SHORTLY after Ronald Blythe became the owner and sole resident of Bottengoms, an ancient farmhouse in Wormingford, north Essex, he allowed the young writer James Hamilton-Paterson to clear out some of the mouldy and decrepit contents gathered over the years by its previous owners, Christine and John Nash.

On the bonfire went a moth-eaten and wonky chaise-longue: “But that belonged to Dora Carrington! Virginia Woolf would have sat on that. And Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster. . .”

“They’re all dead,” responded Hamilton-Paterson; “so they won’t be needing it, and neither do you.” Hamilton-Paterson’s account finishes: “By the end of the day the ashes of it had made Ronnie extremely cheerful.”

The anecdote captures the essence of Ian Collins’s remarkable biography of Blythe, known to a vast circle of friends as Ronnie, and to Church Times readers as the author of the weekly “Word from Wormingford” column, which ran for 24 years from 1993.

Collins found three ways to solve the puzzle of how to write the biography of a writer who chronicled his own life in half a million words. First, he quotes Blythe a lot, and second helpings are as tasty as firsts.

“The man in the library”: an early photo of Ronald Blythe

Second, he introduces a chronology: at least one of Blythe’s friends was irritated by the “circularity” of his Wormingford accounts.

Third, he includes important elements of Blythe’s life which Blythe himself chose never to write about: his East Anglian childhood’s abject poverty and, in particular, his sexuality.

I grew up in Colchester, haunting the town library, where, three decades earlier, Blythe had been employed as reference librarian. (I was taught English by R. N. Currey, whose Collected Poems Blythe was later to edit.) Perhaps it had changed by then, but I never saw it as a town for casual homosexual encounters. Now I know better. . .

Blythe’s various relationships are dealt with matter-of-factly by Collins, who suggests that this is how they were viewed by Blythe himself: Collins describes a typical journey from lovers to “writerly friendship”. And throughout all is Blythe’s watchfulness and introspection, a writer’s aloofness exercised in a mêlée of mid-20th-century authors and artists.

The whole book is rather like the chaise-longue, stuffed with references to Blythe’s friends and patrons, among them Forster, Benjamin Britten, Patricia Highsmith, and, later, Richard Mabey. Collins logs these meticulously, for example: “Many books were borrowed from Aldeburgh public library, with advice from Miss Redstone — whose friend, Miss Howe, was the daughter of Edward FitzGerald’s housekeeper.”

zoe brownThe garden at Bottengoms

Such a sentence might possibly be risible, until one realises that the connections come not from Collins’s research, but from Blythe’s own recollection. Collins first met him in 1988 and, with his partner, became a regular visitor to Bottengoms. At some indeterminate point, it was accepted that Collins would be Blythe’s biographer, and much of the material in the book comes from conversations in which Blythe would recount literary connections. Hamilton-Paterson again: “You can’t see a spinney without being told that Constable used to date the corn chandler’s daughter in it.”

Two other bits of Blythe’s story which Collins tells better than the man himself: one, paradoxically, his writing. Akenfield was to him the equivalent of Cats to T. S. Eliot, and it furnished (literally) a more comfortable lifestyle; but to be known for that one work alone is an unfair view of an output over seven decades which enabled him to live entirely from his writing (albeit frugally at times) after those early days in the library. Essays, short stories, editing work — so many that a bibliography is probably an impossible task.

The other bit is his ending, after Blythe had ceased writing, when Collins and the other “Ronettes” strove successfully to support Blythe through the years, and particularly the last weeks, when they enabled him to fulfil his wish to die in his own bed in Bottengoms, on 14 January 2023.

Perhaps the greatest praise for Collins — and maybe it was why Blythe chose him — is that he has written in the character of Blythe: interested, affectionate, but unsentimental. It would have made Ronnie extremely cheerful.

Paul Handley is a former editor of the Church Times.

Read Malcolm Doney’s interview with Ian Collins here.

Blythe Spirit: The remarkable life of Ronald Blythe
Ian Collins
John Murray £25
(978-1-3998-1906-0)
Church Times Bookshop £20