William Cooper
Scenes From Death and Life
Please note that "Scenes From Death and Life" published in 2000, went out of print in 2007 and is no longer available.
…I suddenly realised that my gaze had been caught by two hundred 20 year old men and women, hair glistening from being washed, eyes bright with attention for what I was going to say, lips eager and rosy…something had come into the atmosphere which made me recall the favourite dictum of one of my colleagues: “Teaching is the most erotic of professions.”
William Cooper's last novel is the final work in a sequence of five going back to the post-War years. William Cooper has been called the Godfather of the Angry Young Men of the Fifties and early Sixties. His first novel under the pen name William Cooper, 'Scenes From Provincial Life', published in the early 1950s, can be said to have inspired the new writers such as Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain and Alan Sillitoe, who shook up the genteel world of pre-War experimentalism with their brusque return to a fictional world of personal morality, class consciousness, and sexual honesty. Many of the writers of the new movement have named William Cooper as the guiding star of the new atmosphere among the young fifties novelists' Scenes From Provincial Life', that early work, is the story of Joe Lunn, a young discontented schoolmaster in a provincial town who enjoys making love to his girlfriend but is rather reluctant to commit himself to marrying her.
Joe Lunn is the hero of all William Cooper's 'Scenes From...' series, which number five, and follow the young man as he leaves the provinces for London, marries and becomes a well-known novelist. It is an open secret that Joe Lunn 'is' William Cooper himself. And although there are enough differences to keep his public guessing, the fictional writer and the writer of fiction do follow very similar paths. As Scenes From Death and Life, the new novel, opens, Joe Lunn is happily married to a woman twenty five years his junior, with two feisty daughters just starting out in life and love. He has just finished working for the Civil Service and is looking round for some interesting work to supplement his writer's income. Out of the blue comes an invitation through a recent contact he made at a University party to lecture to young American students on English Literature. At the same time as he starts teaching, and enjoying his contact with youth - in every sense - his wife comes home with the first hints that there is something amiss with her health...
Tragedy lives beside the gentle comedy of this fine, moving novel. Scenes From Death and Life, as the title implies, contains moments of loss as well as of hope and new beginnings. But William Cooper's light, humorous touch never deserts him, even at the book's darkest moments. A born stylist, Cooper tells an often heartbreaking story with economy, wit and irony, not afraid to underline his hero's sometimes unconscious blundering through the sharp edged world of love, loss and old age. The novel may seem, in these days of shock and schlock, to be of the old school of emotional restraint and stylistic skill. Correct. William Cooper learned his trade in the days when such things were an essential part of a self-taught novelist's rigorous training. He simply could not write in any other way. That is the charm of his writing, and it is very fitting that, right at the end of his long and distinguished career (according to him, at the age of 89, he has said everything he has to say - 'Stop Writing!' he admonishes himself in a 1999 interview) he should produce another novel of the same style and storytelling verve as any of the works of the last fifty years.
