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Extraordinary Ebenezer follow-up

Some weeks ago, we reviewed The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B.Edwards, who dedicated it to Edward and Lisa Chaney, years before its delayed publication. Edward Chaney himself e-mailed us this week, having picked up the review on the Arran Voice website

Written by Edward Chaney
Thursday, 30 October 2008

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Some weeks ago, we reviewed The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B.Edwards, the story of a Guernsey man who lived through the German occupation of the island during WW2. The book was dedicated to Edward and Lisa Chaney, but quarter of a century has gone by since its delayed publication in 1981, and any living connection with its author seemed unlikely. But Edward Chaney himself e-mailed us this week, having picked up the review on The Arran Voice website.

He sends us the story of how he came to know Gerald Edwards and how he managed to get this classic book into print, five years after its author’s death.

When in March 1981, almost five years after the death of its author, Hamish Hamilton published the first edition of The Book of Ebenezer le Page, scarcely a punctuation mark needed altering. As with Lampedusa, who likewise wrote a retrospective novel set in the island of his birth but based on a lifetime’s reading and experience of the world, when in his old age Gerald Edwards concluded his magnum opus he made sure that the completeness and quality of his work justified the unsatisfactory nature of his life. Both men thereby more than justified George Eliot’s dictum: ‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.’ Both men had published a few articles in the 1920s and ‘30s. Then, towards the ends of their lives both men completed a single great novel. It was rejected by the major publishers they admired: in Lampedusa’s case: Mondadori and Einaudi; in Gerald’s: Fabers, Capes, Cassells and Calder and Boyars, and then they died. After their death, forgotten by almost all but their adoptive heirs, their novels were published to great acclaim: Lampedusa’s Gattopardo (or The Leopard) in 1957; The Book of Ebenezer le Page, 24 years later.

I was an art student, spending the summer in a Dorset village, when I first met Gerald, introduced by a young pianist whose parents took in lodgers. One day she told me that they had a new lodger who had known D.H. Lawrence. This had me introducing myself more or less immediately. While I was disappointed to discover that he had never actually met Lawrence, I was far from disappointed by the man himself, his extraordinary erudition and vividly articulate and forthright presence. Where the claim to have known Lawrence personally is concerned, there had been a misunderstanding, for, so far from name-dropping, Gerald rarely referred to his literary past at all, despite his once impressive list of friends and acquaintances. He certainly talked of Lawrence with an extraordinary authority and intimate knowledge of his work and personality but claimed only to have ever met his formidable widow, Frieda. More crucially, he had been the close friend and protégé of Lawrence’s ambivalent disciple, John Middleton Murry, the author and editor now best known for having been married to Katherine Mansfield. Only years after Gerald’s death did I learn that he had not only succeeded Lawrence in writing regularly for Murry’s Adelphi but that on Murry’s recommendation Jonathan Cape had commissioned him to write what would have been the first major monograph on Lawrence. He failed to do so in large part because the great man died on the eve of their proposed meeting. A letter from Lawrence to Gerald, dated 1 March 1929, and addressed from Bandol in the south of France, is included in the modern edition of Lawrence’s Letters, though the recipient is unidentified¹. Lawrence begins: ‘Murry told me you were writing a book about me – which of course makes me bristle a bit…,’ but then becomes friendlier in tone, providing suggestions about where Gerald might find a copy of The Rainbow, and informing him as to his travel plans in order that they might meet.

The likes of Murry, J.S. Collis and Stephen Potter regarded Gerald as the man most likely to fill the shoes of the self-exiled Nottinghamshire miner’s son turned literary Messiah. This is confirmed by the tone and content of Gerald’s letters to Murry, which I was fortunate enough to discover in an Oxford bookshop, as well as those to Collis, which I borrowed from his biographer, Richard Ingrams (of Private Eye fame), and extracts from the unpublished autobiography of Stephen Potter (of One-Upmanship fame), loaned to me by his son Julian. Despite their failure to meet, Gerald’s affinity with Lawrence was regarded as such that his friends looked to him for guidance as to how to become true disciples. He so enthused Potter that the latter set to work on the monograph his ‘genius friend’ Gerald failed to deliver. Collis, on the other hand, already the author of a study of Bernard Shaw (about whom Gerald wrote an Adelphi piece in July 1926), preferred those authors whom Lawrence had chosen as his own spiritual mentors. Enthusing in his autobiography over the writings of Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, Collis writes that these ‘were introduced to Stephen Potter and myself by our mutual friend and mentor, G.B. Edwards, and I doubt if we would have come upon them at the right time otherwise’.²

The only son from the second marriage of a Guernsey quarry owner, Gerald Basil Edwards (1899-1976), left his native island as soon as he could, via the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry and went on to study English at Bristol University. He seems not to have graduated but migrated to London where he soon entered that literary circle which lay somewhere between Bloomsbury, T.S. Eliot’s Criterion and the less privileged world of Toynbee Hall. Nearest the former lay J.S. Collis’s 2nd floor flat at 5 Guilford Street where Gerald occasionally stayed prior to getting married in the late 1920s. When in 1924 Gerald’s mother died she had bequeathed him the substantial family Guernsey house which had been in her name, worried that his father might otherwise exclude him. In characteristic, somewhat melodramatic style, partly out of pity for his father, he tore up his mother’s will. His father then sold the house and married the housekeeper, just as Raymond’s father, Harold, marries the dreadful Mrs Crewe in the novel. Thus was Gerald disinherited and effectively exiled, given Guernsey property rules as well as his concern, articulated to Collis at the time, that the housekeeper-turned-stepmother might poison him if he came to stay.³

Meanwhile, he published a handful of articles and reviews in the Adelphi, including one dated from the summer of 1930 entitled: ‘Lawrence and the Young Man’ and brimming with patronizing scorn for Potter’s pioneering account which he described as ‘utterly heartless’ (an accusation that fifty years later, he would make of my gift to him of a book on Shakespeare by Wyndham Lewis). Gerald’s fascinating correspondence with Middleton Murry, which is intense in this period, resurfacing briefly in 1947, documents his failure to live up to his friends’ expectations. His letters nevertheless maintain an extraordinarily lofty tone given that most of them were soliciting money following failure to please or provide promised typescripts to publishers. Above all it seems to have been his own perfectionism that held him back, manuscripts being — Cezanne-like — destroyed when failing to live up to his own very particular standards, though there are similarly Cezanne-like moments when he burns an article, play, novel or 20,000 word ‘Essay on Sex’, that others had failed to appreciate. Like many other authors, he had a somewhat Romantic notion of the visual artist, glimpsed in his portrayal of the young, Neville Falla, who paints what he calls ‘Wildscapes’. Meanwhile he wrote powerful poems which seem never to have been published and in this period, I suspect, were not submitted for publication though he attempted to publish at least one in the late 1940.

His marriage broke up soon after he and his wife, Kathleen, returned from Switzerland. They more or less abandoned their children at Dartington with the Elmhirsts, the wealthy Anglo-American couple who founded the famously liberal school and shared the Edwards’s theatrical interests.⁴ What followed were Gerald’s wilderness years. Having taught at Toynbee Hall and for the Workers’ Education Association as a lecturer in literature and drama in Axminster and elsewhere; he seems to have taught briefly at the Bolton Repertory Company, for which he wrote plays, but eventually had to settle down as a minor civil servant working in an employment exchange in London. He visited Guernsey occasionally, as well as wilder shores of Wales and Cornwall, and then from his lodgings in Upwey, near Weymouth, struck out for the Orkneys, Shetlands and the Scilly Isles, only to return to his lodgings on each occasion a chastened man, having discovered that there was no escape from the modern world and that the attempt had in any case proved beyond his meagre means. There was also a spell, in 1972, in which he tried to settle down in East Coker with a woman called ‘Olive’ (whom I assume was a former lover) but the combined effects of her poor health and his uncompromising personality brought this experiment to an end after a few months.

When we met, Gerald was completing his great novel. I encouraged him to finish it and he did so, handing over the immaculate typescript in his bed-sitting room with a proud flourish in the summer of 1974. In the novel itself, when Ebenezer hands over his Book to his young artist friend Neville Falla he observes: ‘He didn’t thank me for my book; but I swear he knew I had given him all my secrets for him to read some day’. Though, like Neville I was also a motorcycling artist-rebel, I thanked Gerald warmly for his gift, having already gained some knowledge of its contents. A fortnight after my return to University from my great aunt’s house in Dorset, I received a letter which underlined the symmetry between the fictional and actual donation. Whereas Ebenezer wrote the words: ‘THE PROPERTY OF NEVILLE FALLA’ upon his Book’s first page and bequeathed Neville his house and life savings, Gerald, who owned nothing but the paperbacks he was reading at the time, had dedicated his Book to me and my then wife. He now followed up the gift of the novel with a typed declaration:

My struggle to find a publisher during the author’s lifetime failed.⁵ Gerald took the repeated rejections with extraordinary stoicism, even writing civilized replies to their letters. Only after his death, when I migrated to postgraduate work in Italy and met a former Hamish Hamilton editor there, did I manage to get it accepted. Though Hamish Hamilton required scarcely any changes to the text I was obliged to agree to their abandoning the title and promoting the subtitle in its place, for they insisted that ‘Sarnia Cherie’ sounded too much like a Barbara Cartland romance. Meanwhile, though I had begun writing the introduction they had asked me for they had sent a photocopy to John Fowles who responded very enthusiastically and agreed to write one instead, which he eventually did very efficiently, using the correspondence I loaned him. Having almost scuppered the deal by announcing that the only living author Gerald would have wanted to be introduced by was Patrick White, I subsequently (after we had become friends) compounded my offence by telling Fowles I thought his introduction was the best thing he had ever written.⁶

Where Ian McEwan’s Atonement all too knowingly retracts the happy ending it had seemed to deliver in Bryony’s fiction within his fiction (made all the more annoying by Vanessa Redgrave’s performance in the film version), the narratives of Edwards and Ebenezer conclude in harmony. Describing The Book of Ebenezer le Page as ‘a masterpiece’, in his New York Times review, Guy Davenport wrote: ‘I know of no description of happiness in modern literature equal to the one that ends this novel.’ Perhaps the contrast between the comfortable bourgeois life of the ever-more prosperous Oxford novelist and the exile, failure, poverty and death suffered by the Islander in exile, between the undoubtedly clever but hardly philosophical (and somewhat chilly) McEwan and the profoundly driven and insistently Romantic Gerald, explain the latter’s compulsion to create ‘something upon which to rejoice’, positive beyond even Matisse’s armchair but ‘real’ in artistic terms beyond the mundane ‘realism’ of most modern literature. Gerald remained more or less loyal to a personalized idea of religion that he had articulated as long ago as 1931 in his essay on the subject in the October issue of The Adelphi:


Perhaps it is unfair to compare the over-rated McEwan (or John Fowles) to the still under-rated G.B. Edwards. Far more appropriate is the comparison between The Book of Ebenezer le Page and Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, not quite accurately translated as The Leopard (a ‘gattopardo’ or serval is an even rarer beast). Lampedusa and his creation, Don Fabrizio, are both nostalgic vestiges of a pre-modern world, both casting a jaundiced eye on the new, middle-class vulgarity that encroaches upon their island. Gerald and his creation, Ebenezer, respond in the same way to a similar encroachment. The fact that Don Fabrizio is an aristocrat and Ebenezer a peasant only sharpens the symmetry, for both are essentially anachronisms whose ancient wisdom encourages them to resist change. Don Fabrizio’s relationship with his impetuous nephew, Tancredi, parallels the real Lampedusa’s with Gioacchino, the young cousin he eventually adopted, just as Ebenezer’s relationship with Neville Falla, the young man who will eventually marry his illegitimate grand-daughter, Neville Falla, resembles Gerald’s relationship with me (or at least the role he projected on me). Three years younger than Lampedusa but outliving him by almost twenty, Gerald set his novel in the late 19th and 20th centuries only slightly ahead of his own life. Lampedusa set his further back in the period of the Risorgimento, which symbolized the threat to all that was sacred and customary about his beloved island, almost a century before the period in which he was writing. For both Lampedusa and Gerald, the Second World War was perceived as definitively detrimental to the island’s cultural memory. In The Leopard, Bourbon Sicily is invaded by Garibaldi and his Redshirts as the advanced guard of an invasion by the middle-class bureaucrats from mainland Italy. In reality, during Lampedusa’s lifetime, Sicily was dominated first by Mussolini and his agents and then by the Germans whose eviction by the Allies involved the bombing of the family Palazzo in Palermo, and event that so distressed Lampedusa that it prompted him to write his great novel. During his regular visits to Guernsey after the war, Gerald questioned his fellow-islanders about the German occupation and subsequent liberation, meanwhile observing what he described as the next invasion by tourists and tax-escapees from mainland Britain.

Gerald lost the home he would have inherited, not like Lampedusa due to Allied bombing but to his father’s remarriage. As in the Leopard, it is difficult to distinguish the author’s more or less political protest from the poignancy of more personal angst. Gerald must have had such dreams and aspirations when, like James Joyce he tried ‘to fly by those nets’ of nationality, language and religion that were flung at his soul by his native island, but as with Joyce his imaginative soul never really broke free from them but rather proved the basis for his greatest creative work. Interestingly, Joyce and Gerald who exiled themselves from their native island ultimately constructed more positive personal visions than Hardy and Lampedusa who stayed at home, even if all four describe their birthrights in quasi-tragic terms. The nostalgia of the following:


Here, however, Gerald almost loses Ebenezer’s voice to replace it with his own:


Gerald was a Shelley-like figure; for all his denials an incurable Romantic who didn’t die young because he hadn’t yet fulfilled his destiny. Like Shelley, his determination to live his life as he envisaged it and his refusal to compromise with the requirements or feelings of family or friends no doubt brought a version of the trauma suffered by the Shelley entourage on all concerned, not least himself.


The final verse of a powerful unpublished poem that Middleton Murry declined to publish: ‘Song of a Man who saw God’ confirms that Gerald needed no lessons from the likes of Ian McEwan on the dark side of life:


In preparing this talk, which is a revision of something I had to write for the Italian edition of Il libro di Ebenezer Le Page, I noticed that the last two lines of this 1947 poem are reused in a poem he sent to me in 1975. Somewhat disingenuously (in view of the similarity), he told me he was enclosing a couple of ‘spontaneous’ lyrics, ‘as L’Envoi to Sarnia Cherie’ (his original title for The Book of Ebenezer le Page). The first was entitled: ‘Canticle’; the second, which I transcribe here, ‘Benediction’:

1. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge, 1993), p. 201.
2. Bound upon a Course (London, 1971), p. 108. Gerald would surely have known, but never mentioned to me, this book with its reference to him even though it had just appeared when I met him (he kept up with all the reviews). Tragically, while Gerald was probably too proud to get in touch with his now relatively successful friend, Collis may have assumed he might, or that they would have remained ex-intimates. When Ebenezer was published, however, he wrote an extraordinary review in the Spectator, bitterly regretting (at least by implication) that they had never revived their friendship. His reference to Gerald ‘visiting’ him in Guilford Street may have been disingenuous for Gerald seems to have stayed there from time to time.
3. In honour of G.B. Edwards, Guernsey’s first Blue Plaque was recently erected on this house, which is still named ‘Hawkesbury’. It is a substantial dwelling, dating from the turn of the previous century and far removed from the peasant’s dwelling inhabited by Ebenezer, his parents and sister.
4. His son and daughter still live on the Dartington estate. Kathleen had two other sons but Gerald was not the father. The father of one seems to have been a close friend of Gerald’s, this perhaps inspiring the episode in the novel involving Raymond’s wife, Christine, conceiving a son with his best friend (and cousin) Horace.
5. I have written about this and my continuing friendship with the author in three articles in the Review of the Guernsey Society, 1993-94.
6. His introduction was reprinted in his Wormholes (London, 1998), pp. 166-174.
7. G.B. Edwards, ‘Religion’, Adelphi, III, 1, pp. 50-53.

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