Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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The artistic couple even found him a small house near Aldeburgh and introduced him to Benjamin Britten, who put Blythe to work writing programme material and doing translations for Aldeburgh Festival.

Next to Nature (Signed) - Ronald Blythe - The Bookery Next to Nature (Signed) - Ronald Blythe - The Bookery

Shot at weekends over 18 months to accommodate the work schedules of the amateur actors the film, like the original novel, caught the unchanging nature of life in the Suffolk countryside during the early years of the 20th century. So, a fuddy-duddy then; a man embedded in the old ways that he believes were best, uninterested in, and indeed, scathing about, life in the present. Yes? No. But the tree has a history parallel with my own in the wild garden and I sense that I am losing part of myself as the boughs fall…’ (Blythe, 2022)

Akenfield's Ronald Blythe turns 100

Blythe has long championed the poet John Clare, and there are similarities, as Olivia Laing observes, in Blythe’s “attentive and unsentimental” view of the countryside. When he writes about “gaudy” fields of borage, Blythe knows how it is harvested and where it will be sold. “A very Clare-like knowledge, this, obtained by the steady, perpetual listening that gave Akenfield its power,” Laing writes. Blythe lived briefly at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast (as recalled in his 2013 book The Time by the Sea) before moving to Debach. [5] For three years in the late 1950s he worked for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival, editing programmes and doing pieces of translation. [6] [7] He met E. M. Forster, [9] [10] was briefly involved with Patricia Highsmith, [5] [9] [10] spent time with the Nashes, and was part of the Bohemian world associated with the artists of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End near Hadleigh, run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. [7] "I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them," Blythe told The Guardian. "What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way." [9] Writing [ edit ]

Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside - Goodreads

In 2006 Blythe was awarded a Benson Medal for lifelong achievement by the Royal Society of Literature, [28] and in 2015 he received an honorary degree from the University of Suffolk. [23] This article was amended on 7 November 2022 to correct references to the location of Blythe’s home. Blythe’s next book, The View in Winter (1979), was a prescient examination of old age in a society that did not value it, at a time when more people than ever reached it. The “disaster” suffered by the old, he wrote, is “nobody sees them any more as they see themselves”. Blythe regarded it as his best book. While he was writing it, Kühlenthal died, and Blythe moved into the Nashes’ old farm, Bottengoms, to look after the elderly Nash. When Nash died a year later, he left the house to Blythe. There Blythe lived for the rest of his life, writing beautifully about his home in At the Yeoman’s House (2011).a b c House, Christian. "Ronald Blythe: My not so quiet village life", The Independent, 11 November 2012. Retrieved 24 November 2012. A life rooted in East Anglia has given Blythe a rare depth of vision. His writing is attuned to the physicality of existence, attentive to the world around him, and always listening to people and other species, as here, in June: Having unravelled the threads and got a wider grasp of the content, I read a third time, to luxuriate in the wit, reflections and audacious splendour of it all, celebrating the words and language of someone who knew how to observe his world, squeeze every drop of texture, meaning and association from it, and, most importantly for his readers, knew how to translate those considerations to meaningful and elegant prose. I was incessantly reading. We went to the old Repertory Theatre and then went for little meals at Neal & Robarts in the High Street - which we thought was very sophisticated. We'd go downstairs and there would be all the actors from the theatre.” Of night-walking, Blythe wrote that everywhere was “all so perfectly interesting that one might never go to bed”. According to Macfarlane, this captures Blythe’s sensibility in a sentence: “inquisitive, wandering, democratic, giving us the truth on the ground”. His appreciation for everything extends to his own mortality. “He’s philosophical, he doesn’t complain and he’s interested,” Collins says. “He would be interested in dying – he finds it all fascinating.”

Ronald Blythe is so revered | The Spectator Why Ronald Blythe is so revered | The Spectator

By using the words of the real farmworkers and their families, Blythe dealt matter-of-factly with the notions of life, death, farming, religion and the countryside.The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer. Blythe recovered, and also survived a recent fall. His dear ones bring him three meals a day and everyone is determined that he will still be in his home, as he wishes, when he dies. The Guardian, "Ronald Blythe at 100: 'A watchful, curious and gratefully amazed vision of life'", 5 November 2022. Retrieved 18 November 2022. Lambirth, Andrew. "Bookends: Spirit of place", The Spectator, 5 November 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2012.

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I cannot remember when I first discovered him, but I certainly know that it was his sparkling prose that caught and held me. His writing is rich but he never overeggs his puddings. His descriptions of the world around him, and records of its strange doings, written in ever-fresh prose, are as vivid as paintings – indeed, he originally wanted to be a painter, and the house in which he has lived for most of his adult life, Bottengoms Farm, was inherited from the painter John Nash. He has always lived among artists, poets, occasionally musicians, as well as working countrymen and faithful churchgoers. Blythe was politically radical throughout his life, a Labour voter who joined peace vigils outside St-Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Friends were surprised when he accepted a CBE in 2017, around the time he was gently “retired” from public speaking and writing as his short-term memory faded. When he reached 100, he was still well enough to sign 1,500 copies of a new compilation of his best Church Times columns.

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This intriguing work continues by softly carrying the reader through the seasonal rhythms of a year in the Suffolk countryside, setting ‘Word From Wormingford’ columns for the corresponding months from different years alongside each other, bringing a freshness and new vibrance for those who may have read previous collections. From the scent of impending snow in January, through to the farmers browsing seed catalogues as the bells ring in the New Year at the close of the following December, it is a journey that I found myself taking three times over. Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. The old people who thrived in The View in Winter were those, Blythe concluded, who were able to preserve their “spiritual vitality, a vividness, an imaginative sort of energy”. This credo served him well as he grew older, although he was mistaken in another respect. The old, he wrote, are “cared for, surrounded with kindliness, and people are often interested in what they say; but they are not truly loved and they know it”. The eldest of six children, Blythe was born in Acton, near Lavenham, into a family of farm labourers rooted in rural Suffolk. His surname comes from the Blyth, a small Suffolk river, but his mother and her family were Londoners. His mother, Matilda (nee Elkins), a nurse, passed to him her love of books. Although Blythe left school at 14, by then he had already established a voracious reading habit – “never indoors, where one might be given something to do,” he remembered – which became his education. Each Returning Day: The Pleasure of Diaries (Viking, 1989) - published in USA as The Pleasures of Diaries: Four Centuries of Private Writing (Pantheon, 1989)