Is A.E. Coppard, the short-story writer whose fame was at its height in the 1920s, earning praise from discerning literary folk such as Ford Madox Ford and Arnold Bennett, still worth reading? Stimulated by a review in a recent London Review of Books , I’ve just spent the last week or so revisiting some stories of his that I first read over 40 years ago in order to answer that question.
I think I first became aware of Coppard in the late 1960s thanks to a BBC1 Omnibus programme, directed by Jack Gold, that dramatised three of his short stories: ‘The Field of Mustard’, ‘Adam and Eve and Pinch Me’ and ‘Dusky Ruth’ (It was first broadcast in December 1967 and repeated in 1969). Then in 1972 ITV began an anthology series, Country Matters, which adapted stories with, as the title implies, rural settings, by Coppard and H.E. Bates.* Probably not by coincidence a selection of Coppard’s stories, with an introduction by Doris Lessing, was published in 1972, becoming a Penguin paperback in 1974. Since then it has been joined on our shelves by other, second-hand, Coppards, one of which is The Black Dog, Coppard’s third collection, first published in 1923. It is this, a nicely printed ‘Traveller’s Library’ edition, which I acquired and read in 1978, that I’ve returned to.
What then do I make of the 18 stories in The Black Dog? I have to say that they are uneven: the best of them, ‘The Black Dog’, ‘The Poor Man’, and to a lesser extent ‘The Ballet Girl’ and ‘The Handsome Lady’ are examples of what Blake Morrison (the LRB reviewer alluded to above) called Coppard’s ‘vibrancy of dialogue’ and ‘evocations of the natural world’. Apart from ‘Alas Poor Bollington’ and ‘The Ballet Girl’ (more about that story later), these stories are set in villages or small country towns and feature, for the most part, the marginalised or less privileged: shopkeepers, mill workers, postmen, undertakers, circus performers. True, the title story begins with ‘the Honourable Gerald Loughlin … a well-bred bachelor in the early thirties’ waiting at a rural railway station, but in his pursuit of the beautiful but elusive Orianda he soon is helping in her father’s pub; but then the focus of the story shifts to the ‘foolish, untidy’ Lizzie, who is edged out of her position at Orianda’s father’s side and meets a tragic end. Finally Gerald, who ‘was accustomed to walk from grossness with an averted mind’, is back in London and trying to forget his rural adventure. He is something of an exception in the Coppard world, where characters are unlikely to escape their environment: in ‘The Poor Man’, for instance, there is no happy end for Dan Pavey, who makes a living from newspaper delivery and wood-turning but is chiefly notable for his ‘sweet tenor voice’. Turned out of his local church choir (‘his chief opportunity for singing, that art in which he excelled’) by a new-broom vicar because of his moral lapses – Dan has fathered an illegitimate boy and is suspected of using his newspaper round to pass betting slips – he ends up in prison for poaching and loses his precious son in a boating accident. Certainly a story like that is reminiscent of Hardy, and there are other, more anecdotal, stories in The Black Dog where characters meet misfortune or fail to act in ways that recall the older writer’s ‘Satires of Circumstance’.
I should perhaps already have said something about our author’s background. Born Alfred Edgar Coppard in unpromising circumstances in Folkestone in 1878 – his father was a tailor, his mother a housemaid and laundress – he left formal education at an early age and had a succession of unrewarding jobs, from messenger boy and clerk to professional sprinter, and it wasn’t until he was in his thirties that he had a book to his name. When his first story was published, in 1918, he was living in some poverty outside Oxford – poverty that is reflected in the autobiographical story ‘Luxury’ that concludes this volume:
He finished his breakfast, cleared the things away, and sat down to see if he could write, but it was in vain – he could not write. He could think, but his mind would embrace no subject, it just teetered about with the objects within sight, the empty, disconsolate grate, the pattern of the rug, and the black butterfly that had hung dead upon the wall for so many months.
Although he says in an autobiography that he made friends ‘both collegiate and native’ in Oxford, his consciousness of the divide between the life of the university and the city’s ordinary inhabitants can be seen in ‘The Ballet Girl’, where Simpkins, the son of a cobbler sent to recover a debt from ‘St Saviour’s College’ finds himself caught up in an undergraduate ‘lark’ involving the kidnapping of a chorus girl. Coppard directs the reader’s sympathies away from the story’s arrogant students and towards the naïve Simpkins (‘Acting as he was told to act by his father, than whom he was incapable of recognizing any bigger authority either in this world or, if such a sight, shrinking fellow could ever project his comprehension so far, in the next’) but it is Lulu, the chorus girl who escapes with him, ‘all softness and perfume’, who has the last word. In a way this bears out Russell Banks’s assertion that in many of Coppard’s best stories ‘the protagonist is a man or a boy whose life is confounded by his inability to see into the heart and mind of the woman or girl he loves’.
I said earlier that these stories are uneven. As well as the too-short ‘anecdotal’ stories (‘Mordecai and Cocking’ or ‘Huxley Rustem’) or those too fairy-tale-like for my taste (‘Tribute’, ‘Tanil’), there are a couple of real duds. These are ‘Simple Simon’ and ‘The Man from Kilsheelan’– both set in Ireland and employing a kind of faux Irish speech that, a century on, I find somewhat uncomfortable:
“If it’s Owen Twingeing you are, I’ll bring you to my mother in Manhattan.” The captain grabbed up his bag. “Haste now, come along out of it. I’m going from the cunning town this minute, bad sleep to it for ever and a month! There’s a cart waiting to catch me the boat train to Queenstown. Will you go? Now?”
I know that Coppard did visit Ireland more than once, but this appropriation of an idiom just seems, well, inappropriate – and it’s noteworthy that the 1972 Coppard selection did not choose these two or any other Ireland-based stories that he wrote.
Let us not dwell on that. Instead here to conclude is a passage from ‘The Handsome Lady’, where Coppard shows his strengths:
It was an afternoon of damp squally blusters, uncheering, with slaty sky, and though it had every opportunity and invitation to fall, the rain, with strange perversity, held off. In the oddest corners of the sky, north and east, a miraculous glow could be seen, as if the sun in a moment of aberration had determined to set just then and just there. The wind made a long noise in the sky, the smell of earth rose about them, of timber and of dead leaves; except for rooks, or a wren cockering itself in a bush, no birds were to be seen.
Letting his spade fall Pettigrove sat down beside the widow and kissed her. She blushed red as a cherry and he got up quickly.
Incidentally, the LRB review mentioned above, by Blake Morrison, was of The Hurly Burly and Other Stories, a selection published over a year ago in the US and not apparently available on the LRB Bookshop’s own website (or indeed Waterstone’s). So if you’re looking for Coppard your best option may be to head for the second-hand market …
*Six were by Coppard: ‘The Higgler’, ‘The Black Dog’, The Watercress Girl’, ‘The Sullens Sisters’ and ‘Craven Arms’. That last one starred a young Ian McKellen.
Old geezer re-reading 