This is a guest post by Phyllis Orrick.
Stella Gibbons’s first novel Cold Comfort Farm still resonates, if vaguely, in the popular mind. “Wasn’t there a movie?” Or, “didn’t I see that on TV?” In England, “something nasty in the woodshed,” the phrase invoked by the supposedly mad Aunt Ada Starkadder, proprietress of the farm, is still a cultural touchstone almost 90 years after the book was first published.
But as wonderful a satiric comic masterpiece as Cold Comfort is, the dozen or so of Stella Gibbons’s later novels that I have read are just as — if not more — rewarding because they allow a deeper experience of Gibbons’s greatest literary character: herself.
That is not to say that she wrote the same book again and again, as so often happens with writers who strike the jackpot with their first published work; rather, she creates in each book a different prism (and sometimes more than one) through which she reveals different aspects of herself. To read multiple Stella Gibbons novels is to get to know her better and better, and she is a very satisfactory companion.
She was born in 1902, the first of three children of a quiet and sweet mother who died suddenly when Stella was in her 20s and a volatile father of Irish extraction, a “bad man, but a good doctor” (as she described a character thought to be based on him). Her childhood home life was marked by her father’s rages fueled by his unsatisfied career ambitions. In his 1998 biography, Out of the Woodshed: the Life of Stella Gibbons (Bloomsbury), Stella’s nephew Reggie Oliver quotes a letter from Stella’s daughter Laura (his cousin):
Every few weeks it was ‘That name is not mentioned in this house,’ with an accompanying shudder and pursed lips, as one or other member of the family indulged in some escapade of which the other disapproved. Consequently, sides were taken….
Stella was old enough to be affected by the experience of two world wars and the accompanying changes in British culture and society, as well as by the concomitant destruction of the English countryside and the rise of highways and car culture, all of which bothered her greatly.
Well-educated herself, and a writer who honed her skills on more than 10 years of meeting newspaper deadlines, she lets slip literary references easily understood by any conventionally educated English school graduate; she asserts unapologetically the inherent differences between men and women, the value of marriage and the power of beauty–male and female; money is usually on people’s minds, and she shows she knows how to live on meager earnings. She values tidiness and order, well-turned fashions, and sensitivity to children.
That catalog of subjects and attitudes could lead one to expect a stuffy, garrulous, old-fashioned storyteller. Instead, she takes the dross of mundane lives and spins it into fairy tales that are also down to earth. She peoples her novels with men and women whose aspirations have run aground, but who inhabit a world of metaphysical rebalancings and animistic forces that permit them some escape.
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For the purposes of this essay, I am drawing on only two novels, Bassett (1933) and The Woods in Winter (1970). They come near the start and end of her writing career. And they offer the clearest example of characters that reflect herself.
Bassett was the “conventional” book she was contractually obligated to write in order to convince her publisher to take Cold Comfort. The Woods in Winter was the last book she wrote for publication, though two other novels appeared posthumously.
Bassett opens with a typically succinct Gibbons observation:
There is a simplicity which comes from living too much in the world, as well as a simplicity which comes from living out of the world.
Hilda Baker belongs to the latter group. She is one of Gibbons’s shabby heroines of no great intellectual shakes or culture, but still worth knowing better. “Sensitive and intelligent people will refuse to believe that Miss Baker could be happy. However, Miss Baker was happy.”
She is also a beneficiary of one of those coincidences Stella regularly employs: Miss Baker (who has no living relatives) has suddenly inherited 200 pounds from a distant uncle. Added to her 180 pounds of savings from her paltry salary at a paper pattern office, she is faced with a dilemma of what to do with so much money. She fears it will “Dribble Away” (Gibbons’s caps) unless she makes a plan.
She responds to an advertisement soliciting “another lady, with some capital” to invest in converting a faded country estate to a boarding house. The response, from a Miss Eleanor Amy Padsoe, is postmarked “Bassett.”
And so we are off.
The letter from Miss Padsoe leaves Miss Baker “in some bewilderment,” and indeed, it is a masterpiece of flighty asides and unintelligible confidences. However, Hilda decides to visit. Once in the village, she accepts a ride from a handsome young man in a smart roadster, a silent girl at his side.
Miss Baker learns that the girl is Queenie Catton, another of Stella’s unlikely heroines and another partial stand-in for the author herself. Raised in a loud, activist socialist household, Queenie doesn’t fit in. She is, as her family admits, “our quiet one….So far she had effortlessly resisted all attempts to make her be anything…”
When Miss Padsoe and Miss Baker eventually meet, it does not start well. They are each horrified by the other, but of course do not say so. They eventually get along, and the flowering of their unlikely friendship is a pleasure to behold.
The young man who gives Miss Baker the ride is George Shelling, half of a cold-blooded aristocratic brother-sister duo who dream up sophisticated amusements while living in the country with their widowed mother. According to Reggie Oliver, Stella admitted she modeled the Shelling menage on the family of the man who ended their engagement; he, too, lived with his sister and mother and traveled in the “free love” set.
Queenie is the bridge between these two storylines as the hired helper to Mrs. Shelling and a loyal supporter of the two Misses.
In contrast to the louche brother and sister, Miss Padsoe and Baker pursue simple pleasures with beneficial results. “At eight-thirty precisely the two ladies, washed, dressed and trim … sat down to their eggs or sardines…. The afternoon was passed in more washing up and in cutting bread and butter for tea at half-past four, and then at half-past six it was time to begin preparing for supper at half-past seven. By ten … they ate cocoa and cake like schoolgirls, and fell into bed at eleven, drunk with unaccustomed work, and slept all night.”
In typical Gibbons fashion, Bassett climaxes in a whirlwind of loose ends being tidied up in a way that is satisfying but not always expected.
The Woods in Winter, the last novel Gibbons wrote for publication, seems an intentional bookend to Bassett and an autobiographical coda. She sets it in roughly the same period as Bassett , the early 30s. The early action takes place in two settings familiar to her, the seamy precincts of the North London of her girlhood and Hampstead Heath, where she lived much of her adult life.
Its beginning is once-upon-a-time-ish: “Some forty years ago, there used to be in North London a place called St. Philip’s Square…. It was not a true square, but a rectangle, open at one end to a main road, along which trams and buses ran up to Hampstead Heath; a drab yet swarming place….”
As in Bassett , Gibbons creates two characters far apart in social standing and education but reflecting two aspects of herself: Helen Green, the young aspiring poet (Gibbons’s first book was a collection of poems, favorably viewed by important figures of the time), and Ivy Gover, the old fabulist.
Helen is well-educated and moves in high-brow Bohemian circles but is not quite a part of them; Ivy is a barely literate char who has gypsy-like powers and a proletarian sureness of where she stands (she always thinks of Helen as “Miss Green”). Ivy and Helen are connected by the fact that Helen employs Ivy to clean the small, dark cottage she is renting from a mother of a friend of hers; it’s located in the Vale of Health, the same stretch of Hampstead Heath that Gibbons lived in.
Again, as in Bassett , a bit of luck visits a penurious city-dwelling lower-class female of a certain age. Ivy’s great-uncle, whom she hasn’t seen since her girlhood, bequeaths his rundown cottage in the country near where Ivy was born and where she was sent to char for the gentry at age 11.
For Ivy, the Square is a hectic place: “The Square simmered in the early autumn plague of heat, sending up its shrieks and shouts and heavy footsteps to a pair of small ears that carried two beads of heavy gold, chased with a design that looked ancient, on delicate lobes.” In contrast, Helen looks out on “a prospect very different…. a quiet little street, made up of grey pavement and a long brown wood fence, above which looked the innocent head of a may tree whose berries were just beginning to redden, all lit faintly by the gold of the ascending moon. A bird was singing, far off in the dark woods of the Heath–perhaps even a nightingale–anyway, it was a heartbreaking sound, and Helen thought that she was exceedingly unhappy.”
Ivy, suspicious of the lawyer’s big words, goes to Helen to have her read the letter about the bequest. Helen reassures Ivy that the offer is valid and that she is lucky to have it.
By the time she wrote The Woods in Winter, Gibbons had perfected the technique of dueling interior and exterior dialogs, where each participant is saying what they don’t think and thinking what they don’t say, as in this exchange between Ivy and Miss Green:
“Just think, Ivy. It’s beautiful country there. I … know it well…”
Ivy was not interested in what Miss Green knew.
This being a Stella Gibbons novel, there are a number of pairings both theoretical and actual and various courtships, not all successful. Marriage is one of Stella’s interests. Though she shows sympathy for those who take a more transactional approach, she comes down on the side of marrying for love. In this novel, there are two such marriages by its end.
Of Helen and Ivy, Ivy is the more compelling character. Here she is in her first full night in the cottage, with her dog Neb. Ivy has just said farewell to a friend of her late husband who has delivered her mattress in his van and put it in the bedroom upstairs. Just before he takes his final leave, he suggests she air it out.
Ivy ran up. Up the stairs she raced, light as a leaf, with Neb after her, and in a minute down tumbled her mattress, almost into the fire … straightening it with determined kicks from her sturdy small boot. “Airin’! It don’t need no airin’, do it, beauty?…”
The story never leaves the country setting once Ivy is settled there. The characters Stella has created play out their dances under her masterful direction.
Her final chapter brings us to the present of 1970, as Stella is entering the winter of her life (she was 68 when it was published). Helen makes a final visit to the quaint village near the woods of the title. The High Street of Nethersham is now a tangle of automobile traffic, rooftop television antennas and suburban villas.
Helen escapes the traffic and noise to walk to the hilltop demesne of the old Lord (long dead). Helen encounters one of her friends from the old days and asks about the characters whose fates we do not know. Gibbons writes, “Helen had not quite yet come to that age when one hesitates to ask after a contemporary not seen for years. But she was one the edge of it.”
Helen takes one last look at the Lord’s hill and its beeches as she heads toward “the flat, beetle-like tops of the cars, jerking, stopping, jerking, stopping, behind the hedges whose lower branches were clotted with litter and grey with dust.
There they stood, high above her and far away, solemn and still in the waning fire of sunset; towers and castles of rustling green; benign father-gods of the woods; filled with their gently-stirring life in the blue air of summer or roaring slowly in winter’s gales….
The last passage is a word-for-word reprise of Helen’s private musings some 40 years earlier when she proffered her congratulations to Ivy on her good fortune in inheriting the cottage (which Ivy rejected silently). This constancy of Helen’s attitudes within the span of the 40-year narrative is matched by Gibbons’s constancy in her outlook over the nearly 40 years that separate these novels; this is what makes Gibbons’s appeal timeless, just like a fairy tale.
In her monumental reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, New York.1976), Katharine Briggs notes that the term “fairy” is relatively recent and is derived from “the classical three Fates … supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men ….” Stella and her fictional stand-ins were deeply concerned with getting other people’s lives properly sorted out and in conformance with Gibbons’s deeply felt morality. Following her efforts over the decades is a source of pleasure.
Bassett is available from Penguin Vintage Classics and The Woods in Winter is available from Dean Street Press.
Phyllis Orrick is a retired academic editor and former alternative newspaper editor and feature writer. Follow her on Twitter: @orrickle