The Critic as Human Being
CHARACTERS AND THEIR LANDSCAPES by. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95.
THE BRITISH MAN of letters Ronald Blythe is best known for two superb works of “oral history,” Akenfield (1969), a revelation of life in a traditional English village, and The View in Winter (1979), a book that, posing the question “To be old today is to be contemptible. Why?” invites a number of the aged to comment on what it’s like to be very old. The modern invention that makes all this possible, the tape recorder, prompts those who talk in its presence to behave in special ways, hinted at by the style of the interrogator. When Studs Terkel asks questions, people’s answers are blunt, open, “confessional,” often angry. With Blythe, their answers frequently border on the poetic. “I have these deep lines on my face,” one rural worker told him, “because I have worked under fierce suns.” An American reviewer of Akenfield couldn’t believe that Blythe hadn’t jazzed up that sentence. But no, he assures us in “The Writer as Listener,” one of the essays in this new book, that “odd and untypical remark . . . came out of an emotion which our meeting had unwittingly released.”
Two people he admires were also empathetic listeners. The socialist Henry George possessed such power of sympathy as to “carry him,” his son said, “directly into another man’s place.” And then there is Dorothy Wordsworth. She, Blythe says, “loved people, loved listening to them, and accepted each one of them as individual and unique. She approached every living soul with that special quality which her brother and his friends called ‘imagination’—a kind of deep luminous truth.” Blythe warms to this quality because he shares it: he loves the folk he interviews. They are rural people, like him: Blythe has spurned literary London to associate himself with a small village in East Anglia. And, like him, his village subjects have an instinctive sense of history. The contemporary is only the contemporary, they all know, and soon it will attach itself quite seamlessly to the past. The fortifications still conspicuous to the walker on the Suffolk coast, he observes, have been built “to repel Bonaparte and Hitler.”
But Blythe is more than an affectionate interviewer with a passion for rural England and a deep feeling for history. As the fourteen essays, lectures, and reprinted introductions of Characters and Their Landscapes indicate, he is also, as he confesses, a “chronic reader,” of topography as well as of people and books. He is fascinated by the effect of terrain and local weather upon certain writers, such as the poet John Clare, and by the power of locality and containment to release and to enlarge certain sensibilities the way extensive distant travel does others. Some people, he points out, have seen the most “when the view was strictly limited.” There are some poets and novelists, he notes, who “paradoxically . . . discover that it is not by straying far from the headland that they are able to transport their readers into the farthest realms of the imagination and its truths, but by staying put.” Thus Blythe is attracted to artists and winters who have enjoyed a permanent “osmotic action” with a particular place: not just to Clare but to John Constable, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, whom he sometimes sees as more talented versions of the rural workers and elderly survivors he delights to understand. Of “the indigenous man” Blythe observes: “What he sees, he is. Flesh becomes place.”
Doubtless many Americans will be impatient with this retrograde stick-in-themud philosophy. Five million of us move to a new state every year, and in late spring and summer you can hardly negotiate the turnpikes for the moving vans. “The majority of [Americans] queried . . . in an annual poll said they would prefer to live somewhere else,” write Richard Boyer and David Savageau, whose Places Rated Almanac: Your Guide to Finding the Best Places to Livein America is what Blythe’s place-rooted Characters and Their Landscapes would resemble if you took it all the way through the looking-glass. Americans apparently assume, even when they’ve found their ideal place and moved in, that they’ll not want to stay there continuously, for one of the Almanac’s criteria of desirability is proximity to a major airport, permitting escape from even the ideal place when the inevitable restlessness strikes. Blythe’s view is dramatically different. Far from sympathizing with those who, upon retirement, flee from Scranton to the Sun Belt, he would identify himself with the eighty-four-year-old schoolmaster he quotes in The View in Winter: “If you have worked in a place for half a century, as I have, stay there. Stay there, stay there. Hang on to what you have made when you had the strength to make it. None of it can be replaced.”
BUT REMAINING QUIETLY in one place and studying it until you understand it is not the only kind of behavior Blythe admires. He also celebrates those who, like Henry George and William Hazlitt, declining to compromise their own clearly possessed values, have the perceptiveness to see what’s actually taking place out there and the courage, when it’s loathsome, to denounce it. “The very essence of Hazlitt,” Blythe finds, “is his dangerousness, and not only with respect to the reactionary climate of his own day, but when and wherever freedom and truth are compromised by those actions which are summed up as the ‘art of the possible.’” With many critics today turning their backs on questions of emotional, artistic, and ethical value, it is refreshing to encounter someone like Blythe risking words like “freedom” and “truth.” He is also a critic who, describing some of Dickens’s “party scenes,” is unpretentious enough to use a word like “marvelous,” and elsewhere to jog the reader with a phrase like “Have you noticed?”
Blythe’s critical masterpiece in this collection is “Death and Leo Tolstoy,” an extended and profound meditation on death disguised as a critical essay on Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Like most later inhabitants of what will become modern, “rational” Western culture, Ilyich is a “death-illiterate,” unable to face the one fact that gives the most meaning to life and love. “To refuse to look at it,” Blvthe points out, “is the most certain way of shrinking our responses to everything else.” The modern way of dealing with death is to consider it “a social tragedy which could be conquered by means of compassion, economics, and improved medicine.” With sensitivity and notable imaginative resourcefulness, Blythe indicates the gulf between the contemporary sanitizing of death and past attitudes, of which Michelangelo’s is one: “If we have been pleased with life then we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.”
If Tolstoy is revealed as an exemplary interpreter of human nature, his obverse is suggested by Blythe as he pillories some egotists unable to reconcile themselves to the actualities of life. One is Dr. Marie C. Stopes, the once-famous birthcontrol enthusiast and author of Married Love, recalled by Blythe in a quietly hilarious reconstruction of an evening during which Dr. Stopes discoursed (very badly) about The Sonnet to a literary society and then attended a small dinner party in her honor. “We were very near dessert before contraceptives entered the conversation, and when they did, she talked of them wearily, like a waiter who is dogged through an industrious career by his single best-seller.” She seemed annoyed with everyone at the party, “sick to death of us all.”What was giving her offense, Blythe gradually inferred, was humanity’s stolid refusal to act angelic. “She had taught the man in the street to heave overboard the prurience and taboos of centuries so that he could soar up into the ultimate fulfillment of bliss—and what had he done? The oaf had used her gift like an extra gadget in the lavatory.”
Equally telling is Blythe’s treatment of Thomas Davidson, the vague but pretentious late-Victorian founder of the New Life Fellowship, of which he appointed himself sole guru. The movement was going to reform the world by apolitical means, especially by “the renewal of the self.” Not unlike such antiindustrial, pastoralist gestures as Chautauqua and the communes of the 1960s, the New Life organization (really a mere projection of Davidson’s libido dominandi) secured property among the sublime mountainscapes of upper New York State and developed itself into, as Blythe acutely notes, “the apotheosis of all nineteenth-century summer camps and reading parties. Sunburnt girls, young men singing German songs, ladies lying in hammocks sewing balsam pillows, plain and plentiful food, music, uninhibited talk, free companionships, books and, at the back of everything, splashing water.”This, argued Davidson, was what the New Life was all about, as he might have put it if he’d been our contemporary. “He was writing an important book when death came for him,” Blythe comments, delicately placing Davidson as a type of reformer too much the dandy to associate moral ends with political means, as well as too vain and verbal to resist the temptation, disciples gathered round, to vapor the program all away in talk.
WHETHER CELEBRATING OR stigmatizing, Blythe’s intellect and imagination are naturally so allusive that he can hardly write a sentence without historical resonance. Speaking of a Christmas spent in his Suffolk village, just after describing the immense traditional meals consumed on that day, he notes the “frozen stains on the lane made by the discreet lorries which weekly deliver straw soaked in horse urine from Knightsbridge Barracks to our mushroom factory on the old World War Two aerodrome.” Two past eras are evoked there, cunningly brought alive for just a moment, the diesel truck measuring the distance back to the world of the cavalry, the contemporary manufacture of specialties for the “gourmet” culture recalling the hungers and deprivations of the wartime past. There, one magical sentence conveys in miniature an affectionately ironic little history of our times, good and bad.
“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulkner once said. “It’s not even past.” It is Blythe’s easy, unselfconscious intimacy with the past that lies behind his success as a humane critic, and one strikingly impervious to the fads of the moment. He honors the excellent regardless of what people will say, behaving like his favorite Henry George in rejecting “all kinds of class inhibition, popular cant and myth.”The neglected and out-ofthe-way solicit him always, and he celebrates writers as unstylish as Maeterlinck and John Cowper Powys, George Crabbe and Norman Nicholson. When Blythe criticizes literature, he’s looking for the real human being down there under the words, behind the “styles,” behind the “period” performance of the language. It is this human being, the person in the artifact he beholds, that he’s always probing for. Some historical diaries, he notices, in their “easy jumble of pomp and homeliness, remind one of those florid seventeenthand eighteenthcentury tombs above which a fatherly peer, semi-nude, peruked and amiable, returns the adoring stares of marble cherubs with the same kind of sensible affection as at one time must have accompanied strict advice to his own little boys not to play too near the moat.”
The critic as human being: that is Blythe. Reacting to the music at a carol service in his village church, he says: “‘Once in Royal David’s City’ defies all criticism and shakes the collective emotion.” He then pays homage to its forgotten author: “Cecil Alexander wrote it in 1848,” and adds, as one human being proud of another, “when she was twentyfive. ...” And he ends by emphasizing that the present moment has meaning only because it’s part of the past. The music of the carol “pours through the architecture like a river and out over the frosty hummocks in the churchyard and the path which has become such a climb because centuries of those fortunate farmers have been dug into it, their dust raising it up.” I doubt that a battalion of contemporary semioticians could tease all the meaning out of the word “fortunate” there.