Moonshiny Stories

NIXEY'S HARLEQUIN--A. E. Coppard-- Knopf ($2.50).

If you like the kind of solid but fanciful English spirit that muddles through the stories of T. F. Powys, you will be apt to look with favor on Author Coppard's. But unlike Powys. Coppard has more than one string to his bow. The tales in Nixey's Harlequin range from shrewd fables to realism that is only a little out of date. They are all obviously the work of a man who does not see the world through conventional spectacles. If you are one who finds an original view distressing, "queer," better left unsaid. Author Coppard is not your man. He obtrudes no Message, but he shows an individual face. Some of his stories:

A crafty bucolic rogue, whose favorite expletives are "Appercrampus! Allecap-antho!" flatters a gullible duck to its complete undoing.

An old, retired but incorrigible actress bamboozles her sympathetic landlady out of her rent, but keeps the centre of the stage.

A pedestrian in Ireland's County Clare is warned not to carry out his intention of climbing to a certain mountain lake: a great serpent is imprisoned in it, will be allowed to go free the day before the Day of Judgment. The pedestrian does not heed the warning, sees the serpent sure enough.

A man dying of consumption takes his wife and children to winter in Italy, where his days are further darkened by the knowledge that his wife has been unfaithful to him.

No translatable theme emerges from Author Coppard's tales: they are atmospheric, lyric rather than narrative, moonshiny, elusive.

The Author, Alfred Edgar Coppard, 54, reached 40 before he started writing. Ill-health took him from school at nine, and like Kipling's Dingo Yellow Dog chased him to such good purpose that he became a professional sprinter. He left a clerk's job in 1919 when he decided to become a writer, went into the woods to live and think. His first book of stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, cocked many a critical eye at him in friendly fashion. Poet fundamentally, he makes little money, most of that by his stories. Best model for good writing, he thinks, is folk tales. Other books: Fishmonger's Fiddle, Silver Circus; (verse:) Hips and Haws, Collected Poems.

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