More than Writers

By Rosemary Johnson I’ve never managed to pluck up the courage to become the impoverished-writer-living-in-the-garret, starving for his/her art. Having a husband and children concentrates the mind. Ronald Blythe, however, did exactly this, in the nineteen fifties, holing himself up in a so-called winter cottage in Thorpeness, Suffolk, and I’ve just read his chronicle of that period in this life in his book, The Time by the Sea . By morning, he wrote his novel (which never saw the light of day) and, in the afternoons, he took bracing walks along the shingle, battling against blustery North Sea winds. On the Suffolk Coast, he encountered Ben(jamin Britten), Imo(gen Holst), Morgan (E M Forster) and Mervyn Peake, plus many other writers, painters and musicians unknown to me. His appetite for the arts was all-consuming. Blythe’s idea of heaven was to sit beside the grave of Edward Fitzgerald who edited and translated the Rubaiyat of Umar Khayyam , and read it. Would our fri...