In 2003, a solemn service installed an unusual churchman as an “honorary lay canon” of St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Suffolk. As the lay minister—or “reader” in Church of England parlance—of three rural parishes on the Essex-Suffolk border, the new canon had for three decades preached, taught and even officiated at many services, from evensong to funerals. Only the “sacramental” rites, primarily the Eucharist, were barred to this tireless non-ordained cleric whose parishioners saw him as their “special vicar”.
Past 80 years of age when he enjoyed his elevation in Bury St Edmunds, that “special vicar” had also published more than a dozen much-loved books. Astonishingly, he would publish 20 more before he died, aged 100, in January 2023. The nature-loving lay reader denied being “immensely religious”. Rather, he saw his church work as embedded in “the poetry of life” composed in every field, hedge and stream. Happily, if privately, gay, he enjoyed a succession of amicable erotic liaisons and—in what his biographer justly calls “one of the most unlikely couplings in literature”—also managed to have an affair with the equally non-heterosexual mistress of the amoral noir thriller, Patricia Highsmith.
No novelist could have invented the long, charmed—and charming—life of Ronald Blythe. The son of labouring parents from the Suffolk underclass, he saw his oral history (and veiled memoir) Akenfield turn a farming backwater into a global sensation after it appeared in 1969. Almost 15m watched the British TV showing of Peter Hall’s film adaptation. Later, he settled into a healthily protracted old age as sage, mystic and prose-poet of a storied but fragile East Anglian countryside. Gathered into much-loved books, his Church Times columns, begun when over 70, made this child of a gravedigger born in 1898 a cult celebrity of the 21st century. A soft, benign glow at the edge of a garish literary culture, Blythe had attained “a place of contentment akin to a state of grace”.
At a moment when the declining Church of England has launched into another bout of bitter self-laceration, it might be time to remember that visionary mavericks of uncertain faith often sustain the institution that rival dogmatists seem keen to wreck. The lay canon’s religion had little to do with the niceties of doctrine or canon law. This past Christmas, when legions of muddled and hesitant worshippers filed into pews to croak carols, many will have been paying their annual visit not to the Church of Welby—but to the Church of Blythe.
Those words about Blythe’s “state of grace” come from the biography just published by his friend, literary executor and (at journey’s end) carer, Ian Collins: one of the band of “Ronnettes” whose support kept the prolific author active at home, in the Stour Valley village of Wormingford, into his centenary. Painted with love, wit and a dash of mischief, the affectionate portrait in Blythe Spirit shuns reverence in favour of the sort of delight in everyday wonder—and eccentricity—that stamped the subject’s own writing about place, people, art and literature. Collins calls the “Word from Wormingford” columns, with their “linguistic swoops from learned to lyrical and colloquial”, “an exhilarating ride and a kind of benediction”. That judgement could apply to his own merry, and moving, book.
What made Ronnie run, so strong and so long? Collins’s account is enthrallingly frank about class (in origin even lower than many suspected), cash (always short before Akenfield, frugally rationed thereafter) and the sexuality that Blythe never repressed, but prudently veiled in the age of persecution. He was 45 before same-sex male relations ceased to be a crime in England. Yet this happy, good and fertile life harboured its mysteries and enigmas, just as—to this follower of the earthily mystical “peasant poet” John Clare—any humdrum scrap of pond, wood or hedgerow might shelter miracles of beauty.
Blythe relished pick-ups and trysts of no great longevity
One of the mysteries has to do with love. Many in Blythe’s Church of England would slowly come to accept same-sex relationships, if proclaimed as deep and permanent. That’s not how Ronnie did it. From his teenage years, he relished pick-ups and trysts of no great longevity; sex served “as an aperitif for a feast of friendship”. What more censorious eyes might see as “promiscuity” persisted into his senior decades. The bulging mailbags of his years of fame even brought “a fling with a stand-in postman”. As for Patricia Highsmith’s improbable intimacy with the talented Mr Blythe, sparked after she bought a Suffolk cottage as refuge, it deserves a book—or a film—to itself. For both, this unique heterosexual foray meant “raw material for writing, the thread which bound them”.
The scrupulous observer of nature, and humanity, cultivated erotic affection but rooted out lasting attachment. A solitary girdled by friends, he sidestepped commitment. At Blythe’s memorial service, the writer Julia Blackburn said: “He loved everything and everyone with an equal passion.” Spirituality and sensuality went hand in guilt-free hand. However, writing always came first. In his youth, any enduring relationship might have led to ostracism, scandal, even jail. Later, he watched the “corrosive impact” on creative work of the jealousies of a polyamorous gang of artist friends that included John and Christine Nash—who later bequeathed him their Tudor farmhouse at Wormingford, Bottengoms. The gentle, tender child of the fields guarded his core of untouchable steel.
Love, spread as liberally as muck on an allotment patch, formed part of the puzzle. So did art and faith, of a singular kind. Collins rightly hails Blythe’s literary prowess, that “truthfulness in fine writing” that makes Akenfield (like his great study of old age, The View in Winter) not a sociological tract but a documentary epic poem. He brands his essays the work of a muddy-shoed East Anglian Montaigne, “capturing myriad life in condensed and digressionary style”. Blythe’s flock of disciples—among them Richard Mabey (a firm friend for decades), Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and Julia Blackburn herself—have, like him, led a pastoral English strain of “nature writing” into wider landscapes of social, cultural and ecological enquiry. Out of his garden, a hundred flowers have bloomed.
However, Blythe Spirit sometimes seems to resent the onerous church duties that cut into Ronnie’s writing time. True, his books and columns reached “an infinitely larger congregation in print” than one preacher ever could. Still, that taxing discipline of ritual and worship fed as well as drained him. Collins refers to “the church calendar joining the seasonal cycle in mapping out the year and putting the freelance writer firmly in his place”. Blythe’s spirituality “would never be doctrinal. For him it was all about the stories, landscapes and people”: forces that connected “past and present in a chain of life”.
Scholars might stitch Ronnie’s “natural theology” into various lineages. Within a broader Catholic tradition, Collins notes that his “mystical spirit, born of material sparsity and reverence for the natural world, was deeply Franciscan”. Romantic poetry had sought and found divinity in natural beauty. In philosophy, the heretical pantheism that Baruch Spinoza pioneered located the divine principle everywhere. Closer to home, mystic poet-naturalists such as Thomas Traherne saw angels dancing over treetops. In Essex itself, the botanist-theologian John Ray had in the 1690s written a treatise on “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation”.
The God whom Blythe celebrated in chilly country churches could equally be found “in the sunshine and light, in the darkness of turned soil or the sludge of a pond, in the trumpet of a daffodil, in the song of the nightingale”. And the Anglican liturgy he loved to perform not only carried a music of its own, but made up “part of the consciousness of England”. Such sensuous and aesthetic Anglicanism had, and has, little interest in the questions of rule and dogma that periodically convulse the Church establishment. It seeks for grace, but it dwells in awe, perplexity or doubt.
This kind of sensibility offends, or embarrasses, church politicians of all stripes. Low or High, Evangelical or Anglo-Catholic, conservative or liberal, all come—or pretend to come—from a place of zeal, firmness and commitment. Partisans of every Anglican tribe guard their increasingly threadbare title as a “national” church fiercely, even though, at the last count in 2018, only 14 per cent of English people said they identified with the Church of England. Its latest batch of “Statistics for Mission” tallies the regular “worshipping community” at a paltry 1,007,000 souls. That amounts to 1.7 per cent of the population. Christmas swells attendances, but only (in 2023) to a bare two million. A “national” church that has such trouble gathering a flock within its walls ought at least to appreciate the gifts of a writer who alerted readers to the sacredness everywhere outside them. But the robed and mitred princes of this subsiding realm seldom admit that their state privileges mean, or should mean, a welcome for the doubtful, the confused, the downright sceptical.
Blythe was no schemer in a cassock, but a gay aesthete and naturalist born in dire poverty and sustained by a web of close friends rather than any church-approved partnership. Arguably, he had more to say to, and for, the average half-hearted seeker in the Christmas pew than the warring faction leaders who now scramble to steer their slowly sinking ship.
True believers jockey to run the institutions that project meaning and value—churches, parties, media outlets. Their most gifted human assets, however, will often stray and waver. In recent Anglican culture, the dogma-lite “special vicar” belongs in a distinguished company of creative celebrants whose creed lacks sharp edges. John Rutter, the composer whose carols fill a thousand naves, once admitted that “I owe Christianity a huge debt, and it is rather ungrateful of me not to believe in it more”. Ralph Vaughan Williams, the principal reviver of English church music, was a “cheerful agnostic” who (for instance) lifted the melody for “O Little Town of Bethlehem” from a folk-tune collected from a Surrey farmhand.
In Blythe’s own East Anglian backyard, Peter Pears—life-partner of Benjamin Britten, with whom Blythe worked in the 1950s at the Aldeburgh Festival—called the composer “an agnostic with a great love of Jesus Christ”. Cathedrals and churches resound with modern sacred music and words inspired not by certainty but by doubt, and hope. Thomas Hardy, another of Blythe’s literary lodestones, wrote in his 1915 poem “The Oxen” about West Country villagers whose folk tradition claimed that, on Christmas Eve at midnight, the animals kneel down piously in their stalls. In the midst of global war, the poem’s sceptical speaker longs to visit such a midnight barn, “Hoping it might be so”.
Nourished by a spirituality “both omnipresent and hard to pin down”, Blythe gave a peerless lyrical voice to that hoping. It had little to do with the doctrinal feuding of the Church of England or any other church. His friend Christine Smith—former publisher, as it happens, of Hymns Ancient and Modern—reports that Ronnie didn’t speak about his beliefs but “exuded enjoyment of their fruits”, in wonder, gratitude, serenity and “quiet contentment”. Julia Blackburn “even wondered whether he really believed in God” at all.
However fuzzy or elusive the Blythe faith, it underpinned a century of creativity and (for the most part) happiness. Whatever the orthodoxies promoted in the pulpits of the hierarchy, the “special vicar” may have lessons for us all
