The Odd Couple (of Books)

 I just finished reading a couple of books that, on the surface, have nothing in common. The first is John Steinbeck's East of Eden, the sprawling epic based on the Cain and Abel story. The second is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a parody of conventions in British literature. But as I think about them, it seems to me Cold Comfort Farm could be seen as poking fun of East of Eden - if Gibbons hadn't written her book 20 years before Steinbeck wrote his.

            

First, there is the way each book handles its "source material." Both of them stick pretty closely to the work they are following. Steinbeck's story of the twin brothers is a very close replica of the biblical story; at one point, Cal (Cain) basically says, "Am I my brother's keeper?" just as Cain did. The elements are all there - the rejection of Cal's gift, the "murder" of Aron, the follow-up conversation between Cal and his father that determines Cal's future. SPOILER ALERT! Fortunately for Cal, Adam (his father) gives him a chance at a brighter future than Cain got (but maybe that's because Cal had an advocate, Lee, pushing hard for it).

In Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons takes on a lot of the conventions of books like Wuthering Heights (I don't know that's one of the books she had in mind, but I can see how her book uses elements that are in Wuthering Heights). There's the gloomy, brooding physical environment. There's the irrational group of characters - part of a big family - who respond melodramatically and hysterically to circumstances. There's a big mystery and a character who is hidden away in a room in the huge, decaying farmhouse. There is the male character who oozes sexual energy and the innocent, sweet maiden.

The difference, as I see it, is that Steinbeck was taking his source material very seriously. He spends a significant section of the book having Lee explain his study of the Hebrew word timshel, which Lee (and through him, Steinbeck) sees as the key to understanding the Cain and Abel story. It's very scholarly. Gibbons, on the other hand, is laughing at her sources. Early in the story, the main character (Flora) and one of her friends are speculating what the farm will be like, and they agree there will probably be an oversexed guy named Seth. When we get our first introduction to the farm, we meet the brothers who run the farm - Reuben and...Seth. Here's the opening description of Seth:

"...a tall young man whose riding boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge....His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man."

Within a few paragraphs, Seth is undoing another of his buttons. It's pretty funny - you know the type, or at least the stereotype.

A second similarity between the books is the "character haunted by trauma." In East of Eden, Adam Trask is debilitated by the cruel betrayal of his beloved wife. He spends more than a year in a stupor, ignoring his farm and his newborn sons. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Aunt Ada Doom who isolates herself in an upstairs room, only coming down to be with the rest of the family two times a year. For 20 years, she's constantly reminded everyone that she saw "a nasty thing in the woodshed" as a child. Steinbeck's Adam is pathetic; Gibbons' Aunt Ada is ridiculous. 

In each case, there is someone who pulls the character out of their funk. In East of Eden, it is Samuel Hamilton, the good-hearted, philosophical, sort of bumbling Irishman who literally knocks some sense into Adam. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Flora, the sophisticated, calm, pretty much perfect young Englishwoman who sees through Aunt Ada's hysterics and persuades her flying to Paris is much better than sitting around in a bedroom. Everything Flora puts her hand to succeeds - everything.

I could go on, but you probably get the point. The main difference, I think, is that Steinbeck took it all so seriously. East of Eden is epic, in every sense of the word. Gibbons turns "epic" on its ear and shows us literature doesn't have to take itself so seriously, after all. Which side of the debate do I take? I'll have to get back to you on that....

SPOILER ALERT! One of the ways Gibbons flaunts literary convention is that she refused to give us all the answers to the mysteries in the book. What was the "nasty thing" Aunt Ada saw? We never find out!