by D.W. White
January 17, 2023
There are in Men Without Women many stories which, if life were longer, one would wish to read again.
—Virginia Woolf, contemporary review of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 story collection.
There is, in our brief lease of the mortal coil, much to be said for those experiences that demand to be lived again. After all, to give time to one thing is to irrevocably not give it to something else—this is what the economists call opportunity cost, that lurking demon of sense and sensibility. And so, when we redo, return, or, yes, reread, it is a sure sign of the power and the magnetism of the thing itself—or, at least, its memory. For the literary minded, beset on all sides by TBR lists and ‘haven’t you read this yet’, a never-ending assault of recommendation and requirement, it is a special book indeed that warrants a return trip. But it is a rewarding endeavor for those who venture it. There is an alchemy to rereading a novel, a change—wrought by time, experience, knowledge, the vast phenomenological unknown—that results in a new experience of a familiar place. In this way, like so much else in art, fiction mirrors life.
Two novels, each of them more than worthy of rereading, approach this problem of memory in different ways, carving distinct routes through that overcrowded wood of the first-person, that nonetheless lead to a similar destination. J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) and G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (1981) feature two opposing narrative responses to time—compression in one, expansion in the other—before eventually weaving back towards each other: a meeting place of memory and time, of controlled, precise first-person narration, and the way in which the stories we tell ourselves, about those people we used to be, tucked away behind the shroud of life, expand and contract in their proximity to something like the truth.
As tends to happen in our strange cosmos with its impish gods, the two novels share some odd, if superficial, similarities. Both are relatively little-known books—A Month in the County albeit with more renown, and later benefiting from a successful movie adaption—the other, written by a man from an eccentric island west of France, in his latter years, published a year apart, and eventually becoming something of an underground classic. Then, there are the deeper connections. Both novels are temporally and geographically limited, within varying ranges; set from a specific act of the telling; both are propelled by a singular voice and command of craft; both explore the possibilities of first-person narration as a vehicle to furthering their central concerns. And, ultimately, both are resonant novels, ones that stay with their reader long after the final page, haunted by ghosts of the past and managing to speak volumes on the human condition through the prism of a solitary life.
“There may have been stranger recent literary events than the book you are about to read,” John Fowles begins his introduction to The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, “but I rather doubt it.” Indeed, it is a remarkable novel, in the very essence of that word. “Worthy of attention, striking. From the French remarquable, from remarquer ‘take note of.’” The novel is, quite simply, the life of the Ebenezer Le Page, an old man (at the time of writing), who has lived through two world wars and seismic societal change. From the opening pages, the voice and control of Edwards’ titular (anti)hero, among the most propulsive and distinctive narrators in literature, is in complete control of his story—one that encompasses no less than his entire life, across nearly a century, living on the remote island of Guernsey. As with most great novels, the opening is instructive.
Guernsey, Guernesey, Garnsai, Sarnia: so they say. Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I know I don’t know nothing, me. I am the oldest on the island, I think. Liza Quéripel from Pleinmont say she is older; but I reckon she is putting it on. When she was a young woman, she used to have a birthday once every two or three years; but for years now she have been having two or three a year. To
tell you the truth, I don’t know how old I am. My mother put it down on the front page of the big Bible; but she put down the day and the month, and forgot to put down the year. I suppose I could find out if I went to the Greffe; but I am not going to bother about that now.
One is reminded of Nabokov’s rejoinder the Barthesian concept of the “death of the author”— there is no doubt who is the artificer here, who delimits the fictive world in which the reader may roam. Besides the voice, shot through with Guernsey patios, reflexive of French and suspicious of English, one can see the fundamentals of Edwards’ narrative mode. Ebenezer is telling us his story straight off; this is his life, written from someplace near the end of it, told directly and without fanfare. There is no hesitation, little exposition, a superabundance of that je ne sais quoi possessed by all remarkable fictive voices. Do we not, after only this first paragraph, know Ebenezer? He is a man possessed equally by history and gossip, plainspoken yet sly, dismissive yet captivating. It is an approach to first-person narration from which the contemporary novel, with its fixation on the present tense and rather dubious tricks aimed at disguising the narrative distance, could learn a thing or two.
Let us linger a moment on that idea—narrative distance. It is a central question in first-person narrations (even those à la mode present tense affairs): how far away, in time, is the act of the telling from the fictive present, the events in the story? For first-person past tense novels, it is a predominant feature; not only how far removed our narrator is from the scenes she relates, but also how open she is in acknowledging that distance, how prominent a landmark within the novelistic world the narrative act represents. These decisions, often quite subtle, fundamentally alter the composition of a first-person novel, and the relationship between reader and writer.
In both our books, the act of the telling is notably foreground—Carr and Edwards each make a point of fixing their narrator’s pen in space and time. For Ebenezer, this emphasis is among the strongest of any first-person narration, and is laid immediately. We can see from that first paragraph the direct address that he uses throughout, coming right at his reader. Ebenezer is, in
the tradition of Tristram Shandy, telling the story of telling his story—after all, simply have a look at the title. This creates a strong compact with the reader from the first page, in turn allowing Ebenezer, and Edwards, the freedom of movement and digression that imbues the novel with its extraordinary power and poignancy.
Early on, Ebenezer tells of his uncle’s death, when our narrator was perhaps ten years old. He is allowed to select a keepsake for himself after the funeral.
My Aunt Prissy said I could choose anything I liked, because I had grown to be such a strong boy. I chose the two china dogs on the mantelpiece. They are on my mantelpiece at this moment, listening with their long ears to everything I am writing down. I like my two china dogs. When I write down anything wicked, one of them look very serious; but the other one, he wink.
The small details are emblematic of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page’s bedrock temporal movement, calling up the past to sit side by side with the present. In the space from one sentence to the next, we fly fifty years forward, right up to that act of the telling. The novel is resonant with nostalgia and memory, in large part because of the freedom Edwards’ narrative mode grants his protagonist. After all, this is simply an old man in his rocking chair, talking about history. We must allow him a bit of a tangent from time to time.
———
The narrator of J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is not quite as bombastic, or nearly as expansive, as our man Ebenezer, but he operates similarly within a precise temporal range. Again, the title informs: Tom Birkin is a First World War veteran who leaves London for a job restoring a mural in a church in Oxgodby, a small village in northern England. Much like The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, there is much underneath this fairly simple plot-line—a method less commonly found in the first-person than third, another distinguishing characteristic the novels share. Birkin, during his Month, is addled by the war and his crumbling marriage, but what charges his story, and in turn Carr’s work, is again the narrative distance. Ebenezer, as we saw, locates the act of the telling firmly—in his latter years, sitting in his living room, under the watchful eye of his porcelain dogs. Birkin is not nearly as explicit, at least not until much later on, but he too tells his story from far in the ‘future’; the Tom Birkin writing his account of the Oxgodby summer is much older than the fictive present hero living in a country belfry.
The majority of the narration is focused on that summer, with little of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page’s time traveling free-association. However, Carr makes use of his structure by interposing glimpses of Tom’s future, charging the novel with a nostalgic melancholia.
I liked him from that first encounter: he was his own man. And he liked me (which always helps). God, when I think back all those years! And it’s gone. It’s gone. All the excitement and pride of that first job, Oxgodby, Kathy Ellerbeck, Alice Keach, Moon, that season of calm weather—gone as though they’d never been.
These are the hints we are given throughout the novel’s first third—for the reader who scrupulously avoids the introduction, there is initially little indication of just how long ago all the events took place. But Carr works his way, building short branches off the main narrative path that begin to reveal the book to be something other than a typical first-person affair.
I never exchanged a word with the Colonel. He has no significance at all in what happened during my stay in Oxgodby. As far as I’m concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it’s all about? Let’s dream on. Yes, that’s my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece. That cushion cover was embroidered by my cousin Sarah only a month before she passed on. I go to work at eight and come home at five- thirty. When I retire they’ll give me a clock—with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me. Go away; I’ve forgotten you already.
The imaginative free-association quoted here, of which Carr makes occasional and effective use (and which smacks, ever so slightly, of the modernist novels being written during his hero’s transformative month), gives his work a rawness that heightens the intensity of memory, mirroring the pangs of regret and nostalgia felt by Tom as he thinks and writes on that long ago summer. Extrapolation of a point in time to an entire life—this is the ability of both these novels, that special gift to offer up existence in a bundle of paper and ink.
There are moments in A Month in the Country that, in something like an abbreviated English Proust, slice through the fictive present to the direct heart of the novel’s emotional center—the faraway youth of a man reeling from war and loss, remembering a past that burns bright yet forever elusive in his mind. There is no returning to Oxgodby, to that summer, to the possibilities that once were. This the reader understands before she knows, feels before she is told. It is a marvel of construction that Carr layers these sentiments in his novel before coming to the final pages and their poignant exploration of the time gone by.
Edwards, in his much larger novel, in terms of both length and scale, has more freedom of digression than Carr. Further, by dint of his hero’s early, forthright location of the act of the telling, he can return to the living room, to check in on Ebenezer as he writes, more directly and more often. The effect, however, is strikingly similar.
Tonight the sea is pounding away on the rocks of La Petite Grève and the spray is dashing against my windows and the wind is whistling round the chimney and the first burning blue in the grate. I am in the warm and, as old Jim would say, as snug as a bug in a rug. I could be out visiting this person or that, if I wanted to. They all make a fuss of me when I arrive, and shoo the cat off the armchair for me to sit in; but they are not really interested in anything I have to say…
That is how it is I come to be writing this book. I got to say what I think to somebody; if only to myself. I don't expect anybody will ever read what I have written; but at the back of my mind I always have the hope that someday somebody will…I’m looking forward to starting a new chapter. I like to start a clean page and forget
all the mistakes I have made before.
Here again the centrifuge is narrative distance, the decision by the novelist to imbue an otherwise typical first-person account with the weight of time that sinks it deep into human experience.
———
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is, as much as A Month in the Country, a novel charged with the memory of things gone by, a life lived and, in some ways, lost. Ebenezer’s story, unlike Tom’s, goes right up to the act of the telling, encompassing as it does his entire life. It is also a portrait of a community and a society undergoing profound change; Guernsey is unable to avoid war or the modernization it brings. One benefit of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page’s expanse is the depth Ebenezer can give to his memories, having the time to tell each story. Edwards relies on information withholding to built the emotional center of his work—while Ebenezer of course knows everything from the beginning, his use of digression and aside allow tension to naturally rise in his narrative. His childhood friend Jim, a major figure in the book’s early portion, goes off to war and, while the reader is aware he dies before our narrator, Ebenezer plays it rather coy about the specifics, creating a running storyline around their youth before snapping off with a small isolated moment that is representative of the emotional weight of a life long friendship.
The last time I saw Jim in this world, before we went back to the War, was outside Salem Chapel, where we stopped to say good-bye. He had come for tea to our house that Sunday afternoon. He didn't want to go, and I didn’t want him to go; and we stood there like two momments and there was nothing we could say. At last he said, ‘Well, cheer-bye, then!’ and I said, ‘Best of luck!’ and we shook hands. I watched him go down the road. All of a sudden he turned round and came right back and caught hold of me by the jacket. ‘Remember the day you brought Victor to see me in the Cottage Hospital?’ he said. ‘There isn’t another boy in the world would have thought of doing that!’ and he went off laughing.’ À la prochaine!’ he called out.
The passage represents an example of a strength found in both novels—scenes vividly rendered that distill the emotion of memory into a single instant on the page. Such is is the nature of life that small glimmers of daily life burn on in our memories, standing in for all the hours and the years. It is the power of both novels to transform a highly idiosyncratic first-person narration, driven by memory and constructed along sophisticated technical lines, into elegiac laments for something gone, a life, a moment, a way of being.
As A Month in the Country progresses, Tom Birkin allows himself more moments of introspection as to what might have been.
If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around the corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.
Much like The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, there is an immediacy and an intimacy between the reader and narrator created through passages such as this one. It is a technique driven by that narrative distance that creates the sense of loss and knowledge of how things turned out for both men which enables these stirring lines to blossom. It is only the much older narrator who can see that which his younger self cannot, the way the past stalks the present and gives bleeding life to memory.
And this, then, is the true wellspring of the novels’ resonance and legacy: the poetic elegance found in both books, true works of art invoking the frightful beauty of language.
I wish I could write down the story of this island as I have known it and lived through it for the better part of a century. I don’t think I have changed much; but I think everybody else have. The young people of today don't know and can’t imagine the difference between living on Guernsey as it was and living on Guernsey as it is now. There is a great gulf fixed between the present generation and mine. I wish I could bridge it; but it
is too much to hope…
I think living in this world is hell on earth for most of us most of the time, it don’t matter when or where we are born; but the way we used to live over here, I mean in the country parts, was more or less as it had been for many hundreds of years; and it was real. The way people live over here now is not real: at least, it is not real to me. The people are not real. When I go out, and that isn’t often, I see strange faces everywhere around me and I know at a glance they don’t belong; or, if I see a boy and think goodness, that is young Torode I was at the Vale School with, he don’t know me; and then I realise he must be the grandson, or the great-grandson of the boy Torode I knew. It is an island of ghosts and strangers.
There is something irrepressibly plangent about Ebenezer Le Page in his eighth decade, sitting in his family home, writing about things gone and never to return, of friends dead, relatives buried, buildings torn down and streets paved over. About things that live only in the solitary memory of an old man, writing his words by flickering candlelight for no one to read.
Tom Birkin closes his narrative along similar lines, finally reaching across all those years to commune directly with his younger self.
Last of all, I gazed beyond the scaffolding to the great painting half hidden in the shadows. Truthfully, I felt nothing much. Certainly no more than a bricklayer may feel as he goes on to a new house. There had been a gray wall and now there were shapes and colors…
We can ask and ask but we can’t have again that once seemed ours forever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, as sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.
The directness which with both narrators explore their memories makes them all the more effective. They are drinking deeply from the well of time, hiding from no one what they’re about. These are stories told by narrators expertly created to the novelistic task, weapons of storytelling operating within precisely crafted structures. They are the heroes of important, moving histories, and of truly remarkable books, among the best novels of the twentieth century and the finest uses of the first-person to be found anywhere.
On the surface, there are far more differences than similarities between G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and J. L. Carr’s A Month in The Country. Carr’s short, sharp novel focuses on that single summer in 1920, his narrator back from the First World War and a dissolving marriage, far removed from the time of the telling and never disclosing much information about his fictive present self. Edwards’ fixed odyssey, on the other hand, takes within its massive sweep the earliest memories and most recent moments in the life of its eponymous hero, exploring an entire society’s decline and transformation, encompassing family and friends, two world wars and technological change, and the singular determination to tell one’s own history.
But they share a power and a poignancy rooted in technique and poetic styling uncommonly found in the shelves of literature. Both books, in pursuit of their novelistic tasks, are expertly refracted through intensely personal first-person narratives which confront the legacy of war and time on a people and a place, ultimately standing as monuments to the histories we tell ourselves, the ways in which a life can be remembered, the stories that are read over and over again.
———
Carr, J. L. A Month in The Country. New York: NYRB Classics, 2000. 160pp.
Edwards, G. B. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007. 424pp.
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L’Année et L’Heure: Narrative Distance and First-Person Memory in G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and J. L. Carr’s A Month in The Country
LITERARY COMMENTARY
Image by Johnny Briggs from Unsplash
D.W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. Currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. Before returning to Chicago, he spent nine years in Long Beach, California. He’s on Twitter at dwhitethewriter.
©2023 West Trade Review
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