Ronald Blythe – or “Ronnie”, as he is almost invariably called in the critical tributes that accompany this collection – died earlier this month, having turned 100 in November. This celebratory anthology comprises a generous selection of his “Word from Wormingford” columns for the Church Times, re-establishing him as one of our finest writers on countryside life, even if, some fifty years on from the first publication of his key work, Akenfield (1969), he is perhaps more referenced than read. We can see here the qualities that have earned him reverence from two generations of nature writers: close observation, close engagement and identification with place (specifically the Essex-Suffolk border); a degree of learning remarkable in both depth and scope; a marvellously fluent and occasionally flashy style (“It is not yet midday when we drive off in glittering cars”).
“The great quandary of those who write about the countryside”, he observed, “is how to keep the euphoric vision … in its proper place.” Ease, rather than euphoria, is a defining characteristic of Blythe’s voice. This stems in part from his immersion in what, quoting the poet James Reeves in Akenfield, he called “the everlasting circle”. “Round and round we all go”, Blythe wrote in a column from Wormingford, “the living, the departed, the abundance, the dearth, the planets, the prayers, the holiness of things.” This is as close as he came to a mystical vision.
In a fond and insightful preface to Next to Nature, Richard Mabey draws attention to Blythe’s “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent … Christian faith”. “Unquestioning” is perceptive. At times Blythe’s ease and fluency shade into what feels like complacency – a sense, beneath the turns of the seasons, the vagaries of the land, that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. (Blythe shares this nonchalance, or arrogance, with a number of other engaging authors – Tim Dee, for instance, has a habit of throwing out cultural references or stylistic flourishes without caring where they land.)
We never really know what difficulties or agonies (of faith, or otherwise) lie beneath Blythe’s prose because, as Mabey points out, “the one thing absent … is any consideration of his inner life”. Mabey contrasts this favourably with “the recent tides of self-indulgent memoirs … the literature of the ‘me’ generation”. But while Blythe was certainly a bright-eyed observer, he did not really write in the factual tradition of James Fisher or, more recently, Nick Davies. His was creative, wide-roaming and richly discursive work. We read Blythe for Blythe. So the reader does get the feeling, at times, that the agreeable country stroll has come up against a “no entry” sign – that there are aspects of Blythe to which we have been denied access.
That said, there is as much of Blythe in the writing here as there is of the natural world of Wormingford: in the blackthorn that is “a kind of firmament caught in the hedges”; in the hare praying on the hill, “swaying, listening, one ear to catch what God is saying, one fearful of us”; in the “warm, blustering winds and tumbling fruit” of October; in the rippling farm tracks and shining horse-ponds, the “washed world”, of May. I know of no other nature writer whose work is so easy, and so pleasurable, to quote: at every turn, an exemplary phrase. Richard Holloway, in his accompanying encomium, calls Blythe a “melancholic” – but this only applies in Blythe’s work where the fields are dry, the farms running at a loss, the old churchyards full. His are melancholies of place.
Blythe was from East Anglian farming stock, but took a job in a bookshop at fourteen and from his early twenties worked as a reference librarian in Colchester; thereafter, he fell in with a bohemian set that included Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, Patricia Highsmith and John Nash. It was from Nash, in 1977, that Blythe inherited Bottengoms, the farm that remained his home for the rest of his life. All of this is worth knowing if we wish to place Blythe’s work in context and avoid the assumption that he wrote these pieces only after kicking off his hobnail boots and wiping the clay of the fields from his hands. (“I actually haven’t worked on this land”, he told the Guardian in 2011, “but I’ve seen the land ploughed by horses, so I have a feeling and understanding in that respect – of its glory and bitterness.”)
We might not call Blythe a nature writer, at least not without qualification, but we can trace lines of influence back to the upper-middle-class school of high-minded nature writing: Robert Macfarlane contributes here, and the late Roger Deakin is warmly spoken of. (Perhaps it is a mark of the reverence in which Blythe was held that no editor picked up on a rogue appearance by one “Roger Deacon”; on the contrary, Deacon is hospitably given an entry in the index.) It is satisfying as well to see Next to Nature appear in the middle of a renaissance in English country writing (as distinct from nature writing), even if it doesn’t make much sense to bracket Blythe with the new leading writers on countryside and place: Nicola Chester, Vron Ware, Patrick Galbraith and others. Blythe remembered workers in the beet fields dressed in First World War greatcoats; Galbraith was born in 1993.
“The writer’s task”, writes Blythe, diverting, as he often does, from a discussion of church and church bells, “is to make ordinariness extraordinary. This is not something that a writer can help doing.” The choice of the word “task” perhaps seems at odds with the idea that a writer can’t help doing this. It might be more apposite to say that the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary is simply something a good writer does – perhaps, even, simply something that happens to a good writer. Blythe wrote, with a facility born of maturity and practice, what he wanted to write: of the ordinary things he knew and loved. There is no haste or bustle – as far back as 1984 a New York Times critic was carefully calling him “leisurely, not tedious”. The hard work had all been groundwork: the reading, learning, thinking, living. The earth had been well turned over, and these essays – “There ought to be a more precise name than ‘essays’”, writes Alexandra Harris, “for these pieces which are variously related to sermons, diary entries, letters, prose poems and meditations” – were the crop. One might think of Keats, dreaming at twenty-two of a time when “high-piled books in charactery hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain”. Blythe, in print since A Treasonable Growth (1960), saw many harvests.
This essay was originally published in The TLS in 2023.
Richard Smyth 
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