Ronald Blythe

Ronald Blythe interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 21st October 2015

0:05:06 Born at Acton, a village between Lavenham and Sudbury in 1922 on St Leonard's Day; Norman Scarfe the Suffolk historian says the family have been in Suffolk for centuries, and there is a part of Suffolk called the Blythings, and the River Blyth and Blythburgh, and he thinks it must have come from there, but I have never looked up the family except that in churchyards you do see distant relations who worked on farms or were shepherds or small farmers, old-fashioned Hardy-like people; my mother's family came from London; she went to school in London and went to church at St Clement Danes; she was very influenced by a woman missionary in Ceylon, and the school where she was made my christening robes and my brother's too, I think we all had them; much later when my mother went to Australia they called in at Ceylon, an amazing thing for her; I eventually got a job at Colchester Public Library; there were two other libraries, one an eighteenth century one called a Gentlemen's Library when people gave a book each; I was the Reference Librarian in the public library; there was also Archbishop Harsnett's Library which was a late Tudor library; he was Archbishop of York in the early seventeenth century; in a way it was really my university because I was very scholarly and read all the books; I started the Colchester Literary Society and all sorts of writers used to come; a delightful rather elderly lady came in, the wife of John Nash the painter; by this time I had met a number of artists, including Sir Cedric Morris who had an art school; it was three guineas a week, bring your own sheets; the first pupil was Lucian Freud; when Cedric died many years later I had to do all his papers for an archive and found a letter from Lucian's father saying that he thought his son was an artist and could Cedric take him on; what I did do for a lot of these people was to look after their papers; Christine Nash wouldn't allow me to stay on as a librarian because I waa a poet and she said I must write; I had a tiny bit of money and she knew somebody who had a nineteenth century bungalow near Aldeburgh; my brother drove me over in the snow one day and that is where I began to write: I wrote my first book there, a novel called 'A Treasonable Growth'; I also wrote some poems there and then I began to meet other writers, particularly James Turner, another generation to myself; he bought a rectory called the most haunted house in England; he and his wife were both psychic though I didn't believe any of that, but I loved being with him talking about literature; from then on I simply wrote; I then met W.R. Rodgers, the Irish poet, and he introduced me to a publisher who gave me some work to do; they began the Penguin English Library, the idea of which was to have certain wonderful works of literature with a long introduction and lots of notes which people would read, not in the sense of having to study anything but just to understand a particular novel; the first novel I did was Jane Austen's 'Emma', then I did my hero, William Hazlitt, and I think I am the President of the Hazlitt Society; I then became the editor of the New Wessex edition of Thomas Hardy, and I edited and introduced 'Far From the Madding Crowd' and 'A Pair of Blue Eyes'; bit by bit I started writing my own books, short stories and poems, and doing this literary work; I never got a proper job, as they say; I eventually found myself a little house in Suffolk and I lived then as I live now, really; then my books began to be published in the United States; I went abroad, but not often, and people began to offer me professorships and things like that; I didn't accept any but just stayed at home writing, I suppose and old-fashioned literary life

8:09:12 I write by hand on nice foolscap, then I type them up; now Vicky, my friend, puts them on a computer which I have never tried to use; I write in a study, at a desk, always in the mornings if possible, from 10am until 1pm usually; I don't change much after the first writing; I love the act of writing; I have the proofs of a book here and rather like correcting them; this one is called 'From the Artist's House', about living here; then I also do a weekly column in the Church Times of 400 words; I send all my work through the post and if they query it they ring me up; I have never been to the office; I think one of the things you have to be careful of as a writer is not to be distracted; people often want you to do things you can't do, or to come to London, all sorts of things; I have a circle of friends here; yesterday I had to give a day's talk to the University of Suffolk, and it is another world meeting these people of this age; delightful, absolutely wonderful, and some of them want to write; I have been a member of the Arts Council; I was given another honour this week from the University of Suffolk

11:59:10 My advice to someone who wants to write is to write; I have encountered a number of times people who thought in best-seller terms, but its rather like learning the piano; you must practise; most of us are influenced by some writer we loved when we were young; one of mine was Scott Moncreiff's translation of Proust, and I read Yeats a lot, mostly the poetry, and Hardy all the time; the first Wessex edition was published in 1928 in the year of Hardy's death; I have, what you might call, a retentive memory; I did a book called 'The Age of Illusion' about the twenties and thirties which I wrote in the University Library in Cambridge; I write a lot of essays; often when I am doing the garden or looking after the house I get into a day-dream of just writing; I imagine it is a fairly old-fashioned literary way of thinking; walking helps thinking; Christine Nash was very influential and when I was young I liked chatting to her as she knew a lot of Bloomsbury people, but at 10am sharp she would send me off to work; I write in the garden some of the time; when they founded the John Clare Society they asked Charles Causley to be the President; he was a friend of mine and as he lived in Cornwall he suggested that they asked me; I have just resigned the presidency after many years, but I have written a lot about John Clare and done collections on him; I think, maybe not having a family, the days are undisturbed; the house is very remote and you can't hear any traffic, so I read and write, listen to music, and on Sunday's I go to church; my music is classical, Bach, Mozart, and I love early church music; I also like Georgian folk songs; we go to concerts at Aldeburgh occasionally which is about forty miles from here; I worked for Benjamin Britten for a time on the literary side of the festivals; the Aldeburgh Festival publishes a wonderful book called 'The Programme Book', though it is more than that as it has essays, photographs and drawings; I edited one of those for him a long time ago; I am connected to a lot of Aldeburgh people, particularly the Garrett family who built the maltings in the nineteenth century; my friend Dennis Garrett was a botanist; all these people seem to me to work quietly without any fuss doing all sorts of things; Benjamin Britten was exacting, and could be demanding and difficult; I sang in one of the choirs in the church when I was young, though I can't sing really properly at all; I have given lectures in the Maltings; I hardly knew Peter Pears; he seemed to be rather a big presence standing in the back, smiling; Britten was tense and nervous, but looking back was extremely good to me; they were surrounded by umpteen people and I don't know how they worked really; Imogen Holst was lovely; she was my kind of saint in a way; once when Ben was abroad with Peter in 1956, we had to get the programme done ourselves, and it was just like a great piece; I sat with Imogen in her house; we worked at Gustave Holst's music desk, and we put it all together quietly with no fuss; she was absolutely splendid, a wonderful woman; they are all buried together in a little corner of Aldeburgh churchyard, Ben, Peter and Imogen; I have also known the little place at Thaxted where Gustave Holst lived; I used to go across there and stay with a friend who lived in a rectory which was just up the road from there; I was connected with an earlier kind of culture in East Anglia; when Christine Nash found me the place at Thorpeness where I started to be a writer, I went there on 1st January when it was snowing; I went to get some shopping one day and came back to find a page from a notebook pushed under the door inviting me to go for a drink that night with E.M. Forster; I couldn't believe it really; he was then indexing the life of Marion Thornton, the great-aunt who had left him enough money to save him from getting a job; he was a shabby little man who used to help me do the shopping; he was very charming to me all the time, extremely kind; I was in awe of him; later on when I had done a lot of work for the festival and seen Forster quite often, Imogen took us to the posh hotel in Aldeburgh and gave us dinner together; eventually, after two or three years I felt I had to escape to be myself; I found myself a little farmhouse in the village of Debach near Woodbridge, in the middle of nowhere really; I stayed there for over twenty-five years until I came here; I wrote 'Akenfield' there

23:42:15 An editor at Penguin Books commissioned a lot of rural studies; the idea was to send a Frenchman to Russia and a Russian to France and that they should write about the rural life they saw; they came to me and I thought I was going to have to go somewhere, but they said I should stay at home; 'Akenfield' is very autobiographical, not from the point of family, but my knowledge of bell ringing, or farming, is all part of my background; I am an honorary bell-ringer and I wrote about bells; I did interviews, sometimes with a tape-recorder; the first interview that I did was with a district nurse who was the treasurer of the village church; it was not proper history but just drawing together about fifty people of different classes, living round me at that time, and doing these little portraits of them in a sense; I chose the names from the stones in the churchyard but everybody knew who they all were; nobody ever complained, though a farmer's wife said that if I had gone to her she could have told me a lot worse; Peter Hall, who came from Bury St Edmunds and couldn't tell a daisy from a pumpkin, was upset by my book; he asked if he could film the book but I refused him; then I met him and did a version of the book which could be filmed, rather like Bresson or Pasolini; it took a year to make and the voice-over was done by a man from Felixstowe; I can remember those accents as a child, it is almost another language; as it went from Essex towards Norfolk it got broader and broader; the school was like that in many ways, but not like my own; at the time it was the same in Public Schools where there was an enormous lot of beating, Eton was famous for it; the girls weren't touched but the boys were constantly beaten; the book is a portrait of a vanishing world but I was not conscious of that in the sixties when I wrote it; it is about agriculture and poverty, and the church and chapel, the understructure of things, much of it witnessed by myself; one of the things that happen when books become well-known, probably like 'Cider with Rosie', they take a life of their own

30:13:04 Religion has played a considerable role in my life; I love it, but see it through poetry like George Herbert, and music, architecture, and things like that; there came a moment when the Bishop tried to persuade me to be ordained; one thing is that I am very inefficient and can't drive or anything like that, and I said I couldn't cope; it is incredible how the church often wants to make you something that you are not; I have got a stall in the Cathedral at Bury St Edmunds where I am a Canon; here I am what they call a Reader so I can take services every Sunday; I have to rely on people to pick me up as I don't drive; I suppose I am rather conventional and love the liturgy of the Church of England, and certainly the hymns and the music; my services are aesthetic to a degree; I give a kind of literary talk for ten minutes, usually without notes; it takes an hour every Sunday; we have three churches, all lovely; the only thing is that in village life the church has umpteen other activities, flower shows and things like that; on the whole, old age allows me to get out of things like that, but it is part of my world here and its continuity with my background; often artists and writers don't quite belong; you are admired because you do all these things but you are clearly unlike anyone else

33:48:11 In my writing there is a thread of deeply personal life which goes back to boyhood, connected with nature, old traditions, solitude and friendships maybe; I am a very happy person really and depend upon a group of friends, and wonderful good health; I am basically philosophical by nature, and feel myself as belonging to the arts, music and literature, poetry, its my world really; my childhood memories have a lot of escapes into the wilds of Suffolk, on my bike often enough, a sense of not quite fitting in in some ways, but not unhappy, just being absorbed in natural history, and in reading; the history of Suffolk and East Anglia, then gradually meeting other writers, and people like Britten, who also belong to this world; I never thought of any of these people when I was young as being celebrated in any way; I did lots of work for them and felt it was where I belonged; I have never lived in London more than four days consecutively; living alone, and nearly always alone, is natural to me; I have never shared a house with anyone; all through your life, particularly when young, there are people you love, like James Turner which whom one could talk in a pub about literature; he wrote a lot of essays and some poetry; I sometimes out of duty and respect for him read a poem called 'Church Clock Winding' in his village not far from here; the man who wound the church clock once a week was ill, and James used to climb up the stairs and do this for him until he got better, and this lovely poem was based on that; eventually the Turners moved to Cornwall where they tried to persuade me to live once, where John Nash used to paint; I think I miss talking books to him more than anyone; his wife was a slightly irritable woman; I don't think she liked all this talk about literature and things in pubs; then there was the Irish poet, W.R. Rodgers and R.N. Curry who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford; they were all older than me but I liked being with them, and I liked going and talking yesterday to about forty young people though I don't know much about modern life; I have travelled, been to Australia, the United States, and Sweden more than once, where I met a Swedish couple who wrote 'Report from a Chinese Village', which led in its turn to 'Akenfield' as another of the series; I thought their book was marvellous; they were trained sociologists but found the whole of China was within one village where they stayed; 'Akenfield' became so well known, but I didn't intend it to be so but I suppose at the time I had this literary culture and background which came together; I had no training to do such a thing but just listened to people, some of whom might have been my uncles and aunts; I had actually watched the old harvests, used to help with them in fact, with the sheaves in the fields and things like that; one of the great things was the grave-digger and the end; I remember cycling to see him and coming across his deep eccentricity which one used to see sometimes, a startling episode really; then I marked it out kind of class-wise to a degree, and age-wise with the two world wars and things like that; I have written this book 'The Age of Illusion', the illusion being that there would be peace in our time; there is a very good chapter on the Spanish Civil War, and also the Western Front; it did very well and is always in print; it was partly influenced by my father's experience in Gallipoli; he didn't talk about it and I never asked him any questions; what he never did do was to go to the Remembrance Days services in the Church; I think he had seen through what he himself thought of as the disgrace of it all; the anger at the treatment of the troops was general at the time; Churchill was behind it all and people hated him for it

45:32:07 I live very much in the present; a lot of writers live in the past, or when they were young; I always feel young when I wake up, and garden and write, but now and again you think that it can't last much longer, not with any sadness, it just seems rational; I have been very fortunate in many ways and have a very good memory, things make a huge impression on me; it must seem very odd for people to come here and meet a man all by himself in this house in the middle of nowhere, but it seems quite normal to me

46:57:22 The Study