Stella Gibbons, “Cold Comfort Farm”

I have never lived in a dwelling without a copy of Stella Gibbons‘ Cold Comfort Farm. It’s basic equipment, like a tea kettle. You re-read it periodically to experience, once again, the brisk pleasures of Our Heroine Flora Poste’s effect on the surly, poorly groomed denizens of this agricultural establishment in Sussex. As the years go by, you accumulate your favorite moments:  the names of the cows (Aimless, Pointless, Feckless and Graceless); Adam Lambsbreath’s “liddle mop;” the magnificence of Seth Starkadder who is forever “lounging” into rooms and more or less popping out of his scanty garments.

The novel was written as satire, but it functions as humor even if you’re ignorant of the source material, which I guess is heavy-breathing fiction in the style of, say, D.H. Lawrence. There’s a lot of mud and resentment, and Gibbons has helpfully highlighted her favorite passages to make it easier for reviewers to find and quote them. These would be the bits where the farm crouches on the hillside like an angry animal, etc. etc. The “plot” of the novel is the old genteel-orphan-throws-herself-on-the-mercy-of-unknown-relatives situation, but Flora is a clear-eyed modern girl and her refusal to behave like Jane Eyre provides some of the fun. (The crazy woman in a closed room upstairs is no match for Flora’s cool common sense.)

Pure, reliable pleasure every time.

Elizabeth Taylor, “A View of the Harbour”

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the few writers whose books I will choose blindly. If she wrote a novel and I haven’t read it, I don’t even bother to see what it’s about. Or “about,” because with Taylor there’s always a great deal seething away below the surface. A View of the Harbour, for instance, is one of the more ostensibly quiet of her novels. The structure is apparently casual: the omniscient narrator rambles from one resident to another of the seaside village of Newby, examining the little community and its surroundings in a clear, dispassionate light.

Cadgwith Cove, probably more picturesque than Taylor’s Newby.

The outlander is Bertram Hemingway, a retired naval officer who fancies himself an artist and has come to Newby to paint. His function for Taylor, of course, is to be the outsider who misunderstands or the outsider who notices afresh, and provides insight. The two genteel families are the Cazabons and their next-door neighbor, Tory Foyle. Tory is an unstable element in this setting, a beautiful young divorcee with a young son and a propensity for fecklessness. Beth Cazabon, the novelist who lives next door, has always been Tory’s staid, predictable sidekick. But, this being an Elizabeth Taylor novel, Beth Cazabon has her own unruly qualities. In Angela Thirkell’s hands, she would merely be the frumpy neighbor with the peculiar daughters, but Beth, as Tory points out, has a wild and reliable source of satisfaction in her writing. “‘She is about the only happy person I know,’” Tory tells Robert Cazabon. “‘Don’t you see how she is to be envied? Nothing people do can ever break her.’”

And why is Tory discussing Robert’s wife with him, on these intimate terms? Well might you ask: this relationship is another un-Thirkell development. So is the coarse but vital Mrs. Bracey, fat, crippled and malicious, who makes life grim for her daughters Maisie and Iris. Then the widowed Lily Wilson, proprietress of a pathetic Wax Museum, seems on the verge of slipping into alcoholism or a kind of informal prostitution or possibly both. In fact A View of the Harbour resembles Stella Gibbons’ classic Cold Comfort Farm, with its relish of peculiarities. Taylor, though, avoids Gibbons‘ satiric tone, so we participate in Lily Wilson’s desperation and Mrs. Bracey’s will to dominate.

And what happens in the novel? Oh, life and death. The war is recently over, Newby is poor and shabby. Summer comes and the tourists don’t. Bertram doesn’t paint. Maisie flirts with her mother’s lodger, a fisherman, and Mrs. Bracey kicks him out of the house. The Cazabons’ daft daughter Prudence feeds disgusting messes to her two elegant Siamese cats, Yvette and Guilbert. Tory buys frivolous hats. A yacht skims the water of the bay, white sails looking irrelevant in their beauty. Hats, cats, boats, hearts, they’re all equally important.

Nancy Mitford, “Wigs on the Green”

I was recently thrilled to discover a long-lost Stella Gibbons novel, Nightingale Wood, which has just been republished by Penguin. Perhaps encouraged by that delight, I leapt on the handsome new Vintage paperback of Nancy Mitford’s long-out-of-print Wigs on the Green. But I was reminded that many neglected books deserve to remain that way. Of course, given the energy of the Mitford industry it seems unlikely that any scribblings by any of those sisters will remain overlooked for long.

There are two reasons for the long disappearance of Wigs on the Green, the first of which is that it’s a satire of the British Fascists, so ardently espoused by Nancy’s sister Diana. The book may have been intended as a light-hearted romp but it was apparently completely transparent — the introduction by Diana’s daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley notes that the character of young political enthusiast Eugenia Malmains is a clear portrait of Unity Mitford. The sisters did not speak for years afterward.

Unfortunately, the other reason the book has been forgotten is that it just isn’t any good. Nancy produced two charming novels, Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, but before she achieved those she penned a couple of damp squibs called Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding. (Afterward she went on to write truly wonderful biographies of mostly eighteenth-century figures: Madame de Pompadour, Frederick the Great, Voltaire.) Wigs on the Green is one of those starter novels. It reads less like an actual piece of fiction than like a set of stage directions, strangely declarative, almost hortatory, and the characters are mostly cardboard figures. Roughly, the plot involves two young-men-about-town who travel to a Cotswold village to pay court to a local heiress. This is the beautiful but peculiar Eugenia Malmains/Diana Mitford, granddaughter of Lord and Lady Chalford. She has been brought up in virtual seclusion and cares only about the Union Jack Movement. Madcap doings ensue, culminating in an historical pageant at the magnificent estate of Chalford House. Village life is sketched in: there are arty young men at nearby Rackenbridge, a couple of hearty yokels, an insane asylum populated entirely by peers, and my favorite character, the deliciously pretentious Ann-Marie Lace who sees life as one dramatic opportunity after another. She is inclined to adopt a foreign accent owing to six months’ worth of singing lessons in Paris, and dresses more for the stage than for village life.

Mrs. Lace is funny. Certain throwaway lines are funny. My favorite section comes when Eugenia has to explain to her new friends what an Aryan is:

“‘Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes.’

“‘How about Siamese cats?’ said Jasper.

“‘That’s true. But Siamese cats possess, to a notable degree, the Nordic virtue of faithfulness.’

“‘Indeed they don’t,’ said Poppy. ‘We had one last summer and he brought back a different wife every night…’

“Eugenia was in no way put out. ‘I know, they may not be faithful to non-Aryan cats… But they love their Nordic owners and even go for long walks with them.’

“‘So your definition of an Aryan is somebody who will go for long walks with other Aryans?’”

This is loopy enough to sound like a transcription of an actual conversation among those daffy Mitford gals, and confirms my opinion that Nancy’s writing is at its best when it most closely resembles the truth. Or a slightly more sparkling version thereof.

Stella Gibbons, “Nightingale Wood”

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm was a fixture of my youth, a book everyone in the family read over and over again, though it was years before I understood it to be a satire. (Yes, sadly, I was a child who actually believed it was reasonable to name cows Aimless, Graceless, Feckless, and Pointless.) I finally grasped its true nature and have never been without a copy of the book since adulthood, so I was thrilled to receive Nightingale Wood from a friend. Even more thrilled to read the first sentence: “It is difficult to make a dull garden, but old Mr Wither had succeeded.”

Here’s what this short sentence told me. First, we are in the safe company of prosperous Englishmen, probably in the inter-War years, since no one else bothers to “make gardens.” Second, our narrator is going to take a firm line through the story, telling us what to think about the characters. Third, said narrator is perfectly happy to take a swipe at her own creations; in fact, she doesn’t much care for Mr. Wither at all. A very promising beginning, and Stella Gibbons kept it up. The story concerns well-bred well-fed people, the ones who populate E.F. Benson and Angela Thirkell. Gibbons, though, is less mean-spirited than Benson and more psychologically acute than Thirkell. Nightingale Wood is a re-working of the Cinderella story but it’s more like origami than a straight re-telling. Yes, ultimately, a modern orphan marries a modern prince, but there are multiple candidates for both of those roles and the plot has a way of doubling back on itself that just extends the pleasure.

Handsome car, but the chauffeur's even better-looking

Briefly, the story involves the intertwining of two well-off families in two comfortable houses that face each other across a wooded dell in Essex. The Withers are, as their name announces, joyless, while the Springs are noisy and cheerful. The Young People get involved with each other. And while Gibbons is sympathetic to most of her characters, she is not beyond skewering their pretensions. Thus Hetty Franklin, the mournful intellectual niece who lives with the Springs, mulls over her misfortune one afternoon before a party: “The world was so beautiful! so crammed with romance, excitement, horror, irony! In every part of it, except at Grassmere near Sible Pelden in Essex, there were to be found truths that were stranger than fiction, and more satisfying…. There were people to be taught, wrongs to be righted, there were politics and history and economics…  I know just how Florence Nightingale felt.”

It’s this little trace of affectionate mockery that makes Gibbons special. As one character tries to seduce another, the narrator announces, “Champagne can never be ordered without the temperature shooting up.” At a wedding, relating the eager attention of the guests, she says, “Their wistful, envious, interested eyes take in the tiniest detail, the finest shade of expression, the last shred of meaning, in everything that happens. It is very tiring to be a woman.” But very rewarding, with a book like this in your hands.

Andrew Taylor, “Bleeding Heart Square”

It’s a really good day when you find a new writer who publishes clever, literate murder mysteries. It’s an especially good day when this writer has been at it for a while and there’s a backlog of titles for you to work through. And it’s a terrific day when the writer is Andrew Taylor, and your introduction to him is Bleeding Heart Square.

Bleeding Heart Square hardcover

His U.S. publisher, Hyperion, is issuing some of this previous books along with this one, and they all have beautiful covers with architectural photographs, vaguely sinister, dark-toned — not unlike the covers of the Alan Furst books. Say what you will, these designers know just how to signal the contents of these novels. Bleeding Heart Square is set in 1934 London, as economic conditions reduce the options of many Britons, and the Fascist party starts to stir up all kinds of ugly trouble. But Taylor, clever man, maps this situation onto a 19th-century framework. Did you remember that Bleeding Heart Yard is the setting of a big chunk of Little Dorrit? (It’s OK, I had to check, and I just read the darn thing.) Furthermore certain characters in Bleeding Heart Square — the alcoholic gentleman ne’er-do-well, the physically imposing and menacing landlord — share DNA with Dickens’ characters.

But Taylor’s not slavish, and the mystery part eventually overruns the Dickensian scaffolding. Lydia Langstone, 28 and pretty, has left her boorish rich husband (soon to join the British Union of Fascists) because he bullies her. She flees to her estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who lives in a squalid boarding house in Bleeding Heart Square. Taylor is especially good on the nitty-gritty reality here: Lydia left home with “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones’ Own but she had forgotten her toothbrush.”

There’s a murder, there are sinister clues (literal bleeding hearts are regularly sent to the frightening landlord, Serridge). There’s a downtrodden police investigator (more Dickens) and a fresh-faced journalist who falls for Lydia. Several sections take place in the country but it’s more Stella Gibbons than Angela Thirkell. No laughs, though.

Still, all the literary allusions bring a level of playfulness to the plotting. Which, by the way, is excellent. Twists and turns all the way, right to the end. A really artful piece of work.