Ronald Blythe on 50s Gay Circle: Britten, Pears, Forster

The wonderful chronicler of country life Roland Blythe has released a new book The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh, 1955-1958 to coincide with Benjamin Britten's centenary. A fresh, struggling writer then in his early 30s, Blythe was surprised to be invited over for a drink with E.M. Forster in his 70s. He met Britten and his partner Peter Pears and began working at their new Aldeburgh Festival. His list of artistic "Selected Personalia" included in the book extends four pages: J.R. Ackerley, Elizabeth Bowen, Peter Hall, John Nash, Mervyn Peake, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. The Times says his "delightful memoir" is "a small masterpiece about an extraordinary place."

Recipient of the RSL's Benson Medal, Blythe is best known for his Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, which became a super hit movie on British television, seen by more than 14 million viewers when the UK population was 55 million. Fifty years of his best work is collected in Aftermath: Selected Writings.

He is of the old world in not discussing or writing about private life, though he is not a prude about others' pleasures, praising the "explicit" stories of Colm Tóibín, his favorite contemporary novelist. He does tell interviewers he has never lived with anyone and has never been in love. Does his saying he slept with Patricia Highsmith make him more, or less, queer?

The Guardian has a halfhour podcast of Blythe reading and sharing memories. It's gently amusing to see Blythe and podcast in the same sentence: At 90, he has never bothered to learn to drive a car or use a computer.

For pure Britten, go right to the source with his early diaries compiled in Journeying Boy. Neil Bartlett chose it for Thebes' queer lit poll, saying the book "...gives us the unedited raw material out of which this extraordinary young queer man struggled to compose himself in 1930's England. Confused, enthusiastic, despairing, giddy, sure, horny, guilty, overwhelmed, overworked... but with a steely thread of talent drawing him towards his own future. Terrific."

(photo via)

Comments

[Laurent]

What Blythe writes is basic for anyone's library; very grateful to make this discovery.

[Padraig Rooney]

Ronald Blythe describes a night with Highsmith in the early Sixties:

We would sleep in the same room and talk; she needed some kind of closeness. We weren’t lovers, but we did sleep together once or twice. We talked about gay love and the unsatisfactory nature of some of our romantic friendships – she knew all about my sex life ... sex with her was like being made love to by a boy. Her hands were very masculine and big and she was hipless like an adolescent boy. She wasn’t at all repelled by the male body, she was intrigued by it.

in Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith