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In Kipling’s Own People Mike Smithexamines among others, stories, like Mary Postgate (once called the wickedest story ever written), The Gardener and The Debt, (two stories that touch on the mass slaughter of the First World War, but from strikingly different perspectives), The Eye of Allah (a re-arguing of the dichotomy between religion and science), and They (In which a bereaved father is brought to confront whether or not he has the right to contact his lost child). As well as individual stories, Mike looks at some of the themes that pervade Kipling’s short fiction.
Take Two present a series of brief studies on the differences between adaptations and original stories, both short, and novel length, and looks at the way new agendas make use of stories that were written for apparently quite different purposes. Mike Smith cites good and bad priests in Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, how a personal battle between two US Vets becomes a political commentary on the Vietnam war, how the concept of the hero is not so subtly changed in The Lord of the Rings, and how the story of a relationship between two out of time cowboys becomes a traditional Hollywood love story in The Misfits. Plus many more movie adaptations of both novels and short stories by a wide variety of authors..
English of the English, a phrase used by an American commentator about the short stories of A.E.Coppard. Self educated, having left school at the age of nine, Coppard devoted himself almost entirely to the short story form. Here, in a score of essays, Mike Smith looks at individual stories, and commonly occurring themes. Though still relatively well know in America, Coppard has been almost completely forgotten in his own country. In this first substantial critical study to be published in England, Mike begins to redress the balance.
The fictional Sicilian detective Montalbino got a mention on Radio 4 this morning, and there was a discussion about Sicily and the arts. Some extracts of the dialogue were played and explained. His creator, Andrea Camilleri, whose death was announced yesterday, was mentioned too.
What wasn’t mentioned was that the gritty Sicilian society with its codes of Honour, and the harsh beauty of the Sicilian landscape were the background to the short stories of Giovanni Verga (1840-1922). He was one of the European writers prominent in the development of what became known as ‘verismo’; an often harsh realism and naturalistic style that we take for granted today. There’s a Penguin paperback, Cavelleria Rusticana and other stories, in translation, and, in the original Italian Vita dei Campi, is available as a print-on-demand from Amazon with half a dozen of the same stories, ideal for those of us who, with the aid of a dictionary (and in my case a winter course in the language from Patricia Guseti here in Cumbria), try to make up for our wasted school days!
Another writer I’ve essayed in English and in the original is Prosper Merimee (accents missing!), with stories like Mateo Falcone, in which a Corsican peasant murders his only son in revenge for the boy having betrayed an escaping bandit. Merimee’s tale was first published in 1829. That Radio 4 article picked on this theme as being replicated in the Montalbano stories, re-located to Sicily, describing it as an ‘honour killing’.
Honour Killing is, of course, a subject we’re aware of, in the room, but find attractive in some cultures.
Race too was on the mind of Radio 4 this morning with the candidates (I nearly wrote cadidates) for the Tory, and National leadership being categorised by their skin colour, among other attributes. Later in the programme we were left to guess, should it matter to us, the skin colour(s) of three female commentators, an interesting but not necessarily instructive inconsistency. The metaphor of intersecting trajectories is worth playing about with, but meeting at a single point does not in itself imply pursuing a similar goal, or target (live like an arrow not like a target as the Anglo-Saxons, we are told, if there ever were any, might have said).
The stories of Verga and Merimee seem to me to resonate with those of Mary Mann, A.E.Coppard, and, even though he was writing about the urban poor, those of Arthur Morrison. H.E.Bates too turned in a couple of stories – The Mill and The Little Farm spring to mind – with that same verismo grip. Vive Le Similarité, one might say, though I’m not sure with what lexicographic accuracy. 
The delights of a well told story mean that we can come back to it again and again with equal, and perhaps growing pleasure. Even, and perhaps especially, the short story works in this way, and remarkably, even the very short story can.
A.E.Coppard’s Weep Not My Wanton (most recently published as the title story of a Turnpike Books selection) is a case in point. Only four pages long, it’s a story I’ve come back to again and again, finding something new in it each time – perhaps I’m an inattentive reader – or refining my thoughts from a previous reading. Weep Not My Wanton featured in Coppard’s very first collection, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, alongside Dusky Ruth – often quoted as being representative of his work, and Arabesque – The Mouse, one of his most sinister and searching sidelights on the human psyche, and another favourite of mine. Unaccountably, Coppard left Weep Not My Wanton out of his self-selected American collection, and I wish I’d discovered him in time to have asked why!
I’ve written about the story before on more than one occasion, but I haven’t stopped exploring it. The mystery, if that’s the right word, for me, has always been to explain why Coppard tagged on the last paragraph. It could, of course, be an error of judgement, but I doubt that. The paragraph provides a closing frame, returning the reader to the landscape that opened the story, in a lush description of Sack Down, where ‘air and light […] at summer sunset were soft as ointment and sweet as milk’. The closing sentence is as gentle: ‘From the quiet hill, as the last skein of cocks was carted to the stack, you could hear dimly men’s voice’s and the rattle of their gear.’
What has passed between what I think of as the two water-coloured frames of English landscape, is a simple, but brutal story. Into that landscape walks an itinerant labouring family. The father is ‘slightly drunk’ and as they walk he unmercifully berates, and beats, the ‘tiny figure’ of his son. The cause of this prolonged assault is a lost sixpence, but, just before that closing paragraph of landscape, a startling truth is revealed. The sixpence is not lost, but withheld by the boy, to be given to the mother while the father is distracted.
That father is a complex figure, far more complex than four pages of story might be thought to require. Drunk, but wearing ‘two bright medals’, which, the author tells us, in a phrase that seems to push through the detached narrative of the third person and speak intimately to us, were ‘presumably for valour’. This is an important phrase. That ‘presumably’ raises the question of what the medals were for, and prepares us for another phrase, later, in which we are told that he has fallen ‘from the heroic standard’. Readers in 1921, and perhaps since, would know that ‘for valour’ is what it says on the Victoria Cross, the highest award, for valour, that can be made to a serving soldier of the British Army. This bullying father is not quite what he seems.
That ‘tiny figure’ of the son is not what he seems either. He is described at length early in the story and the description is shot through with elements that show he is in disguise: ‘a man’s cap’, a ‘sailor’s jacket’, ‘a pair of women’s button boots.’ Appearances are deceptive throughout this story. The mother, who watches the abuse of her son without seeming to do anything about it, is equally misleading: ‘she seemed to have no desire to shield the boy’. ‘She did not seem to notice them.’ But, at what might seem to be the climax of the father’s assault, she seems to need to go behind a bush and hands over to him the babe, whom she has been carrying.
Now we see another side of him, as he cooes to and carries the child. The boy falls back, and slips the sixpence to his mother when she reappears. The jolt of this action, on first reading, is immense, and the scales fall from our eyes. The heroism and endurance of the boy, and the cleverness of the mother, and the tragedy of the whole situation are all, instantly revealed. And perhaps, all that seeming, and being dressed in somebody else’s clothes is eclipsed.
There is something else going on in this story. ‘At the crown of the hill’ at a ‘roadside barn’ young boars are being gelded. Their ‘sounds of anguish’ are not illusory. Neither is the singing of the lark, ‘rioting above’. A gypsy man among the workers comments on the father’s beating of the boy – ‘ ‘Selp me, father, that’s a good ‘un, wallop his trousers!’ But it isn’t the trousers, and besides, the father ignores all this. But the pigs, at the end of the story are really ‘bloody and subdued’.
I think a point is being made here, about what is seen and not seen, and what is paid attention to and what is ignored, and how what is real can be misrepresented. And at the very beginning of the story, Coppard has alerted us to the possibility of something very like that, for that luscious opening description, of the peaceful English countryside, with its ‘ointment’ and ‘milk’ is, he quite explicitly tells us, ‘a notion the down might give..[ to ]…some happy victim of romance’. This brings the story down to being, not about the father and his situation, nor even about the England across which he tramps, but about us, the readers, and what we are capable of seeing, through, and in the stories we are told.
If you’d like to read more about Coppard, about the tales, and the themes that run through them, my collection of essays is available online for Kindle, or as a softback, by clicking on the image, or here.
There is a 1937 collection of H.E.Bates short stories, Country Tales, to which the author has added an introductory essay called The Writer Explains. Though only four pages long, it throws light on a wide range of issues that might concern us as writers, and even eighty years later holds much that resonates with current experience.
Bates asserts the supremacy of the short story: ‘…it is in every way a finer means of expression…..than either the novel or poetry.’ He bemoans the lack of newspaper and magazine support for the form (in the UK), and cites the importance of other forms of publication: ‘The existence of the short story seems to depend largely therefore on its survival in volume form’. He gives a reason for writing: ‘…for pleasure, and out of a passionate interest in human lives.’ And he writes about his development as a writer: ‘I had the choice either of repeating myself……or of consciously trying to widen my range of sympathy and develop myself’.
This last undertaking, the transition from a writer of ‘the dreamy world of the subjective’ to ‘a wider, harder, more objective world,’ is one that, in some form or another, I suspect any self-conscious writer must eventually confront.
And those outlets he complains about the lack of – and the poor rates of pay: how, I wonder, would he regard the upsurge of magazines and journals devoted to the form, yet which pay nothing. Curiously, he compares the short story to the ‘heroic couplet’ in ‘the age of Pope’, which, perhaps unintentionally raises the issue of to what extent the writers of those times were actually commercial in any real sense. The sonnet was a form that writers of Shakespeare’s time used to show off to each other, surely, rather than to make money from? And even a writer as late as George Moore, according to one biography, was priming the pump of his publications with inputs of money that eventually ate up the value of his Irish landownings.
That assertion of the ‘fineness’ of the form is still relevant, especially in the context of Bates’ associated remark that it is ‘still in its infancy’, something that his writing contemporary, A.E.Coppard, was entirely at odds with – tracing it back to the oral tradition. Bates attacks this idea vehemently in his The Modern Short Story, fearing that it might lead to writers not being paid for their work. Digital recording, podcasts and streaming, and those non-paying magazines, might be seen as proof of this pudding. But also, could be seen as a return to the days when those who want to write do so, among other reasons, for the pleasure of entertaining each other, rather than for money (making them, according to Doctor Johnson, of course, ‘Blockheads!’).
There’s perhaps an irony too, in the title of the collection in which this introduction appears, for that ‘Tales’ was the term that Coppard always used for his short stories, and which so irritated Bates that he condemned it in his history of the form.
It seems to me that when we are interested and engaged in the making of things, be they wooden chairs, or clay pots, or short stories, the means of making must interest us to a much greater degree than they do those who only sit upon them, or fill (and empty) them, and read them!
An anniversary that you might have missed – I certainly did – was back in January, when the anniversary of the death of short story writer A.E.Coppard’s passed without much of a ripple.
Coppard’s published short stories ran to thirteen collections – with several duplications in short run special editions, often illustrated by artists including Robert Gibbings – usually of about twelve to fifteen stories. There was a ‘Collected’ edition, published in the USA with around fifty, chosen by Coppard himself, and a British ‘Selected’ with less than half that number. A recent collection of seven tales – Coppard’s preferred descriptor – was produced in 2013 by Turnpike Books, and on Goodreads you will find a ‘Coppard page’, listing other available selections and collections. His current popularity in Britain might be judged by the fact that this morning it had 2 followers!
Out of the two hundred or so stories he published, a handful crop up again and again: The Higgler, Dusky Ruth, and The Field of Mustard are three of the most commonly referred to. All three concern the love lives of women, and the men who fall for them. They also hint at another regular Coppard theme: that of poverty, usually but not exclusively rural. My own favourite tale is Weep Not My Wanton, a four page masterpiece in which a family of itinerant farm labourers pass across a beautifully painted English landscape while playing out the brutal game of their family dynamic – and raising a question of why that should be. In a line I’ve quoted often enough, an American commentator wrote of Coppard’s England as one in which ‘accidents of heredity’ outweighed all other factors in determining the course of the lives that Coppard described.
Coppard himself came from grinding poverty –as a child he worked picking oakum (one of the tasks given to felons in the English penal system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) in a Whitechapel sweatshop, having left school at the age of nine. Frank O’Connor accused him of having an ‘issue’ with ‘unearned income’ – surely not an unreasonable one!
I became interested in him a few years ago, while reading about H.E.Bates and V.S.Pritchett, with whom he was often compared, and seemed in some way to hover behind. Writing over the same inter-war decades as them, he was, however, of an earlier generation which was publishing in the 1890s, with writers like Mary Mann, who wrote of poverty in rural Norfolk, and Arthur Morrison, who wrote of poverty in London’s East End. What I discovered was that there is relatively little published about Coppard or his writing, save for the bare bones of biography, and a couple of dozen short-ish press reviews.
English of the English, a collection of 20 essays on Coppard’s tales and their themes, was an attempt to redress the balance. It is available as a paperback, and for Kindle, here.
Mike’s poem L’On Y Danse is one of the guest poems on the Acumen website and features in the current issue (Acumen #86)…You can find it here.
BHD being cock-a-hoop in Heidelberg
BHD says:
I recently sent an old writing buddy of mine a copy of a short story I’d just written. He wrote back to say he liked it, but that the last word was unnecessary, the sense it conveyed being implicit in what had gone before: its meaning could be taken for granted. It went without saying.
I wrote back to him, pointing out that the very last word was the whole point of the story. What ‘goes without saying’ can be left unsaid for so long that we’re in danger of forgetting it, and that particular story, by saying explicitly what could safely be left implicit, was intended to bring the issue back to light. My hope was that the reader would be surprised at the inclusion, because, obviously, ‘it went without saying,’ didn’t it? That moment of re-evaluation, of doubt, and eventual re-assertion was the view that the story was bringing him to (and, seemingly had!). The events described were to give context to the concept, the context in which the word’s meaning might, and perhaps should be obvious to all!
Readers don’t always find what we want them to in our stories (or poems come to that), which sometimes is no bad thing…but often in short stories I find there are elements at the end that seem to be bolted on…That favourite of mine, Weep Not My Wanton, for example (by A.E.Coppard) has a whole scene following the shocking revelation that is the climax of the story…if we think the story is the events being described. Why does Coppard add that scene, I ask myself every time I read it, and the answer I give myself reveals what I think must be his purpose in telling the story. (I’ve written about Weep Not My Wanton both here, and on the Thresholds blog, and on Liars League website if you want to go searching!).
I’m not going to reveal the title of my ‘excessive’ story, but if you come across it, I hope you’ll think that last word was unnecessary too, but only after having thought about it.
Earlier this weekend (which means Friday and Saturday) Facets of Fiction Writers Workshop, and Carlisle Writers Group staged a pop-up Bookshop in Waterstones, Carlisle. Thanks to everyone who helped, and especially to those who visited the stall and bought our books! Especially, specially, thanks to Waterstones Bookshop, who made the space available to us, provided what we hadn’t thought to bring, and encouraged us all around. We couldn’t have done it without you Waterstones! And Watch That Space – because we’d like to come back!!
Now available in Paperback!
Somerset Maugham was born in 1874, four years before A.E.Coppard. But their lives, and stories diverge more widely.
Maugham was educated at Canterbury and Heidelberg, and considered training as a doctor. By the age of twenty three he had published his first novel, by 1919 he was an established novelist and playwright.
In 1921 a curious convergence occurs though, for that was the year in which both Coppard and Maugham published their first collection of short stories: Adam and Eve Pinch Me, and Little Stories of the South Sea Islands respectively.
Education, travel and class separate these two English writers more widely than do their years, and it shows in the sort of stories that Maugham went on to produce, and in the points of view from which they are narrated.
Typical of his South Sea story narrators is the worldly wise and slightly cynical traveller, who has seen much and recounts stories of planters and traders, steamer skippers and their crews, and itinerant writers, exiles and ne’er do wells who move from port to port. In bars and club houses they drink to forget, and to remember, mixing uneasily with each other, and with the native peoples they encounter.
There is poverty here, but not the same sort of poverty as afflicts Coppard’s Old Venerable or his Poor Man. Maugham’s protagonists have the poverty of those who have left comfortable worlds behind them in Europe. They live as self-imposed exiles rather than in circumstances that have been forced upon them. The backgrounds to their lives, and to those of their narrators, have little in common with those of Coppard’s characters. England is a memory, or some other European country is. They are a community of isolates, in their clubs, on far flung estates, or aboard the wandering ships of the archipelagos.
Stories like Mabel, where a would be wife chases her man from Malaya to China, begin with the narrator ‘at Pagan in Burma, and from there I took the steamer to Mandalay.’ He hears the story at a ‘riverside village’ and passes it on to us. Nothing is rooted in these stories. Neither events nor narrators, nor, by implication we ourselves. We are just another passing traveller to whom another passing story is told.
‘The Book-Bag’ is another in which a narrator arrives somewhere, is befriended by a planter, and is told a story as strange as any in the eponymous holdall. Like many others, this story is inconclusive, indecisive, a story about strangers, passed onto strangers, concerning strangers. Whereas Coppard is rooted in places, Maugham is blown about the seas. His characters belong nowhere, and that is where their stories are traded.
Who these characters were, and in what sense they were truly British is a subject for discussion, but they did exist, and Maugham had met them, and in the clubs and bars, and plantation houses in which the stories are set, he listened and noted. When his South Sea Tales began to appear it seemed, to the people whose stories they were, often recognisable as individuals, an act of betrayal, to the extent that Maugham felt unable to visit the area again.
Yet there is little in them, save for the details of location, and the specifics of events that could not be found in the stories of any peoples at any time and in any place. Lust, greed, fear, disappointment and the striving to hold or to gain power over their own lives and those on whom they depend are present in all humanity’s stories. Coppard’s characters might also recognise themselves, and not be so happy to do so, yet Coppard’s narrators seem to be closer to those they describe than do Maugham’s. But what of either of them’s readers?
Though that may be true, it remains that the element which made Maugham’s stories so attractive when they were first published, the whiff of the far flung unknown location, is what makes them worth reading now. What has changed is that whereas a hundred years ago, those locations were exotic by virtue of their distance in space, they are now made so by their distance in time.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Responses-Tales-E-Coppard/dp/1519557426
Now available in Paperback!
Nineteen essays, on themes and threads in Coppard’s tales, eight on individual stories, plus a bibliography that tells you where to find which of the tales! Previously available only on Kindle, but now in paperback…..
I’ve been reading Adrian Bell’s memoir of a year on a Suffolk farm (Corduroy, first published in 1930, but set in 1920/21). You don’t have to be interested in farming, nor indeed in Suffolk, to enjoy it. A liking for how stories unfold, and how the English language might be used will suffice.
Bell’s agricultural apprenticeship took place in the rural England that A.E.Coppard often wrote about, and it was instantly recognisable. In particular there was a paraghraph or two devoted to a description of ‘the higgler,’ both as an individual and a type. The only other place I’ve come across this character, except in an old dictionary, was as the eponymous hero of Coppard’s most famous tale. The descriptions of other labourers recall stories such as The Old Venerable and The Poor Man, and of course, the VC winning itinerant labourer of Weep Not My Wanton. The story of Coppard’s renting of his cottage in the woods is borne out here too, in the prices quoted for such lettings. [you can read more of Coppard and his tales here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Responses-Tales-E-Coppard-ebook/dp/B00UEONRV6 ] 
The writing style is clear and simple, yet rising from time to time, as in a later section telling of the barley harvest being taken in, to the level of lyric poetry. What struck me most in retrospect though, was the way a turning point in English social history was caught. Here horse drawn carts and muscle power co-exist with motor cars and both steam and petrol powered machinery. Bell’s host farm looks to the future, but that of the farmer’s father-in-law clings to the past, making do and mending, and codging up ancient machinery with bits and pieces bought at local auctions. In fact, as the wartime HMSO publication about ‘the land at war’ makes clear, after a bright false start following World War One, with a strong ‘back to the land’ movement, British agricultural nosedived into one of its darkest decades in the nineteen thirties, so that on the eve of World War Two a crisis of food supply, in the face of submarine warfare, would have been imminent without the various government ‘dig for victory’ campaigns and the almost immediate introduction of rationing.
And what came upon me after the recognition of this unique moment of past turning into future, was that a memoir of any period, and of any place, might also catch such a momentary, and unique turning point. For as time rolls on, only change is constant, and as writers this should reassure as much as daunt us. We do not have to wait for a significant moment in history to arrive, so that we might observe and record it, for all the moments through which we live have their significances. And, even if we are not aware of them, to observe and record what passes before us, will be to preserve such moments for those who come later, fully equipped with the twenty-twenty hindsights that will make those significances plain.
Adrian Bell went on to publish, among other titles, two more in this rural trilogy: Silver Ley (Penguin no.278) and The Cherry Tree (Penguin no.264). Corduroy was published as Penguin no.247. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corduroy-rural-trilogy-Adrian-Bell/dp/0571240836 Seven of Coppard’s stories, including the little gem that is Weep Not My Wanton, were recently re-issued by Turnpike Books.
I couldn’t sleep, what with the heat, so, as you do, I started to list, not my favourite ten short stories, but ten of my favourite short stories:
Weep Not My Wanton
A Canary For One
A Rider in the Sky
The Fall
The Dead
Arabesque – The Mouse
The Little Farm
Fitter’s Night
The Misfits
The Gift of the Magi
A Christmas Carol
Monsieur Oufle
Blondeau The Cobbler
You expect me to keep count as well?
You want the authors? A.E.Coppard, Ernest Hemingway,Ambrose Bierce,V.S.Pritchett,James Joyce,Coppard again,H.E.Bates,Arthur Miller (twice),O Henry,Charles Dickens,Abbe Bourdelot,Bonaventure des Perriers,
And there was Chekhov’s Rothschild’s Fiddle too, should have been in that first ten, not to mention some stories by friends of mine…Kurt Tidmore’s Prairie Song for example, and Hugh Thomnpson’s The Italian Fisherman, and Marilyn Messenger’s unfinished story (she knows which one I mean), and nearly all of Vivien Jones’ Perfect Ten collection, and one from her White Poppies collection, and a Daphne Du Maurier, and D.H.Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums…..
And then the question, why is it that the women writers come in so far down the list, and so few? And then, the question, why are there no Jewish Writers in there (for all I know, Miller might have been Jewish, and so might others…I don’t enquire into that sort of thing), and what about redheads, or people who are left handed (like me), or adopted (like me), or apparently heterosexual (like me)? Or who don’t have beards? And does it matter anyway? If I listed my favourite poems, one of Josephine Dickinson’s would come in the first half dozen (Instead of Time), and if novels, Isoabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party would be there with Silas Marner.
If I’ve read all of Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories, and two collections of Alice Monro’s, and one of Miranda July’s, and yet none of their’s appear in my over-stuffed top ten, does it tell you anything about them, or anything about me? And does the fact that my two Coppard entries are from over two hundred stories, and my two Miller’s are from sixteen? From my own several hundred attempts I think four stand out, and one of them I’m still post-creatively infatuated with! And there’s another ought to be in there, but…. Why are there no African stories, or South American, or Asian ones? Why are there none from Wigton, or Wigtown for that matter? Why none from China? How many have you read from my home town, by the way?
And I sort of know that if push came to shove, I’d rescue – desert island disc style – two from the waves (Weep Not My Wanton and The Little Farm – I think…..)
And what about all the ones I have forgotten, for the moment, or really forgotten? How many of them, if remembered, would spring into that top ten? And in fact, isn’t the ten of your top favourite anythings of anytime, just a snapshot of where you are, and when, at that place, and that moment?
(and Christine Howe’s Dancing With Johnny)…oh, yes, and ……
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