Showing posts with label ccf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ccf. Show all posts
Saturday, 21 March 2015
Ticky: fine satirical fantasy
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Westwood
The Guardian Books section had a good article recently: Westwood by Stella Gibbons (Lynne Truss, Guardian, 29 Jul 2011), an appreciation of Gibbons's 1946 novel, which is being reissued by Vintage in a few days' time.
Westwood (Vintage, 4 Aug 2011, ISBN: 9780099528722) is available from GuardianBookshop.
It would be excellent if other Stella Gibbons novels were reissued; currently they're findable on the secondhand circuit, but (except for Cold Comfort Farm) scarce and expensive. One I'd especially like to see reprinted is the 1943 Ticky, a satirical fantasy about English military institutions.
Update, 21 March 2015
I just read the Vintage Books 2011 reprint of Ticky, and have moved the commentary on it to a newer post, Ticky: fine satirical fantasy.
- Ray
Westwood has long been overshadowed by Stella Gibbons's much loved bestseller, Cold Comfort Farm, but this rich, mature novel deserves its reissueUnlike Cold Comfort Farm (see previously Beyond the woodshed and Further beyond the woodshed) Westwood has the more or less realistic setting of wartime North London, and turns Gibbons's satirical spotlight on the awfulness of the Hampstead Heath literary set of the period. It looks good; there's an extended article on it, by Stella Gibbons' nephew and biographer Reggie Oliver, findable in the Internet Archive copy of the now-defunct official Stella Gibbons site: see WESTWOOD, or The Gentle Powers.
Westwood (Vintage, 4 Aug 2011, ISBN: 9780099528722) is available from GuardianBookshop.
It would be excellent if other Stella Gibbons novels were reissued; currently they're findable on the secondhand circuit, but (except for Cold Comfort Farm) scarce and expensive. One I'd especially like to see reprinted is the 1943 Ticky, a satirical fantasy about English military institutions.
Update, 21 March 2015
I just read the Vintage Books 2011 reprint of Ticky, and have moved the commentary on it to a newer post, Ticky: fine satirical fantasy.
- Ray
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Lost in a book
John Sutherland didn't like the sound of it (Plain Jane, please, Comment is free, Guardian, August 21 2008). But I found the first episode of ITV's Lost in Austen very enjoyable: based on the premise of a Jane Austen fan finding herself occupying a missing Elizabeth Bennet's place in Pride and Prejudice, it was well-produced, kept in character throughout, and worked at a variety of levels, from a moment-to-moment "fondant fancy of a drama" (the Radio Times reviewer called it) to a more subtly allusive take on the book for those who know the plot (see the annotated text at the Jane Austen site Republic of Pemberley).
Professor Sutherland likened the concept of Lost in Austen to a formulaic cross-fertilisation of Austen's DNA with that of Life on Mars; I'm mildly surprised he didn't make the connection with many other works using the same motif. Probably the best-known in mainstream literary circles is Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode, the story of an unhappily-married professor who meets a magician who can project him into the text of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, with horrible consequences when he finds himself in a very different book.
As described in the commentary at the unofficial Polish site, WoodyAllen.art.pl, the concept can be a vehicle for analysing the text. For instance, Ann-Marie MacDonald's play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) drops an academic, Constance Ledbelly, into the world of Othello for "comedy, and a feminist reappraisal" (Alex Wheaton, review, dBmagazine). Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm uses essentially the same idea for satire by putting a highly rational modern young woman into the archaic and irrational world of "loam and lovechild" rural novels. However, the juxtaposition may equally make for less deep but interesting literary play for its own sake: the works of Jasper Fforde use it extensively, his whole series of Thursday Next books being based on the premise of entering alternative book-universes (the first, The Eyre Affair, takes place partially inside an alternative Jane Eyre in which Jane goes to India with St. John Rivers rather than marrying Rochester). Fforde, however, is far from the first: Robert Heinlein's 1980 The Number of the Beast took its heroes into Baum's Oz and a variant on Barsoom (the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs); and I first ran into accessible takes on the Elder Edda and Spenser's The Faerie Queene through de Camp & Pratt's Harold Shea series starting with The Incompleat Enchanter.
An interesting variant, where an external person is covertly written into a fictional context, is notorious on the fan fiction circuit as the "Mary-Sue", where that external person is the writer. Mary-Sue is, for instance, the impossible talented young ensign who saves the starship Enterprise and becomes the love of Captain Kirk (the male equivalent is the "Marty-Stu"). Too good to be true: 150 Years of Mary Sue by Pat Pflieger analyses the phenomenon, noting that it had its equivalents in the pages of the 19th century periodical Robert Merry's Museum. At The Other World blog, Clio: Mary-Sue in history argues further that it applies to some fictionalised historical biographies; one identified author admits, surprisingly, that to some extent it may be a fair cop.
Addendum: see The Yiddish Policeman's Universe, a post at Felix Grant's Growlery, where we're swapping examples of books and other works that, in various senses, explore alternate realities.
Addendum #2: Another view (Professor Kathryn Sutherland, The Guardian, Tuesday September 9 2008) : the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives (OUP, 2005, ISBN 0199258724) takes a further glance at Lost in Austen. The piece doesn't say much, but does note what I thought was part of its interest: that it's not just playing with the novel, but also alluding to previous film and TV adaptations. I didn't realise that there's also a book by Emma Campbell Webster - Lost in Austen (UK title Being Elizabeth Bennet) which presents commentary on Jane Austen's novels in role-play format - some choices leading to lethal outcomes - in what looks like a highly creative way to explore familiar texts.
Follow-up: there's more comment and discussion in a later post, Lost in admiration.
- Ray
Professor Sutherland likened the concept of Lost in Austen to a formulaic cross-fertilisation of Austen's DNA with that of Life on Mars; I'm mildly surprised he didn't make the connection with many other works using the same motif. Probably the best-known in mainstream literary circles is Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode, the story of an unhappily-married professor who meets a magician who can project him into the text of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, with horrible consequences when he finds himself in a very different book.
As described in the commentary at the unofficial Polish site, WoodyAllen.art.pl, the concept can be a vehicle for analysing the text. For instance, Ann-Marie MacDonald's play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) drops an academic, Constance Ledbelly, into the world of Othello for "comedy, and a feminist reappraisal" (Alex Wheaton, review, dBmagazine). Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm uses essentially the same idea for satire by putting a highly rational modern young woman into the archaic and irrational world of "loam and lovechild" rural novels. However, the juxtaposition may equally make for less deep but interesting literary play for its own sake: the works of Jasper Fforde use it extensively, his whole series of Thursday Next books being based on the premise of entering alternative book-universes (the first, The Eyre Affair, takes place partially inside an alternative Jane Eyre in which Jane goes to India with St. John Rivers rather than marrying Rochester). Fforde, however, is far from the first: Robert Heinlein's 1980 The Number of the Beast took its heroes into Baum's Oz and a variant on Barsoom (the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs); and I first ran into accessible takes on the Elder Edda and Spenser's The Faerie Queene through de Camp & Pratt's Harold Shea series starting with The Incompleat Enchanter.
An interesting variant, where an external person is covertly written into a fictional context, is notorious on the fan fiction circuit as the "Mary-Sue", where that external person is the writer. Mary-Sue is, for instance, the impossible talented young ensign who saves the starship Enterprise and becomes the love of Captain Kirk (the male equivalent is the "Marty-Stu"). Too good to be true: 150 Years of Mary Sue by Pat Pflieger analyses the phenomenon, noting that it had its equivalents in the pages of the 19th century periodical Robert Merry's Museum. At The Other World blog, Clio: Mary-Sue in history argues further that it applies to some fictionalised historical biographies; one identified author admits, surprisingly, that to some extent it may be a fair cop.
Addendum: see The Yiddish Policeman's Universe, a post at Felix Grant's Growlery, where we're swapping examples of books and other works that, in various senses, explore alternate realities.
Addendum #2: Another view (Professor Kathryn Sutherland, The Guardian, Tuesday September 9 2008) : the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives (OUP, 2005, ISBN 0199258724) takes a further glance at Lost in Austen. The piece doesn't say much, but does note what I thought was part of its interest: that it's not just playing with the novel, but also alluding to previous film and TV adaptations. I didn't realise that there's also a book by Emma Campbell Webster - Lost in Austen (UK title Being Elizabeth Bennet) which presents commentary on Jane Austen's novels in role-play format - some choices leading to lethal outcomes - in what looks like a highly creative way to explore familiar texts.
Follow-up: there's more comment and discussion in a later post, Lost in admiration.
- Ray
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Further beyond the woodshed
Further to Beyond the woodshed, a colleague just sent me a link to a fascinating paper, unfortunately in a controlled-access journal: Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars (Faye Hammill, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (2001) 831-854).
It's generally known that Stella Gibbons parodied various "loam and lovechild" novels for the 1932 Cold Comfort Farm, but as many of the source novels are little-read nowadays, the sheer extent and explicitness of that parody goes unnoticed. Faye Hammill's paper fills in that background, showing it to be "an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day" ... many of them books Gibbons reviewed for the Evening Standard ... "and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë".
Apart from such generalised connections, which also include George Eliot and the Powys brothers, Hammill identifies particularly explicit influences in the works of Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. For instance, the scenario of the doom-laden farm and family comes straight out of Webb's 1920 The House in Dormer Forest, and the farming-obsessed Reuben Starkadder is clearly modelled on Reuben Backfield in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse. Likewise, Gibbons' village sect, the Quivering Brethren, is very similar to the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray. The names Micah, Amos, and Agony appear to come from Harold Alfred Manhood's completely forgotten 1931 Gay Agony (I can't find this online, but Dashiell Hammett described it as "monstrously overwritten", Arnold Bennett said of it, "I await the next phase of Mr Manhood's talent with anxiety", and the Google Books keywords ...
... show clearly that it's in the kind of overblown faux-rustic idiom that Gibbons satirised. Another link is to Hugh Walpole's family saga set in the Lake District, the "Herries" chronicles, written in the early 1930s. Although the novels themselves have no close resemblance, Gibbons' spoof dedication to "Anthony Pookworthy", whose The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare she praises for its 100-page masterly analysis of a bilious attack, has a strong resemblance to Walpole's pompous dedication to JB Priestley at the beginning of Judith Paris.
The Hammill paper also analyses a number of reasons why Cold Comfort Farm, despite its popularity, had a relatively low status on the academic literary circuit. One, Hammill argues, is the until-recent general downgrading of female authors in appreciations of fiction in the inter-War years. Others are its tension with the genres of its time: its hostility toward the literary establishment (as in its dig at the Bloomsbury-style Mr Mybug - thanks to Beyond the Pale); its proto-feminism (in its heroine's rejection of Mybug's DH Lawrence view of women in primarily sexual and reproductive roles); and in its embracing of modernity. Rural-themed works of the period, such as Vita Sackville-West's poem The Land and Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford, characteristically accepted rural England as a timeless fixture or lamented its passing (a stereotype that still persists - see Views of the countryside) whereas Gibbons' Flora improves the Starkadders' lives by bringing them into the modern world of motor-vans, boutiques, contraception, psychoanalysis, and cleaning dishes with a mop instead of a thorn twig.
If you have academic access, the paper is here. Otherwise, you may have to be content with Reggie Oliver's biography Out of the Woodshed (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0747539952), which has a good discussion of the book's inspirations; many of his identifications appear in the Faye Hammill paper.
- Ray
It's generally known that Stella Gibbons parodied various "loam and lovechild" novels for the 1932 Cold Comfort Farm, but as many of the source novels are little-read nowadays, the sheer extent and explicitness of that parody goes unnoticed. Faye Hammill's paper fills in that background, showing it to be "an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day" ... many of them books Gibbons reviewed for the Evening Standard ... "and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë".
Apart from such generalised connections, which also include George Eliot and the Powys brothers, Hammill identifies particularly explicit influences in the works of Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. For instance, the scenario of the doom-laden farm and family comes straight out of Webb's 1920 The House in Dormer Forest, and the farming-obsessed Reuben Starkadder is clearly modelled on Reuben Backfield in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse. Likewise, Gibbons' village sect, the Quivering Brethren, is very similar to the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray. The names Micah, Amos, and Agony appear to come from Harold Alfred Manhood's completely forgotten 1931 Gay Agony (I can't find this online, but Dashiell Hammett described it as "monstrously overwritten", Arnold Bennett said of it, "I await the next phase of Mr Manhood's talent with anxiety", and the Google Books keywords ...
Tobulus, Silla, Linah, Mistress Rue, Tampion, meadowsweet, splin, Seahouses, Goldcrest, cider, Coze, rhines, ramekins, taproom, Twas, pigeon's milk, Micah felt, costmary, marriage, Micah thought
... show clearly that it's in the kind of overblown faux-rustic idiom that Gibbons satirised. Another link is to Hugh Walpole's family saga set in the Lake District, the "Herries" chronicles, written in the early 1930s. Although the novels themselves have no close resemblance, Gibbons' spoof dedication to "Anthony Pookworthy", whose The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare she praises for its 100-page masterly analysis of a bilious attack, has a strong resemblance to Walpole's pompous dedication to JB Priestley at the beginning of Judith Paris.
The Hammill paper also analyses a number of reasons why Cold Comfort Farm, despite its popularity, had a relatively low status on the academic literary circuit. One, Hammill argues, is the until-recent general downgrading of female authors in appreciations of fiction in the inter-War years. Others are its tension with the genres of its time: its hostility toward the literary establishment (as in its dig at the Bloomsbury-style Mr Mybug - thanks to Beyond the Pale); its proto-feminism (in its heroine's rejection of Mybug's DH Lawrence view of women in primarily sexual and reproductive roles); and in its embracing of modernity. Rural-themed works of the period, such as Vita Sackville-West's poem The Land and Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford, characteristically accepted rural England as a timeless fixture or lamented its passing (a stereotype that still persists - see Views of the countryside) whereas Gibbons' Flora improves the Starkadders' lives by bringing them into the modern world of motor-vans, boutiques, contraception, psychoanalysis, and cleaning dishes with a mop instead of a thorn twig.
If you have academic access, the paper is here. Otherwise, you may have to be content with Reggie Oliver's biography Out of the Woodshed (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0747539952), which has a good discussion of the book's inspirations; many of his identifications appear in the Faye Hammill paper.
- Ray
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Cold Comfort Farm on stage
I mentioned Stella Gibbons and Cold Comfort Farm here in 2006: see Beyond the woodshed.
This evening we went to Cold Comfort Farm, Paul Doust's stage adaptation, at the Exeter Northcott. Mixed impressions, really. The acting and production values were of high standard, and there some very clever set pieces (for instance, using a human tableau to create the effect of cattle on stage) but the text of the adaptation was rather strange. It didn't come across as terribly affectionate toward the source material, with silly slapstick additions such as a repeatedly exploding clock - thankfully, if peculiarly, also done by human tableau, rather than a prop that "explodes" as the playscript specifies - and Rennet portrayed as a lunatic sleepwalker. It was also full of self-referential comments on its own theatricality, and occasionally completely lost track of the comic nature of the story (in one symbolic scene, the whole cast stood entwined by tendrils, chanting in unison the words of the controlling Aunt Ada Doom). And it cut out Mrs Beetle and Mr Mybug. Overall worth seeing, but probably not if you expect a 'straight' adaptation like those of the 1968 and 1995 TV versions.
If you've never read the original novel and want to try it for flavour (Roger Ebert describes it well as "like Thomas Hardy rewritten by P.G. Wodehouse") you can preview it at Google Books. As I mentioned previously, there's an extended article on the book's origins at the now-defunct official Stella Gibbons website - see Cold Comfort Farm at the Internet Archive.
Addendum: more on this at Further beyond the woodshed.
- Ray
This evening we went to Cold Comfort Farm, Paul Doust's stage adaptation, at the Exeter Northcott. Mixed impressions, really. The acting and production values were of high standard, and there some very clever set pieces (for instance, using a human tableau to create the effect of cattle on stage) but the text of the adaptation was rather strange. It didn't come across as terribly affectionate toward the source material, with silly slapstick additions such as a repeatedly exploding clock - thankfully, if peculiarly, also done by human tableau, rather than a prop that "explodes" as the playscript specifies - and Rennet portrayed as a lunatic sleepwalker. It was also full of self-referential comments on its own theatricality, and occasionally completely lost track of the comic nature of the story (in one symbolic scene, the whole cast stood entwined by tendrils, chanting in unison the words of the controlling Aunt Ada Doom). And it cut out Mrs Beetle and Mr Mybug. Overall worth seeing, but probably not if you expect a 'straight' adaptation like those of the 1968 and 1995 TV versions.
If you've never read the original novel and want to try it for flavour (Roger Ebert describes it well as "like Thomas Hardy rewritten by P.G. Wodehouse") you can preview it at Google Books. As I mentioned previously, there's an extended article on the book's origins at the now-defunct official Stella Gibbons website - see Cold Comfort Farm at the Internet Archive.
Addendum: more on this at Further beyond the woodshed.
- Ray
Thursday, 14 December 2006
Beyond the woodshed
I just noticed a clipping from the Guardian Books section, Life after Flora, an interesting article about Stella Gibbons. Lynne Truss, who has written the introduction to the recent Penguin Classics reissue of Cold Comfort Farm, sums up the key problem of Gibbons' career: "The enduring popularity of ... Cold Comfort Farm eclipsed her 23 later novels and left her forever labelled 'middlebrow'".
CCF is a wonderful pastiche of the rural novels - such as those of Mary Webb - of the late 19th and early 20th century (as Gibbons put it, "the kind of story in which peasants have babies in cow sheds and push each other down wells"). It also takes a dig at DH Lawrence and, judging by the biographies, the melodramatics of Gibbons' own family.
An intriguing and little-known aspect is that it's not set in the real world 1930s, but in an alternate future of around 1950, of which the biggest giveaway is the videophone. When Flora phones a young man, Claud, we're told: "Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine's future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials". The same Claud has served in "the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46", and in the book aeroplanes are ubiquitous for personal travel and even postal delivery.
This SF background plays virtually no role in the plot. It is, however, a glimpse into her writing interests in other genres, which sometimes go well into the territory of fantasy: Ticky, for instance, is set in a Gormenghast-like Victorian regimental club, riddled with strange rituals and perpetual feuds, and so large that its towers are in the clouds and its officers travel about inside it by horse-drawn tram.
You can read more about CCF's background and her other works at the now-defunct Stella Gibbons Website run by Reggie Oliver, her nephew and biographer, who also wrote a 1998 print biography, Out of the Woodshed.
Addendum: more on this at Further beyond the woodshed.
- Ray
CCF is a wonderful pastiche of the rural novels - such as those of Mary Webb - of the late 19th and early 20th century (as Gibbons put it, "the kind of story in which peasants have babies in cow sheds and push each other down wells"). It also takes a dig at DH Lawrence and, judging by the biographies, the melodramatics of Gibbons' own family.
An intriguing and little-known aspect is that it's not set in the real world 1930s, but in an alternate future of around 1950, of which the biggest giveaway is the videophone. When Flora phones a young man, Claud, we're told: "Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine's future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials". The same Claud has served in "the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46", and in the book aeroplanes are ubiquitous for personal travel and even postal delivery.
This SF background plays virtually no role in the plot. It is, however, a glimpse into her writing interests in other genres, which sometimes go well into the territory of fantasy: Ticky, for instance, is set in a Gormenghast-like Victorian regimental club, riddled with strange rituals and perpetual feuds, and so large that its towers are in the clouds and its officers travel about inside it by horse-drawn tram.
You can read more about CCF's background and her other works at the now-defunct Stella Gibbons Website run by Reggie Oliver, her nephew and biographer, who also wrote a 1998 print biography, Out of the Woodshed.
Addendum: more on this at Further beyond the woodshed.
- Ray
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