Alfred Edgar Coppard was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet. Coppard's work enjoyed a surge in popularity in the US after his "Selected Tales" was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.
Background
In terms of struggle and development, the life of Alfred Edgar Coppard was, particularly in his early years, an epic in itself. He began in abject poverty, and his rise was circuitous. Born on January 4, 1878, at Folkestone in Kent, England, he was the son of a housemaid, Emily Alma (née Southwell) and George Coppard, a tailor.
His father died of tuberculosis. Coppard later remembered him as a radical young man with a bushy beard who never owned nor could afford an overcoat. This fact was apparently significant, as Coppard himself did not own an overcoat until he was thirty. After the father’s death, the family (Coppard, three sisters, and their mother) was sunk in destitution and was forced to apply for parish relief.
Career
At nine, Coppard was taken out of school to become a wage earner. A year later, he was sent to Whitechapel in London, where he lived with an uncle and served as a shop boy to a trousers maker. From there, he was transferred to a pool of messenger boys at Reuter’s Telegraph Agency. The pay was usual for the period, but it was not enough to take care of the rest of his family; he lived on strict rations. This was a period, however, of growth and novelty amid colorful relatives, both hostile and friendly, and the tumult of the city.
Two years later, Coppard returned to Brighton and hired out as an office boy. From thirteen on, he worked at a number of jobs, meanwhile becoming an avid reader of poetry and continuing what had already become a program of self-education. He appears to have been endowed with extraordinary energy; his enthusiasms were broad as well as precocious. He loved sports, hiking, music, painting, and amateur theatricals. Around this time, his lifelong interest in athletics began to manifest itself, and he began to supplement his income, sprinting professionally. He ran, boxed, swam, and developed special passions for soccer and long-distance hiking, which he continued to enjoy for the rest of his life.
By the time of his early teens, he had started to write poetry, inspired chiefly by John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and John Milton’s “L’Allegro.” This poem, and Thomas Hardy’s collection of short stories titled "Life's Little Ironies", were the touchstones of a sudden and all-consuming interest in reading. From this point on, Coppard devoured books of all kinds, the classics of English literature in particular. He especially loved Whitman; Robert Bridges, whose poetry, as he claimed in his autobiography, altered his stance “towards pretty well everything, not merely to the art I was groping for but to life and its thought surrounding me”; and, possibly best of all, Robert Browning, of whose "The Ring and the Book Coppard" once called “the most beautiful long poem ever written.” When Coppard entered the hospital for the last time in 1957, "The Ring and the Book" was the only volume he brought with him.
Coppard’s first writings were essayistic in nature, and, by the time he was twenty-four, he was entering annual essay competitions — and winning. Some of this success he owed to the support and assistance of friend Lily Anne Richards, who often suggested the topics for these essays. They were married in 1905, around the time Coppard abandoned his sprinting career. Shortly thereafter he abandoned Brighton as well, moving to Oxford with his wife in 1907. This simple change of location would have momentous consequences; in effect, reorienting the course of Coppard’s life.
Although he was a working man, clerking his days away in an engineering firm, Coppard participated in the intellectual world of Oxford as if he were a student: he joined literary organizations, followed the lecture series, made use of the resources of the Bodleian library, attended social and athletic events, and mingled with students and academics. Having pursued his love of literature in isolation for so many years, the effect of literary society upon him was galvanic, and apparently something of an overload. Coppard was swept up in a great appetitive rush of interest, chasing after new opportunities to learn, and to display his own learning in appreciative circles; contradictorily, he was both cowed by the academic knowledge of the students and faculty, and somewhat arrogant about his deep and ardent autodidacticism.
He had read many classic books that most students, and even some teachers, only talked about. However, even the students in Oxford’s literary circles were writing, and some were already published. Coppard eventually resolved to participate in literature himself. With Lily, he moved to nearby Combe, in order to distance himself somewhat from frenetic Oxford society, and, away from these distractions, began to write. His first story, “Fleet”, he completed at the age of thirty-four, in 1912. It went unpublished. Coppard continued to produce stories.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Coppard moved back to Oxford. Though he was of fighting age, and, thanks to his athleticism, in excellent health, he was deferred from the draft because his work at the Eagle Ironworks was considered part of the war effort. Some of Coppard’s best stories date from this period, although he did not see publication until 1917, when a few of his poems appeared in the Egoist and in the Nation magazines. It was in July. 1918, however, that Coppard saw his first real commercial success — Pearson's Magazine not only accepted his story “Piffingcap”, which he had written during his days at Combe, but paid him for it. It was his first sale.
From this point on, Coppard’s work was steadily in print, appearing in various magazines. While he had the opportunity to apply to the critic E. J. O’Brien for support of his short stories, Coppard was already forty years old, had been writing for roughly half his life, and felt less in need of promotion than mature recognition and criticism. Coppard had cherished the ambition of becoming a writer for most of his life, and he doggedly decided to make himself a success on his own merits and, more or less, on his own terms. When World War I ended, he broke with Eagle Ironworks in 1919 and moved to Shepard’s Pit in Bayswater to dedicate himself full-time to writing. He had amassed only fifty pounds in savings to maintain himself in the meantime, and he lived highly frugally, subsisting on a Kafkian diet of uncooked vegetables.
"Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" was Coppard’s first anthology, and, though it sold fairly well, he saw little of the money. He had approached one publisher after another — Methuen, Macmillan, Constable, Chatto & Windus — only to be turned down on each occasion, until he received a request from Howard Taylor for a manuscript. Taylor was launching his own company, Golden Cockerel, and it was he who gave Coppard’s works their first home. "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" first appeared in a limited edition of 550 copies in 1921.
A Times Literary Supplement contributor set the tone for much of the criticism Coppard saw in his life, claiming that he was clearly much under the influence of Anton Chekhov, whom Coppard indeed read and greatly valued, but not until after the appearance of this collection, and that his “most obvious influence... is that of the Irish school, with its rather voluble style of narrative, its elaborate similes, and the elusiveness of its meaning.” While Coppard had spent time in Ireland, he was not essentially imitating Irish writers of the time. But, regardless of its relationships to the facts, the Times Literary Supplement review set the persistent refrain with which Coppard’s writing would be greeted: comparisons to Chekhov, de Maupassant, and to Irish writers; complaints about the vagueness and colloquialism of his work; and especially persistent allegations of straining for effect. However, there was no dearth of recognition for his talent as a writer of prose.
Coppard’s stories generally unfold in still, rural settings, and often shade into the supernatural, although not regularly enough as to pigeonhole him as a “horror” or “fantasy” writer. He called his pieces “tales”, insisting thereby on their roots in folklore and oral culture. The title story of his first collection, "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me", relates the out-of-body visions of a man who seems to visit the future, where he is noticed only by a child named Gabriel. When he returns to the present, or from his dream, his wife informs him that she is pregnant, and he inwardly resolves to name the child Gabriel. In another story, “The Mouse: An Arabesque”, the narrator simply sits in his room, musing about his past and watching the activities of a mouse — in his reverie, he recalls how his mother died, her hands having been crushed by a carriage in a street accident, and is suddenly snapped back to awareness by the crack of his mousetrap, which has severed the forepaws of a mouse. This strange, Poe-like blurring of psychological detail and the supernatural is typical of those stories most prized by critics of Coppard’s work.
The following year, 1922, saw Coppard back in Oxford. He continued to publish his anthologies to increasingly positive critical response. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, in critiquing his 1925 collection "The Black Dog", stated, “There is nothing sentimental in his treatment of the country; he does not idealize it, and has no illusions as to the wisdom of those who inhabit it. But sensuously it has deeply affected him, so that the emotions he describes stand out like motives from a rich texture, from a profound inheritance of ‘memoried images.’”
Unfortunately, things were not shaping up so well for Coppard’s marriage, which ended in 1924. He isolated himself for a second time, moving to Little Poynatts in the Chilterns. In the years that followed, his name gradually began to circulate more and more widely, until he was seeing publication from prestigious houses like Knopf. While he had not sought J. E. O’Brien’s promotional assistance while at Oxford, he now found himself collected in O’Brien’s influential Best British Stories anthologies. Suddenly, Coppard was one of the foremost experts in the English short story, a form which many had written off as “dead.”
Coppard wrote poetry as well as short stories, but most critics agree that, while technically accomplished, his poems are undistinguished. Babette Deutsch, in New York Herald Tribune Books, commented on their “lack of originality,” calling Coppard “old-fashioned”, although she admitted that Coppard could “bestow upon the tritest of themes... words and cadences that give it new values.” His verse never emerged from the shadow of his superior short stories.
Coppard met Winifed de Kok, a South African medical student, in 1926, and she began to visit him at his Little Poynatts “hut.” He abandoned his isolated ways in 1927, moving to London and continuing to pursue a financial success commensurate with his critical reception. In 1931 he married Winifred and moved again, this time to Walberswick. Suffolk, apparently unable to extract himself from the countryside he loved. Time and again he expressed his frustration with the small amounts of money he received for his works, pointing out that the signed limited editions of his first books were selling among collectors for more money than he had made on all of them combined. Late in his life, Knopf produced a volume of Coppard’s Collected Stories which finally provided him his commercial success.
Coppard’s productivity slackened as he aged, but he agreed to write his autobiography at the request of Methuen, which had been among the publishing houses that first turned him down. The day after he sent the corrected proofs back to them, he entered a London hospital, with his copy of Browning’s "The Ring and the Book", and died in 1957, at the age of seventy-nine. While his poetry is generally forgotten, and his short stories were sadly deprived of the opportunity to reach a wider audience during much of his life due to Coppard’s own lack of connections, he has come to be recognized as one of the greatest stylists of the English short story, and a late recorder of a vanished rural way of life.