September 08, 2009
Stella Gibbons Kills A Genre (1932)
Few writers get credit for starting a genre — like Poe with the detective story, or Wells or Verne for science-fiction — but on this date in 1932, Stella Gibbons killed one.Four years before, as a young woman working at a London newspaper, Gibbons was assigned the task of summarizing the plot of a novel that was being published in installments. Mary Webb's "The Golden Web" was a novel of the "Loam and Lovechild" school of fiction, which portrayed nature as rough and wild, men and women ruled by their passions, sexual and otherwise, and rural families as combative as any found in the Old Testament. This popular novel was part of a literary genre that ran back to Thomas Hardy and can even include, on a more rarified level, "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Even William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County might be considered a country cousin to the genre.
Although vastly popular in her time, Webb was no D.H. Lawrence, and she's been largely forgotten. Readers today would have little patience with passages such as:
"'See you Deb! The flockmaster goes westering; and the brown water and the blue wind above the cloud and the kestrels and you and me all go after the shippen with the starry door. Hear you Deb, what a noise o' little leaves clapping in the far coppy! Tis he, that shakes the bits of leaves and the bits of worlds, and sends love like forkit lightning— him as the stars fall before like white 'ool at sheep shearing...'"Gibbons thought it dreadful stuff, so she decided to skewer it with her own story, about a smart young woman who moves in with her neurotic rural relatives. The source of her inspiration was none other than her parents, who seemed to take a perverse delight in histrionics. In one memorable incident when she was 11, her melancholic father threatened suicide and her mother begged Stella to intervene. Even at that age, she recognized that her father was secretly enjoying the agony he was inflicting on his family, and this pretense and emotional cruelty left a deep impression.
"Cold Comfort Farm" is a young writer's novel, full of energy and wit, written to entertain Gibbons and her friends and caring not a whit for what anyone else thinks. The encounter between the educated Flora Poste and her cousins in the Starkadder family gave her free rein to deflate not only rural virtues and vices, but the fads and fancies of the 1930s as well: Freudianism, Hollywood, even Lawrence's philosophy that the urging of the blood is wiser than that of the intellect. She penned a mock-fawning foreword dedicating the book to "Anthony Pookworthy, Esq. A.B.S., L.L.B"— a disguised Hugh Walpole, the noted novelist whom she saw as pompous and over-rated (the initials stand for Associate Back Scratcher and Licensed Log Roller). For the reviewers' convenience, she designated noteworthy examples of her best prose with one, two or three stars as "perfected by the late Herr Baedeker."
A typical three-star passage ran like this:
" * * * The man's big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman . . . Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins, like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-coloured, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bridge-path of the bull in his hour. All his, his . . .The manuscript was originally called "Curse God Farm," but she renamed it at a friend's suggestion after a place in the Midlands which no one had been able to make a go of.
"Will you have some bread and butter?" asked Flora, handing him a cup of tea. "Oh, never mind your boots. Adam can sweep the mud up afterwards. Do come in."
Published on Sept. 8, 1932, Gibbons's debut novel was a smash. Punch praised her for mocking with devilish skill "'a certain type of much read, earthy passionate novel -- the kind of story in which peasants have babies in cow sheds and push each other down wells." Gibbon quit newspaper journalism for the writing life, but along with success, she seems to have also acquired the farm's curse. For the next 40 years, she published novels, short stories and poems, but "Cold Comfort Farm" remained her only success.
"I always love hearing from a reader who has enjoyed my other books as well as that wretched CCF," she wrote later in life to a fan. "I know this sounds ungrateful, but honestly, I do get rather browned off with having it tagged onto me -- or rather, me tagged onto it. "
Born: Frédéric Mistral, poet, Maillane, France, 1830; Alfred Jarry, poet, playwright, Laval, France, 1873; Siegfried Sassoon, poet, novelist, London, 1886; Grace Metalious, novelist, Manchester, N.H., 1924; Michael Frayn, playwright, London, 1933; Ann Beattie, author, Washington, D.C., 1947.
Died: William Tindall, essayist, critic, New York City, 1981.
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