Ronald Blythe - The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958

Like many of my generation I probably know Ronald Blythe through his most famous work Akenfield, his semi-fictional account of a rural farming community through the long change of the twentieth century. Finding The Time by the Sea in a second hand bookshop I was expecting something similar, but got something very different. Though Akenfield runs through the book - mentioned as it is in passing and for the film being made. This is the intimate account of Blythe's arrival in Aldeburgh and the community of artists, composers and writers that swirled around him. It is not an account of the "ordinary people" of a Suffolk costal town - though they do occasionally appear. Rather it is a collection of essays about experiences and relationships.

There are probably many of an earlier generation of cultural critics, literary experts and well read folk who will find in these pages a sequence of famous names. Blythe will drop the occasional nugget of information that is likely to be the source of (or sourced from) gossip. Some will find this entertaining. Others will find interesting the way that individual composers or writers found inspiration, motive or confrontation from others in their circles. Many modern readers likely myself will regularly resort to Wikipedia to find out who some, not so famous name, was.

But if all this sounds like Blythe's self indulgent account of a time and people long since past, I would disagree. Blythe's gentle meandering essays have much to calm an anxious mind, as you walk along the Suffolk beaches or wood paths with him. His style of shortened sentences had me in mind of something else - until I finally realised it reminded me of 1066 and All That, as the author presents a series of slightly connected statements before finally concluding. 

There are many in these pages that represent English culture of the 1950s in all its staid and restrictive sense. Benjamin Brittain, Blythe's friend and the founder of the Aldeburgh festival, looms over the book (and the town). His circle includes Imogen Holst, Eric Crozier and the like. Composers, directors and figures intimately connected to the previous century through family and networks.

But there's something else, particularly important for Blythe's friend John Nash. Nash, a painter and illustrator, had like most of his generation, been transformed by the slaughter of the First World War. Blythe encounters him as a figure strill trying desperately to come to terms with the impact of that war. But by 1955 there had been another war, and another generation of scarred people. This time epitomised by the two Jewish families, Leon Laden and his wife the artist Juliet Perkins and Kurt and Gretl Hutton. Blythe talks about "their silence on the Holocaust", not as denial but as shock and horror. This is a poignant chapter as it shows them carrying "the terror of their time" which never "quite vanished". Its important because of what it tells us, but also because of what it shows was lacking among this literary set. Blythe can write eloquently about people, place, landscape and, indeed, change. But he and his fellows lack any real explanation for what has happened and why. It is, perhaps also the weakness of Akenfield. A brilliantly observant and honest account of what happened to people as British capitalism rose. But without any real sense of why or how. Socialism here is the realm of the a few mystics and oddballs - principly HG Wells - everyone else drifts about buffeted by forces beyond their understanding.

Read this for the time and the place, for the mention of people famous and forgotten, and for Blythe's poetry, comment and lyricalism. I enjoyed it, but was left empty. I needed more.

Related Reviews

Blythe - Akenfield
Taylor - Return to Akenfield
Bell (and Nash) - Men and the Fields