Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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Blythe turned down a film offer from the BBC but eventually accepted a pitch from the theatre director Peter Hall, a fellow Suffolk man. Blythe wrote a new synopsis inspired by the unfilmable book, and Hall asked ordinary rural people to improvise scenes with no script. Blythe oversaw every day of filming and played an apt cameo as a vicar. Nearly 15 million people watched Akenfield when it was broadcast on London Weekend Television in early 1975.

Next to Nature : Ronald Blythe (author), : 9781399804660 Next to Nature : Ronald Blythe (author), : 9781399804660

Honorary Graduates, Orations and responses: Ronald Blythe", University of Essex, 12 July 2002. Retrieved 6 November 2012.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. 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. Parker, Peter. "At the Yeoman's House and At Helpston by Ronald Blythe: review", The Daily Telegraph, 23 December 2011. Retrieved 7 November 2012. a b c "Ronald George Blythe, Honorary Doctor of Letters: Bio", Anglia Ruskin University, 2001. Retrieved 6 November 2012. A capacious work that contains multitudes . . . a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions' THE SPECTATOR

Next to Nature by Ronald Blythe | Waterstones

Taylor, DJ. "Aftermath: Selected Writings 1960–2010", The Independent, 19 November 2010. Retrieved 7 November 2012. Blythe said the idea for Akenfield (he took the name from the old English “acen” for acorn) arrived as he tramped the Suffolk fields pondering the anonymity of most farm labourers’ lives. His friend Richard Mabey remembers it being commissioned by Viking as the lead title for a short-lived series on village life around the world.

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. Most importantly, in 1951 he met the artist Christine Kühlenthal, wife of the painter John Nash. Kühlenthal encouraged his writing and championed him: Blythe edited Aldeburgh festival programmes for Benjamin Britten and even ran errands for EM Forster, who took a shine to the shy young man. Blythe helped Forster compile an index for Forster’s 1956 biography of his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton. 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.

Next To Nature by Ronald Blythe – Book Review

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.” 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. 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 ] His father, Albert, had served in the Suffolk Regiment and fought at Gallipoli and Blythe was conscripted during the second world war. Early on in his training, his superiors decided he was unfit for service – friends said he was incapable of hurting a fly – and he returned to East Anglia to work, quietly, as a reference librarian in Colchester library. Through his association with Britten, Blythe then met such distinguished writers are EM Forster and Patricia Highsmith. In 1960, after he published his first book A Treasonable Growth, a novel set in the Suffolk countryside, he became friends with Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End, near Hadleigh, and nurtured the talents of a young Maggi Hambling.A capacious work that contains multitudes . . . a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions’ THE SPECTATOR Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (Allen Lane, 1969) - republished by The Folio Society, 2002 The National Portrait Gallery has two portraits of Blythe, [30] a 2005 C-type print by Mark Gerson and a 1990 bromide print by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies. A 2014 terracotta head by Jon Edgar is featured in his 2015 collection of poems Decadal. 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. I am unsure if he has travelled abroad, but if he has it cannot have been extensively, often or for long and you will be hard put to find a word he has written about it. He has never learned to drive, just travelled on foot, by bike, train, bus – and, it has to be said, in cars driven by other people. He does not own a computer.