Here is a book: it is melancholy and it is humorous, it is ribald but not lewd, it is full of life and people, engrossing and to make you think. In short: it is a success; it does that which literature was invented to do. It is not small thing to find a book of this sort, and I am grateful for it. There are books you read and after you want more of the same, like The Lord of the Rings. There are books you read with satisfaction and after them you happily turn to something else. But after The Book of Ebenezer Le Page nothing satisfactory can come. It is entire and unique and you are left feeling like you will never read anything else, other than perhaps the simplicities and sublimities of the Psalms. I do not say this feeling goes on for ever, but you really are left feeling that way. You don’t want more because the thing has been completed: the life of Ebenezer Le Page has come to its conclusion conclusively.

The rough style of the book was a little difficult for me. I’ve never heard Guernsey English and without the sound I am not entirely sure when it comes to appreciating a style. Nevertheless I can understand how it was necessary: it accomplishes much with regard to showing us the character of Ebenezer Le Page and with long patience it rises by glimmers into a blaze of glory. I was thoroughly satisfied with the conclusion, and the way the style opened the way to see what G. B. Edwards wanted to show I cannot fault. Edwards was fully in command of his unmanipulated protagonist. One feels after such a book one understand better not only Guernsey, insular life, the Guernseyman, humanity in general, but also the ways of God. Yes, the ways of God. If it was the work of his life for Edwards to write this his sole book, then it was a life well spent. The work is a treasure.

Because of this, it is hard to write something that does justice to the book after only one reading, and it is hard to substantiate what may seem to you like hyperbole in my remarks above. I await a second reading in order to put the thing together more completely, to mull over the consequences of what Edwards understood and showed in the book, to put my finger on exactly how it is the complexity of the book resolves into the enormously satisfactory tying up of all things at the end. But I will attempt to give some evidence for the esteem in which I hold the work.

The book is mainly concerned with a change taking place during the life of Ebenezer Le Page: it is the change of the island on which he spends all his life from a quietly prosperous agricultural community to the overpriced tourist destination of later times.* It is also a story of thwarted love and how life goes on, about the tragic view of life and the sustaining love of life that accompanies the tragic view of life—and this is an insight Edwards delivers very convincingly. It is also a book about how Ebenezer overcomes the cliches of religion and his lack of education and the many disappointments of his life to possess something good and true and beautiful which he captures and sets down in his book.

They way Edwards has Ebenezer capture what he does in his book is brilliant: he uses the style and outlook of a man who has never, apparently, read any books beside the Bible and Robinson Crusoe. And it is this long, deft, difficult, sly but believable way in which Ebenezer Le Page comes at last to communicate glories—ironically—that makes the book so remarkable. We participate with Edwards in understanding the irony of what Ebenezer unconsciously does, and this is important for the insight Edwards wants us to achieve. C. S. Lewis says something in his essay on stories about a good story being like a net made to catch the intangible fish that is the real satisfaction of good literature. Ebenezer Le Page is not aware—or only dimly aware—that he is making a net: this is the irony, but it is not a savage or gloomy irony, but a triumphant and skillful irony on G. B. Edwards’ part. The irony is important because it shows us that the character is not contrived, that he lives and genuinely possesses the things his author gives to him. Were Ebenezer to set out with conscious deliberation to capture what he does, his lack of skill would prove an impediment. What G. B. Edwards does is show us how such a character triumphs in the possession of glories earned through his devotion to place, the grace of his good humor, his loyalty to family, his piety in spite of almost crippling ignorance in matters of religion, his thrift and good sense. In short: the folk culture of Guernsey of which Ebenezer is a product and which he laments and desires in the aftermath of its destruction is what makes him able to make the kind of net to catch the intangible fish which is the satisfaction of reading this book.

How can a character be a place and a place be so much a character? Read the book. One only wishes more places had such books and characters.

* * *
Bits to Be Resurrected at the Second Reading with Some Prose a Bit Too Purple:

Perhaps what Edwards does is ring the changes on types of insularity: the good insularity of a man whose land is an island with all its strengths and weaknesses, his love of his own place and people and ways, and the bad insularity of a sentimental and fragmented religion. And the problem is a problem of sentiment, of proper sentiment, of mingled and polluted sentiment, of the search of the isolated heart for that local and universal place of loyalty, that rest of everlasting home glimpsed in a mutable life of shifting light and shadow. Ebenezer Le Page must learn where to leave his treasure and when he does he finds it has changed its value: this is the most wrenching and unsentimental part of the book. The book is melancholy but it ends in triumph, the only triumph available to the humble and powerless: the triumph of hope.

I wonder if the book is so much about religion because Edwards really believed that at the heart of this malady known as modern life is a religious disorder. The insularity of religion, that sentimental and fragmented religion, forces on a man the life of one on an island in a sea of ignorance. Ebenezer seeks truth, has a treasure, has a home and has thwarted desire.

At the end of his life Ebenezer looks on a new world, one in which, or for which, he is no longer suited. I think one thing the book looks at in a satisfactory way is how our times make us and shape us. It is existential in that it shows we are made out of the consequences of our choices. Regardless of the situation we face, with all its good and bad, we are responsible for our choices, and these, when rightly made, ennoble us regardless of the circumstances. The sun rises, the sea surges, the government plays tricks and makes enormous blunders; our permanence must be the permanence of the character of God seen in his works: a permanence of character.

_________________
*I notice it because I think tourism is such a blight, for all that in modern times it may be unavoidable–which doesn’t help: the pernicious surface curiosity, the failure to truly appreciate, the gawking and photography, the artificiality of the whole thing. Tourism is derivative: it creates a derivative place, a derivative life, a derivative economy; and I think it is predatory. Tourism degrades—apparently it is hard to get a quiet look at the Mona Lisa nowadays because of all the tourists standing there getting their picture; isn’t that enough pollution to make you want never to see the thing because you don’t want to be in the same room with those people? It captures entirely the stupidity of the worst sort of tourist: no sense of the real worth, just a famous object. A pox on all tourism and tourists and those who lack the shame to quit behaving like tourists and partake of the spirit thereof, and may we all be delivered from being tourists. I think the spirit of tourists is one of lacking what Anthony Daniels calls existential humility. The worst thing about it is the artificial approach to a way of life: the gawking, unappreciating, guide-book and camera of it all; or perhaps the worst thing is the local who only appreciates the tourist for his money and otherwise scorns him—that can’t be good for the locals. I don’t mind if you hypocritically partake of tourism when it is unavoidable, but have a proper contempt of it. If you like tourism and are not at all self-conscious about the condescending approach to a place it involves, stay away from this book.

I am always struck, when reading women novelists of the 18th and 19th Century, with the elegance of their diction, the completeness of thought and logic in normal conversation. Even if it turns our that their retelling is heightened, it has no stilted feeling: there must be much of the common diction elevating it. People trying it in our time would have, it seems to me, a hard time pulling it off. The preciseness of the way of putting a thing, the exactness of description and clarity of expression determine the quality of light in which the truth the author aims at can be seen.

Jane Eyre is the subject and the object of interest in this novel; it is she that makes it an interesting book. Jane Eyre is remarkable for her bold intelligence: she is not crushed by circumstances; she is persistently observant in her acute way; wonderfully stern in her self-examination, daring and not-daring to hope; and always indomitable and sensible in a way that excites admiration. The situations in which she finds herself we might deplore: some are fraught with an overrealized emotional tension; that she ends up with Rochester is perhaps not altogether satisfactory, though he has been tamed by circumstances; but Jane Eyre you have to admire. The book satisfies because Jane Eyre proves to have a character that is equal to the circumstances.

Jane’s meeting with the crone is characteristic, and it is the point at which the whole story comes into focus for me. A fortune teller traffics in generalizations, and Jane, who so frequently shelters behind generalities, who needs wit to maintain her position because she has nothing else, does battle with the crone who is as skilled as she is and more experienced. We are something of the crone—us readers—searching Jane to know her fortune. The crone turns out to be Mr. Rochester whose moral integrity has been compromised. What is unknown to Jane turns out to be what drives her away from Mr. Rochester, but what is unknown about the crone turns out to be what Jane wants and eventually, because she does not compromise either moral integrity or desire, achieves.

Romanticism deals in mystery, troubling underlying secrets, a world that is not all light and reason because at the core of humankind is not clear thought, but impulse and desire—which are harder to sort out. In Jane Eyre the emerging secret is a disappointment, and one which romantics who are not utopians take into account. It may be that Classicism understood its faults and that Romanticism, the reaction against the hypocrisy of Classicism ignored that fact; but Romanticism is the liberation Classicism never achieved of man from the tyranny of his own reason. It is the reconciliation of Jane Eyre to Mr. Rochester.

A novel needs to start with common interest, but at some point it must twist into such an engagement as will intrigue and keep the reader’s attention all the way to the satisfaction of the conclusion. A common interest, after all, can only be prolonged so far—perhaps the length of a short story. Romanticism understands that what makes people compelling is not the light of clear thinking and rational life but the impulse of the heart, which can be understood, but not exhausted. And the truth is that what makes humanity compelling is the mystery of a creature with reason and impulse both, struggling to operate while satisfying the demands of both properly. Rochester is all impulse, but the Calvinist, St. John Eyre Rivers is the reverse: the path of unfeeling duty. And Jane Eyre while fleeing the distortion of unregulated passions, does not—rightly and to our satisfaction, if with some suspense—give in to the calculations of duty. She perseveres even though impulse has left her destitute. She is a creature of impulse and of reason. To write a novel successfully, as Charlotte Bronte has, is to show us successfully how the two come together. I think that is what Jane Eyre does.

Leftover Observations:

The interlude after Jane’s leave brings up the dilemma: dependency versus independency, or: how to live? Is it a true dilemma? What option does Jane have? To live where she does not belong with independency, out of sight, or in miserable dependency. We want a satisfaction buried in mystery.

What do these poetic interludes mean anyway? Description takes on a slight poetic diction, syntax in other order, and alliteration.

Another preoccupation of that age is shown: spiritual equality. Who is the equal of this indomitable woman? It turns out to be the strange, indomitable man: the romantic man of impulse and not the rationalist man of duty. Jane Eyre is imperfect, must accept an imperfect world, and in this is much of the satisfaction of the novel: we know the world to be this way, and yet, like her, we want more. We are grateful to Charlotte Bronte for having given it to us.

I’ve been working, now, on finishing The Sword of Imagination, the autobiography of Russell Kirk. It is an opportunity for him to ramble about things, to interject observations and anecdotes that one would otherwise probably only get through personal correspondence or conversation; so it makes it yet another enjoyable book. There is very little of this kind of living in our day—from what I can tell, and I remember Lewis lamenting to Greeves that such ways were passing and rejoicing that they had enjoyed them—and less of this kind of informed, learned, informal conversation, though that may entirely be my fault. We live in a world where our friends actually seriously suggest to us the purchase and ownership of the latest fad gadget—but perhaps that was a joke since it didn’t come with an offending list of exclusively practical considerations.

Here is a book so interwoven with the view that what is lacking most of all is imagination that in reading it you can’t help but come away convinced, unless you have so little imagination your reading is essentially sub-literate.

One of the things he exposes is what he calls American Pelagianism in education. It is like Pelagianism in that it denies the necessary operation of a mystery in the life of humankind—an anti-romanticism or a rationalism, I might call it. The analogy of a heresy to an event more or less removed from theology can be a dangerous thing, but so can all comparisons when abused. Here it is apt: Kirk is talking about the belief that education is a cure for social remedies, and by education he means what American universities do. It is the notion that people don’t have the right information, and had they the right information then things would be improved. The solution is to tell them the right thing, which they will then proceed to operate upon once they have received it. Not that Kirk is against right information, but that mere information is not what it takes; this Pelagianism is a glib answer that fails to understand the problem. So institutions of learning cease to be communities of learning and are merely academic conglomerates where the imagination is mortified rather than cultivated—and the information is not all that good either.

It is good to read old and stern but not sententious words against depraved tastes, against decadence, ignorance and other such defeats. Kirk was full of the grace the proper imagination lends to all of life and many of its baroque adornments. So much so that even tough the list is getting limited, I’m going to have to read The Roots of American Order before I no longer own it.