Stella Gibbons is hardly a forgotten writer, but she wrote more forgotten works than almost anyone else. Her first book, Cold Comfort Farm (1940: see SF no.10), has a secure and well-deserved place in the literary pantheon – it is a funny, sharp, tender and hugely quotable novel. Nothing else she wrote equalled its popularity, even the sequels, and by the turn of the millennium it was pretty much the only Gibbons book, out of twenty-five novels, three collections of short stories and four volumes of poems, left in print.
Thanks, however, to the visionary editorial policy of Vintage Classics, a number of Gibbons’s works, including Westwood, were rescued from obscurity in 2011 in a rather lovely series of paperbacks. Westwood in particular was a revelation. Cold Comfort Farm is a brilliant literary satire, taking well-aimed pot-shots at gloomy rural romantic literature. Westwood, originally published in 1946, expands Gibbons’s project of lampooning literary pretension and this time makes it personal. It is simultaneously a beautiful, tender novel about the disappointments of love and a jaw-dropping skewering of one man, and that unfortunate man is the once celebrated playwright and novelist Charles Morgan.
Morgan was at his peak in the 1930s and ’40s, producing hit plays such as The Flashing Stream and well-regarded novels including The Fountain and Sparkenbroke. All his works were characterized by a certain seriousness – as he said himself, his main themes were ‘Art, Love and Death’. T. S. Eliot was a friend and admirer, and in 1936 Morgan was awarded the Légion d’honneur. He wore his high seriousness with great pride. In a review for The Times<
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Subscribe now or Sign inStella Gibbons is hardly a forgotten writer, but she wrote more forgotten works than almost anyone else. Her first book, Cold Comfort Farm (1940: see SF no.10), has a secure and well-deserved place in the literary pantheon – it is a funny, sharp, tender and hugely quotable novel. Nothing else she wrote equalled its popularity, even the sequels, and by the turn of the millennium it was pretty much the only Gibbons book, out of twenty-five novels, three collections of short stories and four volumes of poems, left in print.
Thanks, however, to the visionary editorial policy of Vintage Classics, a number of Gibbons’s works, including Westwood, were rescued from obscurity in 2011 in a rather lovely series of paperbacks. Westwood in particular was a revelation. Cold Comfort Farm is a brilliant literary satire, taking well-aimed pot-shots at gloomy rural romantic literature. Westwood, originally published in 1946, expands Gibbons’s project of lampooning literary pretension and this time makes it personal. It is simultaneously a beautiful, tender novel about the disappointments of love and a jaw-dropping skewering of one man, and that unfortunate man is the once celebrated playwright and novelist Charles Morgan. Morgan was at his peak in the 1930s and ’40s, producing hit plays such as The Flashing Stream and well-regarded novels including The Fountain and Sparkenbroke. All his works were characterized by a certain seriousness – as he said himself, his main themes were ‘Art, Love and Death’. T. S. Eliot was a friend and admirer, and in 1936 Morgan was awarded the Légion d’honneur. He wore his high seriousness with great pride. In a review for The Times of a 1977 revival of his play The River Line, Libby Purves uncovered a quote of Morgan’s that gives a taste of his authorial personality: ‘The sense of humour by which we are ruled avoids emotion, vision and grandeur of spirit as a weevil avoids the sun.’ The fact that he was not a bundle of laughs was not lost on his friends. May we all avoid the kind of eulogy that Edith Sitwell gave at Morgan’s funeral in 1958: ‘Nobility and a sense of fun do not, alas, always go together.’ Morgan’s critical success seems to have enraged Stella Gibbons. There is no evidence that she ever met him but, according to her nephew and biographer Reggie Oliver, she took a huge dislike to him and started referring to him privately as ‘Charlie-Morgan-Playthe-Organ’ as a nod to his preachiness. This could partly have been professional jealousy: Gibbons was never lionized as Morgan was. She sat sniping from the fringes of the literary establishment and so should not have been surprised that it never took her to its heart. However, what was doubly galling to her was the fact that prizes were being lavished upon so po-faced a writer. When she needed a model for Gerard Challis, the sanctimonious, hypocritical villain of Westwood, she didn’t have far to look. The novel concerns two friends in wartime London. Hilda prevails through wit, charm, common sense and an enormous well of pragmatism, even more pronounced than in Flora Poste of Cold Comfort Farm. She happily entertains a number of men, having no time for romance but plenty for fun. Margaret, on the other hand, is from entirely different stock, and forms the emotional heart of the novel. As a shy, reserved English teacher, not particularly charming or dramatic or clever or, as the reader is regularly reminded, attractive, she would have found no place at Cold Comfort Farm. She falls in with the intelligentsia of 1940s Hampstead and Highgate, which includes Gerard Challis. Margaret is soon in love with the handsome, noble-seeming Challis, whose idea of a seductive line in one of his plays is ‘Your ankle bone is softly modelled.’ He has no time for coarseness or lust, despite his many marital infidelities, because he is in search of the Ideal Woman:Each time he met a woman who seriously attracted him, he put her on her mettle by indicating that he had never met his Ideal Woman outside his own plays, and then she would try to be fiery and dewy, until the inevitable moment arrived when she had had it.In other words, Challis doesn’t like women very much. History is tight-lipped about Morgan’s own sexual affairs, but certainly his novels and plays show his male characters forever in pursuit of the great female lover whose main purpose is to enable them to achieve their full manly potential. For instance, in The Judge’s Story (1947), the reader is supposed to pity the main character Henry, who neglects his wife Vivien because she is not supportive of his higher calling: ‘His enthusiasm, which would in the past have delighted her, even his hard work and moderation of life which her gladness might have rewarded, struck no warmth from her.’ Women in Morgan’s world, as in Challis’s, are at best high priestesses at the altar of male nobility. Understandably, Gibbons cavils at all this humbuggery, and punishes Challis by making him fall in love with Hilda. Even as she does so, she skewers his pretension. It turns out that Hilda’s lack of interest in the noble ideal is greatly mitigated by her extreme prettiness, and this induces in Challis a moment of uncharacteristic self-doubt. He wonders that he should have allowed himself to feel for a girl unlike ‘all his other little girls . . . [who] had admired the novels of Charles Morgan or quoted by heart the poems of T. S. Eliot’. It is particularly daring that she directly refers to Morgan and his chum Eliot, inviting the comparison of Challis with the real-life Highgate highbrows. There is no mistaking her target at this most uncomfortable point in the proceedings. It just gets worse for Challis. For a start, Hilda never knows his real name, as he has rather ignobly been calling himself Marcus to hide his married status. He takes her to Kew to declare his love – something he has never plighted to his previous girls – and can barely speak: ‘for all his fame and all his genius, [he] gazed at her and swallowed convulsively, twice’. When he finally blurts it out, her response is a wonderfully deadpan ‘What? . . . Pardon?’ Gibbons then adds insult to injury. Challis’s grandchildren unexpectedly show up, accompanied by Margaret. The very seriousness on which Challis’s reputation is based forces him to act ridiculously; his life must be lived at the highest pitch of drama because he sees himself as a tragic artist. Hilda’s refusal to be anybody’s muse completely punctures that particular balloon. In a further irony Margaret, who has hitherto shared Challis’s lofty view of himself and who would have been receptive to his advances, loses all respect for him as he chases fruitlessly after the utterly indifferent Hilda. The revelation of Challis’s love for Hilda only serves to bring the two women closer together as they realize how shallow he is. As far as Gibbons is concerned, Gerard Challis and Charles Morgan are both done for. There is a final tension, though. Westwood ’s subtitle is the The Gentle Powers. Towards the end of the novel, after Challis’s disastrous declaration of love, Margaret has a discussion with the playwright’s mother that cements her rejection of the tragic muse. Margaret says that it seems ‘silly and weak’ to want to be happy, and Lady Challis gently rebukes her: ‘I don’t think that you are one of the people who need tragedy. You need what I call the Gentle Powers . . . Beauty, and Time, and the Past and Pity . . . Laughter, too.’ Margaret comes to agree that she has no need for a consuming passion, for drama. It is a wholesale rejection of the portentous stuff of Challis and Morgan, and perhaps it is an attempt too to find a new tone of voice for post-war Britain, a lowering of the emotional temperature, a plea for kindness, reflection and simple pleasure. However, it doesn’t seem as if the powers Gibbons has used on Charles Morgan have been very gentle. She hasn’t expended much pity on him, and the laughter is all at his expense. In that same funeral oration, Edith Sitwell also said: ‘I am sure not one of us heard him pass a harsh judgement, or be unkindly witty at the expense of another.’ The same could not be said of Stella Gibbons, whose wit is often wicked and unsparing. Morgan’s fiction has dated quite badly, and it isn’t full of laughs. It is difficult, though, to imagine him brutally taking down a professional rival. It’s a reminder of Gibbons’s spikiness, her willingness to burn bridges. She might say that a woman had to be bolder to make herself heard above all the men, and she would probably be right. It is sad, though, that her literary loneliness was the almost inevitable result.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Chris Saunders 2023
About the contributor
Chris Saunders is managing director of Henry Sotheran Ltd, the oldest antiquarian bookdealer in the country, and a sporadic writer on literary subjects. He lives in East Sussex with his wife and daughter and a house full of books. You can hear him in Episode 12 of our podcast, ‘Slightly Foxed – But Still Desirable’, discussing the world of antiquarian and second-hand bookshops.