Studio Note · 3 December 2024

On a Coastal Episode

Among the more contentious items in the studio archive is a small black-and-white photograph, slightly sun-bleached at the corners, in which Edmund appears—if we accept the identification—to be standing at the edge of an unnamed beach, holding an improbably elegant surfboard. The hair is wind-tangled, the beard more carefully maintained than his prose would lead one to expect, and the aviator glasses conceal any trace of the usual insomniac stare.

He is not looking at the water so much as past it, toward some off-stage complication; behind him, a single line of footprints advances and then dissolves into foam. The image is undated, unlabelled, and was found in an envelope marked only "coastal episode," in Edmund's own hand. Certain correspondents insist it was taken off the coast of California; others, perhaps more fancifully, maintain that the wave he is contemplating breaks on no ordinary shore at all.