RONALD BLYTHE was a reader. His mother read the Bible to him every day, which led to a love affair with public libraries, where this quiet boy, ignored at school, read his way to an education. At 18, he found work in a library. From there, he was scooped up into a Bohemian world of East Anglian writers, musicians, and artists, which included Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, and Christine and John Nash, who became an alternative family, and supported and encouraged his talent.
As a writer, he read landscapes, buildings, faces, fields, character, and history. The result was a wealth of poems, reviews, a novel, and, in 1969, his masterpiece, Akenfield. This was based on Suffolk village life and the spoken words of fictionalised individuals who had struggled through the years of agricultural depression before and between the world wars of the 20th century.
Blythe’s curiosity invited the most extraordinary and vivid confidences from people who had never “told their story” or “spoken their truth”, and never thought that they were remotely important. He must have given his 49 subjects an attention which enabled them to talk with an uncanny immediacy, as though they had just looked up from a task they would return to as soon as they had stopped. Blythe found an unselfconscious richness in lives which were otherwise often marked by chronic poverty and cruel hours of work. There is no sentimentality, bitterness, or nostalgia in these testimonies.
He was also a Reader in the Church of England. Ordination was suggested, but it was not for him. Yet his writing reminds me of an archetype of English priesthood. He must have had that sacramental quality of listening, which enabled him to read the blend of good and evil that makes up most human lives. It is not easy to hear of terrible things without expressing sadness or offering well-meant sympathy. But, sometimes, a non-possessive curiosity is even more important.
The only thing I found shocking in the recent obituaries of the discreetly gay Ronald Blythe was his self-confessed one-night stand with the novelist Patricia Highsmith, creator of one of the most evil characters in literature, The Talented Mr Ripley. Apparently, they were both simply curious about how heterosexuals managed. Curiosity is the key here: a library book can be read only when taken from its accustomed shelf. I can see Blythe in my mind’s eye, with his pink cheeks and longish hair, like a watchful cat. “Teach us to care and not to care. . .”, as T. S. Eliot put it. There is no true contemplation without detachment.
Akenfield has been read around the world because it drives us back to the implacability of nature, whether in the field or through human generations. And it reminds us that often true dignity is expressed through what is ordinary, local, quiet, and difficult.
Malcolm Guite reflects on a memorable meeting with Ronald Blythe here