Copey

Copey is remembered as a compelling reader whose voice connects literary performance with the making of a writer. His reading of Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King” gives Richard Ellsworth Savage a decisive glimpse of what literature can do: listening in a small, candlelit room, Savage decides that he will become a writer.

Identity and Presence

Copey appears through his reading rather than through a developed account of his biography. The people around him gather to listen, and the narrative singles out his beautiful voice as a distinct presence. In one recollection, that voice belongs to a dense cluster of college memories: books, the campus at dusk, lecture halls, and the old buildings. Copey’s place in the story is thus defined by the act of giving written words a living sound.

The Candlelit Reading

After meeting with Savage, Freddy Wigglesworth takes him to Copey’s. A scrubby-looking little man reads aloud in a low-ceilinged room lit by candles. The listeners sit on the floor and attend closely; the story is Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.” The scene is intimate and informal, far removed from a lecture hall, but its effect on Savage is consequential: he decides, in that moment, to become a writer.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Copey’s voice recurs in the narrative as part of the sensory texture of literary life. A recollection places the sound of his reading alongside handsome books, campus twilight, and the elms and buildings of college. The passage later turns toward death, abruptly setting those cultivated memories against a harsher present. It does not establish that Copey himself has died; rather, his voice remains among the remembered experiences through which the narrative evokes a world of books, listening, and youthful possibility. The contrast gives his brief appearance a lasting function: Copey is both the reader who brings a story vividly before an audience and a voice preserved in memory after the scene has passed.