Books & Authors
This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
with a note of reference.
I think myself that it is no more properly classifiable so than Flora Thompson's famous trilogy, Lark Rise to Candleford. Of course any book whose ground is the close observation of small community risks this damning label of 'provincial.' (John Fowles - Introduction).
If Guernsey feels that it has, since Victor Hugo's famous fifteen years of exile there, been rather left out in the literary cold, it need worry no more. It now has a portrait and memorial that must surely become a classic of the island. (John Fowles - Introduction)
... Edwards always thought of the patois as his native language. His deep regard for Joseph Conrad was not purely literary. Here was another exile forced to write in an 'acquired' English. (introduction - John Fowles)
Mr Chaney once sent Edwards a copy of Wyndham Lewis's The Lion and the Fox, and the judgement in return showed no mercy. After condemning Lewis for his slipshod scholarship and his 'rasping, harsh, abusive manner,' Edwards went on; 'It all adds up to no more than a chaos of logical positivist deductions, heartless and intellectual ... "romantic" is not a dirty word, you know.' (introduction - John Fowles)
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. (Introduction - John Fowles)
She didn't speak the English, and could only read the Bible in French. My mother spoke the English a little, and the big Bible was in English.
I am not sure all that reading do a fellow much good. Me, I used to read the Gazette, and now I read the Guernsey Evening Press, and I have read Robinson Crusoe.
Gerald, the youngest, was a smart boy and knew it. He was dark and not nearly as tall as Jim; but had a grin made everybody like him. I didn't much. When he was a boy at the Secondary School, Jim and me went to see him in a play called Twelfth Night, which the boys was doing in St Barnabas Hall. He played the part of Maria, who was a wicked little minx; and I couldn't help but think it was his own nature he was acting.
He had dozens of books on the shelves. There was some about religion and some about the history of Guernsey, and stories by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and others. He didn't like the stories of Sir Walter Scott himself, but had bought them for his father. He liked the stories of John Oxenham and Hall Caine and Florence Barclay. The Manxman by Hall Caine was on the Pictures, and for once he took his mother; but she didn't like it because there was an illegitimate baby in it. He also took her to see The Rosary, and that one she liked; but he said it wasn't like the book.
Sir Walter Scott
John Oxenham
She had a couple of rooms in Pedvin Street. They was very clean and nicely furnished. I saw she was an educated woman. She had a whole shelf of books by Marie Corelli.
After tea, she asked me if I would like to have something of Jim's. He had left some books behind in his room when he got married. Perhaps I would like to go up and choose one. I didn't want to go into his empty room. I knew what books he got up there. There was a pile of Bibby's Annuals he kept because he liked looking at the pictures. There was a Bible and a dictionary, but I didn't want those; and there was David Copperfield and The Mill on the Floss and Robinson Crusoe. I said I would like to have Robinson Crusoe. She fetched it for me.
The fellows was fed like fighting cocks, but wasn't allowed to tire themselves out by doing any work, in case they got bit by the bug. The only parades they had to go on was to line up twice a day and gargle permanganate. The rest of the day they passed on their beds yarning, or reading stories by Victoria Cross, or playing cards or housey-housey.
Raymond passed his time in his little room reading Les Miserables in four volumes in French from beginning to end.
'I'm the one who is father and mother in this house. They're just two unhappy children.' He didn't help his father in the yard; but he got him boys' adventure stories from the library. I remember Harold reading Coral Island and Peter the Whaler forwards and backwards; and he said they was good yarns.
For himself, Raymond was reading a book I looked into, but couldn't make head or tail of. It was called The Unrealised Logic of Religion, I don't know by who.
There was another book he had I read bits of called The Beloved Captain by Donald Hankey; but that book he had bought for his own, because he liked it so much. I liked the bits I read of it, myself. That Captain must have been a nice chap.
Raymond had several books from the Library by Bernard Shaw; and others in French by Anatole France.
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