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Authors: Dr Ronald Blythe
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morning cooking, he and his Danish wife Marianne. Hissoft weary voice suggested a conversational exhaustion. The fact was that although he never stopped talking he never stopped listening. Conor Cruise O’Brien said that Bertie’s eyes were ‘large, prominent, lustrous, suited to a hypnotist, or a Swami. They also seemed to be, in some strange way, turned off, not looking. He listened like a blind man.’ And there was something ‘a little pastoral, as well as a little clinical’ about this listening which made it disconcerting. Although one eventually told him anything and everything, the distinct fastidiousness of his nature prohibited shapeless outpourings. He would say that men and women were ‘as honest as the day is long, and no longer’.
He enters the Aldeburgh scene at this point because, listening to my diatribe about money, he promptly solved everything by whispering over his drink, ‘You must be a publisher’s reader.’ Thirty shillings a report. He sent me off to Ian Hamilton. The only person I knew who wrote about being a publisher’s reader was William Plomer. And he was part of the Aldeburgh scene. He and Ralph Currey, my other Colchester poet, were South Africans. Bertie Rodgers in the Aldeburgh pubs was a sight to be seen. But not, as the beer disappeared, always a voice to be heard as it grew softer and softer.
‘Can you hear me, Ronnie?’
‘No, Bertie.’
‘If you’d had the drink you could.’
Observing Bertie Rodgers, I began to observe myself. Shouldn’t writing make me look for his philosophy – or at least something akin to his temperament? Whether listening to friends or enemies, he worked on the principle that everybody’s stories were fine if he thought that the speaker himself believed they were. Balancing the vanities and the decencies of human nature, Bertie arrived at his kind of accuracy by means of give and take.
When my father died in 1957 I gave Bertie his Donegal tweed suit. He looked fine in it. When I wrote
Akenfield
Bertie gave me Rider Haggard’s
Rural England
. But what he most gave me that first year on the Suffolk coast was a sense of inclusion. Our mutual friend James Turner did the opposite. He believed that Aldeburgh would corrupt me. That going there was my initial error. He is ‘the Poet’ in
Akenfield
. As I couldn’t possibly be like Bertie Rodgers, then I must be like him. But the brief time there would make me unlike either of them, or anyone, unless in some strangely hoping way, at least at the beginning, like Imogen Holst. An absurd comparison of course. When I told Christine Nash this she didn’t flinch. She gave me furniture to make the flat which Imo found for me by pointing to an ad in the house agent Tuohy’s window, and said that all she asked of me was to
settle
. With whom? was what I was thinking. The question was deep down preoccupying . Imo herself had settled in a flat above Tuohy’s.
Life at Crag House was most unsettled. People came and went, doors were never closed, cars went back and forth to Saxmundham station like rockets. Mr Baggott at the newsagent’s was selling postcards of it and gawpers stood on the sea wall. It was unbearable. But Miss Hudson, the housekeeper, produced meals whatever the number round the table with a bewildering efficiency. Imogen had a three-and-sixpenny lunch at the Cragg Sisters’ restaurant every day. I lived on herrings and bread and counted pennies – even when the publisher’s reader fortune began to pour in. My first manuscript was
The History of the Pig
. But then an American magazine paid me a hundred pounds for a short story. When I took it to Barclays bank it was taken to Mr Cullum, who peered at me through his door. I went to the Thursday sale at the scouts’ hut and bought things for the flat with it.
Working on the Festival finances with Stephen Reiss at eight o’clock each evening I recall how we would keep our lives separate and stick to the task in hand. Beth, his wife, would
He enters the Aldeburgh scene at this point because, listening to my diatribe about money, he promptly solved everything by whispering over his drink, ‘You must be a publisher’s reader.’ Thirty shillings a report. He sent me off to Ian Hamilton. The only person I knew who wrote about being a publisher’s reader was William Plomer. And he was part of the Aldeburgh scene. He and Ralph Currey, my other Colchester poet, were South Africans. Bertie Rodgers in the Aldeburgh pubs was a sight to be seen. But not, as the beer disappeared, always a voice to be heard as it grew softer and softer.
‘Can you hear me, Ronnie?’
‘No, Bertie.’
‘If you’d had the drink you could.’
Observing Bertie Rodgers, I began to observe myself. Shouldn’t writing make me look for his philosophy – or at least something akin to his temperament? Whether listening to friends or enemies, he worked on the principle that everybody’s stories were fine if he thought that the speaker himself believed they were. Balancing the vanities and the decencies of human nature, Bertie arrived at his kind of accuracy by means of give and take.
When my father died in 1957 I gave Bertie his Donegal tweed suit. He looked fine in it. When I wrote
Akenfield
Bertie gave me Rider Haggard’s
Rural England
. But what he most gave me that first year on the Suffolk coast was a sense of inclusion. Our mutual friend James Turner did the opposite. He believed that Aldeburgh would corrupt me. That going there was my initial error. He is ‘the Poet’ in
Akenfield
. As I couldn’t possibly be like Bertie Rodgers, then I must be like him. But the brief time there would make me unlike either of them, or anyone, unless in some strangely hoping way, at least at the beginning, like Imogen Holst. An absurd comparison of course. When I told Christine Nash this she didn’t flinch. She gave me furniture to make the flat which Imo found for me by pointing to an ad in the house agent Tuohy’s window, and said that all she asked of me was to
settle
. With whom? was what I was thinking. The question was deep down preoccupying . Imo herself had settled in a flat above Tuohy’s.
Life at Crag House was most unsettled. People came and went, doors were never closed, cars went back and forth to Saxmundham station like rockets. Mr Baggott at the newsagent’s was selling postcards of it and gawpers stood on the sea wall. It was unbearable. But Miss Hudson, the housekeeper, produced meals whatever the number round the table with a bewildering efficiency. Imogen had a three-and-sixpenny lunch at the Cragg Sisters’ restaurant every day. I lived on herrings and bread and counted pennies – even when the publisher’s reader fortune began to pour in. My first manuscript was
The History of the Pig
. But then an American magazine paid me a hundred pounds for a short story. When I took it to Barclays bank it was taken to Mr Cullum, who peered at me through his door. I went to the Thursday sale at the scouts’ hut and bought things for the flat with it.
Working on the Festival finances with Stephen Reiss at eight o’clock each evening I recall how we would keep our lives separate and stick to the task in hand. Beth, his wife, would
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