New Releases: The Hurly Burly and Other Stories by A. E. Coppard
The Hurly Burly and Other Stories
By A.E. Coppard, and Introduction by Russell Banks
336 Pages. Ecco. $16.99.
I.
Though The Hurly Burly has been given the conventional subtitle for a book of short fiction - “And Other Stories” - Russell Banks, in his introduction, informs us that A. E. Coppard always called his stories “tales.” “These stories, then,” Banks writes, “are told and not written, heard and not read.”
At the same time, Coppard’s tales have few of the distinguishing characteristics I associate with folk tales and many of the characteristics I associate with modern fiction of his era. Only two of the fifteen tales are written in the first person, as if being spoken aloud; Coppard’s usual point of view is in the third person, in which he narrates the thoughts of characters in finely-shaped free indirect discourse, while occasionally stepping outside the head of any one character in order to use his full literary abilities for a description of the natural world. His tales even contain a rather peculiar, Latinate vocabulary, as if in defiance towards the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of common English conversation.
Few of his plots would work well as folktales either. They certainly have stories, with causes and effects, but they usually rely upon psychological subtleties as much as extraordinary events. We see this particularly in “The Higgler,” which concerns a small-scale merchantman who finds a reliable source of business from a middle-aged farm woman with a beautiful, but vexingly silent daughter, named Mary. The titular higgler is enchanted by the daughter, but cannot get her to say so much as a sentence to him. When the farm woman offers her daughter in marriage - and with it her considerable estate - the higgler, thinking his rural simplicity to be incompatible with the refined nature of the young lady who will not communicate with him, “rejects both and settles for much less,” as Banks puts it. That phrasing is the pat resolution we would expect from a story passed around a small village. However, Banks goes on to note that Coppard’s artistry extends beyond such a simple conclusion: “In the end, it’s the lovelorn daughter we most care about.”
He’s correct to make the observation. So what is it about Mary that makes us care about her? I think it comes from her quiet, determined personality, in contrast to the mind of the higgler, who is perpetually confused and uncertain throughout the whole tale. The only moment of true harmony the two experience takes place after the higgler has married another woman and has visited Mary again to find that her mother has just died. While preparing the old woman’s body for burial, the higgler is briefly left alone with the corpse; a draft of wind blows open a door and suddenly he feels “as if some invisible onlooker were resenting his presence.” Struck with the thought of Mary, but not actually Mary herself, the higgler is seized with all the determination he has been lacking for the last twenty pages, and he bends the body into shape for a coffin.
“Oh, if you’d only tipped me a word, or given me a sort of look,” the higgler exclaims to Mary at the end of the story; I don’t trust him, though. A word and a look, we come to believe, was what she gave him, and all she permitted herself to give. And yet - we can’t be too harsh on the higgler; a large part of his sad ending comes from class distinctions he is aware of but cannot overcome.
That last sentence of the paragraph above shows another side to Coppard’s genius: his characters are full people, not reducible to any set of adjectives or easy judgements. His fiction contains very few caricatures - indeed, in depth of human sympathy, I would say he excels Dickens, Hardy, Ford and possibly even Lawrence.
His commitment to well-rounded characters does not come at the cost of a biting wit. Take this exchange, from “The Poor Man,” where a priest hears the musings of a county laborer:
“I never knowed what was to be out of work for one single day in all that sixty years. Never. I can’t thank my blessed master enough for it.”
“Isn’t that splendidly feudal,” murmured the priest, “who is your good master?”
The old man solemnly touched his hat and said: “God.”
“O, I see, yes, yes,” cried the Rev. Scroope.
This is an immensely effective bit of satire, and unlike so much satire, it’s not a cynical joke but a joke at the expense of cynicism; the reverend is so jaded that he cannot perceive the earnest belief of the laborer. “The Poor Man,” about a good-natured but reckless man named Pavey, is a finely-shaded story, one that exposes all the indignities and difficulties of poverty without wallowing in misery. And Scroope is not as Dickensian a character as his name would lead you to believe; when Pavey, at the end of the tale, is put on trial, Scroope, absent for many pages, returns: Pavey is “deeply moved by the spectacle of the Rev. Scroope standing up and testifying to his sobriety, his honesty, his general good repute, and pleading for a lenient sentence because he was a man of considerable force of character.”
II.
While reading The Hurly-Burly, I frequently thought of the claim Philip Hensher makes in the first sentence of the introduction to his two-volume Penguin Book of the British Short Story: "The British short story is probably the richest, most varied and most historically extensive national tradition anywhere in the world."
Though I have not read Hensher’s anthology, I find that claim rather peculiar, considering that the major authors of prose fiction from Britain - unlike those from Russia, France, the United States, Ireland, Japan, Argentina, et. al. - are hardly ever read for their short stories. The story of Coppard’s that Hensher includes in his anthology, “Olive and Camilla,” also appears in the collection under consideration in this newsletter, and I found the tale to be among the weakest of the bunch.
“Olive and Camilla” concerns two women who are lifelong partners together, and how their relationship changes as they turn from an itinerant life throughout continental Europe to a settled life in the English countryside. Whether this is read as a story of female friendship or whether it’s read, as I suspect a substantial minority did then and a large majority will now, as a story of suppressed lesbian desire, the relationship between Olive and Camilla is drawn with startingly intimacy. Coppard is able to portray, with the precise tone of aggravated familiarity, the way in which Olive observes how Camilla eats with such particularity (“the knife must pursue with infinite patience one or two minuscular crumbs idling in the plate and at last wipe them gloatingly on the mass”).
But “Olive and Camilla” is not only about Olive and Camilla. Once the two settle into their country homes, their domestic help play an outsized role in the tale, and instead of revealing more about the titular duo, they are a distraction, causing the story to be imbalanced, unsatisfactory.
“Olive and Camilla” is the oddest-structured tale in terms of storytelling and potentially the most transgressive in terms of subject matter, but it’s also the one where the English countryside feels most quaint, even static, not fully alive as in Coppard’s other works.
III.
The Hurly Burly contains two tales that I place among the best pieces of short fiction I’ve ever read: “The Black Dog” and “Ring the Bells of Heaven.” The first is Coppard at his most fable-like, and the second is Coppard at his most penetratingly real, even as “The Black Dog” exposes the psychological and social fetters of its time and “Ring the Bells of Heaven” is about the passion of an extraordinary individual.
“The Black Dog” is about a well-bred city man named Gerald who falls in love with a woman from the rural working class named Orianda; their relationship seems to go preternaturally well until they visit the woman’s father, who, after being abandoned by his wife, has taken up with another woman. The psychological dynamic this event unleashes is complex, but, in short, Gerald believes Orianda’s father should marry this woman, but Orianda disagrees; Orianda gets her way, and the woman leaves, then commits suicide; the thought of this suicide causes Gerald to abandon Orianda.
The style is lush, rhythmical; sentences take strange turns and so do the events they describe. Coppard seems to write this ironic tragedy of the English countryside more in the style of Tennyson than Hardy. Here is Orianda recalling, in conversation with Gerald, her childhood home:
“The yard is full of poles and pailings, spars and fagots, and long shavings of the thin bark like seaweed. It smells so nice. In the spring the chaffinches and wrens are singing about him all day long; the wren is lovely, but in the summer of course it’s the whitethroats come chippering, and yellow-hammers.”
“Ah, blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales!”
“Yes, but it’s the little birds seem to love my father’s yard.”
“Well then, but why did you, why did you run away?”
“My mother was much younger, and different from father; she was handsome and proud too, and in all sorts of ways superior to him.”
This dialogue at once captures a kind of rustic vernacular, as well as indicates the unspoken feelings of the two characters, all while being not just beautiful, but almost metrical. Gerald’s repetition of “why did you” is both a nervous stutter as he turns the conversation to heavier matters and the kind of refrain you’d read in fanciful verse for children. More than anything, “The Black Dog” recalls Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” - a favorite poem of Coppard’s, according to Banks.
As grim as “The Black Dog” is, “Ring the Bells of Heaven” is much more sad. In forty pages, it tells in full the life of a country boy, Blandford Febery, who, attending a local theatrical performance one day, falls in love with art. Through determination, he becomes a great dramatic actor; then, disfigured in an accident, he remakes himself as a fiery evangelical sermonist; finally, after growing disillusioned with the temporal politics of his church, he becomes a preacher for temperance. His path from art to religion to social activism is one we can still recognize today, but Coppard portrays it as a degradation. Blandford’s journey through these successive phases is one of abandonment, of loss and limitation. His first childhood encounter with the theatre and with poetry is one of such pure, ardent passion - but his later activities cannot help but feel artificial, compromised. As a churchman, he meets a woman and develops a sort of romance with her - but like many a romance in a Coppard tale, it is one that cannot be fully consummated, or even acknowledged directly.
Once again, Coppard imbues more into his tale than a summary can capture. I initially took Blandford’s temperance preaching to be the grift of a desperate man, but when we actually hear one of his speeches, it is not a simple moralistic lecture. Instead, it has a more existential and also a more personal feel. Here is how he describes the atmosphere of a village tavern:
It is a world of shirt-button joys, and griefs that would drown in a single tear. How fatuous! What waste, what profanation! I hear a voice that cries: ‘Begone! You may not enter here!’ Yet the heart pleads for some charity that the soul ever denies, and I long to enter there, to merge myself humbly with these, and be one with its cheap oblivion. ‘Begone! Begone! You may not enter here!’
“The world is my tavern. Am I excluded, or is it I that exclude myself? Are there cherubin at the gate of that paradise from which I have known neither expulsion or exclusion, or is that flaming sword merely my own? I know, I know, for it scorches my hand and heart!’
He speaks of an anguished division between the worldly and the eternal - anguish that begins in the encounter with art. Could his lament also be Coppard’s?