Adam and Eve and Coppard
I recently reread, out loud with my wife, The Collected Tales of A.E. Coppard. Going back to a book I admired as a teen or twentite, I nearly always wish I hadn’t. All the faults and omissions that I missed in my youthful enthusiasm now rear up and bark.
Not so with Coppard. Still revered in his native England, pretty much ignored in the U.S., Coppard, I’m coming to see, was not just a good short-story writer or even a great one, but perhaps the best ever in the English language.
His range is astonishing – he tackles any emotion, theme, tone, class, narrative structure, psychological outlook, genre with equal facility, grace and skewed understanding. Love, hate, betrayal, work, leisure, simple pub tales, densely claustrophobic lives, fantasy – nothing stops him. He beams and sniggers at his characters from the authorial highlands, then suddenly turns them free to run mad through the countryside.
Despite no formal schooling past the age of nine and no published books before the age of forty, he arrived on the English literary scene in the early 1920s complete and fully accomplished, with his first collection, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. Most of the tales in my over-500 page collection from the 1950s – each chosen by the author – date from the ‘20s, and each is a gem.
He also wrote poetry and an autobiography published in the year of his death (1957), none of which I have read. In his introduction, he tosses the novel to the winds as a modern (post printing) invention that can’t rival the history of the short story, which traces to oral storytelling. So far as I can trace, he never wrote a novel that was published.
Many of his tales of love involve doomed romances, run aground on the shoals of reality. Yet… there is usually an underlying redeeming element, not in the facts of the story itself but in the shading of character, even among his rotters. I think Coppard truly appreciated, celebrated and forgave humanity, and did this without a touch of condescension or bombast.
I also think that the necessity of essentially raising himself and pulling his own way through life gave him not only a panoramic view of the human race but an artistic freedom that few writers ever achieve. He isn’t confined by the idea of “what a story should be.” He simply writes. With some of the tales, I can’t decide if they were plotted or whether he simply followed where his mind, his characters and his setting led.
His language – his wording – is propelled by an eccentric cam; his sense of humor runs up trees and chases squirrels. His characters say the most unlikely and addlepated things to one another, yet each of these unlikelihoods illuminates a new corner of the speaker’s being.
Here’s the start of “Fishmonger’s Fiddle”:
“Maxie Morrisarde was not of the generation of Morrisardes; what they were doesn’t matter, save that one of them was a vendor of cheroots. Her paternal ancestry was Vole, her father and her father’s father were Voles, but neither does that matter, for her mother had been a Crump.”
Maxie was abandoned by her husband– “a swindler he was, pimp, bloodsucker, criminal, and sponge” – and lives with Aunt and Uncle Vole, her saviors and over-protectors. “Now the Voles had a great rough hufty of a dog, with the name of Toots and the manners of a buffalo.” Maxie takes Toots for a walk and becomes involved with a young man who salvages a bird from Toots’ jaws. Off to the side, we encounter a rowdy in a pub who sings about the Queen of Poland and seems to have nothing to do with anything. Then we’re back to Maxie whose aunt refuses to consider the possibility of Maxie achieving a divorce. At the end, the Queen of Poland makes her vocal return.
How does all that fit together? Brilliantly, and in ways only Coppard could have contemplated. If there’s one thing best to say about him, it’s that no one better mixed disparate ingredients into a complete, satisfying concoction.
A word about the story “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me.” It has often (and reasonably) been said that there are no new stories, only new tellings, that all the themes and most of the permutations have been set over the ages. I honestly think “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me” may be a new story. Does it relate a dream, a fantasy, a foretelling, precognition, skewed telepathy or… a state of being that has no name?
I won’t attempt to describe it, because you should approach it with fresh eyes. On the third reading, I have a hint what it’s “about,” but, basically, it’s not about “about.” It simply is, as the best things are.
by Derek Davis