Cold Comfort Conjugation in my Darkest Sussex

It’s a tarrible gurt noration (terrible great travesty) told abroad that a dusty parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), deserves its popularity as a vaunted classic of English comic fiction, when the distinguished prototype from which Stella Gibbons derives her satire (Sussex Gorse, 1916, by Sheila Kaye-Smith) is a fine novel in its own right, and unjustly neglected.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, 1923,
by
Robert John Swan (1888-1980)
The pose in the picture is said to be based
on Titian’s A Man with a Quilted Sleeve. 

As I wrote to a Professor of Modern English Literature in California, whose Intensive Writing Course on The Fictions of the Sexes includes Cold Comfort Farm:

I’d be very interested to know whether any critique of this novel in your tutorials ever includes the acknowledgement that the writer Gibbons satirises (Sheila Kaye-Smith) was a very fine chronicler of Sussex dialect and rural life, and her novel, Sussex Gorse, is a moving work of literature, true to the character of Sussex farming stock. I was brought up for some years on a Sussex farm so I can vouch for the fidelity to customs and dialect of Kaye-Smith’s writings. You may find the dialect impenetrable in Kaye-Smith BUT another point to consider is that Sussex dialect is very similar to US Southern rural speech with pronouns ‘his’n’ and ‘her’n’, for example, while Sussex has exported many other grammatical features to the States.

I am invariably admiring of the open-mindedness of academics, and the professor truly did not disappoint me in his prompt response:

Thank-you for that excellent reference. I am tracking down copies of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s work for our University Library, and will read her for the next time I teach Cold Comfort Farm.

My mother, poultrykeeper on East Sussex farm 1930s.

Of course, for American dialectologists, these grammatical niceties present an ever-widening, ever more complex vista of the diaspora of those inheritors of our rural English tongue.

I am not an American dialectologist but I can observe with certainty that Zane Grey and his fellow practitioners of classic Western fiction, including Colonel William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), correctly conjugate their possessive pronouns:

‘Keep back ... you snake! Or I’ll put out one of them slinky eyes of your’n!’

‘I felt as how ef yer was a good set of fellers you wouldn’t mind havin’ another true rifle and arm with your’n, for this is an all-fired dirty Injin country, you know.’*

Yet the odd thing is that I would not again have been reminded of my early interest in Sussex dialect – an interest that had all but faded from my mind – had not a certain ‘award-winning’ literary composition been cited to me as a superlative example of the common speech of Sussexers, when analysis of the text revealed at once in the tenth line a solecistic howler that no Sussex child – let alone an acclaimed scholar of our county’s provincialisms – would have inflicted on the ear of her elders. And the contentious phrase?

Gaffer stands in the yard and counts ourn hogs an’ lambs.

Ourn? No! Our hogs an’ lambs. (I imagine the prize for that literary composition was awarded by metropolitan critics.)

As the Rev. W.D. Parish, Vicar of Selmeston, writes, in his Dictionary of Sussex Dialect (1875):

The possessive pronoun is thus conjugated in Sussex,

Mine, thine, hisn [his own] or hern.

Ourn, yourn, theirn.

[Mine, thine, his, hers, ours, yours, theirs.]

To aid our parsing, the Rev. Parish gives us any number of specimen utterances.

That new lean-to of yourn is a poor temporary thing.

Robbuts! Ah, I layyou never see such aplaace for robbuts as what ourn is! 

These strict observances of grammatical rules cannot be neglected, in my view, when attempting to faithfully reproduce Sussex rural speech heard within living memory.

In my own fiction, Sister Morphine (2008), I remember, the speech of Wilkes, a Sussex farmworker, employs two possessive pronouns (the episode, Dispossession), both observant of rules that neither Buffalo Bill nor Zane Grey contravene ... so if they didn’t breach them why should we?

Yore ma sez as how the babe is her’n.

As you can just possibly begin to imagine, my brother’s birth was a fearful page in the record my existence.

    I can remember Boy in his pram, a peevish elf in a pointed woollen hat. That elfin cap concealed a skull elongated by a forceps birth, as though he had been delivered by coal tongs.

    Coincidentally, Grasper the sheepdog was struck dead six months later in an altogether less violent thunder storm; a bolt aimed true and found the brass tag that honoured his name; a medal struck by lightning, you might say.

    Mention of that sheepdog recalls a variant account of my brother’s nativity story, a kind of parallel creation myth that relates the genesis of the Young Lord and Master. As it also concerns myself it bears retelling.

•

A lamb, you know, can be born with eyes of a different colour and, in ancient times, shepherds believed such a lamb had two different sires. In fact, a lamb characterised by this phenomenon is one of my earliest memories.

    When I was going on seven, on the way to the lambing sheds one spring morning, Wilkes, the farmhand, pointed out a tawny-eyed ram, then, in the pens, he showed me lambs with brown eyes and, later, a sickly lamb with blue eyes suckling on a ewe. Disowned, in a corner, on shaky legs, stood an even sicklier lamb with an eye of each colour.

    ‘ ’Minds me of the time tha’ brother of yourn come into this world ’cause, true enough, he were born in a barn.’

    ‘In a barn?’ I exclaimed in wonderment.

    ‘Ain’t you never heard tell of the birth of yore brother? T’was full moon and light as day. Heard this hollarin’ an’ fancied diddikoy folk mostlike must of took the wrong turnin’ into the yard. So afore it’s light I got the lantern an’, begger me, I wouldn’t of belieft it if I hadn’t sin it wi’ my own eyes, a diddikoy babe bawlin’ in the cowhouse! An’ no sign o’ the mite’s mother.’

    ‘No!’

     ‘On my word. Next thing I knowed, yore ma comes hurryin’ outen the gate in her nightgown so I arsts her if summat’s wrong.  Then the mistruss took on summat terrible – sez the diddikoys are allus up to tricks – sez they’ll take away a mort of things as they’ve no call to have. She set up such a din, cryin’ and sobbin’, sayin’ as how the brat’ll be tarrible difficult to rear on account o’ it bein’ a child o’ the gyppos.’

    ‘A gypsy’s child! No!’

    ‘Then yore ma ketches holt o’ the babe an’ laid it on a silk idydown. “They’ll be a bout o’ trouble wi’ tha’ boy, shouldn’t wonder,” sez I, but yore ma jest gives it a sup o’ milk, an’ a crust to bite on, an’ sez as how the babe is her’n.’   

    He rubbed his nose reflectively.

    ‘An’ nobody didn’t tek it away from yore ma agin, ’cause nobody didn’t know the mistruss had bin cheated by the diddikoys. Same as a cuckoo, surely.  Jest ’sposin’ a cuckoo come along and turned out all them blue eggs and laid a speckly brown ’un.’

Sturdy double negative.

You’ll note that I refrain from discussing the double negative here (‘nobody didn’t know’), which is such a feature of Sussex rural speech, no different from American ruralisms.

‘Eleven hundred hides stole from my camp,’ replied the grizzled hunter, ‘an’ ain’t never heerd of them since, let alone seein’ hide or hair.’  Zane Grey  

As H. L. Mencken remarks in his The American Language, (1921): ‘Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative.’

Well, I don’t see nothing wrong in that.

NOTE: See Epitaph for an Anti-Hero (previous post) ‘... you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing.’

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/anti-antihero-heroine-takes-heat-to.html 

Postscript April 13 2015

One other thought about the title, Cold Comfort: Please be aware that Cold Harbour farms and place names abound in England, particularly Sussex.

It is a Saxon place name, meaning a refuge from the cold.

The Cold Harbours or Coldharbours are all in the vicinity of one or other of the great Neolithic or Roman roads, and were originally the remains of partially destroyed Roman or Romano-British dwellings, or settlements. Travellers used them as being more or less secure places in which to spend a night. As the places became known, traders gathered there to distribute goods and do business, and eventually the places once more became villages, but retained the old generic name.

So the title is also a play on a familiar Sussex place name, in my own view. 

* Shades of King Solomon’s Mines. Allan Quatermain to his hunting party on their mission to Kukuanaland: ‘I may say that I like you and believe that we shall come up well to the yoke together.’

Anti-Antihero Heroine takes Heat to Hail Fritz Lang and Emily Post.

Am I alone in thinking (I suspect I am) that émigré Fritz Lang is perpetrating a European sophisticate’s grotesque caricature of American table manners and rudimentary cuisine in his The Big Heat (1953)?

For I believe high satire defines the scene of supper-time exchanges between police sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) and wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando, sister of Marlon), with Lang — none-too-subtly — guying suburban domestic rituals performed in dinettes from coast to coast where Everyman is king; a demoticised king whose gun is always toted, and whose castle’s ever moated by a homesteader’s white picket fence.

No salad. A baked potato, a massive wedge of steak 
with bottled brown sauce and canned beer.

Consider the sly interplay between consumables as fast food is dished out from a diner-style menu of fried steak, baked potato, cigarettes and canned beer. What, we ask, would New Yorker Emily Post, la grande prêtresse des bonnes manières, have made of it.

It’s a long overdue question, so — after precisely sixty years of agonising — why not allow the simple folk of Hicksville their own agony-aunt-column to quiz her?

Hicksville: Is it not egregiously impolite for Bannion to smoke a cigarette in his wife’s kitchen and, moreover, while nibbling a bread-stick, to perch his smouldering butt-end at the edge of the countertop on which their food is prepared?
Emily Post: Smoking like a furnace in most polite circles is to be abhorred. Nor should one talk with one’s mouth either full of food or barricaded with tobacco. On the other hand, the Hicksville wife should not make a display of intolerance, or she had better take the first train back home, since she is likely to find New York very, very lonely.  

Hicksville: Is it not equally impolite for Bannion to tuck into his steak, plunging his knife into his baked potato before his wife is seated at the supper table?
Emily Post: The bolting of meals is to be deplored. No one should begin eating until everyone is seated. The knife must never be used to scoop baked potato out of the skin, or to butter potato ... butter for baked potatoes is taken on the tip of the fork shovel fashion, laid on the potato, and then pressed down and mixed with the prongs held points curved up.

Hicksville: Bannion’s wife, Katie, carves her husband’s steak on the supper table. Is this correct form?
Emily Post: A certain type of man always likes to carve, and such a one does. Carving on the table was once considered an art necessary to every gentleman.

Hicksville: Appallingly, Bannion brings two beer cans from the fridge to place on the table; the implication being that they will remain there. Surely this is a solecism of a very ugly character?
Emily Post: In proper serving of cold drinks of all sorts, even where a quantity of bottles, pitchers and glasses need space, everything should be brought on a tray. A cloth must always be first placed on the table, before putting down the tray. The tray may be a massive silver one that requires a footman with strong arms to lift it, or it may be of Sheffield or merely of effectively lacquered tin. 

Hicksville: The absence of vegetables or salad is troubling. Surely a meal composed of a baked potato and a massive wedge of steak with bottled brown sauce (high in carbohydrates and cholesterol) cannot be considered wholly nutritious?
Emily Post: Steak and broiled chicken are fairly practical since neither needs gravy, condiment, or sauce — especially if you have a divided vegetable dish so that two vegetables can be passed at the same time.

Rebel cop as New York anti-hero.

Emily Post may have held inflexible views on table place settings and dining etiquette (‘...the diner must never be allowed to hold his fork emigrant fashion, perpendicularly clutched in the clenched fist, and to saw across the food at its base with his knife...’) but she was also aware that the younger New Yorkers of her day were as a breed fiercely independent of their elders. (Incidentally, we may reasonably assume The Big Heat has New York as its setting because Bannion’s wife talks of ‘Jersey mosquitoes’ attacking on all sides.) 

Yet, all the same, I believe Emily Post would have applauded Fritz Lang’s satire (she was in her 81st year when The Big Heat was premiered and New York’s cinemagoers first saw rogue cop Bannion bolt fast food any old how, then turn in his badge to prowl the mean streets on a payback mission to bring down the gangland syndicate that murdered his cigarette-and-beer-sharing post-Postian proto-feminist wife). 

As Emily Post concedes, the generation of young males growing to manhood in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘… don’t care enough … to live up to the conventions of “manners” that old-fashioned hostesses demand. And as these “rebels” are invariably the most attractive and the most eligible youths, it has become almost an issue; a hostess must in many cases either invite none but older people and the few young girls and men whose mothers have left cards for them, or ignore convention and invite the rebels.’

The Emily Post Eligibility Test for New York’s ‘attractive’ rebels.

Emily Post lived just long enough to greet the 1960s, so she was no stranger to the rising class of Rebel Hero emerging from Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York whose alumni include those classic antiheroes, James Dean, Paul Newman and the kid brother of rogue cop Bannion’s screen wife, Marlon Brando.

But hang on! 

What our Hicksville country cousins eagerly desire to know, surely, is: would Emily Post have recognised the Strasberg rebel’s attractive onscreen persona as fundamentally the biddable notional firebrand who will eventually be welcomed by the Quality to dance the cotillion at Lucy Wellborn’s débutante ball? 

Hicksville: Consider The Wild One (1953), released in the same year as The Big Heat. Is biker gang leader Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) rebelling against anything of socio-political significance other than those forces that oppose his narcissism? 
Emily Post: Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embarrassment, ardor or hilarity, are all bad form in public. And bad form is merely an action which ‘jars’ the sensibilities of others. 

What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’

‘Whaddaya got?’

Hicksville: Would you censure the Method school of acting, which, despite its emphasis on theatrical honesty and total immersion in the character’s emotional state, is often associated with actors who have never overcome a tendency to mumble? Take, for example, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), whose risible angst finds its causative agent in the trauma of witnessing his father’s emasculation by frilly apron.
Emily Post: In all monosyllabic replies a child must not say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘What?’ ... Any number of busy men scarcely know their children at all, and have not even stopped to realise that they seldom or never talk to them, never exert themselves to be sympathetic with them, or in the slightest degree to influence them. To growl ‘Mornin’,’ or ‘Don’t, Johnny,’ ... is very, very far from being ‘an influence’ on your children’s morals, minds or manners.

‘What are you rebelling against, son?’

‘Undiagnosed Frilly Apron Complex, Daddy.’

Hicksville: Would you consider an incident of public disorder, drunkenness, and fatuous vandalism the impressive act of a Rebel Hero? One recalls the opening scene of Cool Hand Luke (1967) in which beer-swigging Paul Newman beheads parking meters with a pipe-cutter.  
Emily Post: An older man addicted to the use of too much alcohol, need not be discussed, since he ceases to be asked to the houses of ladies. A gentleman may be in his shirt sleeves actually, but he never gets into shirt sleeves mentally — he has no inclination to. All thoroughbred people are considerate of the feelings of others no matter what the station of the others may be. 

‘What we have here is a failure to communicate.’

Hicksville: Perhaps you could direct us to your own Emily Post Method for overcoming inarticulateness and achieving an expressive persona that is distinguished by simplicity and a grounded honesty of utterance.  
Emily Post: Simplicity of speech and manners means language in its purest, most limpid form, and manners of such perfection that they do not suggest ‘manner’ at all. Unconsciousness of self is not so much unselfishness as it is the mental ability to extinguish all thought of one’s self — exactly as one turns out the light. Simplicity is like it, in that it also has a quality of self-effacement, but it really means a love of the essential and of directness. Simple people put no trimmings on their phrases, nor on their manners.

Epitaph for an Antihero.

Hicksville: It’s time to extend a big thank you, Emily Post, for reminding us of your god-fearing forebears who evidently tempered your discrimination in matters of speech, morals and, indeed, table manners. Our citing of Paul Newman as Rebel Everyman reminds us also of his earlier movie, Hud (1963), and the almost Old Testament judgement on the eponymous antihero pronounced by his high principled father. ‘That’s the shame of it ... ’cause you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites. You live just for yourself and that makes you not fit to live with.’ Indeed, an Epitaph for an Antihero. 
Emily Post: Occasionally too, there appears in Best Society a provincial in whose conversation is perceptibly the influence of much reading of the Bible. Such are seldom if ever stilted or pompous or long-worded, but are invariably distinguished for the simplicity and dignity of their English.

‘You gonna get your mouth around that?’
‘Gonna try’

Template for a True Antihero.

Let me confess it. My jaundiced view of the American Antihero derives from my first encounter with a gun-toter in New York City in 1968, the decade in which Emily Post died (1872-1960). The occasion was a thanksgiving dinner and, after the grace was said, my table companion turned to the Limey and removed from his waistband his NYPD .38 special as a cue to laud the rights he enjoyed to bear arms, being essential, he insisted, for the security of a ‘free State’.  That was his thanksgiving.

In the sixties, some 50 percent of New York households boasted a handgun, yet, regrettably, Emily Post had not prepared me with the correct form to manage this encounter, so I nodded vigorously and passed the cranberry sauce with a sickly grin. Actually, Emily Post reserves her advice on the politesse of gun ownership to a few words. Despite the askance glances of wife and valet, a gentleman customarily resolves that ‘every evening is spent in cleaning guns’, and she adds the admonition that the gentleman’s son should be ‘taught by his father or a guide — at all events, some one — how and how not to hold a gun ...’

Anyhow, any discontent with the shortcomings of the American Antihero – whose whining consumerist anomie is exhibited here, specifically, the rebel’s want of a heartfelt grown-up cause, an infantilism that Emily Post presciently identified in the ‘younger fashionables in New York’ almost a century ago – is predicated on literary conditioning that takes as its template the searing heroics of a REAL Old World vigilante (executed March 20 1540, Berlin) ... Michael Kohlhaas, as envisioned by that master of German Letters, Heinrich von Kleist, in his classic eponymous Revanche-Geschichte. (It decidedly does NOT concern the antics of a drunken saddo, such as the ‘hero’ aforementioned.)

My adulation is boundless, as was Kafka’s, for this existential antihero without peer ... a charismatic rebel WITH an exhilarating, soul-blazing cause.

●

Post-Postian Postscript

I should not allow this opportunity to pass, in reflecting on American mores observed by cinema-goers of my mother’s generation, without a flashback to her consternation at witnessing Marlon Brando as the sheriff in The Chase (1966) polishing his toe-caps with his boots on, his foot braced on the arm of his living room chair. It was a solecism incomprehensible in its magnitude. Incidentally, The Chase, was one of only two films in which Jocelyn Brando appeared in a supporting role with her celebrated brother; the other was The Ugly American (1963).

Incidentally, my mother pointed out, much later, that Carly Simon, a New Yorker, appeared to be exposing a supreme breach of good manners in her celebrated lyrics. You’re So Vain: ‘No respectable man would walk into a party still wearing his hat, would they?’

Boot polish! Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall in The Chase 

●

Post-Brexit Footnote 08.07.2016 : A correspondent takes issue with me to question whether there exists a truly sustaining belief in the survival of high toned etiquette in Britain today, considering it a false ‘preciosity’ to suggest that somehow American table manners are a ‘burlesque’ of an enduring English correctitude. Well, I am pleased to reassure my correspondent that back-sliding in the Best Behaviour department is not wholly restricted to diners in the States, and there are back-slidden malefactors to be found in the very best High Society in England, particularly, it seems, among the Ruling Class at Westminster. Consider the scandal whipped up by the newspapers in 1996 when Conservative junior minister David Heathcoat-Amory resigned on a point of principle (a pre-Brexit protest at the over-regulation imposed by the European Union and the Tories’ ambivalence in rejection of a single European currency). 

On his announcement of his resignation, the UK press published a photo of a milk bottle on his breakfast table. This was regarded as a glaring solecism for a toff* by some. ‘Can any person who permits a milk bottle on his table be considered for high office?’ the newspapers reported. (Source: Confessions of a Eurosceptic by David Heathcoat-Amory, 2012.)

*For more revisionist views on English toffs, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/12/verifiable-proof-of-englishness-my.html

●

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html