Ronald Blythe - Early Cultural Connections

Early Cultural Connections

Blythe briefly served during the Second World War and spent the ten years up to 1954 working as a reference librarian in Colchester, where he founded the Colchester Literary Society. Through his work at the library he met Christine Nash, wife of the artist John Nash; she was looking for the score of Idomeneo. Christine Nash introduced Blythe to her husband, inviting him to their house, Bottengoms Farm near Wormingford on the border of Essex and Suffolk; he visited first in 1947. She later encouraged his ambitions to be a writer, finding him a small house on the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh.

For three years in the late 1950s Blythe worked for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival, editing programmes and doing pieces of translation. He met E.M. Forster, was briefly involved with Patricia Highsmith, spent time with the Nashes, and was part of the bohemian world associated with the artists of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End near Hadleigh, run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. "I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them," Blythe told The Guardian. "What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way."