A. E. Coppard

A literary bookworm once contacted a close friend. “I just discovered A. E. Coppard, a most amazing turn-of-the-century English writer.”
When his friend asked him to describe Coppard’s literary style, after an awkward pause the fellow replied, “That’s absolutely impossible. Just Read a few stories and you’ll understand why he is so unique.”
Not to be denied, the friend insisted, “I’ll go to the library and hunt him down, but there must be something you can tell me about his writings.”
Another uncomfortable pause twice as long as the previous ensued. “No, there’s nothing I can say that will do Coppard justice. Just read The Higgler, Dusky Ruth or The Field of Mustard and you will understand why I’m at a loss for words.”
Several weeks elapsed and his friend called back. “I read Coppard.”
“Yes?”
“You were right. His writing’s indescribable, like nothing else on the planet… or the universe.”

*****

Alfred Edgar Coppard was born in 1878 the son of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone, England. He grew up under difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances and ultimately quit school at the age of nine when his father died. Coppard, who described his childhood as “shockingly poor”, had little formal education and could best be thought of as a literary autodidact or self-taught writer.
Living with his mother, he held a number of low-paying, menial jobs at one time or another working as an errand boy for a tailor and junior clerk for manufacturing firms. Coppard’s fiction was influenced by the Victorian writers such as Thomas Hardy as well as de Maupassant. Coppard also mentioned Dickens, Shaw, Chekhov and James Joyce as writers he much admired and sought to emulate.
By 1931 the Times Literary Supplement praised Coppard’s “brilliant virtuosity as a pure spinner of tales.” Many of his short stories though were deeply disturbing. On a personal note, I remember reading a short Coppard piece, Arabesque: The Mouse, about a small field mouse that finds momentary comfort near the warmth of the fireplace in a rustic cabin. The story left me so completely unsettled that I couldn’t sleep for hours after reading the story, which continued to haunt me for days afterward.
Russell Banks, a contemporary poet and short fiction writer from Massachusetts, praised Coppard's treatment of women: "Like Maupassant, he was a careful, affectionate, compassionate observer of the lives of women, particularly poor, abandoned, or 'fallen' women."
Again, speaking from a purely personal standpoint, I noticed that same veneration early on in my own reading of A. E. Coppard. The author treats women with a reverence seldom seen in contemporary literature.

One biographer notes:

“Reading them (i.e. Coppard’s short stories) for the first
time was a revelation. In almost all of them, the influence
of Hardy and Maupassant is wide and deep, especially in
the dark ironies and unintended consequences that upend
the quiet lives of desperation led by ordinary working men
and women and their sad-eyed children, trailing behind.
Like Maupassant, Coppard was a careful, affectionate,
compassionate observer of the lives of women, particularly
poor, abandoned, or “fallen” women, both young and old.
And, like Hardy—and, to a lesser degree, Lawrence—he
took pure delight in the English countryside. A true
countryman, he possessed a vast personal knowledge
of all of England’s green.


The author goes on to say that “In many, if not most, 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. But it’s not because of her secretiveness. It’s because the male is too obtuse, self-absorbed, and overloaded with fantasy and projection, or too dishonest and insecure, or merely too professionally and financially ambitious, to see what’s before his clouded eyes.”
“Coppard himself, however—and, thus, the reader—sees clearly into the depths of the beloved woman’s vulnerable heart and mind, even while the lovestruck suitor or the befuddled husband or the overprotective father or the dismissive brother or son cannot catch a glimpse. Until it’s too late, that is, and the lover and beloved must go their separate ways. As a result, at the center of these stories there is a profound, heartbreaking loneliness, male and female alike. A loneliness, one senses, that is shared by the author.”

In the preface to one of Coppard’s short story collections Russell Banks goes on to note,

“His father, deserted the family when Coppard was six, forcing
his mother to support the family by herself as a presser and with
parish relief. Coppard’s was a Dickensian childhood. Taken from
school at the age of nine and apprenticed to a paraffin-oil vender,
he was later shipped off to live with an uncle in
London. He read voraciously and indiscriminately
and memorized whole swaths of poetry that he
could, and would, recite for the rest of his life.”


In his introduction to “The Collected Tales,” Coppard argues that the short story, unlike the novel, “is an ancient art originating in the folk tale, which was a thing of joy even before writing, not to mention printing, was invented. . . . The folk tale ministered to an apparently inborn and universal desire to hear tales, and it is my feeling that the closer the modern short story conforms to that ancient tradition of being spoken to you, rather than being read at you, the more acceptable it becomes.” What Coppard implies is that “these stories, then, are told, not written—heard and not read”.
“They are artfully told, and they seduce the reader’s ear with great skill. The diction and tone are not archaic or exotic, but there is a distinctly Gaelic twist and inversion to the grammar and phrasing and a warm appreciation for the English countryman’s and countrywoman’s colloquialisms, with a striking lyrical flair to the descriptive passages.”

One has to wonder, Russell Banks writes in his preface to Coppard’s collection, “ how and why, not even sixty-five years after his death, a writer of Coppard’s widely acclaimed ability and significant body of work is so little known, even among writers. No doubt it has something to do with the erroneous, market-driven view of the short story as the illegitimate stepchild of the novel, a kind of practice field for the apprentice writer training to play in the big leagues of novel writing, rather than a literary form as distinct from the novel as poetry or drama or film.
It may also be partially blamed on the fact that Coppard lived most of his life in country villages far from literary or academic nexuses, avoiding coteries, claques, and cliques.”
As Doris Lessing observed, “What came out strong in him was his inability to play the role ‘writer.’ He didn’t like making speeches, he didn’t like formal occasions, or conferences or big statements about literature. He did like talking half the night to an old pre-revolutionary waiter about Tolstoy, or examining the plants that grew beside the field in a collective farm. He liked flirting in a gentle humorous way with the beautiful girl doctor at the children’s holiday camp.” He was, in other words, just the sort of man one would expect to have written his marvelous stories.”