'The Native Element, Naturally, is Omnipresent'

Ronald Blythe died last week at the age of one-hundred. He was an indelibly English writer much taken with rural life and the natural world, and can be seen as part of a motley English tradition that includes Gilbert White, John Clare, William Cobbett, Frances Kilvert, Richard Jefferies and Andrew Young. He will be best remembered for Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), a lightly fictionalized account of life in a Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966. Blythe based it on interviews he conducted with three generations of his neighbors in the villages of Charsfield and Debach.

That was my introduction to Blythe. Later I read The Age of Illusion (1963), a social history of England from the end of World War I to the start of World War II, an era chronicled in fiction by Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Henry Green. Later still I read England: The Four Seasons (1993). My favorite among his books is a collection of essays, Characters and Their Landscapes (1983). In his introduction, Blythe hints at the ambivalent persistence of nostalgia as a theme that runs through his work like chalk in the soil of Suffolk:

“The native element, naturally, is omnipresent [in his essays]. I still occasionally speculate what it can be like to live somewhere where the signposts are not all pointing to the towns and villages of childhood. It is not as if, as some writers have, I made a vow to stick to the home ground, for I never did, and have often thought that there could be benefits from giving it the slip for a decade or two.”

Not all of his subject matter is English and rural. “Death and Leo Tolstoy” deals with the Russian’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” “Love masters death,” Blythe writes, “at the penultimate hour in Tolstoy’s story.” (I'm not sure about that.) In an essay titled “Interpreting the Shades,” the centenarian writes: “I cannot remember a time which I did not feel history in solid and fairly reliable centennial terms.” Best of all is “My First Acquaintance with William Hazlitt,” a title borrowed from Hazlitt’s own “My First Acquaintance with Poets”:

“An impression persists of a man at odds with all and everything, someone to whom his friends had to offer an almost saintly response if they were not to get their heads bitten off. He was a bitter creature, a malcontent.”

All true, but Blythe understands that at least one friend remained loyal and went on loving Hazlitt thanks to his (not Hazlitt's) inveterate sense of humor:

“Among these was Charles Lamb, Hazlitt’s senior by only three and a half years, but in whose (much tried) relationship there was a stable, protective element suggesting a much older man. The great difference, in fact, between Lamb and Hazlitt was that the former seemed to have received the gift of perpetual early middle-age and the latter, with his moodiness, his iconoclasm, his physical energy, his hero-worship, his passionate love and his general recklessness, appeared to have been cursed with everlasting youth. To outgrow innocence – one’s initial reflexes to important matters – was for Hazlitt a sin.”