The Hurly Burly and Other Stories Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Preface

  The Black Dog

  The Handsome Lady

  The Wife of Ted Wickham

  The Poor Man

  Luxury

  The Higgler

  Dusky Ruth

  Ring the Bells of Heaven

  Olive and Camilla

  Ninepenny Flute

  A Little Boy Lost

  The Hurly Burly

  The Field of Mustard

  The Watercress Girl

  Fifty Pounds

  About the Author

  Ecco Art of the Story

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  by Russell Banks

  HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT AN ACCLAIMED TWENTIETH-CENTURY master of the English short story, his work loved and admired by critics and writers as different and demanding as Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley, Frank O’Connor, and Doris Lessing, turns up all but lost to us today? From the start of his career, he was compared favorably to Hardy, Kipling, and D. H. Lawrence, and was viewed as Chekhov’s and Maupassant’s legitimate British heir. Between 1921 and his death in 1957, he published more than twenty short story collections. The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard was published in the US by Knopf in 1949, and, thanks to a letter-writing campaign led by Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg, was the Book of the Month Club headliner in 1951—a very big deal at the time, critically and commercially, rare for a non-American writer and rarer still for a book of short stories.

  Yet, until the early 1980s, I myself had read only one of Coppard’s stories when I taught a seminar on the modern American short story in the Columbia Graduate Writing Program and assigned Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story to help guide the students through the bodies of work of writers like Flannery O’Connor, J. D. Salinger, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, James Alan McPherson, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and so on. At that time, there was a short-lived renaissance in writing, publishing, and reading short stories, and students in creative writing workshops were eager to learn how it was done.

  The Lonely Voice gives high praise and an entire chapter over to the work of A. E. Coppard. “Coppard was a Georgian in the same way that Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, and a score of others were Georgians, and he shared their obsession with personal freedom—freedom from responsibilities; freedom from conventions, particularly sexual conventions; freedom from duties to state and church; above all, freedom from the tyranny of money.” Elsewhere, O’Connor says, “He was fascinated primarily by women’s secretiveness: it is the theme of most of his great stories.” These were themes that my students and the American writers on their syllabus were obsessed with, too. It was time to read some A. E. Coppard, I decided.

  Easier said than done. Most of his books were long out of print, even in England, and his Collected Tales could be found only as an abused copy at the legendary Strand Bookstore (this was pre-eBay, Amazon, and quickie print-on-demand facsimile editions of out-of-copyright books). Eventually I got my hands on the Collected Tales, which is more “selected” than “collected,” the stories chosen and briefly introduced by Coppard himself, and a tattered copy of The Black Dog and Other Stories, published in the US in 1923 by Knopf. Between the two volumes, I had access to most of his best stories, early and late. It’s from these two collections that I’ve chosen the fifteen that follow, five from The Black Dog and Other Stories and ten from The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard.

  Reading them for the first time was a revelation. The best of the stories, like “The Black Dog,” “The Higgler,” and “The Field of Mustard,” are as fine as anything in the English language. In almost all his stories, even the ones I was obliged to leave out, 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 workingmen and -women, and their sad-eyed children trailing behind. Like Maupassant, Coppard was a careful, affectionate, compassionate observer of the lives of women: mostly poor, abandoned, or “fallen” women, 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 and deep personal knowledge of all of England’s green. As Lessing noted, “Coppard knew England through walking over it,” and he was, indeed, in the tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth, a tireless, lifelong tramper.

  But there was something uniquely characteristic of Coppard’s stories that I’d rarely seen in male writers, especially of his generation—perhaps of any generation. Yes, he was, as O’Connor said, “fascinated by women’s secretiveness,” although I would put it rather differently. In many, if not most of Coppard’s best stories, the protagonist is a man or 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, overloaded with fantasy and projection, 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 hidden depths of the beloved woman’s vulnerable heart and mind. It’s his male protagonists, the lovestruck suitor or the befuddled husband or the overprotective father or the dismissive brother or son, who cannot catch a glimpse until it’s too late, and both lover and beloved must go their separate ways. As a result, at the center of these stories there is a profound, heartbreaking loneliness for all—male and female alike. A loneliness, one senses, that is shared by the author.

  Alfred Edgar Coppard was born into extreme poverty in 1878 in Folkestone, Kent, the eldest of four children. His mother was a housemaid; his father, a tailor, deserted the family when Coppard was six, forcing his mother to support the family by herself as a presser and with parish relief. His was a Dickensian childhood: Taken from school at the age of nine and apprenticed to a paraffin oil vendor, he was later shipped off to live with an uncle in London, where he worked at a series of jobs as a messenger boy and eventually as a clerk for small businesses and manufacturing firms. At fifteen he was earning side money as a professional sprinter and using it to buy books. The boy with three years of formal education had fallen in love with literature—specifically, he wrote in his autobiography, with Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Hardy’s Life’s Little Ironies, and the poems of Robert Bridges and Walt Whitman. He read voraciously and indiscriminately, and memorized whole swaths of poetry in English that he could, and would, recite for the rest of his life.

  In 1905 he married and in his late twenties was at Oxford, but not as a student. He was employed there as a clerk—an irascible autodidact with nascent literary ambitions and all the usual insecurities and defenses, elbows sharpened, no doubt, by his friendships with the collegiate literary intellectuals. In his autobiography, he confesses, “Here were all these boys, boys! with their poems and tales already in being . . . some even in real books. Straightway I was fired, though not by any more worthy muse than the spirit of rivalry.” He wrote his first story at thirty-four—twelve thousand words—called “Fleet,” which was rejected by The English Review for being too long. But the floodgate had opened, and soon he was publishing poetry and stories, among them some of his best, like “Dusky Ruth” and “The Wife of Ted Wickham,” in the most prestigious English and American journals of the day, including The Double Dealer, The Dial, and The Saturday Review. He may have come late to the party, but he had definitely arrived. Ford Madox Ford remembered that “the first English writer to whom I wrote for a contribution to The Tra
nsatlantic Review was Mr. Coppard.”

  Each of the fifteen stories included here is emotionally stirring in its own way, sometimes unexpectedly, as in “The Black Dog,” when, halfway into the story, the locus for our sympathy shifts from the besotted middle-aged bachelor, the Honorable Gerald Loughlin, over to the young woman he’s obsessed with, “a mere girl, just twenty-three or twenty-four,” and then near the end shifts yet again to the older woman whom the “mere girl” has roughly displaced. The movement incriminates the reader: we see that we have granted our sympathy too casually to the two characters who don’t deserve it and overlooked the fate of the one who does. It leaves one feeling almost ashamed. Or similarly in “The Higgler,” our sympathies and easy identification are first attached to the lonely, impecunious young peddler who, suspicious of his good fortune when a widowed, dying mother offers him her prosperous farm and the hand of her daughter, rejects both and settles for much less. In the end, it’s the lovelorn daughter we most care about. It’s her fate that moves us. The higgler’s fate is merely absurd and somehow deserved.

  Characteristically, these two masterpieces, like most of Coppard’s stories, or “tales,” as he insisted on calling them, are told in the close third-person, past-tense point of view. Yet we are constantly aware of a personalized, confiding narrator who is telling the story, someone not in any way a player in the tale or a witness to its unfolding—just someone who has drawn his chair close to ours by the fire and has begun to speak in a most interesting way about a surprising thing that happened to someone else. In his introduction to 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.” These stories, then, are told and 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 flare to the descriptive passages. Ford Madox Ford says Coppard’s language is “Celto-British,” and that seems right. But Coppard deploys it with amazing grace and transparency—it never sounds like dialect or impersonation. Ford goes further and says that Coppard “is almost the first English writer to get into English prose the peculiar quality of English lyric verse. I do not mean that he is metrical; I mean that hitherto no English prose writer has had the fancy, the turn of imagination, the wisdom, the as it were piety and the beauty of the great seventeenth-century lyricists like Donne or Herbert—or even Herrick.” That, too, seems about right.

  I like knowing what writers from the past looked like, especially writers whose work I love. I wonder what it was like to be in the room with them. There are few photographs of Coppard, and no film footage that I’m aware of. He seems to have kept himself out of the camera’s way, no doubt deliberately. I’m grateful, therefore, for Doris Lessing’s word-portrait, made after a sponsored journey with Coppard and several other leftist English writers to Russia in 1950: “He was a small man, light in build. At that time he was seventy-two, but looked sixty, and with a boyish face. Characteristically he would stand to one side of a scene, in observation of it, or quietly stroll around it, his face rather lifted, as it were leading with his chin, his nose alert for humbug, or for the pretensions of the rich or the powerful—about which he was not passionate but mildly derisive. . . .”

  One has to wonder how and why, barely seventy-five years after his death, a writer of Coppard’s widely acclaimed ability and with his significant body of work is so little known today, 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 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 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.” Indeed, just the sort of man we would expect to have written these fifteen marvelous stories.

  The Black Dog

  I

  Having pocketed his fare the freckled rustic took himself and his antediluvian cab back to the village limbo from which they had briefly emerged. Loughlin checked his luggage into the care of the porter, an angular man with one eye who was apparently the only other living being in this remote minute station, and sat down in the platform shade. July noon had a stark eye-tiring brightness, and a silence so very deep—when that porter ceased his intolerable clatter—that Loughlin could hear footsteps crunching in the road half a mile away. The train was late. There were no other passengers. Nothing to look at except his trunks, two shiny rails in the grim track, red hollyhocks against white palings on the opposite bank.

  The holiday in this quiet neighbourhood had delighted him, but its crowning experience had been too brief. On the last day but one the loveliest woman he had ever known had emerged almost as briefly as that cabman. Some men are constantly meeting that woman. Not so the Honourable Gerald Loughlin, but no man turns his back tranquilly on destiny even if it is but two days old and already some half-dozen miles away. The visit had come to its end, Loughlin had come to his station, the cab had gone back to its lair, but on reflection he could find no other reasons for going away and denying himself the delight of this proffered experience. Time was his own, as much as he could buy of it, and he had an income that enabled him to buy a good deal.

  Moody and hesitant he began to fill his pipe when the one-eyed porter again approached him.

  “Take a pipe of that?” said Loughlin, offering him the pouch.

  “Thanky, sir, but I can’t smoke a pipe; a cigarette I take now and again, thanky, sir, not often, just to keep me from cussing and damming. My wife buys me a packet sometimes, she says I don’t swear so much then, but I don’t know, I has to knock ’em off soon’s they make me feel bad, and then, dam it all, I be worsen ever . . .”

  “Look here,” said the other, interrupting him, “I’m not going by this train after all. Something I have forgotten. Now look after my bags and I’ll come along later, this afternoon.” He turned and left the station as hurriedly as if his business was really of the high importance the porter immediately conceived it to be.

  The Honourable Gerald, though handsome and honest, was not a fool. A fool is one who becomes distracted between the claims of instinct and common sense; the larger foolishness is the peculiar doom of imaginative people, artists and their kind, while the smaller foolishness is the mark of all those who have nothing but their foolishness to endorse them. Loughlin responded to this impulse unhesitatingly but without distraction, calmly and directly as became a well-bred bachelor in the early thirties. He might have written to the young beauty with the queer name, Orianda Crabbe, but that course teemed with absurdities and difficulties for he was modest, his romantic imagination weak, and he had only met her at old Lady Tillington’s a couple of days before. Of this mere girl, just twenty-three or twenty-four, he knew nothing save that they had been immediately and vividly charming to each other. That was no excuse for presentin
g himself again to the old invalid of Tillington Park, it would be impossible for him to do so, but there had been one vague moment of their recalled intercourse, a glimmering intimation, which just now seemed to offer a remote possibility of achievement, and so he walked on in the direction of the park.

  Tillington was some miles off and the heat was oppressive. At the end of an hour’s stroll he stepped into “The Three Pigeons” at Denbury and drank a deep drink. It was quiet and deliciously cool in the taproom there, yes, as silent as that little station had been. Empty the world seemed to-day, quite empty; he had not passed a human creature. Happily bemused he took another draught. Eighteen small panes of glass in that long window and perhaps as many flies buzzing in the room. He could hear and see a breeze saluting the bright walled ivy outside and the bushes by a stream. This drowsiness was heaven, it made so clear his recollection of Orianda. It was impossible to particularize but she was in her way, her rather uncultured way, just perfection. He had engaged her upon several themes, music, fishing (Loughlin loved fishing), golf, tennis, and books; none of these had particularly stirred her but she had brains, quite an original turn of mind. There had been neither time nor opportunity to discover anything about her, but there she was, staying there, that was the one thing certain, apparently indefinitely, for she described the park in a witty detailed way even to a certain favourite glade which she always visited in the afternoons. When she had told him that, he could swear she was not finessing; no, no, it was a most engaging simplicity, a frankness that was positively marmoreal.

  He would certainly write to her; yes, and he began to think of fine phrases to put in a letter, but could there be anything finer, now, just at this moment, than to be sitting with her in this empty inn. It was not a fair place, though it was clean, but how she would brighten it, yes! there were two long settles and two short ones, two tiny tables and eight spittoons (he had to count them), and somehow he felt her image flitting adorably into this setting, defeating with its native glory all the scrupulous beer-smelling impoverishment. And then, after a while, he would take her, and they would lie in the grass under a deep-bosomed tree and speak of love. How beautiful she would be. But she was not there, and so he left the inn and crossed the road to a church, pleasant and tiny and tidy, whitewalled and clean-ceilinged. A sparrow chirped in the porch, flies hummed in the nave, a puppy was barking in the vicarage garden. How trivial, how absurdly solemn, everything seemed. The thud of the great pendulum in the tower had the sound of a dead man beating on a bar of spiritless iron. He was tired of the vapid tidiness of these altars with their insignificant tapestries, candlesticks of gilded wood, the bunches of pale flowers oppressed by the rich glow from the windows. He longed for an altar that should be an inspiring symbol of belief, a place of green and solemn walls with a dark velvet shrine sweeping aloft to the peaked roof unhindered by tarnishing lustre and tedious linen. Holiness was always something richly dim. There was no more holiness here than in the tough hassocks and rush-bottomed chairs; not here, surely, the apple of Eden flourished. And yet, turning to the lectern, he noted the large prayer book open at the office of marriage. He idly read over the words of the ceremony, filling in at the gaps the names of Gerald Wilmot Loughlin and Orianda Crabbe.