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A Writer’s Day-Book By the same author A Treasonable Growth Immediate Possession The Age of Illusion William Hazlitt: Selected Writings Akenfield The View in Winter Writing in a War Places: An Anthology of Britain From the Headlands The Short Stories of Ronald Blythe Divine Landscapes Private Words Aldeburgh Anthology Going to Meet George Talking About John Clare First Friends The Assassin The Wormingford Trilogy: Word from Wormingford, Out of the Valley, Borderland The Circling Year Ronald Blythe A Writer’s Day-Book Trent Editions 2006 Published by Trent Editions, 2006 Trent Editions English Division School of Arts, Communication and Culture Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane Nottingham NG11 8NS http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/trenteditions/mission.html © Ronald Blythe, 2006 Typeset by Roger Booth Associates, Hassocks, West Sussex BN6 8AR Printed byy Antony owee Limited, umper’s Farm Industrial Estate, Chippenham, Wiltshire SN14 6LH ISBN 1-84233-124-8 CONTENTS Foreword vi Acknowledgements vi I. Take a Fresh View 3 Young Mr Kilvert 9 Good to be Alive: Thomas Traherne 18 The Green Roundabout 27 Miss Mitford and the Cricketers 31 II. A Craving for the Post 41 Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1898-1902 50 Baudelaire to his Mother 53 From my Sickbed—Letters of Katherine Mansfield 1918-1919 56 Love Letters from Ezra and Dorothy, 1901-1914 59 Arnold Bennett to his Family 62 The Letters of G.B.S., 1911-1925 64 The Great War—and the Little Magazines 66 III. John Clare and the Gypsies 77 The Poet and the Nest 85 John Clare in Scotland 90 The Ultimate Divide 99 Silent Likeness 105 IV. In Caswell County 113 Coleridge at Nether Stowey 118 The Runaway: Laurie Lee 127 God’s Trip to Dorset 131 Listen with Father 138 Afterword 143 Index 149 FOREWORD A day-book is a document showing the profits and losses of every twenty-four hours. A poet friend advised me to keep one when I first encountered the bewildering economy of the writer, and so I have. ‘Put everything down’, he said. ‘The total will surprise you.’ And so it does. But other things add up and the following pages are but a fraction of the total. They reflect the kind of working life created over many years by reading, writing and solitude. Reading, even for research, has never quite become work. Writing has been a compulsion and never been Philip Larkin’s toad, and solitude has long been the norm. Had I lived earlier I suppose a collection such as this would have been called ‘Fugitive Pieces’. But I see them plainly as part of the whole, and a sum of sorts. R.B. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank: The Listener, The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, The Guardian, The Hogarth Press, The John Clare Society Journal, The Sunday Times, Country Life, The New York Times, The Folio Society, Thames and Hudson, The Observer, The Kilvert Society and The Thomas Traherne Society. The volume was copy-edited and prepared for press by Catherine Byron and John Goodridge and indexed by Souvik Mukherjee. For Michael and Alison Mayne I. 2 TAKE A FRESH VIEW Does any doctor prescribe landscape nowadays? Until recently, for certain ailments of body and mind, tuberculosis or depression, it was all that could be prescribed. There are, wrote Richard Jefferies, ‘three potent medicines of nature’, the sea, the air and the sun. And he might have added the scenes which these elements both create and contain, for if anyone set out for a thorough self-prescribed landscape cure, he did. A long time ago I read an essay of his called ‘The Breeze on Beachy Head’ and at once recognised in it a correct phrasing of what must be a common experience of perfect wellbeing. I am walking, climbing, or lying on grass, and not necessarily high up, and filled with a great view, and suddenly all that I can see, hear and smell amalgamates and becomes a kind of landscape laser which passes right through me, healing me totally. Never having been ill, I must ask myself, of what? I suppose, in my case, of dullness, of that reduction of my senses brought on by not getting out. For Jefferies and all literary consumptives it was a very different matter, of course. They had to get out—doctor’s orders. For a while the three potent medicines of sea, sun and air worked wonders, as a wide literature reveals, And then the healing had to stop. Some became reconciled to this fact, Jefferies did not. He turned on ‘Nature’ and said he hated it. Its indifference to whether he lived or died appalled him. Although what was really appalling him was that never again would there be such a fully alive day as that, for instance, which he spent on Beachy Head. ‘Discover some excuse to be up there always ... go without any pretext ... it is the land of health’. My initiatory heights of what we called ‘High Suffolk’ were little more than half a dozen steps upward in comparison with Beachy Head, but there the countryside would unroll and any such tensions which I might be feeling with it. This release and revitalisation were not just the products of my native view, as I soon found out when I began to cycle further afield, or make long train journeys to Cornwall and Scotland. Or even, recently, when I walked the hilly outskirts of Sheffield. The landscape cure, originally discovered as a child in Suffolk, usually when I was sulkily in flight from the incessant tasks of goat-milking, brother-keeping, wood-chopping, errands to far-distant shops, etc. which hanging around the house entailed, worked anywhere. ‘Where have you been?’ they would ask, and I would give the classic answer, 4 ‘Out’. In the long run, perhaps, this could be the only answer to ‘why does scenery do you good?’ Because it takes you out of yourself into its out-ness, It can be a heady business, as Jefferies was to learn, but one which does not necessarily require a numinous vocabulary to describe it. Very much the reverse, in fact. I am transported by ‘The Breeze on Beachy Head’ because it is so brilliantly down to earth, and with not a yard of its natural geography smudged. Spray, jackdaws, brambles, plough-teams, the immense cliff, the liner Orient, Australia-bound, flaking chalk, bees on the furze are seen with intense clarity. It is an accurately recorded view which always reminds me of an incident in the life of the Victorian photographer P. H. Emerson, when the poverty-stricken Norfolk labourers saw their wetlands landscape miniaturised in a camera lens for the first time and were amazed that this beautiful place was just their poor old familiar marsh! High Suffolk was often similarly perplexing. Distant flint towers gave nothing away about the villages which they marked and the widely stretching scene was, for a boy, too broad to be local. And so the curative properties of landscape must have something to do with travel, and thus exertion. But I would personally put these things low on the list, for what toned me up all those years ago (‘You need toning up’, people would say), tones me up still, and I need only to stare from the window to the steep Stour-side fields to set this desirable process in motion. Never having needed to test the healing quality of these East Anglian scenes against disease, I can only say what they have done for me in terms of stimulus, hedonism and imagination, and while it isn’t everything, it is quite something. I realise now that my first scenery-seekings were deliberate excursions to find the drug. What I liked, and still like, is the way in which the panorama dominates me. The land is all view and I am all viewer, and soon the ecological patterns and colours not only spread before me but permeate me, and I become part of what I am seeing. I can see patches of medieval forest here and there among the corn, and although I know that ‘the woods decay and fall’, I also know that in comparison with human flesh they takes ages to do so. Thus its ancientness must be one of the healing factors of landscape. High Suffolk tells me that the foundations of my view were laid in the ice- age, and the shape of almost everything which covers its surface was fashioned centuries ago. But simultaneously with its antiquity it presents its very latest seasonal crop of flowers, birds, insects and sounds. And so I too, wandering on to Monks Eleigh, have a nice sense of being just born and everything before me. Landscape certainly provides most of us with a lift and although I know it won’t keep me buoyant for ever, or maybe for very much longer, I shall go on absorbing all I can of it. When you think of the world’s literature, 5 what other cure-all (or at least make it possible to endure-all) medicine has received such thankful testimonials? Once it had to be taken quite literally. Both doctor and patient accepted that it was a gamble to go off in search of beneficial air or a change of surroundings, and it was a poignant moment when the sick in body or mind set off for the prescribed spring or climate. Naaman the leper testily to a foreign holy river, the medieval hordes to their shrines and John Keats to the Mediterranean, And then there were those like the exile in Robert Frost’s poem ‘New Hampshire’ who knew that they would never get better until they got home: I met a Californian who would Talk Californian—a state so blessed He said, in climate, none had ever died there A natural death.