Bibliotherapy 2

This week's Bibliotherapy is about one of my favourite books -- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. It's a complete joy whenever I return to it (which is often), and though I didn't have enough space to write about the Branwell Bronte connection in my Sunday Telegraph column this week, there is an excellent one, in the form of the misguided Mr Mybug, who is writing a biography of the Bronte brother: "'Yes, it's goin' to be damn good,' said Mr Mybug. 'It's a psychological study, of course, and I've got a lot of new matter, including three letters he wrote to an old aunt in Ireland, Mrs Prunty, during the period he was working on Wuthering Heights... You see, it's obvious that it's his book and not Emily's. No woman could have written that. It's male stuff... I've worked out a theory about his drunkenness, too -- you see, he wasn't really a drunkard. He was a tremendous genius, a sort of second Chatterton -- and his sisters hated him because of his genius.'"
Mr Mybug's theory becomes even more misguided (sadly, there is no record of whether Symington or Daphne du Maurier ever read Stella Gibbon's novel, which was published in 1932); it's so wonderfully mad that I've got to quote a bit more... He claims that the Bronte sisters were alcoholics intent on stealing their teetotal brother's work, in order to 'sell it to buy more drink... They were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot. Branwell, who adored her, used to pretend to get drunk at the Black Bull in order to get gin for Anne... Secretly, he worked twelves hours a day writing Shirley and Villette -- and of course, Wuthering Heights. I've proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty.' Needless to say, the three old letters are about nothing but the weather...
Anyway, you can read the column here in the Sunday Telegraph. Or below here, if that's easier...) But if you haven't yet read 'Cold Comfort Farm', then please do get hold of a copy, and discover it for yourself. It's better for the spirits than gin...


Having lived in London most of my life, there are moments when I find myself longing for rural seclusion. But as a teenager, after a family crisis necessitated that we abandon the city and move to a dilapidated Welsh farmhouse at the dead-end of a pot-holed track, I loathed it, and sank into gloom as deep as the surrounding mud. What saved me – or so it seemed at the time – was the discovery in a local library of “Cold Comfort Farm”, a novel by Stella Gibbons, originally published in 1932. The title appeared to me to be an exact description of my new dwelling, and I took myself off to read it halfway up an oak tree (a place I often retreated to in order to avoid the acres of manure and swampy ground).

Within minutes, I was laughing, and also comforted by the resourceful heroine, Flora Poste, a sensible, sophisticated girl who leaves London to live with her distant relatives, the Starkadders, after she is orphaned at 20. Her new home, Cold Comfort Farm, “was crouched on a bleak hill-side, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away”. Its sullen inhabitants believe themselves to be as doomed as their gangrenous cows, but Flora sorts everyone out, introducing contraception, chic dress sense, improved cleaning methods and a Hollywood agent to the household.

When I first read the novel, I had no idea that it was written as a parody of previous rural melodramas, nor that Stella Gibbons had a thoroughly urban upbringing, albeit in a family as dysfunctional as the Starkadders. But “Cold Comfort Farm” remains as fresh and funny now as it ever was, wherever you live, and the perfect antidote to grey skies, grumpy relatives and something nasty in the woodshed.

Bibliotherapy

I've started writing a new column called 'Bibliotherapy', and the first one is published in Seven, in the Sunday Telegraph, today. I hope the title is self-explanatory -- I wanted to write about what to read at different times in one's life, in order to find some consoling words. Anyway, here it is, but if you read it on the Telegraph website, there should be a place where you can suggest your own ideas for future columns. All suggestions gratefully received!

There are times in one’s life when a good book – the right book – feels like a voice speaking in the darkness, or a hand reaching out from the past; providing solace when all else seems lost. Thus it was when I was 18, and heartbroken; awash with tearful misery until a friend’s mother gave me a second hand copy of “Dusty Answer”, Rosamond Lehmann’s coming-of-age classic that was first published in 1927. I devoured it overnight.

The title is taken from George Meredith’s poem, ‘Modern Love’ – ‘Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul/ When hot for certainties in this our life!’ – and its themes, of passion betrayed and love lost, were to recur in Lehmann’s subsequent novels. All remain relevant now, especially in times of emotional turmoil; but her debut, telling the story of Judith Earle, and her passage from lovelorn adolescent to the verge of clear-sighted adulthood, has an emotional intensity that subsequent generations have recognised as their own, so that a myriad individual stories seem to be reflected within this book in particular.

Lehmann wrote “Dusty Answer” in her mid-twenties, when she was still young enough to remember the agony of a crushing rejection she’d received as a Cambridge undergraduate, from a handsome old Etonian who seemed on the verge of proposing to her after a whirlwind romance, but turned out to be engaged to another girl. In ‘Dusty Answer’, Judith falls for Roddy Fyfe – who is careless and inscrutable and irresistible – only to be discarded after a single, summer’s night of lovemaking. Over 80 years after the novel was written, Roddy’s callous dismissal is as recognisably cruel as any 21st century account of rejection; for when Judith confesses she has loved him ever since they were children, he responds with silence, and “a face as smooth and cold as a stone”.

Like the rest of us, Rosamond Lehmann went on to suffer other heartbreaks – most devastating of all was the end of her affair with the poet, Cecil Day Lewis, which is fictionalised in her later novel, ‘The Echoing Grove’. But the conclusion of her first book gives some consolation in its suggestion that heartbreak, however painful, can be a beginning, rather than a bitter ending. “She had nobody now except herself, and that was best… This was to be happy – this emptiness, this light uncoloured state… Soon she must begin to think: What next?”

The American cover of Daphne

I've just read Rob Hardy's review of Daphne. It's made my day (my week, my month!). Incidentally, he's mentioned that he prefers the British cover. I wonder what other people think?

Back to the future

There's something in the air that feels very autumnal -- the leaves are already falling on the plane trees outside our house, and there is a chill in the evenings. My son went back to school on Monday, and I'm back to work. Not that I stopped working altogether in August -- in fact, I had quite a lot of journalism to do -- but somehow, this week seems like the real return to... what, exactly? I was about to say, 'reality', but work shouldn't necessarily be any more 'real' than everything else we do with our time.
So what have I been doing? Well, kind of drifting along through August, when London is at its quietest. Thinking about how to do a film treatment of 'Daphne' (which I've been trying to finish this summer). Playing cards with my family. Walking the dog. Taking our elderly cat to the vet. You know, the nuts and bolts of life...
Now, I'm thinking, ok, time to get on with it. (What? Not sure, exactly.) Which reminds me of the fortune-telling stones I came across in July, at the bridge over Pont Creek. I'd walked there from Ferryside, at Boddinick by Fowey, and was on my way to the church at Lanteglos, where Daphne du Maurier married Tommy Browning on July 19th 1937. As it happens, I was there on their wedding anniversary, though I didn't actually realise it -- not consciously -- that day. Perhaps this means I was living in the moment, for once... not thinking about the past, or worrying about the future. At the risk of sounding glib, the present can be the best present of all... And no, I didn't ask a question...

The road to Manderley

I'm back from Edinburgh -- which must be one of the most beautiful cities in the world -- and all went well. Met lots of nice people, including Cornflower, who was wearing a cornflower in the rain...
In the midst of unpacking, and now packing again, because I'm going away with my younger son for a few days. So while I'm gone, here are some pictures of a footpath I recently discovered near Fowey, which crosses the old Menabilly drive. I'd searched for it in the past, but could never find it --- and here it is at last...

Sunshine and showers...

I'm off to Edinburgh this weekend, to speak at the Book festival on Saturday evening, and very much hoping to meet some of you there (like Cornflower), though by the sound of things, it's going to be horribly soggy in Scotland. Perhaps I need to pack wellies, and wear them with my frock for the event, as at Port Eliot?
Meanwhile, here are some sunshine-y pictures from Cornwall -- of the daymark at the Gribbin Head, just up the hill from Polridmouth Bay and Menabilly. Actually, I say 'just', but it's a steep, steep climb... especially for a dog with short legs.

Visiting the shipwreck at Polridmouth Bay, as 'Daphne' sails to America...

Polridmouth Bay -- as du Maurier fans will know -- is the beach on the edge of the Menabilly estate, along the coastal footpath from Fowey, before it rises up to the Gribbin. It's also recognisable as the beach in 'Rebecca' -- at the end of the path from Manderley to the sea, where Rebecca visits her boat-house, and also where the ship-wreck occurs that plays such a pivotal part in the plot of the novel.
When du Maurier published 'Rebecca' in 1938, she hadn't yet moved into Menabilly -- indeed, as I've already written (in this blog and elsewhere), this was the house that Rebecca rebuilt, in that Daphne used the money she made from the novel in order to lease and restore Menabilly, which was her original inspiration for the story. But she had already seen the wreck at Polridmouth, when she was staying nearby at Ferryside -- subsequently evoked with such drama in 'Rebecca' -- and at low tide, you can still see the remains of that wreck on the rocks. I've been there many times in the past, and seen its bones, like a skeleton only partially submerged in the water -- just like in the opening pages of my book -- but until now, I've never been able to get close enough to touch it.
Polridmouth still feels to me like a slightly melancholy place, especially when the clouds cast shadows over it, but my family disagree (they think I read too much into it; which is perhaps an inevitable consequence of my time researching 'Daphne'). Anyway, here are some pictures...
Oh, and by the way, 'Daphne' is out in America today. Here's a review in the Los Angeles Times. I do hope the book sails peacefully into new waters...