The greatest living writer on the English countryside will celebrate his 100th birthday this week at his home, Bottengoms Farm, surrounded by the friends he calls his “dear ones”. Ronald Blythe is best known for Akenfield, his moving and intimate portrait of a Suffolk village through the lives of its residents, which became an instant classic when published in 1969. But Blythe, who has spent all his 10 decades living within 50 miles of where he was born, has also devoted millions more words – in history, fiction, and luminous essays and columns – to describe with poetry and precision not simply rural folk but the very essence of existence.
His writing is honoured in a new volume, Next to Nature, a highlights package of nearly a quarter-century of weekly columns for the Church Times, written between 1993 and 2017. Fellow writers agree that Blythe’s work has improved with age. His friend Richard Mabey notes in an introduction that these columns resemble Virginia Woolf’s ideal diary, which she felt should be “like some old desk” full of odds and ends, which in retrospect refines itself “into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life”. For Mabey, Blythe possesses a “watchful, curious, compassionate, unifying and gratefully amazed vision of life”.
The eldest of six children of a farm labourer and a nurse, Blythe was born in Suffolk in 1922. Although he read voraciously, he left school at 14. Later he was conscripted to serve in the second world war but friends say he was judged congenitally unsuitable for fighting, and he ended up working as a librarian in Colchester. In the late 1940s he met Christine Kühlenthal, the wife of the painter John Nash, who introduced him to the often bohemian writers and artists drawn to the area, including EM Forster and Benjamin Britten. Eventually Blythe, who has always lived alone, inherited the Nashes’ home on the border of Suffolk and Essex, which remains his home today. “Ronnie has always been elated that he had the life he wanted out of very difficult circumstances,” his friend the art critic and writer Ian Collins says. “He’s had to do it all himself, with the support of Christine Nash who recognised him and got him out of the library.”
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:
Early morning in the heatwave, the air still and sullen, the trees cardboard shapes, the birds silent. One can almost hear the dead rose-petals falling. David’s corn is a motionless bluey-green sea. At the moment, the day is holding back its potential and seems uncommitted, but in a little while the sun will spin up in the east like a gold coin. Yesterday, the washing dried in an hour.
As the writer Julia Blackburn observes in one of 12 introductions to the monthly sections in Next to Nature, Blythe “is able to move as seamlessly as a ghost between time past, time present and even time future”, often within one elegant sentence encompassing scripture, literature and oral rememberings.
An account of night-walking is “a miniature masterpiece”, according to another contributor and friend, Robert Macfarlane. Blythe writes: “It is a night for a discreet wander – one must never forget the scandal caused by the Wordsworths and Coleridge at Nether Stowey by their nocturnal ramblings.” It is filled with vivid observations – “Cats emerge from ditches with golden glances at this late person” – and deep history: “The church tower is a charcoal stump, just as it was during the summer nights which followed the Conquest.”
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.
As well as being an adept listener, Blythe is also a free thinker and writer, which Collins attributes to his lack of formal education. “People from his class didn’t go to university,” he says. “He taught himself by reading and this has given him great freedom. It’s such a singular voice across forms. He’s not constricted by training. He has no received opinions at all.”
For many years, Blythe was a lay reader for his local parish, often performing the de facto job of vicar without a stipend. Collins feels Blythe was slightly taken advantage of by the Church of England, despite the Church Times giving him the weekly column that arguably delivered his best work. Mabey, an atheist, admits he has never discussed with Blythe his “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith”.
But Rowan Williams, who also contributes to Next to Nature, believes that Blythe’s faith has been crucial in liberating him as a writer and as a person. “He’s somebody who is very committed to the Christian tradition and he uses it to think with, he uses it as a structure – a Christian year, the round of festivals and commemorations, for him is woven into the round of the calendar year as it would have been for generations before him,” Williams says. “You can think more freely and you may be able to feel more deeply if you’re confident that there’s this steady backdrop. You don’t have to keep making things up. There’s a world you can inhabit, your feet are on the ground, and that means you can walk around, breathe deeply and look slowly. That’s faith.”
But alongside this faith, Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides, sharp portraits of fellow writers and unexpected notes of worldliness such as this: “On the radio, Evan Davis, Mammon’s angel, is talking to a Mr Warren Buffett, of Oklahoma, who is the world’s second-richest man. Mr Buffett lives in a nondescript house with a nondescript car, and there is no computer in his nondescript office. He likes Evan, with his sweet, crocodile grin.”
Blythe’s writing is not nostalgic for lost country life; it often refers to past hardships. “He knows how hard country life was,” Collins says. “He certainly doesn’t want that back. He said he’d like the countryside to be repopulated again but with the farmworkers coming back as their own masters.”
And yet Blythe does represent a way of life that has all but disappeared and Williams detects a gentle moral in his writing. “He’s certainly saying to us, ‘This may be a way of life that’s passing, and it’s not perfect, but you’re going to be much worse off if you’re not ready to learn from it, so let me help you learn from it.’ He’s saying, ‘Society is moving on – don’t forget this.”
In his 50s, Blythe wrote The View in Winter, a moving account of growing old which Collins feels is due a revival. “It’s a wonderful book, a very positive view of old age. He lives an incredibly contented life.” Collins helped his mentor “retire” in 2017 and began to manage his affairs after asking him about a pile of unpaid bills and receiving Blythe’s answer: “I’ve decided I’ve given them enough money over the years. I’m not giving them any more!”
For all the brilliance of his memory a decade ago, he has now been diagnosed with dementia. “He lives in a kind of dream world and he’s probably still writing books in his head,” Collins says. “He’s so fortunate to have this amazing physical strength. He’s never taken any medication apart from a bit of sherry. He caught Covid on his 98th birthday. A short course of antibiotics just sent him into space.”
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.
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.”
• This article was amended on 7 November 2022 to correct references to the location of Blythe’s home.
• Ronald Blythe will be 100 on 6 November. Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside is published by John Murray. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
