A. E. Coppard Revisited

I recently stumbled across a collection of A. E. Coppard's short stories. Coppard, one of the greatest nineteenth century writers, was much admired by younger writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, Frank O'Connor, Doris Lessing and Russell Banks. In the preface to the anthology the author talks at great length about the historical significance of short fiction. From the outset he says,

“First, I want to crush the assumption that the short story and the novel are manifestations of one principle of fiction, differentiated merely by size, that the novel is inherently and naturally the substantial and therefore the important piece of work, the bale of the tweed - out of which your golfer gets his plus-four suits, the short story being merely the remnant, the rag or two left over to make a caddie cap. In fact, the relationship of the short story to the novel amounts to nothing at all. The novel is a distinct form of art having a pedigree and practice of hardly more than a couple of hundred years; the short story, so far from being its offspring, is an ancient art form.”

Coppard goes on to note that, while the novel dates back to the fifteenth century and the beginning of English printing, which is when the traditional folk tale lost its oral or spoken form and reemerged in printed form. It was an additional three hundred years later (i.e. the eighteenth century with Gulliver's Travels and Pilgrim’s Progress) when the conventional novel finally emerged. Coppard goes on to say:

“The folk tales minister to an apparent 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 to you, the more acceptable it becomes. One of the earliest delights of childhood is to be told a tale, and the queer pleasure does not lessen or leave us until we ourselves are left in the grave.”

Let me repeat that very last sentence: “One of the earliest delights of childhood is to be told a tale, and the queer pleasure does not lessen or leave us until we ourselves are left in the grave.”

At the close of his introduction Coppard goes on to recommend that contemporary writers plot their stories through “the mind or consciousness of only one of your characters, a process that I used to think might be the secret hinted at in Henry Jame’s tale, The Figure in the Carpet. Of course, one does not adhere to the literary principles any more than one does to political or moral ones - we accept them for guidance, not for use in dictatorship. As long as mine served and were not too difficult to embody, I was virtuous; whenever they became irksome or incurred some loss of interest, I took the primrose path and hoped for the best.”

On a personal note, two decades ago while travelling in southern Siberia on the Mongolian border, a Russian educator gifted me with a collection of ancient Russian folktales that dated back to the pre-literary, oral tradition. These stories, not unlike Aesop’s Fables, were told while sitting around a campfire many hundreds of years ago. They still retained a subtle enchantment and bewitching wisdom. I have gone back many times to read these clever tales, which put much of our academically inspired contemporary writing to abject shame.