The Waves (1931) and Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

THE WAVES (1931) and COLD COMFORT FARM (1932)

‘…that pleasure [of reading] is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick – the reason why we have made better shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this – we have loved reading.’
Virginia Woolf from Essays Volume 5: 1929  to 1932

I mean to spend more time with Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction. Who could not love someone who writes in her diary:

Tuesday 17 February 1931:
‘And I feel us, compared with Aldous and Maria [Huxley], unsuccessful. They’re off today to do mines, factories…black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities – while I live here like a weevil in a biscuit.’

And who does not think that Mrs Dalloway is a masterpiece?
But I have been reading The Waves (published in 1931, around the time she was writing that diary entry, and that essay). It is written in a sort of high incantatory style, and by time I reached the words ‘the end’ I wanted to throw the book across the room.
I was eager to read the novel because rather to my surprise I was thrilled by Katie Mitchell’s production for The National, and which I saw when it was touring in New York. I’d heard such mixed reactions to her work that I was pretty much convinced I was going to be a naysayer; which ought to be a warning against what has become almost irresistible: having an opinion about everything. So much of ordinary everyday exchange is made up out of opinions dubiously grounded. But what is the alternative: to remain silent?
My friend Cy left at the interval, having been made so incandescent with rage she won’t talk about the experience even now months later. I had gone under duress but was quickly mesmerised by Katie Mitchell’s theatrical magic. Woolf herself called the novel a ‘playpoem’ and it has found its best expression in Katie Mitchell’s adaptation. The theme of the novel is of the underlying oneness of Nature, not just of the one-ness of the consciousness of its six main characters, and of Percival, the 7th and absent character (absent in that we never enter his interior monologue as we do the other six in turn and turn again), and who in his absence affects deeply the lives of the other six. (He dies about half way through the novel.) I feel Woolf must have been influenced by the ferment of the ideas from the 20s around how to interpret quantum physics: that a unified reality seems to underpin Nature, out of which the illusion of separate things mysteriously emerges. In the novel, the sea is a metaphor for that underlying connectedness:

‘”Yet these roaring waters,” said Neville, “upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out those false sayings, ‘I am this; I am that!’ Speech is false…”‘

‘But we who live in the body see with the body’s imagination things in outline…’

For me it is not enough to declare that the characters are all meant to sound the same. That is of little comfort to the reader, with readerly expectations. And even then perhaps all would have been well if I were at all drawn to that ‘one’ voice. For me the interior monologues are self-absorbed maunderings.
Katie Mitchell brought the novel alive by concentrating on this philosophical aspect of the novel – its oneness – and uses it to fire her theatrical imagination. We were made to see  in what way the material world might be an illusion. The fabric of reality dissolved around us. In the centre of the stage was a screen on which a film was being shown. The film, however, was being constructed in front of our very eyes by a group of actors and a studio filled with props. At one point in the film we ’saw’ a woman standing on a cliff top, leaning forward over the precipice looking out at a blue sky, the wind blowing through her hair. Away from the screen, however, we could also see how the illusion was being constructed, how the fabric of reality is woven out of parts. We see one actor playing the woman, but since on screen we only see her head and upper body it hardly matters what else she is wearing. Another actor (now prop assistant) holds up a painted blue board to represent the sky, while another prop assistant (and actor) wafts a piece of stiff card in order to create enough of a disturbance of the air to blow the performing actor’s hair back.
I loved every minute of the show. It was continually inventive, often moving, though I seem to remember, as the novel is, never funny. On the whole I don’t like negative criticism, but I feel Woolf is great enough that her failures might at least be pointed up. As my friend S pointed out, ‘the trouble with The Waves is that it isn’t nourishing.’

Of course it has its moments:
‘I am immeasureable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales – huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive.’

or

‘Yet like children we tell each other stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language, such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’

but a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. I also liked: ‘But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.’ Except that the million millions spoils the effect. Given that she talks of the six, she must mean human beings and there have been nothing like even a single million million humans even through the whole of history. Arguably she could be referring to all life-forms and that might put her in the right ball-park. But perhaps I’m becoming pedantic out of irritation.

Woolf seems to be quite aware of the difficulties she has to overcome. I can’t help but feel that when she has a character say: ‘I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?’ she knows that her own novel suffers for lack of narrative impulse. And we can only nod in weary agreement when she writes: ‘Yet like children we tell each other stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language, such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’

There are many passages of true bathos:

‘My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people. Let them fail and I am full of holes, dwindling like burnt paper. Oh, Mrs Moffat, Mrs Moffat, I say, come and sweep it all up.’
[Did she really have to call the servant Mrs Moffat? If this were a comic novel, I’d say how brilliantly done.]

‘Now that lovely veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now. (Note: an Italian washerwoman stands on the same rung of physical refinement as the daughter of a English duke.)’
[Is that so? I wonder if the Italian washerwoman would agree?]

‘I open a little book. I read one poem . One poem is enough.
O western wind…
O western wind, you are at enmity with my mahogany table and spats, and also, alas, with vulgarity of my mistress…’

and

‘”Life, how I have dreaded you,” said Rhoda, “oh, human beings, how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube!…”‘
[Yes, I want to cry, what marvellous comedy choices: 'spats', 'Oxford Street'!]

[A few days earlier]
I’m in Provincetown on the tip of the Cape, north of Boston. The most easterly point in America. Travel directly east and it’s Ireland where next you pitch up. It’s one of those cold and gloomy days that makes being inside a guilt-free pleasure. The perfect reading day. Putting aside The Waves I search around for something better suited to my mood. When I look at my reading pile and see that coming up next are The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Violent Bear it Away, I begin to see a pattern that needs to be broken. So I get on my bike and cycle to the Provincetown Book store where I know there are copies of Cold Comfort Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, passed over on previous visits because I then felt my own pressure to read what I haven’t read before. Today I’ve given in to the desire to re-read what I know I love, and what will deliver some lightening of the spirits. On the non-fiction front I’m reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which, as stimulating and entertaining as both are, nevertheless require rather more of a certain kind of attention than I’m ready to give them today. Perhaps the left hemisphere of my brain needs a day off, or at least a rest.

I plump for Cold Comfort Farm next, which by coincidence was published the year after The Waves came out; in my higher mind I’d remembered it as a later novel.

I’ve read Cold Comfort Farm (1932) umpteen times. I probably first read it when I was at university in the late 70s, though perhaps even then I was re-reading it. Sometimes it’s hard to say why it is so entirely satisfying, and quite so funny: ‘She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.’ Now why is that perfect, and what about it makes me laugh out loud?

Flora Poste, a young woman of 19, finds herself living with distant cousins at Cold Comfort farm, Howling, Sussex. Her love of order meets head-on the chaos of life on the farm. Apollo confronted by Dionysus. Civilization forced to address Nature; but Nature that has been perverted: ‘The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think.’

As Lynne Truss points out in her Introduction, the ‘as well they might be’ is comic genius.
Flora is partly guided by the works of the fictitious French philosopher the Abbé Fausse-Maigre, author of a book of Penseés, and ‘The Higher Common Sense’. This latter work ‘had been written as philosophic treatise; it was an attempt, not to explain the Universe, but to reconcile Man to it inexplicability’: a sentence that came as a shock to me because it read like some sort of summary of intent of my book, and perhaps even more aptly of the book I may write next; though as I read Cold Comfort Farm I long to write a comic novel.
Not for nothing does Flora reference Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Flora possesses the capability of Anne Eliot and effects a transformation at Cold Comfort Farm every bit as powerful as that which Fanny Price brings about at Mansfield Park. But Flora has none of their meekness (even though their meekness turns out to be a disguise hiding a resolute moral core). Flora is more like a young Mary Poppins. She is, as Lynne Truss puts it, the superego organising the id. The creative powers of the id have been suppressed by the shadow-matriarchal toad-like presence of Aunt Ada Doom who by disallowing change has brought a kind of Biblical barrenness to be visited on the farm.  Legs and horns fall off the cows (brilliantly named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless) and no one notices. Strange plants grow with strange names and monstrous flowers. Characters jump down wells, or give joyless annual birth to children they care nothing for. In a casually symbolic gesture Flora lets the bull out of the shed in which he has been enclosed for as long as anyone can remember, and so begins a process in which she gradually brings some kind of order to bear where there has only been chaos.
But even she can only go so far towards normality. Seth, representative of all things virile, and at whom all the local young women throw themselves, proves to be more interested in the ‘talkies’ than he is in sex. Flora engineers his discovery by a Hollywood producer, and off he goes towards some transformed life: ‘She watched the car drive away. It was going to Cloud Cuckoo Land; it was going to the Kingdom of Cockaigne; it was going to Hollywood. Seth would never have a chance, now, of becoming a nice, normal young man. He would become a world-famous, swollen mask.
When next she saw him, it was a year later and the mask smiled down at her in the drowsy darkness, from a great silver screen: ‘Seth Starkadder in”Small-Town Sheik”.’ Already, as the car receded, he was as unreal as Achilles.’
Cold Comfort Farm is famously a parody of the novels of Mary Webb (Gone to Earth, Precious Bane) with their overblown descriptions of nature, and in which nature has almost a sexual hold on the characters. (I have actually read both these novels, and loved them.) But Gibbons is also satirising the pantheism of D H Lawrence and his acolytes. Mr Mybug (really Meyerberg but Flora can only think as him as being called Mybug) represent a type of then modern intellectual, and about which Gibbons has some pointed things to say: ‘This was his idea of romance, Flora could see. She knew from experience that intellectuals thought the proper – nay, the only – way to fall in love with somebody was to do it in the very instant you saw them. You met somebody, and thought they were ‘A charming person. So gay and simple.’ Then you walked home from a party with them (preferably across Hampstead Heath, about three in the morning) discussing whether you should sleep together or not. Sometimes you asked them to go to Italy (preferably to Portofino) with them. You held hands, and laughed, and kissed them and called them your ‘true love’. You loved them for eight months, and then you met somebody else and began being gay and simple all over again, with small hours’ walk across Hampstead, Portofino invitation, and all.
It was very simple, gay and natural, somehow.’
Gibbons has a philosophy of ordinariness which is never quite spelt out but is implicit in the very tone of the novel and perhaps comes closest to being made explicit at the end: ‘They were all there. Enjoying themselves. Having a nice time. And having it in an ordinary human manner. Not having it because they were raping somebody, or beating somebody, or having religious mania or being doomed to silence by a gloomy, earthy pride, or loving the soil with the fierce desire of a lecher, or anything of that sort. No, they were just enjoying an ordinary human event, like any of the other millions of ordinary people in the world.’
CCF is a plea for clarity. I wonder what novelists she has in mind when she writes: ‘The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.) But it had looked dirty, and miserable and depressing, and when Mr Mybug had once remarked that it looked like a beast about to spring, Flora had simply not had the heart to contradict him.’
Could she be thinking of Virginia Woolf? I was struck by how similar certain passages are in both novels, except as I say that The Waves is a humour-free zone (even though Woolf can be hilariously spiteful in her diaries and journals). Woolf makes the same point about the limitations of simile: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of thing?” but cannot help falling into Gibbons’s trap. What is the content of a sentence like: ‘The sky is dark as polished whale-bone.’ Eh, come again?

‘These then are the flowers that grow among the rough grasses of the field which the cows trample, wind-bitten, almost deformed, without fruit or blossom.’

That’s from The Waves but it could just as well have come from Cold Comfort Farm.
CCF was her first novel and Gibbons went on to write over 20 more. It has youthful vitality and goes deep, like poetry can, and as vital things do. I adore her idiosyncratic style and  inconsistencies; her made up words, and her strange chronology. (We are told that Adam learnt a song at the wedding of George I. But what George could this be? Not the English king, who died in the 18th century. But if  George I of Greece, then why him?)
Another thing that made me wonder if Gibbons had read The Waves is the frequent appearance of the words quiver and quivering in both novels. Coincidence? Doesn’t seem  very likely.
Hurrah for the French that they awarded Gibbons the femina via heureuse prize for 1933, and much to the astonishment of Virginia Woolf, who writes to Elizabeth Bowen on May 16th 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 the book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.’ Yes, the novel was indeed Cold Comfort Farm and if Virginia Woolf had read it she might have been even more enraged.