Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Ronald Blythe

Mr Mayor, Chancellor, fellow graduates, although I have listened with pleasure to the Public Orator’s wonderful outlining of my life and work, and to his generous recommendation  of myself as worthy of the great honour of being made a doctor of  this distinguished University, there is nevertheless something rather strange in hearing about an existence which is certainly my own, but which somehow I have never been told about to my face, as it were. Now and then I found myself wondering , “Who can this interesting person be ?”   For the writer more than any other individual, is usually only profiled by his readers and their view of who he is does not usually reach him.  Critics of course have a go at his best and his worst features over the years.  To have written many books over many years makes it hard for me to have a clear self-portrait or cv for that matter. And so I am extremely moved by the kindness of the University and of Professor Pretty’s summing up of my life.

Some years ago I wrote an essay on a public orator. He was George Herbert, who was Public Orator  of  Cambridge University during the reign of James I. I had to show the poet at the extremes of his very brief career, because he died when he was 39, as both the voice of academic Cambridge and yet as the voice of a village priest.  Two voices but a single tongue, two languages, Latin and an inspired English, but a single poetry.

Every writer eventually finds a language which is unique to himself, or tries to.  This language is partially shaped by the times in which he lives and his own experience of a thousand things, both great and small.  Style comes into it, of course. First the style of the authors he loves, and out of them with luck an emergent style which he can call his own.  Quite how the latter finds its way on to his page he will never really find out. But there it is, the way he or she writes – I am sure that many people here today are going to be writers.   Writers read, they read like gluttons really, never getting enough of  other writer’s words, or now and then sometimes making do with just a little shelf of books, and I am thinking about people like Emily Dickinson.  Writers like to think that they read differently to non-writers, but who is to say?  What they certainly do is to come very close to another writer’s words, to take off  from them, or sometimes to drown in them.  I must have done some kind of writer-reading ever since boyhood, at first innocently and then knowingly.

My first teachers were not writers but the many artists who lived around here after the last war. It was they who made me take my nose out of a book and see and look around.  They taught me not to be like the American critic who said, “They tell me that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”  But there was no fear on this account because I was, I think by nature, a natural explorer and a dreamer and a watcher and I suppose some might say a spy.  And of course a storyteller.  When not reading and writing  and connecting history with natural history, and the present with the past, I idled around in these painters’ studios in Suffolk and Essex and Norfolk.   But eventually I gravitated towards three poets in particular who lived in this part of East Anglia, James Turner now dead, the Ulster poet  W R Rodgers who came to live near hear, and the South African poet R N Currey, who was the English master at Colchester Grammar School.  These were another generation but they became my first friends in the opening world of literature.  I was now living on the Suffolk coast writing novels and essays, and walking vast miles by myself by the sea, and encountering for the first time that solitude which is the fate or condition of being a writer.   The other day I read an interview with Doris Lessing. She made no bones about her lovers long ago and the time and energy they took up. But what did she most love now she was asked, “Oh, solitude, the blessed, beautiful solitude” she said as she was walking back to her Hampstead flat.   Young writers have to make space for this needful solitude. Old writers are given it in all its limitless pleasure.

When I was on Desert Island Disks Sue Lawley said, “You were hard to do.”  This amazed me.  I imagined that a longish list of titles would have made it easy for her.  My books weren’t hard to read, nor easy to write.  Should I perhaps be described as a regional writer she wondered ?  Well, I thought, no more than Ben Okri.  It is an achievement when a writer is able to make universal what is parochial  to him. Thomas Hardy is, of course, the master of this transition.

I suppose I write out of an East Anglian landscape about people and things, or subjects rather, which are not obviously seen.  The tensions produced between these home scenes and what is going on, or has gone on elsewhere interests me.  I regard myself as a witness, an observer, and as I said – a spy.  Or to be perfectly honest writing has been such a usual activity for me these many years that when I attempt to say what has happened to me on an occasion like this, this lovely occasion, a voice inside me begins to ask, “Who is this person you are talking about ?”

However, coming to receive a doctorate from the University of Essex does make me very happy. It is wonderfully good of you to give it to me.  There will be all kinds of writers here today, for writers exist before their books, their novels, their poems, their journalism, their words on the page, and all I can say to them here is that there can be no escape from what you were born to do.  And to wish you well.  First find yourselves, then write.  And tell the tale.

So thank you very much indeed.