than to mock a certain style which is current (and which has probably had its day, mostly by inferior copies of a once vibrant original), then it won't outlive the original. But like Blazing Saddles, Cold Comfort Farm is a parody that also manages to say something original. Also, it's funny!

I agree with Dowland: there's more to this than spoofery. Why else would so many people continue to enjoy reading it? Even so, it's tricky to explain the appeal. Dowland says that the book manages to say something original. But what?Possibly, we might see an original philosophical outlook in Flora's reliance on The Higher Common Sense. We never get to see anything much of this book, which she carts around everywhere, just as we never find out what it was that Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed, or how Flora's father was done out of his rights (aside from a hilariously cryptic – and troubling – reference to a goat).

That's just as it should be. Gibbons is an expert at the devious hint, the suggestive elision. Our minds boggle all the more for being left to their own devices.

Although we don't get to read Flora's book, we do see it put into practice. Flora's essential talent is to stop people being ridiculous – or at least, to stop them being ridiculous in situations where they can do any harm. She never displays contempt. She's even polite to Amos Starkadder about the Church of the Quivering Brethren and his opinion that "ye're all damned." Nor does she indulge the emotional excesses or strange beliefs of the Starkadder clan. She doesn't take herself too seriously – and doesn't make that mistake with other people, either, except in that she is loyal to her friends and kind to others. Should we aspire to a similar breed of suave, understated urbanity? It's tempting to see Flora as an ideal version of the author: the parodies of purple prose fit perfectly with Flora's attitudes to anything highly strung.

If we are to see Flora as a role model, it's also possible to see the book as a failure. Mary Beard, in a typically thought-provoking piece for the Times Literary Supplement, declared that Cold Comfort Farm "didn't do it for me" for this very reason. The more you think about what Flora represents, the less appealing she becomes: "I thought we had been reading a rather controlling victory of modern order, cleanliness, contraception and medicine – over these messy, different, rural types … Flora got her way on everything – at which we, the readers, were meant to be delighted, and applaud her future nuptials."

Flora has come along and tamed the wild Starkadders and sanitised their farm. She's interfered. She is like Jane Austen's Emma, only she never gets her comeuppance and never learns not to meddle.

The issue is whether we see this as part of the joke or part of the message. Given that Flora ends up marrying a man who is her cousin, and a clergyman to boot, I tend to consider her part of the joke. In many ways, Flora herself is absurd. It's hard to believe, for instance, that Gibbons shares her disdain for anyone ever saying anything intelligent, or for education:

One of the disadvantages of the almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a funny feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wearing one's favourite dressing gown.

There's recognisable half-truth in that line. Plenty of us have winced when our favourite secret bands break into the big time and every sucker starts wearing their T-shirt. But the real intention of that passage is surely just to make us laugh. We aren't expected to take the ideas seriously – or Flora, for that matter. Gibbons may have complained about Cold Comfort Farm's popularity later on in her life, but only because it came at the expense of her other books. She didn't want people like Flora keeping her books to themselves.

I'm inclined to regard her attempts to mould the Starkadders in the same way. She's out for fun, rather than on a moral mission – and we should feel the same. Mary Beard may be right that the book isn't "entirely nice", but she's possibly taking Flora too seriously. A telling moment comes when Flora's friend Claud comes to visit: "How you do enjoy yourself, don't you, Florence Nightingale?" says Claud. Flora retorts: "I do … and so do you."

Interestingly, that passage also contains one of the few moments we probably are expected to take more seriously. The next lines are: "It was true; he did. But never without a pang of exquisite pain in his heart, and a conviction that he was a traitor." Claud has served in the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46". He has seen friends die horribly. In 1933, that was no joke. But the rest is.

So, if we accept that the book is mainly aiming for the funny bone, where does that get us with Dowland's original challenge? What is it that helps it stand alone? There's the fact that the laughs keep coming, I suppose, although I have to admit I laughed far less later in the book, after I had grown more used to the gloriously extravagant style and the story was starting to seem more like a homage to Jane Austen than a jab at DH Lawrence.

But there was plenty more to maintain interest in the book in these later stages. For one thing, it's full of warmth. Gibbons encourages us to laugh at the Starkadders – but in doing so she also makes us like them. We quickly start to want the best for them, so it is very pleasing when Flora supplies it. No matter what you may think of her methods, it's impossible not to admire how neatly everything is resolved. She is a grand master, the Starkadders supremely entertaining pawns, and the game comes to a satisfying conclusion when everyone gets what they want – including generations of happy readers. Maybe it isn't the originality of the book that continues to appeal, so much as its good old-fashioned sense of humour and humanity.

THE GUARDIAN