Roots

By Melvin Maddocks

CHARACTERS AND THEIR LANDSCAPES by Ronald Blythe; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 208 pages; $14.95

"Does landscape enter the bloodstream with the milk?" The poser of this oddly shaped question, Ronald Blythe, is author of a classic documentary on English village life (Akenfield), and he permits no doubt about the answer. In this celebration of social roots, Blythe contrasts what he sees as the skittering superficiality of jet-age tourists with the intense thereness of stay-putters like the 19th century poet John Clare, who went mad when he had to leave the village where he was born. Blythe celebrates all nature except the open sea, which "makes us treacherous; it captures our senses and makes us faithless to the land." Poignantly recalling the turreted manors, the moats and the swans of his own East Anglia, Blythe concludes that he and Clare (along with most of the characters of Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte) belong to a breed apart, "activated as much by weather and place as by society."

Yet Characters and Their Landscapes, is no celebration of the romantic idyl. Blythe well knows the curse of the quaint. He understands the perversity as well as the sanity in the compulsion of an Englishman to pull on his boots and muck about on the meadows, heaths and chalky plains of his native land. With country realism the author allows that to "be a native once meant to be a born thrall." He also notes that "Robert Burns' object in publishing his poems was not to celebrate his oneness with the village of Mossgiel but to make enough money to get off the land altogether and sail to Jamaica."

Indeed, Blythe comes close to bitterness when he examines the soft focus the English have sometimes cast over nature. Constable, he is not the first to observe, painted "the landscape of every English mind." But the scenes were bereft of humans except for minuscule boatmen or field hands, toiling like ants in the distance. "The poor people are dirty," Constable explained, "and to approach one of the cottages is almost insufferable." Blythe groups Wordsworth with Constable in regarding the English countryside as Eden, polluted by the presence of inferior Eves and Adams. Even William Hazlitt, an essayist with a political conscience, thought rural England was full of louts. Pinched by poverty, exhausted by labor, "all country people hate each other," he maintained.

Blythe does not deny that country living can brutalize, but he sees no alternative for those who suffer, as he does, from "the fatal involvement, the need to remain." Nor does he think that modern gadabouts are really making a getaway. For all his engines of mobility, a man remains buried in his body as irrevocably as a turnip in a garden. And so this home county of the flesh is where Blythe finally arrives in his search for the ultimate landscape.

In an essay on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Blythe takes landscapes a step further: Tolstoy's merciless story about a man's terminal illness becomes the occasion for a consideration of the human body as geography. How does the territory of the ailing become a no man's land to the healthy? What detours will the living not invent to avoid contact with the near dead? In the end, says Blythe, every man, like Ivan, becomes his own isolated and besieged domain of flesh and blood. Dust to dust is the final, inevitable summary of mortals. Yet every life-oozing ounce of clay tells the lover of vistas that existence is something more than a matter of life and death. The search for meaning, says Blythe in this moving collection, continues in two landscapes: the one that holds the body, and the body that contains the soul.

-- By Melvin Maddocks