The following review of Silver Circus, 1928, Coppard’s
sixth published collection, appeared in The Bookman, London, Vol.
LXXVI, No. 451, April, 1929.
A
Superb Tale Teller
Mr.
Coppard's tales made their first appearance shortly after the War. They
obtained a hearing, shyly, almost furtively, in progressive periodicals
with a very limited circulation. They were not proclaimed upon the
housetops. A few discerning ones smiled, added the precious copies to
their collections, and passed the good news on to others. Here was a man
doing something new; here was a man who could give significance to an
art that in England anyway was a kind of Cinderella among her sisters;
here was a man for whom words still had something of the dew of the
morning upon them. But the tales were not, by any stretch of the word,
popular. Even Mr. Coppard's first book of collected stories appeared
under the imprint of a private press.
All
this is now changed. Within a few days of the appearance of Silver
Circus, his newest book, we were informed that it had run into a
second printing. And collectors point with pride to their first editions
of him. The change is not in Mr. Coppard; it is in the reading public.
Men and women who, when Mr. Coppard was first writing, never dreamed of
reading a short story that was not of the magazine type (something that
tripped its meaningless way to a surprising dénouement—something
to read on a railway journey and then throw away), are now reading this
new kind of story with interest, if not yet with avidity. And the slow
but positive increase in the demand has created in return a slow but
positive increase in the supply. Where one collection of short stories
was printed (and proclaimed a "drug on the market" at that), half a
dozen or more are printed now. And all are the work of authors who have
chosen this particular medium as carefully, as purposely as a poet
chooses his. Indeed something of the poet is in every one of the best
short story writers of to-day—A. E. Coppard, T. F. Powys, Liam
O'Flaherty, H. A. Manhood and Sherwood
Anderson (to mention only a few).
In no
small measure Mr. Coppard is responsible in England both for this
increased demand and for this increased supply. He has not only made a
hearing for himself, he has made a hearing for others. Silver
Circus is his sixth book of tales, and it is interesting to note
with what fixity of purpose and sureness of inspiration he has followed
the track he laid down in his first book, Adam and Eve and Pinch
Me. The same fantasy is here, the same bold insight into peasant
character, the same genius for so enlarging a simple theme that its
cadences pass from particular to general, from local to universal. If
one thing has changed—no, not changed, but grown—more than another, it
is his amazing understanding of peasant character. The height of that
understanding was reached in the title story of The Field of
Mustard; and there is nothing in the present volume to surpass
it—if indeed it can be surpassed. The other most noticeable development
has been Mr. Coppard's progress from a tendency too frequently to
indulge the purple patch, to a style that, for simplicity and directness
and ease and sureness of attack, is like impossibly good conversation.
As for his humour, it grows each year more delicious, more penetrating,
more sly.
If the
title tale was the best in his last volume, "A Looking-Glass for
Saint Luke" is probably the best in this present volume. Mr.
Coppard's mastery over the poetry of the vernacular is shown in his
"Darby Dallow Tells His Tale." In "That Fellow Tolstoy" he pushes
artifice as far as artifice should go—and no jot farther. Inventive
fantasy and pathetic realism are nicely mixed in "The Martyrdom of
Solomon." And "Fine Feathers"—but this remarkable tale has
already been highly praised in these pages [The Bookman LXXI, No.
424, January 1927]. With "The Field of Mustard," "The Higgler"
and "A Looking-Glass for Saint Luke," it can be numbered among
the superlative of Mr. Coppard's work; and that at once places it
among the "great short stories" of modern English literature.
C. Henry Warren