Life
Art student Edward Chaney met Edwards in his old age, when he was living a reclusive life near Weymouth in Dorset. Edwards had had a fraught and difficult life. He left Guernsey to study at Bristol University. He then moved to London where he encountered group of writers, which included his friends John Middleton Murry, J. S. Collis and Stephen Potter. There was an anticipation that he would become the next D. H. Lawrence, and he was in fact commissioned by Jonathan Cape to write Lawrence's biography, before his death.
Instead he published nothing more than a handful of articles for Murry's Adelphi magazine. He married, had children, divorced (leaving his children to be educated with the Elmhirsts at Dartington) and went through a series of jobs, teaching at Toynbee Hall., as an itinerant drama teacher, a minor civil servant in London, eventually retiring to the West Country. His quarry-owning father had effectively disinherited him where the family home in Guernsey was concerned, by remarrying.
When he met Chaney, he was pouring experience and literary know-how into one last attempt at a major novel. Chaney encouraged Edwards to complete his book, which Edwards then dedicated to him and his wife, giving him the copyright. The immaculate typescript was rejected by many publishers but, eventually, at Hamish Hamilton, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson accepted it with enthusiasm.
There is a parallel between this real-life story and the story in the novel, in which Ebenezer bequeaths his autobiography (The Book of Ebenezer Le Page) to his young artist friend Neville Falla, the motorcycling rebel with a heart of gold.
Read more about this topic: The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I have no scheme about it,—no designs on men at all; and, if I had, my mode would be to tempt them with the fruit, and not with the manure. To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives?—and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared, to live more worthily and profitably?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)