The Book of Ebenezer le Page (2 page)

The second thing to be said is that the present book was to form the first part of a trilogy. The second and third were to be called
Le Boud'lo: the Book of Philip le Moigne
and
La Gran'-mère du Chimquière: the Book of Jean le Féniant
.
[1]
Edwards left enough hints in his letters to make it plain that he saw the first part as something of a humorous contrast to the other two. Readers may be interested to know that Neville Falla, the cause of much of the final sentimentality here, was in fact earmarked for an early death in the second part, and that its tone was to be much more tragic than comic. Edwards himself remarked wrily of it: ‘I will certainly thereby graduate out of the charm school.'

But the main virtues sit to a rare extent in each page, each episode, each character, in the waywardness of memory, in the accuracy and strength of evocation within the strictly imposed linguistic means. What Edwards was aiming for is expressed in a passage of the same letter in which he damns Wyndham Lewis. He praises Conrad by contrast for remaining ‘within a human and material continuum; but masterfully with controlled passion and exquisite tenderness'. It was clearly this sort of quality that he found so lacking in an age of helicopter thinking and that also helped explain for him why his own book found so little sympathy among publishers' readers. Elsewhere he defined its purpose as ‘humanizing'; and to that end, he realized that it had to risk things that no trend-conscious novelist today would care to risk his reputation on, just as in some ways it had to stay resolutely old-fashioned and simple-tongued. But that is precisely what I like most about it. It seems to me, beyond all its more obvious achievements and attractions, beyond its occasional lapses into cantankerousness and sentimentality, an act of courage; and of a kind that can never be old-fashioned if the novel, and the free society of which it is still the deepest artistic expression, are to survive.

‘The mere thought of having a public image appals me.' ‘I would not willingly supply the public with any autobiographical data whatever.' ‘I'd rather be a hermit-crab than live
en famille
.' ‘By the way I've got rid of all fragments, correspondence and records (except for those essential for my official survival).' So Gerald Edwards wrote in various letters to Edward Chaney; the last quotation comes from one written six months before he died. Mrs Joan Snell, with whom Edwards stayed in the final five years of his life and who has kindly relented a little over one of his last instructions to her (that she should stand ‘like a dragon' in the path of any future researcher), tells me the holocaust was total: only his birth certificate and—touchingly, as will shortly be seen — a photograph of his mother were spared. Nor was this an isolated act of self-destruction.

Gerald Basil Edwards was born on July 8, 1899. He gave an account of his family past in a letter to Edward Chaney, and it is worth citing at some length. Dalwood, a small village near Axminster in East Devon, was long blessed or notorious locally (depending on one's religious viewpoint) for being a breeding-ground of dissenters.

‘The earliest ancestor I know of on my father's side was Zackariah Edwards of Dalwood, Devon, who married a gipsy and begat a brood of stalwart sons, who migrated to every quarter of the globe. He was my great-grandfather. My grandfather, Tom, married one Mary Organ of Honiton and migrated to Guernsey at the age of 19 for the “stone-rush”, when the quarries of the north were opened. It was a hard life. My father, the eldest son, also Tom, was born on Guernsey, but at twelve ran away from his strap-wielding father and his mother, who had a bosom of iron, to the softer usages of sailing ships. He sailed and “saw the world” until he came home and married at the age of 26. He wouldn't have come home then, except that he never overcame his tendency to sea-sickness. He worked for his father, who was by now a quarry-owner, and in due course inherited the quarry and the house, Sous les Hougues, where I was born. I was the only child of his second marriage ... my mother died in 1924. A couple of years later he married the housekeeper and sold up to disinherit me, buying another property which he could legally leave her. Hence my exile. (It won't make sense to you; but it's Guernsey law.) He was a very tough man, my father: with a very tender core. He was passionately attached to Guernsey and refused to leave before the Occupation. He lived for more than a year after the Liberation and must have been well over ninety when he died. I have to be vague on this, for it was not considered decent for a Guernsey child to know the precise age of its parents. I was only truly in touch with him on one occasion; and that was in 1938, the year of the Munich Crisis, when I visited him at Les Rosiers, where he ran a small growing concern, the quarry being worked out. He was rather humiliated, though over 80, by being reduced to so effete an occupation. He regarded quarrying granite as the only work fit for a man.

‘My mother was a Mauger. I cannot claim she was pure Guernsey, for the purest Guernsey are Neolithic ...

‘My boyhood, adolescence and young manhood was an increasingly intense fight to the death against my mother; and indeed all my relationships with women have been a fight to the death. I survive, but in grief; for I have sympathy with what I fight against, and sorrow at the necessity. That should make clear to you my disorientation from Lawrence, with whom in other ways I have much in common ... underneath I am steel against the female will. I do not mean the feminine nature. D. H. submitted. To my mind, his is the saddest story. The White Peacock becomes the flaming uterus of Lady C. They are the same. The Phoenix is swamped.'

I should add that in fact very few names could be purer Guernsey than Mauger; it goes back to Norman times. Edwards must have savoured the possibility of descent from the first member of the clan, who is said to have been banished to the island by William the Conqueror for having had the temerity to suggest that no good would come of adding the perfidious English to his subject peoples.

In 1909 Edwards won a scholarship from the Hautes Capelles primary to the States Intermediate School, now the boys' grammar-school of the island. In 1914 he was made a pupil-teacher at Vauvert School, St Peterport. A contemporary remembers how Edwards was ‘a real loner, an odd sort of character who never had any friends'. In 1917 he joined the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry. He never saw active service, but ended in Portsmouth as a sergeant instructor of gunnery. Between 1919 and 1923 he was at Bristol University, but neither subject nor degree can be traced. It seems from the above letter that he placed himself in permanent exile from Guernsey about 1926. In this period he worked for the university settlement of Toynbee Hall in London and also joined the Workers' Educational Association as a lecturer in English literature and drama. He apparently also had a spell with the Bolton Repertory Company, and wrote plays for them. At some point he got to know Middleton Murry, and through him met Frieda Lawrence. That manifestation of ‘the female will' he recalled frequently to Edward Chaney, with a predictable blend of fascination and repulsion. He told Mrs Snell that he had also known Tagore and Annie Besant quite well.

By 1930 he was married. A survived document of that year reveals that he was living in Hornsey; and he gave his profession as ‘author'. The marriage was not a success, and he seems to have gone abroad to Holland and Switzerland in the early 1930s to try to earn his living by his pen — articles and poetry, as well as plays. He told Mrs Snell that he destroyed much of his best work, including ‘a very good play'. Like many, perhaps all, writers he remained a manic-depressive about his work throughout his life.

His marriage finally broke down about 1933. One of its four children tells me that her father disappeared entirely from her life between that date and 1967, and the gap had become too great by the time the relationship was renewed to be very successfully bridged. Even to her, very little was ever said of the past. Where or how Edwards spent the next years (the Toynbee Hall records were severely war-damaged) is not known; but during the Second World War he worked in an employment exchange and he seemingly remained a civil servant (in 1955 he was living in Balham) until retirement in 1960.

The storm-petrel then went to ‘live rough' in Wales for a year; from 1961, he spent three years in Penzance; from 1964, three years in Plymouth; and in 1967 moved on to Weymouth. In that latter year he told his daughter that the first draft of this book was completed, and the second part,
Le Boud'lo
, half done. He also spoke of returning to Guernsey ‘to die', but one may guess that the high cost of living — and property — on the island made that impossible for a man of his limited means; and perhaps added a bitterness to both his book and his exile. That his sense of the latter remained very real can be deduced from the move to Weymouth — the nearest place one can be to Guernsey on the English mainland.

In 1970 he became Mrs Snell's lodger in ‘the small room of a large house' at Upwey, just outside Weymouth. Mrs Cynthia Mooney, a Guernsey woman herself, remembers the room as ‘like that of a monk'. It was ‘very tidy, terribly tidy'. Edwards himself wrote in 1972 that ‘I live from day to day, at the edge of living'. But the general impression given from his letters to Mr Chaney is not of crabbed misery, but of a kind of tart serenity of soul, an acceptance of ascetic outsiderdom. The tartness — ‘My dislike of Heath, like my aversion to television, is almost pathological' — did not spare anything or anyone surrendered to what Edwards saw as false values; on the other hand his affection, when it was given, was unmistakably sincere and unstinting. One can assume that the very similar combination of traits in Ebenezer was closely autobiographical.

The vital new encounter for him in this last period was undoubtedly with Edward Chaney and his wife. Their sympathetic encouragement made him entirely re-write this book, a task he undertook in 1973 and 1974. He continued revising it until the end. Mr Chaney thinks there were never more than brief drafts for the rest of the intended trilogy; and most of those Edwards seems to have destroyed before he died. Once or twice he showed a restlessness, a need to escape Weymouth (and a truly remarkable willingness in a man of his age to travel light); but these fugues to the Scillies and the Orkneys ended back in Upwey. The letters show an impressive blend of honesty and self-humour, besides a frequent Orwellian excellence of plain English prose. They would do very well as a contemporary appendix to the Grub Street side of Dr Johnson's
Lives of the English Poets
, and I hope that one day Mr Chaney will consider publishing parts of them.

Joan Snell sums up her recollections of him thus: ‘He was a man of dynamic character, yet full of feeling and sympathy. Proud but humble, he had a superb memory. He could remember conversations of fifty or sixty years before, word for word. He hated machines, modern technology, he thought they had brought so many bad things into the world. He needed nothing, and lived on a small pension. All he possessed could be packed in a small suitcase. He was charming and endearing; he was despairing and moody. A man of heights; and of deepest, blackest depths. I cannot do him justice in a short comment. All I can say is that it was a great privilege to have known him.'

Gerald Edwards died after a heart attack, in his small room near Weymouth, on December 29, 1976. His ashes were scattered at sea. I should like to think that some at least were washed up among the
vraic
and granite of his long-lost native shore.

—John Fowles
1980

[1]
Literally, ‘The Puppet: the Book of Philip the Amputated' and ‘The Grandmother of the Cemetery: the Book of John the Sluggard'. Edwards' full title for the present book was
Sarnia Chérie: the Book of Ebenezer Le Page
, in symmetry with the other two. The first phrase has been dropped in this edition because of the unfortunate connotations of
chérie
to English ears and the general ignorance of Sarnia — the Latin name for Guernsey. The phrase was not of Edward's invention. ‘Sarnia Chérie,' beloved Guernsey, is the island's private anthem. There is incidentally a short essay by Edwards on the patois of Guernsey at the end of the book, to which I have added a glossary of the more difficult words in the text.

SARNIA CHÉRIE

G. A. Deighton

The Property of Neville Falla